Cable News Networks (CNN): First train reaches Tibet
High-tech line will help bind region, says China
China's new railway to Tibet will help modernize the isolated Himalayan region and bind it to the rest of the country, state media said on Sunday after the first train reached the regional capital.
The first train to Lhasa arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning, 13 hours after Chinese President Hu Jintao watched it leave Golmud, the dusty outpost in the far-western province of Qinghai that is the start of the new 1,142 km (710 mile) line.
The first train from Beijing was en route, due to arrive on Monday morning.
The railway, built at a total cost of $3.76 billion, will be much more than a conveyor of people and goods, according to a Sunday editorial in the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's chief mouthpiece.
"The Qinghai-Tibet railway will be a route joining the hearts of Tibetan compatriots with the whole country's people of every ethnicity, and it will be a route for the modernising take-off of the snowy highlands," said the editorial.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, the railway, which took five years to build, could double Tibet's tourist revenues by 2010 and cut transport costs into the region by 75 percent, lifting its 2.8 million people out of isolation.
The People's Liberation Army occupied Tibet in 1950. Nine years later, Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India after a failed uprising.
Since the 1980s, China has tolerated the revival of Tibet's Buddhist religion and injected central government funds to spur Tibet's economy.
But critics charge that China continues to repress Tibetans' religious aspirations, especially their veneration for the Dalai Lama, whom China denounces as a "separatist".
And they say that the new railway will accelerate an influx of Han Chinese migrants who are already displacing Tibetans and taking the lion's share of new wealth.
"Tibetans are not equipped to compete for employment and business opportunities in the Chinese-dominated economic environment in today's Tibet," said the International Campaign for Tibet, which supports Tibetan autonomy.
Chinese census figures showed that Tibetans had the lowest literacy rates of any major ethnic group in China, the group noted in a new report about the railway..
Han Chinese, China's dominant race and ethnic group, make up 4.2 percent of Tibet's permanent population according to Chinese statistics, but critics say the number of uncounted long-term migrants is much larger.
But for many Chinese, who see Tibet as an inseparable part of their own country, the railway and the flow of people will be for the good of Tibet.
"The Qinghai-Tibet railway will have a profound impact on Tibet's economic and social development, and will create the conditions for Tibetan society's advance towards modern civilisation," Wang Taifu of the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences told Xinhua.
The train uses technology to stabilize tracks over permafrost. The cabins are enriched with oxygen to help passengers cope with high altitudes.
Last Stop, Lhasa: Rail Link Ties Remote Tibet to China
BEIJING, July 1 — This weekend, China opened the world's highest railway, a 710-mile line that crosses the vertiginous Tibetan Plateau and forges a steel bond with the once-secluded Buddhist holy city of Lhasa.
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The New York Times
The last leg of China's $4.1 billion railway to Tibet opened Saturday.
The railway, inaugurated on Saturday by President Hu Jintao and top Communist Party cadres on a deluxe opening run, is an engineering marvel that traverses unstable permafrost and reaches more than 16,000 feet above sea level, higher than Mont Blanc in France.
Party officials have hailed the $4.1 billion project, which was decades in the making, as a milestone in its efforts to develop its vast, poor western region and bring an infusion of people and prosperity to remote Tibet.
But Tibetan and foreign critics say that the railway benefits Han Chinese, China's dominant ethnic group, at the expense of Tibetan natives. They argue that enhanced transportation links will accelerate a trend of Han-led economic development and smother Tibet's ancient spiritual culture, while undermining the pristine natural environment of its highlands.
"The overwhelming opinion among Tibetans is that the railway will consolidate Chinese control and bring in huge numbers of Han Chinese," said Tenzin Tsundue, an independent Tibetan writer who lives in India. "It will mean less employment and more destruction for Tibetans, not more opportunity."
On Friday, three women from the United States, Canada and Britain were detained briefly after they climbed through a second-floor window at Beijing's main train station and unfurled a black-and-white banner that read, "China's Tibet Railway, Designed to Destroy."
