BEIJING – China on Monday defended its environmental record in Tibet, outlining efforts to protect its ecology and denouncing what it called false claims by the Dalai Lama and activists that it has harmed the Himalayan region.
The central government’s voluminous white paper on Tibet, released by its official Xinhua News Agency, said the region’s fragile ecosystem is threatened by industrial pollution, soil erosion, and increased tourism.
The report said “the Dalai clique” and other “anti-China forces” have “shut their eyes” to the progress made in environmental protection in Tibet since China took control of the region.
Communist troops marched into Tibet in 1950, and Beijing contends it has been part of China for centuries.
The Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, established a government-in-exile in India after he fled Tibet in 1959 with thousands of supporters, following a failed uprising against China. He and other groups have accused China of hurting the region both politically and environmentally.
“They have spread rumors all over the world that the Chinese government is ‘destroying Tibet’s ecological environment,’ ‘plundering Tibet’s natural resources’ and ‘depriving the Tibetan people of their right to subsistence’ … in order to mislead world public opinion and deface the image of China,” the paper said.
It said Tibet has among the least polluted environments in the world, with most of the region still in “a primordial state.” Not one species in Tibet has become extinct in more than 50 years, it said.
In 2001, 686,100 domestic and foreign tourists visited Tibet and spent 750 million yuan (US$90.8 million), it said, adding that the government is considering ways to reduce the detrimental effects of tourism on the area.
The money made in tourism, though, dwarfs the funds that the government says it has put into protecting Tibet’s environment in recent years. China has spent 368 million yuan (US$44 million) on ecological improvement in Tibet since 1996 and plans to invest another 22 billion yuan (US$2.7 billion) by the mid-21st century on environmental protection projects aimed at steadily improving the region’s ecosystem, it said.
