Opponents rail against China's record-breaking train to Tibet

Published on Friday 30 June 2006 00:58

IT IS the world's highest railway, featuring hi-tech systems to stabilise tracks over permafrost and cabins enriched with oxygen to help passengers cope as the train climbs to record altitudes, taking 16,500ft passes at 60mph.

China's 2.3 billion, 710-mile line to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, sometimes called the "sky train" in Chinese, is an engineering marvel of which officials are proud.

The line is a "major achievement" that will "hugely boost local development and benefit the local people," Zhu Zhensheng, of China's railway ministry, said.

Yet, as with so much else in China's often harsh 56-year rule in Tibet, the railway has caused controversy even before the first train departs tomorrow.

Tibetans loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama and other critics say the railway is part of a campaign by Beijing to crush their culture and the still-simmering separatist movement, by encouraging a huge influx of Han Chinese immigrants. Environmentalists worry about the impact on the ecologically fragile Tibetan highlands.

The train "will mean more environmental destruction for Tibet, more unemployment for Tibetans and, of course, our culture will be devastated", said Ngawang Woeber, a member of Gu Chu Sum, an Indian-based support group for Tibetan former political prisoners.

Members of his and other pro-Tibetan independence groups plan to wear black armbands and demonstrate outside Chinese embassies tomorrow as part of their "Reject the Railway" campaign.

Mr Zhu defended the project, saying the line would give a huge boost to the Tibetan region's economy - it is projected to help double tourism revenues by 2010 and reduce transport costs for goods by 75 per cent - and help educate more people about its unique culture. However, he admitted that few Tibetans would be working on the train at the start, though "we hope to increase those opportunities".

Chinese officials had been thinking about building a railway to Tibet for decades. China's extensive rail system reached Golmud, in Qinghai province, nearly 1,865 miles from Beijing, by 1984. But railway officials gave up on reaching Tibet, saying the region's huge swathes of permafrost and extreme variations in temperature made building a track to Lhasa unfeasible.

In 2001, the plan was resurrected. Engineers determined they could build elevated bridges over the most unstable tracts of permafrost. In other places, they could sink pipes with cooling elements into the ground to stabilise track embankments, ensuring they stayed frozen. "It's kind of like non-electric refrigeration," Mr Zhu said.

The train cars are fitted with double-glazed windows with ultraviolet filters to protect passengers from the sun's glare and have carefully regulated oxygen levels in all classes of travel.

Despite the strong feelings on both sides of the argument, the new line is unlikely to have a huge impact, according to Andrew Fischer, an economics researcher at the London School of Economics.

Daily flights and overland links have given the Chinese ways to get to Tibet for decades, tourism levels are likely to be only slightly higher, and exploiting the area's natural reserves will remain prohibitively expensive, he said. The main reason for the project was symbolic. "It's the last frontier they have been dreaming of for the last century," he said.