Bridging Beijing to Tibet with each new track
By Erling Hoh
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series on recent developments in Tibet. The final part will run next Friday.
AMDO, Tibet — The tracks for a railroad being built to Tibet recently reached the northern bank of the Tuotuohe River, the headstream of the Yangtze River, about 310 miles from the terminus in Lhasa.
Framed by the snowcapped Tanggula Mountains, where the railroad will tunnel through the highest pass 16,640 feet above sea level, a reporter from Tibet television recorded the event for the evening news, and interviewed an engineer with an armband labeled "Communist Party Vanguard Project."
"We lack oxygen, but we don't lack the right stuff," the engineer confidently informed the reporter.
In Tuotuohe, a muddy truck stop along the Qinghai-Tibet highway, a man named Zhao, proprietor of the Lanzhou Handmade Noodle Tavern, was chatting with the owner of another restaurant in the village. It had snowed in the Kunlun and Tanggula Mountains during the night, and traffic on the highway was at a standstill.
Sitting by the iron stove in the middle of the room, Mr. Zhao sucked his cigarette, surveyed his empty noodle shop and reminisced about the golden year 2002.
"If you had been here then at this time of day, every table would have been taken," he said.
Come 2007, when the Qinghai-Tibet Railway is scheduled for completion, Mr. Zhao's business may decline even further as the movement of people and goods to Tibet shifts from the road to rails. The 695-mile-long line from the garrison town Golmud in Qinghai province to Tibet's capital, Lhasa, will reduce Tibet's geographical isolation and allow Beijing to tighten its annexation of the territory.
With an official price tag equivalent to $3.2 billion, the project is one of the most complex and daring railways ever undertaken. About 485 miles of the line run more than 14,765 feet above sea level, and 342 miles of track traverse permanently frozen earth, presenting a formidable challenge to the project's engineers.
The journey from Beijing to Lhasa, in rail cars pressurized like airplane cabins, will take 48 hours.
All along the highway from Golmud to Lhasa, work on the railroad is forging ahead, as billboards proclaim the importance of the project with slogans like: "Build the Qinghai-Tibet railway, create prosperity for people of all nationalities."
The seven main tunnels on the line, including the two-mile-long Yangbajain tunnel 50 miles north of Lhasa, have been completed.
Construction on one of the world's highest railroad stations recently began in the Tanggula Mountains. In Lhasa, work on the 3,281-foot-long railroad bridge that will span the Lhasa River, one of 286 bridges being built along the route, is nearing completion.
In Amdo, the first town on the Tibetan side of the Tanggula Mountain pass, situated at an altitude of 15,750 feet, Hui Muslim migrant workers from Qinghai Province were squatting outside the national railroad company's medical clinic, whiling away their day as they waited for news from their boss regarding the railroad work he had assured them. Having been in Amdo for more than a week, they were still suffering altitude sickness, which causes throbbing headaches and loss of appetite. All workers are required to present a clean bill of health, but one of the migrant laborers explained: "Eighty percent of the doctor's certificates are fake."
Xinhua reported in December that not a single death from altitude sickness had occurred among the 100,000 workers laboring on the project. Although that report is impossible to confirm, the harsh conditions under which the railroad is being constructed make it seem unlikely — and the same report said more than 3,000 workers died during construction of the Qinghai-Tibet highway in the 1950s.
The cold and the weather are so fierce that railway construction crews can work only five months out of the year.
"Every construction worker has a health clearance before stepping on the plateau. Everyone passes a strict physical examination before being enrolled into the construction team," Lu Chunfang, director-general of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Construction headquarters, told Xinhua.
A group of about 30 migrant laborers from Qinghai said the railway construction company pays their boss 2,000 yuan (about $245) per month per worker. The boss, a Hui Muslim also from Qinghai, takes half, leaving each worker with 1,000 yuan for a month of backbreaking toil. With five months of work per year, the boss stands to pocket 150,000 yuan ($18,315), and the workers return home with about 5,000 yuan ($610).
Asked about the absence of Tibetan railroad workers in Amdo, the boss replied: "The railway company does not like to employ Tibetan workers. The Tibetans think the land belongs to them, and that they should decide how fast to work."