Chinese officials defend the railway as vital to stimulating Tibet's development. They project it will double tourist revenues and reduce the cost of cargo transport by up to three-fourths.
"The completion of the Qinghai-Tibet railway is a significant piece of good news longed for by the people in Qinghai Province and the Tibetan Autonomous Region," Zhu Zhensheng, executive vice director of the Qingzang Railway Office of the Chinese Railway Administration, said in a news briefing this week. "The railway provides capacity for the quick flow of people, goods and information and will directly contribute to the development" of the area.
Mao proposed extending a railway to Tibet after the People's Liberation Army invaded the territory and brought it firmly under Chinese control in 1951, sending the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, into exile.
The first section, from Beijing to Golmud in Qinghai Province, was completed in 1984.
But the 710-mile section connecting Golmud to Lhasa was delayed indefinitely. That section had to cross the Tibetan Plateau, survive extreme temperatures and stay fixed in the shifting permafrost of the highlands.
The plan was revived in 2001, when it was promoted as a crucial element of the Communist Party's Go West campaign. Engineers designed bridges to span the most treacherous area of permafrost and sank naturally cooled piping into the ground to keep the track bed frozen year-round, reducing instability.
Canada's Bombardier Inc. supplied specially outfitted train carriages that have artificial oxygen, like that used in aircraft, to prevent sickness among passengers at high altitudes.
A direct Beijing-to-Lhasa luxury train was officially unveiled Saturday to coincide with the 85th anniversary of the founding of the governing Communist Party. State news media have been promoting the train for weeks as a new feather in the cap of state engineers who also celebrated the formal completion of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest dam, this spring.
But the event is being tightly controlled by Chinese officials to ensure favorable coverage. They handpicked 40 foreign journalists to ride the first train. Other news organizations, including The New York Times, that bought train tickets independently were denied requisite permits to enter Tibetan territory.
Even at the official price of $4.1 billion, the railway is hard to justify in economic terms alone. Tibet's total gross domestic product in 2005 was $3.12 billion, so the payoff for the railway in terms of lifting economic activity would appear to lie decades in the future, if it ever comes.
Moreover, foreign engineers who have been involved with elements of the project, but asked not to be identified because they did not wish to offend their Chinese sponsors, say the railway will require heavy expenditures on maintenance and may be hard to run for more than a decade without an extensive overhaul.
Tibetans who have voiced reservations say they do not oppose the railway in principle but argue that it was conceived mainly to enhance China's economic and military control over the Tibetan region. They say it will also aid Chinese exploitation of mineral resources in the Tibetan highlands.
They say Chinese investment in other vital infrastructure, like roads to connect Tibetan towns and electrification of rural villages, remains a lower priority.
Even as they promote the rail line, Chinese officials still focus heavily on combating what they call Tibetan separatism, especially the resilient loyalty there to the Dalai Lama.
Zhang Qingli, who was recently appointed as the Communist Party's top official in Tibet, told party leaders there in May that they were engaged in "a fight to the death" against the Dalai Lama, according to The Tibet Daily.
First Railway to Tibet Ready to Operate
BEIJING — The first railway to Tibet is ready to start operation this weekend, using sealed, oxygenated cars to cope with the thin air and high-tech cooling to keep the frozen track bed stable, China's Railway Ministry said Thursday.
The $4.2 billion rail line, which took four years to build, links Tibet's capital of Lhasa to Golmud, a small city in Qinghai province already connected to China's vast rail network.
China says the prestige project, which leaders have dreamed of realizing since the 1950s, will help economically develop the poor, restive western region and establish better trade and information links with the prosperous east.
Critics say it is part of a larger campaign by Beijing to crush Tibetan culture by allowing a huge influx of Han Chinese migrants.
The line will "hugely boost local development and benefit the local people," said Zhu Zhensheng, vice director of Railway Ministry's Tibetan Railway Office.
However, he acknowledged that few ordinary Tibetans would benefit directly from the railway — a key complaint by human rights and Tibet activists.
"At first there will be not very many opportunities for Tibetans to work on the train," he said at a briefing. "We hope to increase those opportunities."
