Under a blistering Himalayan sun, 500 workers are completing the Lhasa River Bridge, part of a 1,142km project that will link Tibet by rail to the outside world for the first time.
Remarkably for a project that will supposedly bring new hope and opportunity to the local economy once it becomes operational in 2007, only a tiny number of the 500 people toiling on the 929m bridge are Tibetan.
Hiring practices
PHOTO: AFP
"Very few of the people employed here are ethnic Tibetans," said Wang Weidao, chief engineer on the bridge. "They don't have the technical training needed for the task."
While Wang was speaking, workers from as far away as China's Hubei Province were pushing wheelbarrows, sweeping dust and performing other non-specialized or technically undemanding tasks.
Foreign observers have long criticized the rail project, begun in 2001, for favoring members of China's Han majority over Tibetans.
But they also fear that once the railroad has connected Tibet with neighboring Qinghai Province in two years' time, it will continue to benefit the Han Chinese first and local Tibetans last.
Officials in Lhasa, by contrast, emphasize the advantages they say the rail line will bring to the Tibetans, such as greatly reduced transportation costs for Tibetan products.
"Tibet is rich in water resources, but if we want to sell water to other provinces, now we have to use trucks or buses," said Xu Jianchang, deputy director general of the Tibetan Development and Reform Commission.
"After the rail is constructed, the local resources can be transported at much lower fees," he said.
But what worries pro-Tibet advocates overseas is that when the rail link is completed, a train ride from Beijing to Lhasa will take just 48 hours, and Tibet will suddenly be within much easier reach for millions of job hunters.
Immigration
The Tibetans, who are already under pressure from massive Han immigration, could end up becoming even more marginalized, said Kate Saunders, the Washington-based spokeswoman for the International Campaign for Tibet.
"Population movements will be encouraged by the shorter travel times, lower transportation costs, and enhanced connections to an increasingly Chinese cultural and economic network," she said. "These movements represent a significant threat to the livelihoods and culture of the Tibetan people as well as to their prospects for achieving genuine political autonomy."
Local officials acknowledge that the rail will make it easier for Han Chinese to go to Tibet, but deny that Tibetans have so far lost jobs to migrant workers.
Currently, about 50,000 migrants arrive annually in Lhasa, a city of about 250,000, said Zhang Jianbo, a senior macroeconomist with the development and reform commission. Most of them leave after a few months of employment, he said.
But some do decide to stay on, and gradually they succeed in pushing Tibetans out of entire industries at a time, critics argue.
In one high-profile instance, taxi drivers were mostly Tibetan until a few years ago, but are now mainly Han Chinese.
"That's because the taxi business has become less lucrative and many Tibetans have decided to change jobs," said Zhang, the economist.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS