The title is borrowed from a CNN report (July 6) on the historic inauguration of the first rail link to Lhasa, capital of Tibet, from Beijing and other mainland cities. It highlighted Tibetans’ fears of “erosion of their untouched landscape, unique culture and independent identity”. The high-speed train will bring in trade and economic benefits and lead to “an influx of thieves and gangsters”. But “the benefits will only go to the Chinese population, the Tibetans will be further marginalized”.
And on the eve of the railway’s opening (July 1), Beijing’s police detained briefly three women from Britain, Canada and the U.S. after they climbed through a second-floor window at the main train station and unfurled a black-and-white banner that read, “China’s Tibet Railway, Designed to Destroy”.
Opponents of the railway called its opening the “death knell” of an independent Tibetan culture and the region’s pristine natural environment.
That sums up the world’s criticisms of Beijing’s rail penetration into the heart of Shangri-La. Many reports praised the railway’s engineering success, carried out under extremely difficult conditions.
The railway is key to development and modernization. So Beijing hailed its opening “a route to civilization”.
That description, implying improvement, is a highly subjective term for a process more accurately described by the word “acculturation”, meaning the adoption by one group of the customs of another.
But 210 years ago in America, Indian tribes were subjected to a similar “process of civilization”. George Washington selected in 1796 the Cherokee Indians, living in the western regions of North Carolina and Georgia, for a pilot scheme in integration. The reluctant Indians were taught ways to build log cabins, till the land and accept Christianity.
Like America’s scheme, China’s new railway to Tibet is designed to put the isolated Himalayan plateau on a fast track to economic development and integration with the country’s other 55 ethnic tribes, to avoid disparity and instability.
The Shangri-La’s extraordinary isolation has kept it poor, but also helped to preserve its native way of life, just as other fellow human beings, who have long passed the post-modern stage, have wished.
For centuries, Tibet has drifted in and out of Chinese control. Under the Dalai Lama, a spiritual as well as temporal leader, it ran its own affairs for years during the first half of the 20th century, when China was in turmoil. But Beijing’s military forces reimposed Chinese control in 1950, and the Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas. After years of pushing for renewed independence, at times with covert backing from the U.S., the Dalai Lama more recently has sought to renew relations with Beijing and return to Tibet on the basis of autonomy under Chinese rule.
But Beijing has continued to regard the Dalai Lama as a separatist because he refuses to publicly endorse Beijing’s “one-China” principle for reunification with Taiwan.
The railway could double Tibet’s tourism revenues by 2010 and cut transport costs into the region by 75 percent, lifting its 2.8 million people out of isolation and poverty.
Tibetans are virtually at the bottom of the economic and social ladder. Cash incomes are concentrated in the urban areas, largely populated by non-Tibetan immigrants. More than 80 percent of the Tibetan population still herd animals or farm.
Migrants are much better at finding jobs or doing business than the natives, who have no skills or outside connections.
To correct the trend, Beijing has been sending hundreds of Tibet’s star students to other Chinese provinces each year, to receive higher education and acquaintance other cultures.
The changes lamented by Tibetan nationalists and Shangri-La dreamers are largely the inevitable price of progress. The modern world will close in on Tibet sooner or later. Poverty preserves no culture or ecosystem.