LHASA, China, July 3 (UPI) -- A pair of Chinese trains reached new heights during their inaugural runs along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, it was reported Monday.
The trains called Qing 1 and Tibet 2 set records when they reached a latitude of 5,072 meters (3.15 miles) along the 1,200-mile railway, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.
The previous record for a locomotive set in the Peruvian Andes was about 200 meters (656 feet)lower, Xinhua said.
While the Tibet 2 left from a station in Lhasa, Tibet, Saturday, Chinese President Hu Jintao was among 2,600 people watching Qing 1 depart from Golmud, China, Xinhua said.
"The project is not only a magnificent feat in China's history of railway construction, but also a great miracle of the world's railroad history," Hu told the crowd.
The new railway will be of particular value to Tibet, which had to import and export its goods by truck, bus or plane.
Tibet train a route to civilization: China
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's new railway to Tibet will help modernize the isolated Himalayan region and bind it to the rest of the country, state media said on Sunday after the first train reached the regional capital.
The first train to Lhasa arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning, 13 hours after Chinese President Hu Jintao watched it leave Golmud, the dusty outpost in the far-western province of Qinghai that is the start of the new 1,142 km (710 mile) line.
The first train from Beijing was en route, due to arrive on Monday morning.
The railway, built at a total cost of $3.76 billion, will be much more than a conveyor of people and goods, according to a Sunday editorial in the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's chief mouthpiece.
"The Qinghai-Tibet railway will be a route joining the hearts of Tibetan compatriots with the whole country's people of every ethnicity, and it will be a route for the modernizing take-off of the snowy highlands," said the editorial.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, the railway, which took five years to build, could double Tibet's tourist revenues by 2010 and cut transport costs into the region by 75 percent, lifting its 2.8 million people out of isolation.
The People's Liberation Army occupied Tibet in 1950. Nine years later, Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India after a failed uprising.
Since the 1980s, China has tolerated the revival of Tibet's Buddhist religion and injected central government funds to spur Tibet's economy.
But critics charge that China continues to repress Tibetans' religious aspirations, especially their veneration for the Dalai Lama, whom China denounces as a "separatist".
And they say that the new railway will accelerate an influx of Han Chinese migrants who are already displacing Tibetans and taking the lion's share of new wealth.
"Tibetans are not equipped to compete for employment and business opportunities in the Chinese-dominated economic environment in today's Tibet," said the International Campaign for Tibet, which supports Tibetan autonomy.
Chinese census figures showed that Tibetans had the lowest literacy rates of any major ethnic group in China, the group noted in a new report about the railway..
Han Chinese, China's dominant race and ethnic group, make up 4.2 percent of Tibet's permanent population according to Chinese statistics, but critics say the number of uncounted long-term migrants is much larger.
But for many Chinese, who see Tibet as an inseparable part of their own country, the railway and the flow of people will be for the good of Tibet.
"The Qinghai-Tibet railway will have a profound impact on Tibet's economic and social development, and will create the conditions for Tibetan society's advance toward modern civilization," Wang Taifu of the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences told Xinhua
New train to Tibet will mean influx of Chinese commerce and culture
BEIJING – For the first time, relatively isolated Tibet is accessible to the Chinese masses, even if you have to briefly don an oxygen mask to get to the land of clouds.
For $46 any Chinese can now hop on a 15-car daily train in Beijing and be listening to wind chimes in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, two days later. Three trains from cities around China will now surmount 16,000-foot mountain heights, traverse a world-record 240 miles of permafrost, go through the longest tunnel built on frozen earth, and disgorge an estimated 1,000-2,000 passengers daily in the heart of Shangri-La - formerly approachable only by air or bad roads.
The new high-altitude passenger train service, which opened this week after 50 years of effort may well represent one of the largest single shifts of cultural boundaries in decades here, experts say.
Inside China, where trains still symbolize a vision of modern life and progress, state media has covered the rail opening with unvarnished pride, as a significant engineering feat. President Hu Jintao set the tone by calling it a "miracle railway" at a July 1 inauguration that coincided with the 85th anniversary of the Communist Party.
