On July the 1st the Himalayas will cease to exist. On July the 1st the power balance in Asia will tilt hugely in favour in China. On July the 1st the maiden train from Beijing will depart for the holy city of Lhasa reaching the capital of Tibet in 48 hours.
Towards the end of nineteenth century when, China, then themselves a victim of imperialism, violently retaliated against the European colonials’ railway plans condemning the foreign railways as a direct threat to the survival of their culture and sovereignty. And today – at the dawn of the 21st century – China is rehashing the same imperialistic devices on the Tibetan plateau under the shabby garbs of development.
The completion of the railway track from Gormo in traditional Amdo region of Tibet to Lhasa, which has impoverished the communist coffers by over $4.2 billion, marks the fulfilment of a mission set by Mao Tsetung more that 40 years ago as a part of China’s unchanged strategy to exert absolute control over the region and assert its military presence in the Indian subcontinent and south east Asia. The decision to ply daily and alternate-days trains from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xining and Guangzhou is a politically motivated decision that has been imposed on, and strongly opposed by, the Tibetan people in and outside of Tibet. Jiang Zemin, the former President of China publicly declared in 2001 that the Gormo-Lhasa railway was a ‘political decision’ thereby removing any doubts and hopes whatsoever of the train to Tibet heralding development and bringing benefits to the Tibetan people.
The World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme in their researches have constantly found Tibet remaining as the poorest and least developed region of China. Independent datas show a wide and threatening gap between the 1,861 yuan per capita income of the rural majority of Tibetans accounting for 85% of the total population and the 8,200 yuan ‘disposable income’ of those living in urban areas where there is a high concentration of Chinese immigrants. The reports further state that the Human Development Index, which uses indicators such as education, income and health, of Tibet is only 0.39, placing Tibet amongst the bottom of 49 officially recognised least developed regions of the world. In stark comparison the Gormo-Lhasa rail link has been estimated at costing more than three times the amount Chinese government has spent on health care and education in Tibet during the past fifty years. The allocation of resources in an extraneous railroad in Tibet where the illiteracy rate is four times that of its neighbouring provinces and the number of vocational schools per capita is one fourth that of the rest of China, highlights China’s intentions of developing Tibet as a feasible alternative for Chinese immigrants rather that developing the Tibetan people.
As opposed to China’s claims of the railways bringing employment to Tibet where at certain parts 40% unemployment has been recorded, of the 38,000 people hired on the railways only 6,000 were Tibetans. Chinese officials working on the railways have said that none of the 2,700 workers who operate heavy equipment or hold supervisory posts are Tibetans. Reports further indicate that out of the 10,000 positions for skilled workers, no Tibetan was considered qualified. Chinese immigrants are bound to beat Tibetans in securing long term jobs on the railways as it has been in the case of the Kashgar, Xingjian railways where the majority of the staff as well as the clientele are Chinese to go along with the Chinese signs, Chinese music, Chinese food and Chinese announcements. Even the Tibetan tour guides who would have otherwise earned a marginal profit from the boost that the tourism industry shall receive from the railways have now lost their jobs to Chinese tour guides due to the Chinese government’s policy of looking upon Tibetan guides as harbouring sympathy for H.H. The Dalai Lama. Li Ruihuan, Senior politburo member had said that the railway project was ‘related directly to the struggle against the Dalai Lama’s splittist attempts’.
Building of roads and railways in Tibet have always sought to fulfil the military intentions of China as so clearly defined by Mao Tsetung as Tibet being the palm and Nepal, Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh (which China still shows as Chinese territory), Jammu and Kashmir (one fifth of which China occupies) and Sikkim being its five fingers. The roads which China built across the Indo-Tibet border in the fifties were later used for aggression against India in the 1962 war while the railway link extended to the strategic town of Gormo in 1958 from Siling connected the Military airbase of Gangca, the missile base of Terlenka 19, the resource rich Tsaidam basin and the notorious Ninth Academy responsible for designing all of China’s nuclear bombs through the 1970s. Gormo-Lhasa railway link which will be extended upto the southern city of Shigatse will enhance military manoeuvrability, enable rapid troop deployment upto 12 infantry divisions, facilitate the expansion of army bases and increase nuclear weapon stockpile and missile deployment on the Tibetan plateau which already has 17 top secret radar stations, eight missile bases furnished with a huge payload of intercontinental ballistic missiles and 25 airfields and airstrips.
