Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

To secure Beijing’s control over the region, General Mu knew a road for his troops was more important than any document. In 1953, he was given 300,000 yuan, 1,500 kilograms of explosives, and 500 men to build the world’s highest highway. He did it in a year. Tibet’s remoteness had been breached. When the Dalai Lama led an uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, it was crushed by troops that flooded in on the road built by General Mu. Ever since, Tibetan policy has been determined in Beijing rather than Lhasa.

Almost as soon as I set out on the road that General Mu built, I saw a jarring sight: row upon row of freshly painted blue and gray single-story buildings in the middle of an otherwise empty and dusty plain outside Golmud. It was a new housing estate for thousands of Tibetan herders who had been resettled from the open spaces of the plateau, where their families had lived for generations, to a city built by Han soldiers. I asked some of the inhabitants what had happened.

Da Jie was the fifty-eight-year-old head of a family of eight. He had the weather-beaten face of a man who had spent his life roaming the plateau. He had been given a new home and a promise of 500 yuan a month for ten years in return for leaving the land. There was little choice or explanation. “Our leaders told us we must leave. They didn’t tell us why. There is still plenty of grass on the plateau, but the land isn’t ours—it belongs to the government,” he told us. He and his family are coping, but the adjustment is huge. “I’ve herded animals all my life. I had more than a hundred sheep. Now I have no job.”

They were environmental refugees, part of a nationwide resettlement of millions of people affected by climatic shifts, ecological stress, and politics. Most of the people in this housing estate formerly lived close to what was now the railway, which had led to forced relocation along other sections of the track, particularly near Lhasa. But it was not just the arrival of the train that forced the Tibetans in Golmud to give up their old way of life. Modernization, Sinicization, and climate change had also played a part in driving them off the land.

Nomads depended on grassland to feed their herds. But this fragile high-altitude ecosystem was degraded by China’s and mankind’s rush to develop. A moderate amount of grazing is good for grassland as it keeps the plants in check. But the balance between herd sizes and territory had been knocked out of synch by economic reforms and administrative policy set in distant Beijing. The deregulation of herd sizes in the early 1980s prompted nomads to buy as many goats, sheep, and yaks as they could afford. Subsequent policies that, for purposes of taxation, valued yaks four times as highly as sheep led to a surge in the numbers of the latter, which were far more damaging to the grasslands. The situation was not helped by a ban on polygamy that encouraged status-conscious Tibetan men to compensate for the loss of wives by increasing the size of their herds. 15

As a result, wide areas of grassland were so overgrazed they turned to desert. 16This was calamitous. Denuded of its thatch covering, the roof of the world was less able to absorb moisture and more likely to radiate heat. The result? The mountains of Tibet warmed more than any other part of China.

To make matters worse, the high Kunlun and Himalayan ranges acted as a chimney for water vapor to be convected high into the stratosphere instead of being trapped at a lower level and released as rain or snow. This was bad for several reasons: First, water vapor has a stronger greenhouse gas effect than carbon dioxide; second, its dispersal over a wider area potentially deprives arid areas of China of water; third, it contains pollution, dust, and black carbon, which create brown clouds that spread over the region. 17Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Center, told me Tibet’s climate was the most sensitive in Asia and impacted other parts of the globe. Changes in the soil here fed back rapidly into the atmosphere, affecting global air circulation just as rising ocean surface temperatures affected storm patterns.

Beijing’s efforts to reverse these effects and restore grassland focused on resettling between 50 and 80 percent of the 2.25 million nomads on the Tibetan Plateau. 18China’s propaganda organs depicted the end of the nomadic way of life as a triumph. A Xinhua report claimed former Tibetan herders shed tears of joy on becoming the first generation of industrial workers. “Machines are now roaring on the pastureland where melodious pastorals used to be heard,” the agency said. 19Supporters of the Tibetan government in exile said the forced relocation of herders merely shifted the blame for grassland degradation and paved the way for exploitation of the region’s mineral wealth. 20

There was a checkpoint on the road ahead. A few days earlier, some foreign tourists had been turned back because they didn’t have a special permit for Tibet. Neither did I. But on the advice of a friend familiar with the area, I had bought a long-peaked baseball cap before setting off. When the guards looked into the vehicle, I was napping in the back with the cap pulled far enough down to cover my big nose and Western face. It worked. There were no awkward questions about travel permits and we were allowed to drive on.

This was where engineers had started blasting and building the first of the seven tunnels and 286 bridges on the 1,110-kilometer stretch of the railway line. We climbed rapidly to the Kunlun Pass. At 4,776 meters, this was one of the great doorways to the top of the world. It was also the northern shore of a vast sea of permafrost that stretched more than 600 kilometers across the plateau toward Tibet and the Himalayas, prompting some to describe it as the third pole of the world. It was an apt term. The plateaus and the mountain ranges around it contained 37,000 glaciers, some of which were 700,000 years old. 21Together they contained the largest body of ice outside of the Arctic and Antarctic.

This barrier had been considered impassable for a railway, but China’s scientists believed they had overcome the challenge. Their big technological breakthrough was to insulate the track from the unstable surface above the permafrost. It was a huge challenge. Near the surface, the permafrost thawed every summer day and froze by night, dropping and lifting and turning the earth into mush and puddles. On a normal line this would buckle the rails, collapse bridges, and collapse tunnels. But for the new railway, engineers pumped cooling agents into the ground so the earth around the most vulnerable tunnels and pillars remained frozen and stable.

But there were doubts that even this ingenious and expensive solution would be enough to protect the track from the worst hazard affecting the plateau. Global warming was melting the permafrost faster than engineers had imagined. Temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau were rising three times faster than the global average. 22If the trends continued, Chinese climatologists forecast a 3.4°C temperature rise by 2050, which would lead to a shrinking of the permafrost and a greater risk of the railway track buckling. 23

There were other warnings that the thaw of the world’s third ice cap was well under way. Yao Tandong, a professor of the China Academy of Sciences, told me glaciers in the region had been shrinking at the rate of four meters a year since he started monitoring them in 1989. The rate of retreat is accelerating. 24A Greenpeace expedition found one of the world’s most spectacular ice formations, a towering forest of seracs, some as tall as 20 meters, near Mount Everest base camp, had almost disappeared during the previous forty years. 25The news horrified me. Though the seracs usually merited only a paragraph or two in the memoirs of explorers, the gnarled pillars of ice were one of the world’s hidden treasures. Now they were almost gone.