Scholar Yuan Weishi notes that for 140 years, "the history of railroads in China is the hardship-laden history of China's pursuit of modernity."
The completion of the Qinghai-Tibet railway over the roof of the world encapsulates both the strengths and defects of post-revolutionary China.
Rising to 16,640ft over a permafrosted plateau, it is an epic feat of engineering that was completed a year ahead of schedule.
It marks a further stage in the development of China's interior, an immense project already apparent in the rapid expansion of motorways, and, thanks to the Three Gorges Dam, the opening of a 1,250-mile stretch of the Yangtze to ocean-going vessels by 2009.
Mao would have approved of this transformation. "Man must use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus achieve freedom from nature," he said in 1940.
Yet "freedom from nature" has come at a cost. Changed it may have been, but not necessarily understood. There are fears that the 650-mile new line between Golmud and Lhasa will upset the delicate ecology of the Tibetan grasslands, thus adding to the environmental disaster that has overtaken much of China in the form of eroded soil, poisoned water and polluted air.
The railway facilitates the further colonisation by Han Chinese of Tibet and the concomitant swamping of its indigenous culture, a process begun when the People's Liberation Army invaded in 1950.
It will also be hugely subsidised by the state, a phenomenon observable from the Three Gorges Dam to such obvious manifestations of Western capitalism as the tower blocks and magnetic levitation railway of Shanghai.
This gargantuan building programme is the domestic side of a coin whose outward face is the conquest by Chinese products of markets across the globe in return for raw materials.
As its latest manifestation, the Qinghai-Tibet railway points to a country bursting with self-confidence but environmentally suspect, politically oppressive and a world removed from a proper market economy. From its inception, Communist China has been taken with great earth-moving projects.
They are both breathtaking in their scale and frightening in their human implications.
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This railway makes me think of Hitler's autobahns: it will certainly enable the Chinese to rush troops to forcibly colonised Tibet in the event of any attempt at dissent from their rule.
More likely it will enable rapid movements in and out of Tibet by non-indigenous Chinese - swamping the culture of the country as has long been the aim since it was invaded half a century ago by the communists.
China has few outlets for very vast engineering capabilities and appears to turn resources at illogical infrastructure projects driven by doctrine rather than sense.
Soon we will be wowed by the Olympic village and the set-pieces of the 2008 Games. What we won't see is the ancient homes swept away to enable the Games venues to be built - nor the vast areas polluted by heavy metals and other materials in which people have to live scratching a living picking apart re-imported old PCs for their dangerous components.
The Olympic Games will be a platform on the world stage for China to ostensibly show she has come of age in the modern world. Just don't stray too far away from the manicured areas, or dwell on how she forcibly colonises her neighbours, lest the shine goes off all the phoney ceremonies.
Perhaps this is unfair, Britain and others also colonised heavily in the 19th century - and our industrial revolution was very damaging - but has since been cleared up. Might be an idea to take pause before throwing the first stone at the Chinese.
Posted by simon coulter on July 1, 2006 9:55 AM
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This is the typical eurocentric viewpooint.
By the same yardstick, Europeans built continental american railways facilitating colonisation and swamping of the indigenous cultures. The reality is that the American native peoples were wiped out and their cultures obliterated by Europeans. The Tibetans will have a better fate from the Chinese
Posted by Guhy on July 1, 2006 1:22 PM
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What a lot of rot your article is. You've hit every buzzword there is to sound as negative as you can about China.
I’m sure the same would have been said when Britain engaged is such engineering feats in bygone days, which have long since passed.
Tibetans fear 'cultural genocide' will follow Chinese railway
Tibet will be soldered to China today with the opening of a railway line across the Himalayas. But the controversy around the engineering marvel was highlighted at Beijing station yesterday when protesters unfurled a banner warning that the line would destroy the culture and environment of what, until recently, was one of the planet's most remote regions.
The first of an expected 4,000 passengers a day will set off from the Chinese capital at 9.30am on a 48-hour journey to Lhasa. They will travel across mountain passes, alpine deserts and the vast plains of the Qinghai plateau. Some are likely to require oxygen, which will be available under the seats, because of the thin air.
