Has the "American Dream" left New Orleans for Lhasa, Tibet?
The railway across the roof of the world
They said it was impossible to build a railway to Tibet. There were 5,000m-high mountains to climb, 12km-wide valleys to bridge, hundreds of kilometres of ice and slush that could never support tracks and trains. How could anyone tunnel through rock at -30C, or lay rails when the least exertion sends you reaching for the oxygen bottle? But that's the sort of challenge today's China relishes. Next month, three years ahead of schedule, more than 1,000km of fresh track will link the garrison town of Golmud in China's 'wild west' and the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, strengthening the regime's grip on this troublesome corner of the empire and confirming its status as a technological superpower. Jonathan Watts travelled the route to create a snapshot of a nation on the move
Tuesday September 20, 2005
The Guardian
'Aren't we Chinese great? They said it couldn't be done. And yet, we've not only done it, we've done it ahead of plan. No other country in the world could do this. Chinese people are so clever." We are two hours, several beers and half a roasted duck into a journey on the overnight express from Xining, travelling along the completed half of what will soon be part of the world's highest railroad - the 1,900km line from Xining across the Qinghai Plateau to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. But my patriotic conversation partner, Wang Qiang, is just warming up on his favourite subject: China's engineering prowess.
"The new track follows the highway built by our soldiers in the 1950s. The terrain is so harsh that three of them died for every kilometre of road. You have to admire their spirit. But now, we've built the railway without the loss of a single life. Isn't China great?"
Wang, a stout and ruddy power factory worker from Hunan, is in the bunk two below mine. He is as keen to demonstrate the conviviality of China as he is to wax lyrical about the country's strength. As well as cracking open a bottle of beer and sharing his food, he offers a packet of Dongfanghong cigarettes - "I smoke these because it was Mao's favourite brand" - and travel advice: "Actually, there isn't much in Qinghai. It's full of police and soldiers, but we have very good public order."
Wang is one of about 60 passengers squeezed into a "hard sleeper" carriage as our overnight train rattles towards the sunset, passing a half-formed rainbow, the world's largest saltwater lake, hillsides quilted with yellow rape seed and the occasional white Tibetan yurt.
With a couple of hours left until lights out, my fellow travellers are looking for ways to kill time and forget the cramped and smoky conditions. Some play cards, others sing with their children, a curious few chat with a Tibetan monk. And when that entertainment runs out, several attempt to talk to me.
They are engagingly friendly. A family from Xining pours a pot of instant noodles and offers sightseeing tips. Two young sightseers from Hong Kong share their herbal remedies for altitude sickness and talk enviously about the mainland.
"There is an amazing can-do spirit in China these days," says Susan Hong, a maths teacher. "We used to have a bit of that in Hong Kong. But now we are so conservative compared to the mainland. Anything seems possible in China these days. It's very exciting."
As I get ready to turn in, Wang qualifies the level of his friendliness. "I am happy to share food and drink with you. We are friends with all countries now. Except Japan. If you were Japanese I would not share my food with you. And I would not let you sleep in the bunk above me."
Perhaps it is the lack of oxygen here at 3,000m above sea level or the frequent patrols by ticket inspectors, but I have trouble getting to sleep. Instead, my mind races across the day's contrasting impressions: the warmth of my fellow passengers, the sometimes scary nationalism of Wang, the can-do spirit.
China is a nation on the move. But should its economic growth be cause for alarm? Other nations have risen fast - Britain during the industrial revolution, the US at the turn of the century, and Japan during and after the 1960s. However, it took Britain 100 years to rise; 60 for the US and 30 for Japan. It seems China will be transformed in just a couple of decades. And it is not just the speed of change that is turning heads, but the scale.
China has the world's biggest population: 1.3 billion. Now those billions are travelling, earning and consuming more than ever before, and pessimists fear the world will be overrun by an eastern horde. Others, however, view China as the nation most capable of extending the limits of human civilisation in centuries to come. This is where development is progressing fastest. This is where the biggest risks are taken, where the impossible seems possible.
