fast lane to prosperity

With the Qinghai-Tibet railway line opened last year, China hopes to daze the Tibetan population into affluence in the hope that they abandon their dream of an independent country

Sanjay Kapoor Lhasa

As China's technological marvel, the Qinghai-Tibet railway chugs through one of the most picturesque landscapes a modern traveler could hope to see, one can be lulled into ignoring the political implications that this train has on the future of Tibet and China's desperate attempts to integrate it with the mainland. The Qinghai-Lhasa is not just a railway line, but a serious political hand dealt out by the Chinese leadership.

In sheer audacity, the Qinghai-Tibet line is comparable to the Great Wall of China. And by the looks of it, the $3.2 billion train seems to be paying interesting political and financial dividends. In the short term, it is likely to help in showcasing the government's ability to execute gigantic projects just when the Beijing Olympics take place in 2008.

But it is the long term spin-offs that China would really await. Beijing would hope that the development that the train would bring to these economically depressed regions would help in curbing the simmering dissidence among the Tibetan population and enable them to join the Chinese in their long march to become the world's foremost superpower.

Just a year since the train was flagged off and Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and other towns, have seen a surge in tourism and affluence. Tibetans are seemingly making more money, and they are loving it. “The Chinese leadership has been able to convey the message to Tibetans that their salvation lies in making money rather than hanging on to old anxieties about religion and culture,” claimed a young Tibetan employed in the government.

I boarded the train from Xining, the capital of Qinghai, headed towards Lhasa. This stretch was completed only last year and it involved some of the most sophisticated understanding of high altitude environments. Of the 1,142km journey to Lhasa, 980km is at the height of 4,000m or more. The line reaches its highest point of 5,072m at the Dangulla Mountains. Here, oxygen is scarce and it gets difficult for many passengers to breathe. An interpreter accompanying me fainted as she stepped out at a high altitude railway station. 

Scarce oxygen is just one of the few problems the Chinese builders faced. Another problem was the frozen soil and how to build a railway line on that. Therefore, engineers and scientists decided to build the line on bridges. This took care of landslides, permafrost and other attendant hassles that would normally have made the line not navigable.

The train passes through every conceivable ecological system. Passengers forget the discomfort of a long journey and cramped coaches when passing through picturesque wetlands, cold deserts, snow-covered mountains, meadows where goats and antelopes graze and big lakes.

While many Tibetan groups have ran an international campaign against the railway line based on how it can hurt the fragile eco-system, the Chinese are using the railway project to show the world that they do not just mindlessly go about big projects. Zhang Luxin, head of an environmental team that had to clear the project, said in a report, “The Qinghai-Tibet project was different from other previously developed projects as it requires the protection of frozen soil and the ecology based on it, the protection and restoration of vegetation, grassland and water system, and the protection of wild animals, rather than simply trash and sewage disposal.” 

Have the Chinese succeeded in their environmental enterprise? That may be difficult to say, but at a first glance, one gets the impression that the train is not upsetting the yaks that graze leisurely at a distance or the antelopes that feed on lichens. Fears were voiced that waste from the train would spoil the environment, but the Chinese planners have been careful about waste disposal techniques.

To its credit, the Qinghai-Lhasa line has not got the kind of hostile reception that many expected. In fact, since the train began running last year, criticism has been rather muted. The Dalai Lama, it is learnt, has not really criticised the train and the development spin-offs it would bring to the Tibetans.

The train, designed by a European company, has a few things lacking. The three-tier compartments are too tightly cramped. The dining car is inadequate for the number of passengers that travel every day. But surely, the purpose of the train is different. First, it is to give passengers a chance to feast on the glorious view that the Qinghai-Tibet plateau has to offer. All carriages have large windows on both sides giving ample opportunities to amateur and professional photographers to capture memories of this journey.

The Qinghai-Tibet train brings in about 8,000 passengers each day. There are accusations that the train is a conspiracy by the Chinese leadership to change the demographic profile of Tibet by pushing Han Chinese from the mainland into Tibet. It is difficult to find a clear answer to this charge. Tibet has one of the lowest population densities in the world — one person per sq km. The region urgently needs people for development. The Chinese leadership allows Tibetans to have as many children as they want — unlike the one child norm that they have enforced in rest of the country. Tibetans have been responding by having more children and they are the fastest growing nationality in China. Yet, these figures have not been able to fight the accusation of growing Han influences in Tibet.

A social ecologist told me, “If the Tibetans and their habitat is not protected, they would disappear like the Australian aborigines or native Americans.” Tibetans, however, are unanimous in their view that the Qinghai-Tibet train has brought more prosperity than they had seen in many years. The shops around Barkhor Market in Lhasa are doing brisk business. Some of the big showrooms here are owned by top lamas, which clearly show that spiritual pursuits do not really contradict money-making enterprises.

The Qinghai-Lhasa train is a big gamble for the Chinese, who are hoping that their roaring economic success and their achievements in the urban infrastructural development would force the Tibetans to forget their old demand for an independent country. Only time, and economic development, will tell if that gamble pays off.