At its highest, the railway hits an altitude of 5,072 metres (16,604ft), higher than any European mountain peak and more than 200 metres higher than Peru's railway in the Andes - previously the world's highest. The Chinese track, which cost 34bn yuan (£2.4bn), was completed a year ahead of schedule despite the permafrost under much of its route.
Underlining its political symbolism, the inauguration coincides with two other triumphal anniversaries of the Chinese government: the 85th of the founding of the Communist party and the 10th of Hong Kong's handover from British rule.
The Chinese media have hailed the economic benefits that the railway will bring to one of the world's most impoverished regions with cheaper freight costs and a doubling of tourist revenue. More than a million people a year are expected to use the line. Prices initially range from 389 yuan (£28) for a "hard seat" to 1,262 yuan for a "soft sleeper". Luxury carriages will be introduced later this year.
Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, has cautiously welcomed the railway but warned it could accelerate the "cultural genocide" of his homeland as it becomes dominated by migrants from the majority Han Chinese ethnic group. Three foreign protesters, including Katie Mallin from the UK, scaled Beijing's central station and unfurled a banner reading "China's Tibet Railway: Designed to Destroy". They were detained for several hours.
Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said in a statement: "China plans to use the railway to transport Chinese migrants directly into the heart of Tibet in order to overwhelm the Tibetan population and tighten its stranglehold over our people."
The group planned to demonstrate outside Chinese embassies today in at least six countries.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China opened the world's highest railway on Saturday, celebrating the link into Tibet as a symbol of strength and ethnic harmony while critics denounced it as a threat to the Tibetan people's culture and environment.
A proud but somber President Hu Jintao waved farewell as the first train left Golmud, the outpost in the far-western province of Qinghai where the new 1,142-km (710-mile) track to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, begins.
"The building of the Qinghai-Tibet railway is of major significance for accelerating the economic and social development of Tibet and Qinghai, improving the lives of people of every ethnicity, and strengthening unity between ethnic groups," Hu told a meeting broadcast on Chinese television.
After his speech, a train carrying officials and model workers on the project set out from Golmud for Lhasa where it was due to arrive on Saturday night, Xinhua news agency reported. Another train set out from Lhasa.
The inaugural service from Beijing leaves on Saturday evening amid a crescendo of publicity and reaches Lhasa 48 hours later, after a 4,000-km (2,500-mile) journey touching altitudes of over 5,000 metres (16,400 feet) on the Tibetan plateau.
Critics fear the railway will spur an influx of tourists and migrants who will erode Tibet's cultural identity. China says Tibet is an inseparable part of its territory.
"Tibet is a part of China. If any Chinese want to go there, that is their choice," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu.
China's army occupied the Himalayan territory in 1950 to impose Communist rule. Nine years later Tibet's chief spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.
"BLACK DAY"
Tibetans in Dharamsala in northern India, where the Dalai Lama presides over a governent in exile, called Saturday a "black day" for Tibet. They have launched a Web site, www.rejecttherailway.com, in protest.
On Friday, three overseas activists of Students for a Free Tibet unfurled a banner at Beijing's main railway station reading "China's Tibet Railway: Designed to Destroy." Police quickly detained them.
China hopes the railway will boost Tibet's economy and reduce transport costs. According to Chinese statistics, Tibet's average economic growth from 2001 to 2005 was more than 12 percent a year, driven by injections of central government funds.
But critics say too little of that development benefits Tibetans who, with Chinese migrants already flooding in, are becoming an underclass excluded from prosperity.
"We're already seeing the marginalisation of Tibetans, and the railroad is the final achievement," said Kate Saunders of the International Campaign for Tibet.
"The railroad is a topdown project that prioritises the development of the military and the administrative state," she said.
Opponents also say the railroad, which crosses fragile, frozen highlands, is an environmental peril.
The government counters that it has gone to unprecedented lengths to protect the environment, from carriages equipped with garbage compacters and vacuum toilets to special crossings for endangered Tibetan antelopes.
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