The railway to Tibet is one of the greatest symbols of that spirit. Since it was built in 1984, the route from Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai Province, to Golmud, the garrison town in China's wild west, has been the train to nowhere. No one, it was believed, could build a line any further across the Qinghai plateau, certainly not one all the way to Tibet. It was too bleak, too cold, too high, too oxygen-starved. Even the best Swiss tunnelling engineers concluded that it was impossible to bore through the rock and ice of the Kunlun mountain range.
If that were not enough, even the flats were filled with perils. A metre or so below the surface was a thick layer of permafrost; above this, a layer of ice that melts and refreezes with the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun. How could anyone build a track on that? And how could a regular service be run in an area plagued by sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter?
As the great train traveller Paul Theroux wrote in Riding the Red Rooster, these challenges are why the former Himalayan kingdom of Tibet - on the other side of the plateau - has remained unspoilt and so un-Chinese for so long. "The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa. That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realised that I liked wilderness much more."
But that guarantee no longer applies. Next month - three years ahead of schedule - Chinese engineers will lay the final section of track on a line stretching to Lhasa, across the roof of the world. Test runs will begin on the new line next July and commercial services are scheduled to begin within two years.
[...]
Xidatan service station (4,350m)
It is no longer possible to ride the train. We are now ahead of the operational tracks. Engines are ferrying equipment up and down the route and we have to be content with a jeep ride along General Mu's bumpy highway. It is soon evident why so many people died during the construction of the road.
Soon after leaving Golmud, we hit the start of the Kunlun range. The craggy slopes on either side are so steep and barren that it is like driving through an alien planet. This is where engineers started blasting and building the first of the seven tunnels and 286 bridges on the 1,110km-long stretch of new line. At its maximum altitude in the Tanggula pass, the track runs 5,072m above sea level - higher than Europe's greatest peak, Mont Blanc, and more than 200m higher than the Peruvian railway in the Andes, which was previously the world's most elevated track. The longest tunnel - at Yangbajin - stretches 3.3km. The longest bridge spans 11.7km over the Qingsui river.
Such awesome statistics are the scripture of China's materialism, evidence of the powerful gospel of scientific development. So is the speed at which the track has been laid, three years ahead of the original seven-year schedule. For the disciples of the economic miracle, this is further proof of how China is overtaking the US to become the country of bigger, higher, faster.
This ambition is apparent across the country, where Chinese engineers are building the world's biggest dam, the longest bridge and the tallest building. Two years ago, China joined the US and Russia as the only countries to put a man in space. Another will go up next month, and in 2007, the country plans to launch its first moon probe. But the railway across the top of the world is arguably the greatest example of the achievements and risks of this can-do spirit.
After driving for four hours, we stop to talk to some of the pioneers who have conquered the terrain at Xidatan, the first servicing station on the new line. Just completed, the small, brilliant-white building waits forlornly for passengers in the midst of a vast dirty grey plain of dust and stones. The nearest habitation is an exhaust-filled, rubbish-strewn strip of a dozen restaurants and a few petrol pumps. Perhaps the station's function is strategic - the plain is also home to an encampment of hundreds of green PLA tents, trucks and artillery pieces.
The station's current residents, however, are railway engineers who are looking forward to leaving. With the work almost complete, they are in good spirits, but they have faced treacherous conditions over the past four years. When Zhao Jianjun arrived from his native Shaanxi province, he needed oxygen to breathe. Working mainly on viaducts, he helped to push the work forward at the rate of a kilometre of track a day. But for five months every winter, work became impossible in temperatures that fell to -30C. Even in the warmer seasons, there were often snowfalls or hailstorms.
According to the Xinhua news agency and my patriotic friend Wang, no one has died of altitude sickness, but Zhao says the work has claimed several lives. It is something we hear on several occasions, though no one knows how many of the 38,000 workers on the project have perished from accidents or illness.
[...]
Tuotuohe (4,200m)
Just downstream from that glacier, and far across an endlessly bleak plain, is our destination: the station at Tuotuohe, the biggest town between Golmud and the Tibetan border. It is the ultimate frontier community: a narrow strip of grubby buildings populated by a few hundred railway workers, soldiers, truck drivers and the providers of the services they seek - garages, restaurants, open-air pool tables, rough beds and a brothel. An endless stream of lorries roars through on the road that General Mu built.