When the railway is completed, 16 trains per day will make the journey between Golmud and Lhasa, bringing 5 million tons of goods into Tibet and 2.8 million tons out annually.
The Beijing government says the railroad will reduce the cost of transportation to Tibet from 6 cents to less than 2½ cents per kilometer/ton, help speed up Tibet's economic development, generate nearly $500 million in direct and indirect income, induce businesses to set up shop, and bring about 900,000 tourists to Tibet each year.
Other key infrastructure projects also are under way. Altogether, investments in fixed assets in Tibet, mainly by the central government, totaled the equivalent of $1.6 billion last year.
In the past three years, the gross domestic product of the Tibet Autonomous Region has grown by 12 percent annually, and annual per capita income among its urban population has quadrupled over the 10 years to 2002 to roughly $980. However, annual per capita income for Tibet's rural population was just more than $195 in 2002.
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For Tibetans, railroad brings doom
By Erling Hoh
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Second of two parts
AMDO, Tibet — This small town is in dire need of modernization. Like many others in Tibet after more than 50 years of Chinese rule, it still lacks paved roads, piped water and proper sanitation.
According to a report on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway by the International Campaign for Tibet — a Washington-based nonprofit organization that is critical of China's rule in Tibet and seeks human rights and self-determination for Tibetans — the budgeted cost of the railroad is more than three times the amount the Chinese government has spent on health care and education in Tibet during the past 50 years.
The neglect of Tibet hampered that region's social development. As recently as 1999, it had an illiteracy rate of 67 percent, compared with 11 percent illiteracy for China as a whole.
Critics also fear the railroad will accelerate the migration to Tibet of jobless Han Chinese from overpopulated urban centers. In Lhasa, which has about 200,000 residents, Han Chinese are already on the verge of becoming a majority.
This is a pattern seen elsewhere in China in the past century.
Between 1912 and 1949, the Han Chinese population of Inner Mongolia increased fivefold. Millions arrived after the railroad from Zhangjiakou to Hohhot was completed in the 1920s, and by 1949, the Han Chinese outnumbered the Mongolians by a ratio of 11-to-1.
The same process took place in Manchuria with the help of railroads built by the Japanese, who seized that region in 1931 after gaining Taiwan in the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese war.
Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, is already a predominantly Han Chinese city. In Kashgar, the Han Chinese population increased by 30 percent in 2001, the year after the railroad there was completed.
"In public, Tibetans will not voice any criticism. But in private, they will tell you that this is the end of Tibet," said Dr. Robert Barnett, lecturer in Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University in New York.
Other analysts point to the military implications of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, saying it could be used to deploy tactical nuclear weapons.
In 2001, Jane's Intelligence Digest reported that the Chinese People's Liberation Army "considers it necessary to build up a network of roads and mule tracks to bring military hardware and troops to the forward areas of the disputed border" with India, with which China fought a brief 1962 war in the Himalayas.
Writes defense analyst William Triplett: "With even a single line, the PLA could move about 12 infantry divisions to central Tibet in 30 days to meet up with their pre-positioned equipment."
The railroad also will be used to accelerate mining activities in Tibet.
In the past few years, 13 copper belts, with an estimated reserve of more than 1 million tons, and two cobalt deposits with a combined reserve of 20,000 tons have been discovered in the vicinity of the railway line.
Bringing development — along with its many beneficial and adverse consequences — the Qinghai-Tibet railroad to the "top of the world" looks set for completion on or before the 2007 schedule.
In Zaziqu village in the Qugaxiong valley about 60 miles north of Lhasa, 18 families earn their livelihoods by herding about 1,000 yaks and 1,500 sheep. The railroad will run through their valley, and the herders will have to bring the animals to summer pastures in the mountains through a small tunnel under the tracks.
"We don't know whether or not the animals will refuse to pass through the tunnel," said the village head. "We are not opposed to this project, but it is creating big losses for us."
"The radio said that we would be able to make $30 a day working on the railroad," said a housewife in the village.
"We were very happy, and thought that we could make some money. But only five or six people got work, and they were paid only $9 to $12 per day. It's unfair, but we don't know where to complain," the woman said.
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