Tibet train a route to civilisation, says China

Beijing, July 2: China's new railway to Tibet will help modernise the isolated Himalayan region and bind it to the rest of the country, state media said today after the first train reached the regional capital.

The first train to Lhasa arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning, 13 hours after Chinese President Hu Jintao watched it leave Golmud, the dusty outpost in the far-western province of Qinghai that is the start of the new 1,142 km (710 mile) line.

The first train from Beijing was en route, due to arrive tomorrow morning.

The railway, built at a total cost of 3.76 billion dollars, will be much more than a conveyor of people and goods, according to a Sunday editorial in the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's chief mouthpiece.

''The Qinghai-Tibet railway will be a route joining the hearts of Tibetan compatriots with the whole country's people of every ethnicity, and it will be a route for the modernising take-off of the snowy highlands,'' said the editorial.

According to the official Xinhua news agency, the railway, which took five years to build, could double Tibet's tourist revenues by 2010 and cut transport costs into the region by 75 per cent, lifting its 2.8 million people out of isolation.

The People's Liberation Army occupied Tibet in 1950. Nine years later, Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India after a failed uprising.

Since the 1980s, China has tolerated the revival of Tibet's Buddhist religion and injected central government funds to spur Tibet's economy.

But critics charge that China continues to repress Tibetans' religious aspirations, especially their veneration for the Dalai Lama, whom China denounces as a ''separatist''.

And they say that the new railway will accelerate an influx of Han Chinese migrants who are already displacing Tibetans and taking the lion's share of new wealth.

''Tibetans are not equipped to compete for employment and business opportunities in the Chinese-dominated economic environment in today's Tibet,'' said the International Campaign for Tibet, which supports Tibetan autonomy.

Chinese census figures showed that Tibetans had the lowest literacy rates of any major ethnic group in China, the group noted in a new report about the railway.

Han Chinese, China's dominant race and ethnic group, make up 4.2 per cent of Tibet's permanent population according to Chinese statistics, but critics say the number of uncounted long-term migrants is much larger.

But for many Chinese, who see Tibet as an inseparable part of their own country, the railway and the flow of people will be for the good of Tibet.

''The Qinghai-Tibet railway will have a profound impact on Tibet's economic and social development, and will create the conditions for Tibetan society's advance towards modern civilisation,'' Wang Taifu of the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences told Xinhua.

Reuters