We stay overnight in a grimy truckers' lodge. Over dinner at the Chengdu First Class Restaurant, I am too tired to even chat. We have reached the place where China's can-do spirit pushes people and the environment to the limit.
Just across the river, migrant labourers are rushing to finish the construction of a railway station. They are doing their part to achieve China's engineering miracle, but there is no pride, only relief. "I'm too tired to feel glad," says a welder from Xining who lives in a tent on the building site. "I have been here four months and I'm still not used to the altitude."
This is the end of the line for me. Ahead is another vast barren plain then the towering peaks of the Tanggula range, which mark the border with Tibet. The railway stretches forward, but I have seen its destination. It is time to head home.
On the way back, the clouds - seemingly close enough to touch - break in a fury, and the storm makes the stony, blotchy plains darker, damper and bleaker. The landscape looks as exhausted as the workers.
As the rain lashed down, I wondered who was to blame for the environmental disaster of the Qinghai Plateau. Certainly not only China. Global warming is a legacy of two centuries of industrial development in Europe, the US and Japan. But in doing the same thing on a bigger scale and at a faster speed, China has the capacity to make things much worse, much more quickly.
If railway tracks can spread the tools of modern technology and education to Tibet, the lifestyles of some of the poorest people in the world could be dramatically improved. If ideas are allowed to flow freely in both directions along the track, the meeting of Chinese materialism and Tibetan spiritualism could fill a gap at both ends of the line. And if, as some suggest, the tracks are extended further south to the border with Nepal and then on through the Himalayas to India, it could transform relations between the world's two most populous and fastest-growing economies.
Present trends, however, suggest a much bleaker future. Fifty years ago, when Qinghai Plateau was part of Tibet, it was a scantly populated wilderness. Now, under Beijing's control, it has become a land conquered and settled by Han engineers, miners, soldiers, police and prisoners. There are few grimmer examples of what Chinese-style development can mean for ethnic minorities and the environment.
In the 19th century, Britain and Europe taught the world how to produce. In the 20th, the US taught us how to consume. If China is to lead the world in the 21st century, it must teach us how to sustain.
China's world-beating engineering projects
Three Gorges dam
The $24bn Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river is the largest hydroelectric dam project in the world, and China's biggest construction project since the Great Wall. It will span nearly a mile across and tower 185m above the world's third-longest river. Its reservoir will stretch more than 350 miles and will force the displacement of between one and two million people. It is scheduled for completion by 2009.
Shenzhou spacecraft
China launched its first Shenzhou or "divine vessel" spacecraft on an unmanned flight in November 1999. Shenzhou V (October 2003) was the first manned flight, carrying Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei, making China the third country to send a human into space. The Shenzhou spacecraft, launched with Long March rockets, is modelled on the Russian's Soyuz spacecraft.
Oriental Pearl tower
At 468m tall, Shanghai's 10-year-old Oriental Pearl tower is the highest TV tower in Asia. The main structure is formed by three columns and a series of spheres, the largest 50m in diameter. With its revolving restaurant, hotel and observation decks, it attracts 3 million visitors a year.
Lupu bridge, Shanghai
With a main arch span of 550m, the Lupu bridge is the world's longest steel-arch bridge. It spans the Huangpu river and connects the Shanghai north-south expressway between Pudong airport and the city centre. It took three years and cost 2.5bn yuan (£171m) to build.
Terminal 3, Beijing airport
British architect Norman Foster and British engineering company Arup are building the third terminal at Beijing airport, to be opened before the 2008 Olympics. The complex, funded mainly by the Chinese government, will be the world's largest and is worth £1.2bn. The airport will handle up to 60 million passengers and 500,000 planes a year. Foster has described the scale as "truly awesome".
Beijing's Olympic stadiums
China's ambitious plans for the Olympics (early estimates put spending between £17bn and £22bn) have been scaled down after rumours of corruption and concerns that extravagance would highlight the poverty of much of the country. However, 14 of the 36 Olympic venues are still being built from scratch. The main stadium, with a capacity of 91,000, is being built by Herzog & De Meuron, the firm that designed Tate Modern.
Source: Guardian Research
· Additional reporting by Huang Lisha
guardian.co.uk |
