July 17 : The Tibet Express is a triumph of technology. The new, high-speed railroad runs from Beijing, the capital of China, to Lhasa, the former capital of occupied Tibet, travelling 4,000 kilometres in just 48 hours.
It goes over the top of the world almost literally. Coaches are equipped with oxygen the same way that jet airliners are, because at the railroad’s highest grade, at Tanggula Pass near Lhasa, it reaches 5,072 metres. People can get ill at that altitude.
More than 100,000 people worked for four years to build the railroad — a remarkable accomplishment given the difficulty of the terrain — at a staggering price tag of $4.2 billion.
The Tibet Express is also a triumph of totalitarianism. Probably no other nation in the world could have mustered the money, the labour and the determination to complete such a job. No other nation with those kind of resources would devote them to a railroad whose real purpose is the repression of an occupied nation and the destruction of its culture.
So while we gaze at this extraordinary accomplishment, we need to remember that it is due to a $4.2-billion budget, 100,000 indentured Chinese labourers and a Chinese government committed to wiping out Tibet’s culture, language and religion.
China invaded Tibet in 1950 and has never left, compiling a 56-year record of brutality and cultural genocide. The Dalai Lama, spiritual and political leader of Tibet, fled to India after a failed rebellion in 1959 and has lived in exile ever since. Tibet is now officially the autonomous region of Xizang. The international community does not talk much about it; China is the world’s biggest market. There are today more Chinese in Tibet than there are Tibetans.
The railroad is ostensibly intended to increase tourism, but Beijing tightly restricts who can go there and what they can see. The monasteries are closed, the Tibetan language discouraged. The railroad might bring more tourists, but it will be the Chinese in Tibet who will benefit from that, not the Tibetans. It will facilitate the migration of more Chinese workers and the movement of troops and military equipment should the need arise.
This railroad is truly a marvel of technology, but for Tibetans, it is the railroad from hell.