The new Tibetan railway described by China’s Qinghai Daily as the ‘political frontline in consolidating the south-western border of the motherland’, indubitably carries significant strategic ramifications for India. The Gormo-Lhasa-Shigatse railway link forms a strategic part of China’s plans of forming a military swathe around India along with the two north-south strategic corridors that China is building on either side of India – the Trans-Karakoram Corridor stretching right upto Gwadar Harbour in the Arabian Sea which Pakistan gave to China in April 2002 to be developed into a naval base; and the Irrawaddy Corridor involving road, river and rail links from Yunan right upto Burmese ports where China has build military facilities on the Coco Islands, just 40 kms away from Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.
Xizang, the Chinese word for Tibet means ‘western treasure house’. Tibet has proven deposits of 126 minerals all over the plateau with a significant share of the world’s resource of uranium, lithium, chromate, copper, borax, cobalt, gold and iron. The Tsaidam basin alone holds 42 billion tonnes of oil reserves, 1,500 billion cubic metres of natural gas and rich deposits of potassium chloride along with other oil and natural gas reserves at Lhunpo-la and Chang Thang basins. The advent of rail links will increase the extraction of minerals and make the exploitation of natural resources much more profitable and attractive as the cost of transportation to China will be drastically reduced. The exploitation of natural resources in Tibet has minimum bearing in boosting the local economy as according to the Chinese constitution all the primary industries are owned by the State and their revenues go straight to the central government.
The fragile ecology of Tibet as many experts believe has suffered irreversible damage with the construction of the railways. Tibet being the headwaters of all the greatest Asia rivers, contamination of water bodies caused by the dumping of nuclear wastes in Tibet, inducement of deflation, siltation and soil erosion as a result of escalating resource exploitation will have profound effects down stream. Given the harsh climate of the Tibetan plateau, the vegetation cover that sustains some of the rarest animal and bird species in the world such as the black neck cranes, yellow ducks, musk deer and chiru antelopes have been damaged by the engineering works beyond repair. Environmentalists believe that the railway line with its extensive tunnel and bridge system will seriously affect the migratory pattern of wildlife. Furthermore, with the government’s approval for a plan to form 25 new townships along the railway, the population pressure will increase illegal poaching, push the natural boundaries of wildlife and overburden Tibet’s fragile environment.
The most serious consequence of the July 1st railways will be the demographic aggression that the railways shall force on the Tibetan people. Within the next decade Beijing plans to relocate 20 million Chinese in Tibet using the railways. The Gormo-Lhasa Railways will serve to bolster China’s age old population transfer policy and complete the Sinicization of Tibet while exacerbating the ongoing economic marginalisation of Tibetans. For instance before the advent of the rail link, Gormo was a vast pastoral land inhabited by a few hundred Tibetan nomads but after being rail linked to mainland China, Gormo’s population has risen upto 200,000 of which only 3,600 (1.8%) are Tibetans. Under international law population transfer without the free and informed consent of the transferred population or any receiving population, is unlawful even when carried on under the guise of development, which has been the case in Tibet. Since 1950, China has maintained a practice and policy of moving Chinese settlers into Tibet despite the opposition of Tibetans. The population transfer is not just infringing on the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people, it is threatening the very survival of the Tibetan people and culture.
His Holiness The Dalai lama while referring to the railways in Tibet said that some kind of ‘cultural genocide’ was taking place inside Tibet. The World Bank had earlier backed off from supporting one of China’s population transfer policy into Tibet citing the reason that it didn’t want to be accomplice to cultural genocide.
Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), the largest Tibetan non-governmental organisation struggling to regain the complete independence of Tibet has constantly opposed the construction of railways in Tibet with its XIIIth General Body Meeting passing resilient and effective resolutions against the rail-link. TYC fiercely rejects any so called development plans in Tibet as long as effective local participation is denied and policy-making powers at all levels are not devolved. TYC maintains that the Gormo-Lhasa railway link is a death knell for an independent Tibetan culture, religion and race and strongly condemns the Chinese government for her continued occupation over Tibet and unlawful and heinous policies of ethnic cleansing in Tibet.
