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Last updated May 15, 2008 12:25 p.m. PT
'China's Great Train' superbly chronicles Beijing's cultural assault
on Tibet
By JOHN MARSHALL
P-I BOOK CRITIC
Forget those romantic images of the "Forbidden City." These days,
Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, should be called the "Globalized City."
The Chinese overseers of the Tibetan capital have transformed its
quaint byways and spectacular setting with a familiar mishmash of
block apartment complexes, wide highways, strip shopping, high-rise
hotels, disco clubs, car dealer****ps and industrial parks. Immigrants
from China have doubled Lhasa's population in a few years to 500,000
residents. More than 70,000 private vehicles clog its streets.
One of the primary reasons behind this transformation is the subject
of Abrahm Lustgarten's illuminating and disheartening new book --
"China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake
Tibet" (Times Books, 277 pages, $26). The timely volume, in the
aftermath of this spring's riots in Tibet, is a devastating eye
opener, especially for those who give little thought to the embattled
country other than when they encounter a bumper sticker urging, "Free
Tibet!"
Lustgarten's impressive re****tage was compiled during four extended
trips to Tibet, China and Nepal over five years.
China's go west onrush into Tibet has parallels to what occurred in
the American West after the transcontinental railroad spanned the
country. Neither the landscape nor the native population was ever the
same.
The heart of Lustgarten's account is China's decision to build a
railroad to Lhasa, a longtime dream of the country's leader****p but
still a technological nightmare in the 21st century. The railroad had
to be built not only over mountainous terrain, with p***** up to
17,000 feet high, but also across miles of unstable permafrost
plateaus.
The central government's $4.3 billion commitment to the project in
2001 set off a sprint to completion that meant construction raced
forward despite inadequate technological and environmental research,
piecemeal construction and 100,000 railway workers toiling in adverse
conditions.
Politics gave the project its urgency. As Lustgarten writes, "Tibet's
mystique, its very identity, was its remoteness. It was the great
thing Tibet stood to lose to the Chinese. And to the Chinese, the
geographic separation, and how it sustained Tibet's political
separation too, was an embarrassing reminder of the limitations of the
nation's progress."
The railway project seldom slowed; in fact, its construction deadline
was speeded up by a year, requiring round-the-clock efforts. It opened
in 2006, well ahead of the Beijing Olympics, when the world spotlight
will ****ne on China's economic colossus, its environmental problems
and its repressive policies.
Lustgarten profiles the great stresses endured by Chinese railway
officials and engineers committed to building what had long been
thought unbuildable. He writes, "Zhang (Luxin) and his fellow
engineers developed a commonality with the Tibetans; they were
prisoners of the time, cogs in China's impersonal, fits-and-starts of
development."
Lustgarten also profiles Tibetans whose traditional agrarian
lifestyles were destroyed by the Chinese when they were ordered from
their homes, saw them razed, then were forced to relocate to cookie-
cutter modern housing blocks. Such dislocation was all in the name of
"progress."
But very little of the promised benefits of the new railroad trickled
down to the Tibetans. They were seldom integrated into the country's
new go-go economy. Instead, most benefits went to government and
military officials as well as the waves of Chinese immigrants to the
country's "new frontier," a region free of the massive crowding in
eastern cities. They got the new jobs, the better condo lives.
As one Lhasa merchant put it, "What is happening here is not
development. It is just construction. Development would include new
schools, health care and programs to improve the standard of living."
Four million tourists, 93 percent from China, flooded the once-
forbidden city in 2007 -- an invasion of outsiders that is rife with
irony. The Tibet they want to see hardly exists any longer.
Lustgarten covers considerable territory in "China's Great Train,"
from Tibetan history and culture to train technology to human beings
amid societal upheaval. His considerable talents meld these elements
into a compelling narrative -- even when the transformation of Tibet
often seems too sad for words.
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