Beijing – Authorities in Lhasa, the capital of China’s Tibet region, have begun building a huge new district to help the city accommodate an influx of tourists and migrants, state media said on Wednesday. The city will finish the Liuwu New District by 2009 to house 110,000 people on undeveloped land land south of the Lhasa river to “divert the city’s growing population and protect cultural relics,” the official Xinhua news agency reported.
“The new district will help ease the pressure on ancient buildings in the old downtown, caused by the increasing population in Lhasa over the past decade,” the agency quoted Shi Wenjiang, head of the district government, as saying.
“With the economic development of Tibet, especially in tourism, more people are choosing to live in Lhasa and the limited area of the current downtown district cannot meet the needs of development,” Shi said.
Most of Lhasa’s 500,000 people occupy just 59 square kilometres of the old city and the new district, 10 kilometres south, will provide an extra 42 square kilometres.
The local government began constructing main roads on Tuesday and plans to develop the district into a high-technology industrial centre that could potentially provide 114,000 jobs, Shi said.
Seventeen firms agreed to move to the district, with a total planned investment of 820 million yuan (107 million dollars), he was quoted as saying.
“The regional government will not only improve the environmental protection facilities in the old downtown district but will also make the Liuwu New District a garden district by using clean energy, reducing emissions and increasing greenery,” he said.
The Tibet Autonomous Region received 3.72 million tourists in the first 10 months of 2007, compared with 2.45 million in the whole of last year and about 1.7 million in 2005, state media said.
The increase was spurred by the opening last year of a 1,142-kilometre railway linking Lhasa with the rest of the Chinese rail network.
Tibet is one of China’s poorest and least developed regions, but critics see some development projects as cementing Chinese rule and encouraging non-Tibetans to migrate into the region.
The government said the regional population increased to 2.81 million last year, but its figures apparently do not include the tens of thousands of temporary migrants and soldiers who live there.
The official China Daily in August said about 125,000 Chinese migrants were living in Lhasa.
Many overseas Tibetan activists have called for a boycott of the new railway, saying it will speed up environmental damage and the migration of ethnic Chinese people into the region.
The Dalai Lama, the exiled Buddhist leader of Tibet, in January said the railway had already allowed the start of a “second invasion of Tibet” by Chinese migrants.
The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 after an abortive uprising against the occupation of Tibet by Chinese troops since 1951.
