Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

It had been thought that no one could build a line any farther across the Tibetan Plateau, certainly not all the way to Tibet. It was too bleak, too cold, too high, too oxygen-starved. Even the best Swiss tunneling engineers concluded that it was impossible to bore through the rock and ice of the Kunlun mountain range. And if that was not impassable enough, even the flats were filled with perils. A meter or so below the surface was a layer of permafrost. Above that, a layer of ice that expanded or melted according to the season and time of day. How could tracks be laid on such an unstable surface? 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 traveler and writer Paul Theroux notes in Riding the Iron Rooster, these obstacles protected the former Himalayan kingdom of Tibet from modernity:

The main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese—and so thoroughly old-fangled and pleasant—is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached. 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 realized that I liked wilderness much more. 8

That was written in 1988. Less than two decades later those protective barriers were falling, though Tibet was still more inaccessible than almost anywhere else on earth. A World Bank study located the planet’s most remote place in Tibet. The region was also home to much of the last 10 percent of the planet that was not within a 48-hour car, train, or speedboat ride of a city. The advent of the Sky Train will change that. 9

The railway was a meeting of opposites. On one side was the heir of Mao’s legacy, Hu Jintao, the engineer-president who preached a philosophy of “Scientific Development.” When he opened the track, he celebrated it as a symbol of national progress and unity that would help to improve life in Tibet and draw it closer to the rest of China. On the other was the Dalai Lama, the political monk who advocated a philosophy of compassion and conservation. He warned that Tibet was threatened by cultural genocide as the railway brought more Han settlers, tourists, and businessmen. His support for development was tempered by his Buddhist concerns about the natural environment: “The world grows smaller and smaller, more and more interdependent … today more than ever before life must be characterised by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.” 10

In the Western world, the train has been the subject of much hypocrisy. The British in India, the French in Africa, and the European settlers in North America built railway lines to subjugate indigenous populations, but when China did the same thing in Tibet, it was pilloried. This may be because of the strategic importance of the Himalayas. As early as 1889, another mustached British colonial, the writer Rudyard Kipling, noted with alarm: “What will happen when China really wakes up, runs a line from Shanghai to Lhasa … and really works and controls her own gun-factories and arsenals?” 11The fact that Beijing has now done exactly that shows how global power has shifted.

Orientalist fantasies often reached absurd levels in Tibet. Adolf Hitler sent an expedition there in search of paranormal powers to strengthen the Third Reich and to make contact with the mythical kingdom of Shambala. More recently, a host of Hollywood stars have seen in Tibet the spiritual core missing from their homes in California. Steven Seagal was named a reincarnated lama, but he is far from alone in being mocked for an obsession with “Shangri-La-La Land.”

Tibet has not always been associated with peace, spirituality, and remoteness. It once boasted an extensive empire that stretched through much of central Asia. At other times, it was invaded by Mongols, Manchus, Dzungars from Xinjiang, and Gurkhas from Nepal, and its leaders built alliances with Arabs, Turks, Indians, and Chinese. The first Europeans, a group of Portuguese missionaries, arrived in 1624. Buddhism was not native to the region; it was introduced either via China or Nepal or directly from India. Neither were monks necessarily peace-loving—the “Dobdobs” were the most famous of many bands of warriors based in monasteries that once fought for control of territory—nor are they necessarily any less tempted by money and power. Before 1959, 95 percent of the land was concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of the theocracy. Tibetan scholars have never claimed their land was Shangri-La. 12

Chinese rule has brought very real economic and health benefits even as it has curtailed religious and political freedom. 13The Xinhua News Agency, China Central TV, and the other organs of state propaganda insist Beijing’s rule is not just benign, it is altruistic. Less often stated, but more crucial, is the strategic importance of the world’s peaks and the mineral wealth they contain. Tibet covers an eighth of China’s landmass and contains an abundance of valuable ores, including gold, lithium, copper, magnetite, uranium, borax, and lead. More important still, it is also the source of Asia’s biggest rivers.

We were woken just before dawn as the train approached Golmud, from where we were to continue by car for a closer look at the plateau. I was prepared for the worst. My Lonely Planet guidebook warned that this “forlorn outpost in the oblivion end of China” was set amid an eerie and inhospitable moonscape at 2,800 meters. Golmud did not disappoint. Desolate in the early morning gloom, this was clearly a frontier town for Han materialism. There were few signs of the indigenous Tibetan population and a high concentration of soldiers, miners, and police. Formerly a small trading post, this city of 200,000 had become a key supply point for the People’s Liberation Army in Tibet. With the addition of potash production and oil drilling, Golmud had expanded rapidly to become the second-biggest city in Qinghai Province.

And with the railway, it was expected to grow further and faster. Development was evident everywhere. Many of the roads and buildings looked new, and there was a plethora of cranes and construction sites. The newest addition to the cityscape was a giant two-story TV screen blaring out advertisements for cosmetics and electrical goods. The city had become more hospitable too. Eight years ago when my guidebook was published, there had been only one hotel that would accept foreigners. Now there were several four-star inns, along with neon-lit streets of restaurants, pink-lit “massage parlors,” and gaudy karaoke bars.

According to hotel staff, tourist numbers were rising, but most are en route to Tibet. With a few hours to kill, we went for breakfast with Zha Xi, a burly Tibetan and a member of the Wild Yak Brigade. This ragtag patrol of two dozen vigilantes had been formed to fight off poachers threatening the chiru (Tibetan antelope) and other endangered species. Their leader, a local government official named Sonam Dorjee, was killed in a gun battle with the hunters, becoming a martyr for the Chinese environmental movement. His exploits were mythologized by the award-winning film Kekexili (Mountain Patrol).

Over a bowl of noodles, Zha expressed mixed feelings about the pace of change on the plateau. “Overall, I think it is a good thing because this area is poor and isolated so people need more economic development. But it is bad for the environment. The railway is being built through the habitat of the chiru. They are very timid animals and they have been scared off by the construction work which goes on night and day.”

Before setting off, we asked to be taken to the closest thing the city had to a museum, the former home of General Mu Shengzhong, who oversaw the construction of the road from Golmud to Lhasa in 1954. He was the Younghusband of his day, an empire builder who believed in the duty of “advanced civilizations” to help more backward societies. He too led his country’s first military intervention into Tibet in the guise of a diplomatic mission. In 1950, against a background of deadly fighting in other parts of the region, the general led 1,100 troops from the Eighteenth Army on a grueling overland march into Lhasa to reaffirm Chinese control. The fatalities are disputed. According to Tibetan accounts, 5,000 Tibetan soldiers were killed by the superior People’s Liberation Army. The “peaceful liberation,” as it is styled in Chinese history textbooks, resulted in envoys of the sixteen-year-old Dalai Lama signing a seventeen-point agreement affirming Chinese sovereignty in return for a promise of high autonomy. 14The Tibetan leader later disavowed the arrangement completely.