Controversy Is Building as China Makes Tracks for Tibet

Building a railway to Tibet across lofty mountain passes and frozen plains isn’t just an engineering challenge for Shi Jiaming. It’s a moral duty.

“Tibet has been without the railway, but now they will have the same great things and great life as us,” said Shi, who oversees dozens of workers in a treeless gorge that the tracks will pass through.

Sentiment among Tibetans could hardly be more different. They worry that the railway--from the western Chinese city of Golmud to the fabled Tibetan capital of Lhasa--will bring floods of Chinese settlers, erode their culture and threaten their livelihoods.

The $3.3-billion project will be China’s biggest investment in Tibet since communist troops occupied the Himalayan region in 1950. It’s not much less than the $4.8 billion that official figures indicate Beijing has spent over five decades building public facilities in Tibet and subsidizing the influx of Chinese migrants.

Chinese officials talk up the railway’s economic potential. But it also will strengthen Beijing’s political grip. The trains would allow quick deployment of troops to put down Tibetan protests like those in the late 1980s against Chinese rule and to guard the frontier with India, which fought a border war with China in 1962.

The line will “exert a far-reaching impact in political, economic and military terms,” state media quoted China’s vice minister of railways, Sun Yongfu, as saying earlier this year.

The Tibetan government-in-exile led by the Dalai Lama says the railway will damage Tibet’s environment and allow Beijing to plunder its resources.

Tibetans already complain that Chinese settlers are pushing them aside.

“We’re not anti-development, but we’re scared of all the Chinese coming. They have the government’s backing, so what can we do?” said a Tibetan trader buying clothes in Golmud for resale. She wouldn’t give her name.

Builders like Shi can barely understand such sentiments. They work with almost missionary zeal in barren mountain passes in Qinghai province, where Golmud is located. Bulldozers are piling dirt for embankments. Some 11,000 workers are assigned to the project.

“Golmud’s a great place. Lots of development, lots of opportunities,” said Lai, a Chinese farmer from Sichuan province who was riding the last leg of the existing line to take a construction job in Golmud.

Laying track is scheduled to take six years. The route runs 693 miles across the high-altitude Tibetan plateau, at one point crossing a pass 16,600 feet above sea level.

The technical challenges are immense and working conditions punishing.

Tracks can buckle in winter as temperatures drop to 35 degrees below zero. The ground shifts as it freezes and melts. Work virtually stops from October through April. In the thin air, almost any effort is exhausting. By November, 50 workers had been hospitalized with altitude sickness, the Railways Ministry said.

But builders won’t contemplate failure.

“We took on the task. We are absolutely confident we can complete it,” Shi told reporters who visited the camp where his crew is casting concrete sections for a railway bridge.

Studies on a railway to Tibet were ordered in the 1950s by communist founder Mao Tse-tung. But work was shelved due to engineering obstacles, lack of money and repeated political upheavals.

China announced last year that it had solved the technical problems, and work camps sprang up this summer.

Even ethnic Chinese will face economic disruption as freight trains replace trucks that make the six-day round trip from Golmud to Lhasa, which lies at 12,154 feet. Truckers and the garages and other businesses that serve them will have to find new income.

“The train will cost lots of jobs, so we’re worried,” said Xu, a trucking agent in Golmud.