Cultural invasion by rail
Dhargyal is worried that his ancestral land has been dug up like a minefield, and that his nomadic family is desperately searching for temporary shelter for their yaks and sheep. Living in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile, Dhargyal can neither go back to his remote Tibetan home, nor can he stop worrying.
Like Dhargyal's family, there are hundreds of Tibetan families who have lost their land to the recently opened train track that runs from Golmud in Qinghai to Lhasa. Even while Beijing trumpets the railway – the highest in the world – as an engineering feat and an economic boon in waiting, these families are either yet to be paid for their confiscated land, or are living in temporary shelters awaiting relocation.
The construction of the new train track, which runs between Tibet's extreme northeast and its capital in the central-south, was finished in September last year, almost a year ahead of schedule. The first train pulled into the new station in Lhasa in mid-July. All along the 1140 km track, China Railway's Western Railway administration has acquired huge tracts of land from Tibetan farmers and nomads, cutting through the grasslands the Tibetans call the Jangthang. Because the Tibetan plateau is an active earthquake zone, the tracks could not simply be laid on a narrow stretch of land. Instead, huge mounds of earth with sloping sides needed to be built up in order to support the infrastructure, which meant the requirement of large tracts of land on both sides of the line. All in all, the breadth of land acquired for the line averages 100 metres.
In Yangpachen, around 90 km northwest of Lhasa where Dhargyal's family lives, the engineers made a mistake and had to re-route the railroad, thus abandoning many kilometres of trenches. The farmers complain that since the fragile soil composition has been disturbed the land can no longer be used for farming; the locals do not have the resources to level this costly mistake.
Nomads in Nagchu, Damxung and Yangpachen have also reported that along with the railroad have come mass deaths of animals under the elevated bridges. Although these bridges were built specifically as underpasses for the animals, the nomads say that the gaps between the pillars supporting the bridges are too small. Sheep, yaks, chiru (Tibetan antelope) and kyang (wild ass) traditionally graze in huge herds in these lands. But when these groups rush between the pillars, stampedes occur that end up killing scores of weak and young animals. What were designed as safe corridors have turned out to be death traps for wildlife and domesticated livestock alike.
Flooding Xizang
The 1 July launch of the railway line has brought with it the fear of many Tibetans in Tibet and Tibetan exiles that it will trigger a flood of Han settlers from the Chinese mainland. There is an odd association here with the traditional stories about Genghis Khan, or the long-ago exploits of warlords in eastern Tibet who came marauding. As a result of the railway, Tibetans are talking not about such conquering fighters but rather about the flow of migrant workers from China, jobless college graduates for whom the train is a direct deliverance into a land of opportunity. Encouraging such aspirations, Beijing advertises Tibet as Xizang, meaning 'Western Treasure House'. In major Chinese urban centres, railway tickets are being sold for as little as USD 49, or USD 160 for luxury class. (In London, travel agencies offer the luxury rail trip into Tibet at a whopping USD 8000).
Major Tibetan cities like Lhasa, Golmud, Chamdo and Shigatse are already flooded by Han Chinese businesses and products. In 1997 Beijing attempted to resettle 80,000 Han citizens into a remote area in the northeastern Tibetan province of Amdo. At that time, the activism of Western pro-Tibet campaigns was able to get the World Bank to intervene, and force the withdrawal of the scheme due to a lack of funding. The railway will change the dynamic and make Han settlement difficult to contain. One Chinese development programme estimates that about 200 million Han will be resettled into Tibet by 2015. Tibet's indigenous population is said to be 4-6 million, depending on where you define its boundaries.
Already Tibetans are a minority in their own land vis-à-vis settlers and tourists alike. As the new 'miracle' trains roll into the Lhasa station, Tibetans in Tibet fear they will be submerged into insignificance. The official Chinese tourism department reported more than 1.2 million tourists visited Tibet last year, out of which 92 percent were Han. Conversely, in the 1980s almost the entirety of the small tourist influx was foreigners.
Constructing a railway that would connect Lhasa directly to Beijing was a dream of the Chinese Communist Party since the time of Mao Zedong. While discussing China's takeover of Tibet, Jung Chang, the latest authority on Mao, writes that when the Red Guard ran into difficulty penetrating into Tibet in 1950 due to its dramatic topography, Mao initiated a duplicitous strategy: promising autonomy to the young Dalai Lama, while simultaneously starting to build roads into Tibet. Once a network of roads was built, Beijing was able to send in the People's Liberation Army.
Railway lines that have been built into other parts, such as Inner Mongolia, Manchuria and East Turkistan (Xinjiang), have long shown the inevitability of an influx of Han citizens. Today, 85 percent of the population in Manchuria is Han. Mongolians hardly speak their own language anymore. The restive East Turkistan, meanwhile, remains under tight control of the People's Liberation Army.
Development bullying
The railway is a part of China's Western Development Programme, which is also intended to reach further into the Himalayan belt, thereby being able to facilitate direct trade between South and East Asia. Beijing has plans to extend the railway to southern Tibetan cities such as Shigatse, Gyantse, Nyingchi and Yadong. Two more railway networks from Chengdu and Yunnan in the Chinese south are also planned to connect to the Lhasa railway.
The new line from Golmud will function to 'homogenise' Tibet with the inevitable introduction of Chinese-style modern development. Even as such programmes are touted in Beijing for their potential to boost Tibet's economy, by and large Tibetans cannot participate in these schemes, as most lack technical and scientific expertise. The need to fill carpentry, plumbing, electrical or engineering jobs creates an excuse to import and employ additional Han settlers.
The railway may be symbolic of a new level of incursion, but what is really invading Tibet today is a consumerist culture, in the extreme forms of karaoke bars, alcoholism, prostitution, drug trafficking and widespread mining, besides an overload of tourism. This is a new way of life – driven by economic exercises and enforced by a rampant culture of market economy – in direct opposition to what may be considered basic Tibetan values. But with a facade of liberalism and development promising life's comforts, there is little resistance to the new invasion. What the Cultural Revolution could not destroy with communist brutality and indoctrination, what law and iron-fisted suppression could not destroy over the past five decades, is now about to fall prey to globalisation through the intermediary of the Chinese state and its programmed as well as inadvertent Hanification.
If Beijing truly wants to develop Tibet, it needs to listen to the needs of the Tibetans. Introducing and imposing their own definition of 'development' is nothing more than an act of bullying on the part of the Chinese government. This is what one needs to understand as the railway arrives in Lhasa and spreads its tentacles deeper still into Tibet: in the absence of the Tibetans' ability to decide what they want and do not want, the train tracks are but tools of cultural invasion.