China’s‘Sky Train’ shrouded in controversy

CHINA unveils an engineering marvel this weekend — a railway to Tibet that features hi-tech systems to stabilise tracks over permafrost and cabins enriched with oxygen to help riders cope with high altitudes.

Yet as with so much else in China’s often harsh 56-year rule over Tibet, the 710-mile railway to the Tibetan capital has drawn controversy even before the first train departs today.

Tibetans loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama say the €3.3 billion railway is part of a campaign by Beijing to crush Tibetan culture by encouraging an influx of Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnic group. And environmental groups worry about the railway’s impact on the Tibetan highlands.

The train “will mean more environmental destruction for Tibet, more unemployment for Tibetans and of course our culture will be devastated,” said Ngawang Woeber, a member of Gu Chu Sum, a support group for former Tibetan political prisoners based in India.

Pro-independence groups plan to wear black armbands in protest and demonstrate outside Chinese embassies today, a campaign they call Reject the Railway.

But railway official Zhu Zhensheng defended the project, saying it would boost the Tibetan region’s economy and help people learn about its unique culture. Mr Zhu said few Tibetans would work on the train at first, but “we hope to increase those opportunities.”

Railway Ministry chiefs previewed the new line from the city of Golmud to Lhasa, noting it was the world’s highest, taking 16,500ft passes at 60mph.

The line — sometimes called the Sky Train — was a “major achievement” that would “hugely boost local development and benefit the local people,” said Mr Zhu, vice director of the Railway Ministry’s Tibetan Railway Office.

When construction on the line was completed last year, Chinese President Hu Jintao called it an “unprecedented triumph”.

The railway is projected to help double tourism revenues by 2010 and reduce transport costs for goods by 75%, the government’s Xinhua News Agency says.

China has considered building a railway to Tibet for decades and it reached as far as Golmud, in Qinghai province, nearly 1,865 miles from Beijing, by 1984.

But rail chiefs said it was too difficult to extend the line to Tibet because of the region’s huge swaths of permafrost and extreme temperatures.

But in 2001, the plan was resurrected when engineers determined they could build elevated bridges over the most unstable tracts of permafrost. In other places, they could sink pipes with cooling elements into the ground to stabilise track embankments, ensuring they stayed frozen.

The carriages, manufactured by Canadian company Bombardier, are fitted with double-paned windows with ultraviolet filters to protect passengers from the sun’s glare and have carefully regulated oxygen levels in all classes of travel.