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Day Three| Day Four Day Four Across the region, an array of tactics for keeping the peace Feb 2nd 2010 | From The Economist online Day one | Day two | Day three| Day four Day four ON THE plane out of Lhasa, I sit next to a Nepali businessman who frequently visits Lhasa to buy shoes. He puts them in containers to be taken by lorry to Nepal, where most of them are re-exported to India. He has his complaints: about the duties he has to pay at the border, and the snow that sometimes blocks traffic. But of the road from Lhasa to Nepal, he is full of praise. It once took three days by lorry, he says. Now it is a day and a half. “China is so developed,” he says wistfully, looking out of the window at the ribbons of light marking highways and city streets below. He has little positive to say about Nepal and its roads. China has been pouring money into its infrastructure in the past few years, and—from a business perspective at any rate—Tibet has been a big beneficiary. On my last visit to Lhasa, in 2008, I went by train. The railway line, Tibet’s first such link with the Chinese interior, had been opened just two years earlier and is one of the country’s most spectacular engineering accomplishments. Critics of Chinese rule in Tibet condemn its impact on the environment and the encouragement it gives to a flood of immigrants from the rest of China. But as a feat, it amazes: the $4.2 billion line crosses higher terrain than any other in the world, including permafrost—which requires elaborate ground-cooling measures to protect the rails from changes in temperature. James Miles Floor it On this trip I drove to the city of Shigatse on the same highway traversed by the Nepali businessman’s shoes. Shigatse itself may look uninteresting to tourists, who usually come to admire the ancient monastery on its outskirts or to stop off on a sightseeing trip to Mount Everest on the Nepali border. But the businessman is in awe of the wealth of some of its inhabitants. They have got rich, he says, by running freight services along the 830km (515-mile) highway. In the past few years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent improving the road. This has included covering its gravel sections with asphalt, which has greatly facilitated cross-border trade. On the Lhasa- Shigatse section, which winds along a valley lined by sand dunes and spectacular peaks, Han Chinese from the interior have opened little Sichuanese restaurants catering to the lorry drivers. There is more to come. Later this year, work is due to finish converting Shigatse’s military airport to civilian use (Peace Airport, it is called, in homage to China’s “peaceful liberation” of Tibet 60 years ago). This will enable direct flights to Shigatse from the rest of China. A local tourism official says that Mount Everest will need to be protected from the resulting influx of visitors. Tibet had only one civil airport until the mid- 1990s. It now has three, and this year should have five. Work is due to begin next year on a sixth, which at 4,400 metres (14,400 feet) will be the highest in the world. Railway building continues too. By 2012, says an official in Lhasa, the railway line will be extended to Shigatse (though he denies reports that there are plans to build another line to the interior, connecting Lhasa with the Sichuan capital, Chengdu). And there has been huge spending in recent years on rural roads. Work began last year on connecting China’s last roadless county—Medog, on Tibet’s border with India—to the highway network. There have been seven failed attempts to do this since the 1970s (mountains and frequent earthquakes are among the obstacles). The target now is 2011. It would be unwise to bet against success. Critics of China’s human-rights record in Tibet worry that all these connections will facilitate the ravaging of China’s environment as mining companies move in to extract the region’s natural resources (the railway line happens to run conveniently close to a massive copper reserve, possibly the biggest in China). The rail link has already boosted immigration from the interior and with it the ethnic tensions that resulted in the violence of March 2008. More prosaically, as I discovered on the road to Shigatse, better roads have fostered a tendency to put the pedal down. On one stretch, a recently repaired metal barrier above a perilous drop into the Brahmaputra River (the Yarlung Tsangpo, as it is known in Tibet) bore testimony to the fate of a speeding tourist bus. In reaction, police now stop drivers periodically along the way, where their average speed since each prior checkpoint is measured. Our car crawled along a near empty road. With a fine of 100 yuan ($15) for each minute short of the ordained time of arrival at the next checkpoint, we could not afford to do otherwise. Back to top >> Day three I HAVE seen my share of development zones in China. They appear on the edges of cities and towns, amid wasteland or, very often, farmland prised from ill-compensated peasants. Officials fill them with dreams of transforming their region’s economy. Sure enough, within months or a couple of years at most they are brimming with factories turning out profits with the help of armies of low-paid workers who flock in from far and wide. The Lhasa Economic and Technological Development Zone fits the bill partially. It is an expanse of wasteland, a few minutes’ drive west from the centre of Lhasa, along a six-lane road divided in the middle by closely packed little Christmas trees and lined with military camps, restaurants and big, smart-looking car dealerships: Toyota, Volkswagen, Ford and Buick. The new and oddly-named Jardin Secret Hotel (“like a piece of emerald on the bank of the Lhasa river” says its website, making no mention of the camps and dealerships) presents itself with a large, mock-Tibetan façade that suggests hope for an influx of big- spending tourists and businessmen. The steep hills opposite bear the scars of quarrying. Officials’ dreams are evident enough. Over the entrance to the zone there is a big blue hoarding with a quotation from Deng Xiaoping, China’s late leader and architect of the development-zone concept. “The development zone has a lot of hope”, it says. The phrase was uttered more than two decades ago in another vast expanse that was to transform a sleepy border town into a whole new skyscraper-studded city: Shenzhen. There had been pessimists, who thought Shenzhen would not make it. In Lhasa, scepticism is certainly in order. “Build it and they will come” does not really work the same way on the roof of the world. Lhasa won state-level approval for its development zone in 2001. In 2006, Tibet’s first rail link with the rest of China was opened. The line runs straight through the zone and Lhasa’s extravagant new railway station lies just beyond it. In recent years millions of dollars have been spent upgrading the Friendship Highway that runs past the zone and leads into Nepal, a vital conduit for Tibet’s exports. Conditions, it might be said, look ripe for the zone’s takeoff. A boom there has been, but not an industrial one. The rail link has been a huge boon to Lhasa’s tourist industry. It has been a help to Lhasa’s commerce too. The trains provide more reliable transport for the sort of freight that used to get stuck on the plateau’s roads for days in bad weather or when trucks broke down. But Lhasa’s zone is proving slow to fill. My last visit was in March 2008. It was mid-morning when I was taken to the zone’s headquarters. The vestibule was large, bright and tellingly empty of people. An official showed me a model: a dream come true of factories, villas and office buildings. Half of it, he said, already been built. My own observations suggested there was a degree of hyperbole in this. We walked up to a first-floor meeting room, beside a silent corridor. It was during this interview that the ethnic violence erupted downtown, waking up dreaming officials with a jolt (though in that first hour of the rioting no one appeared to bother my hosts at the zone with news that something was amiss). This time I needed no more than a quick drive around to see that the past two years—and a huge infusion of government cash, to get Lhasa’s riot-shattered economy back on its feet—had done little for the zone. “Lhasa Economic and Technological Development Zone booms”, trumpeted an official website at the end of 2008. It said 115 companies had registered to set up there. Of these, 14 had “started operation” or were “under construction”. A new definition of “boom” perhaps; try telling that one with a straight face to the officials in China’s coastal zones. By the end of last year, there had been an uptick: 178 registered with 40 already on-site. The statistics, however, deserve a little scrutiny. A report just published in Lhasa’s official media mentioned only six factories that were actually making things, some of them on an experimental basis. Not bad for nearly a decade’s work. James Miles Still just domestic One company preparing to move into the zone this year is Lhasa Brewery, which is half-owned by Carlsberg.
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