International Campaign for Tibet

Railroading Tibet

Tomorrow, the first train bound for Lhasa will leave Beijing. Traversing glaciers and ascending the world's highest plateau, it is an engineering marvel that took five years to construct and is a pet project of the Chinese leadership. Its $4.1 billion dollar price tag makes it the largest and one of the most unprofitable projects ever undertaken in Western China.

It is also the most unwanted by local residents. Most Tibetans fear that the railroad will bring with it a fresh influx of Chinese migrants, and perhaps even soldiers, which will threaten their culture and language as never before. Han Chinese immigration to Tibet is already on the increase. But, until now, this influx has been constrained by the region's inaccessibility - an obstacle about to be swept away by the new line.

Extending China's existing rail network 1,275 miles south from Golmud in the neighboring province of Qinghai, the new line will allow Beijing to bring in everything from troop reinforcements to food supplies in a matter of hours. The main beneficiaries are likely to be the Chinese military, which now faces staggering costs in resupplying its hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Tibet. Chinese settlers, who rely on imported wheat and rice in a region where no staple crops can grow, will also benefit. But few Tibetans will share in the benefits of a project that showcases the heavy-handed "development" policies favored by the Chinese government in its attempt to integrate its hinterlands with its booming coastal regions. These policies take the form of enormous central government subsidies, which are often spent in a way that makes little economic sense.

The new railroad is a classic example of this. Indeed some technocrats in China's Ministry of Railways unsuccessfully opposed its construction for precisely this reason. Freight capacity is expected to be limited to around two million tons a year, which means that it will take a few generations at best to pay off the invested capital, according to Lou Thompson, an economist with the World Bank. The railroad might not exist for anywhere near that long. According to reports from Chinese scientists, the permafrost upon which much of the railroad is built may destabilize it within as little as a decade.

The problem is that, as has again been demonstrated by this railroad project, ethnic Tibetans are allowed virtually no say in how best to use the central-government subsidies. As a result, money is misspent on grandiose projects like this while poverty in Tibet remains widespread, with levels of rural-urban inequality are among the highest in China. Tibetans have little or no access to health care, and often cannot afford to send their children to school.

Tibet already has numerous roads linking it to the rest of China. Instead of getting carried away with adding an unprofitable railroad, the central government would have done better to focus on more pragmatic avenues to economic development. That means bringing Tibetans into the decision-making process so that they can decide how resources can be better directed. And improving education and training opportunities so that Tibetans can compete on an equal footing with Chinese migrants in setting up their own businesses.

According to Hong Kong press reports, Chinese President Hu Jintao is likely to board Saturday's first train for at least part of the journey to Lhasa. If he does so, he will bring with him the official pageantry and propaganda that Tibetans have become accustomed to since the ideological campaigns of the 1960s and 70s: tight security, a heavy military presence and full state press coverage. This conveys the time-tested message that Beijing is in control, and that dissent will not be tolerated. Western reporters who search for provocative opinions will be stymied by a local population that is too fearful to talk about the railroad or its implications. They do not want to end up on the wrong side of an electric-shock prod.

In the long term, this railroad can only be considered a gift to Tibet if Tibetans gain a measure of genuine autonomy over both it and the land its traverses. That is the decisive question: can Beijing and the Dalai Lama's representatives work out a settlement for true Tibetan autonomy that both can live with?

The two sides are already discussing a possible trip by the Dalai Lama to China. If that trip does come off, it is not unthinkable to imagine a future Lhasa Express might carry both the Dalai Lama and President Hu into a new era for Tibet. Now that would be a real feat of political engineering.

Mr. Ackerly is president of the International Campaign for Tibet, a nonprofit organization with offices in Washington D.C., Amsterdam and Berlin.