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Week of 06/25/2006


China's Tibet railway ready to go

By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press, June 30, 2006

In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency June 30, 2006 shows, a train runs along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway in the section of Golmud, northwest China's Qinghai Province, Wednesday, June 28, 2006. The whole line of the newly completed Qinghai-Tibet railway, the highest railroad in the world, is due to open to traffic on July 1, 2006.
(AP Photo / Xinhua, Chen Xie)

BEIJING - China unveils an engineering marvel this weekend- a railway to Tibet that features high-tech systems to stabilize 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-long railway to the Tibetan capital has drawn controversy even before the first train departs Saturday.

Tibetans loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama and other critics say the $4.2 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.

On Friday, three women from the United States, Canada and Britain were detained after unfurling a banner at Beijing's main train station reading, "China's Tibet Railway, Designed to Destroy."

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

Railway official Zhu Zhensheng defended the railway, saying it will boost the Tibetan region's economy and help people learn about its unique culture. Zhu said few Tibetans will work on the train at first, though "we hope to increase those opportunities."

Railway Ministry officials previewed the new rail line from the city of Golmud to Lhasa on Thursday, noting it's the world's highest, taking the 16,500-foot passes at speeds up to 60 mph.

The line- sometimes called the "Sky Train"- is a "major achievement" that will "hugely boost local development and benefit the local people," said 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 percent, the government's Xinhua News Agency said.

Chinese officials thought about building a railway to Tibet for decades. China's rail system reached Golmud, in Qinghai province nearly 1,865 miles from Beijing, by 1984. But railway officials said it was too difficult to extend the line to Tibet because of the region's huge swaths of permafrost and extreme temperatures.

In 2001, the plan was resurrected. 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 stabilize track embankments, ensuring they stayed frozen.

"It's kind of like non-electric refrigeration," said Zhu.

The train cars, manufactured by Canada's Bombardier Inc., 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.

The trip from Beijing to the Tibetan capital will take 48 hours; officials have yet to decide if there will be daily trains.

Though the technology is new, the strategy of using trains and commerce to tamp down restive ethnic groups in China is not. Campaigns to integrate Inner Mongolia and the Muslim Xinjiang region in the far west were aided by rail links that ferried in millions of Chinese- sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not- to firm up Beijing's control.

Despite the rosy economic forecasts and dire predictions of Chinese control, the train is unlikely to touch off social disaster or commercial windfall, said Andrew Fischer, an economics researcher at the London School of Economics.

Daily flights and overland links have given Chinese interested in Tibet a way to migrate for decades, tourism is likely to stabilize at only slightly higher than the current rates and exploiting the area's natural reserves will remain prohibitively expensive, said Fischer.

The main reason for the project is symbolic, he said: "It's the last frontier they have been dreaming of for the last century."

For now, the Dalai Lama, in exile since 1959 but still the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, is taking a wait-and-see attitude.

"The railway line itself is not a cause of concern for the Tibetan people," said Thupten Samphel, spokesman for the Dalai Lama's government in exile. "How it will be used is the main concern."


Delegation of 2 Is Vatican's First to China in Years

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, New York Times, June 29, 2006

ROME, June 28 — For the first time in more than five years, an official Vatican delegation is visiting China and meeting with government officials, signaling a warming between parties that have been locked in conflict in recent months, experts said this week.

"This is a real gesture by the Vatican and its diplomats," said the Rev. Bernardo Cervellera, director of AsiaNews, a Catholic missionary news service with close links to the Vatican that first reported the meeting. "I think it is to keep the door open, to have a link."

The Vatican and China broke off diplomatic ties in 1951, although both sides have in recent years expressed interest in re-establishing links.

Still, the relationship has been going through a stormy period since April, when China's state-controlled church, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, appointed two bishops without first consulting the Vatican. The Vatican denounced the move as "an attack on religious freedom."

China has long insisted that its state-controlled Roman Catholic Church has the right to appoint bishops. The Vatican insists that such power rests with the pope alone. As a practical matter, such appointments over the past two years have generally been made after informal discussions between the sides.

The Vatican delegation now in Beijing consists of two relatively senior officials, Archbishop Claudio Celli and Monsignor Gianfranco Rota Graziosi. They arrived last Sunday and will remain until Friday, meeting with "midlevel" government officials, Father Cervellera said, although not with officials from the Patriotic Church.

Neither the Vatican nor the Chinese government would confirm the meetings. The papal spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, said, "I have no comment to make."

A church official, who had been involved in previous talks and was not authorized to speak for attribution, confirmed the visit.


CENSORSHIP IN CHINA: A Step Backwards

By Andreas Lorenz in Beijing, Spiegel Online, June 28, 2006

Beijing, never a big fan of the freedom of press, is currently seeking to tie the media's hands even further. Under a new law- unscrupulous local authorities would be given the legal power to prosecute the media for reporting on disasters.

A Chinese newspaper: Beijing doesn't think much of freedom of the press.
(AFP)

China's Communist Party thinks about as highly of the freedom of the press as Pope Benedict XVI does about birth control. Beijing's functionaries are constantly coming up with creative new ways of controlling it. As part of its bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, China promised it would open up more, but two years ahead of the games, Beijing is still light years away from transparency.

The latest devolution in this unseemly process is a draft law from the "Legislative Office under the State Council," that is being discussed this week by Chinese lawmakers in the National People's Congress, the Communist Party's pseudo parliament in Beijing. The bill stipulates that the press may not report on emergency situations or rescue operations without official consent from the authorities. At the same time, however, the draft legislation instructs authorities to inform the public, but they should also "conduct management work over the media's related reports."

The new regulations are part of a law for coping with "sudden events," legislation for states of emergency that has been debated in China over the course of two years. The legislation is intended to precisely structure the responsibilities and competencies of different authorities during states of emergency. Among other things, it would stipulate when a state of emergency is to be declared and at which point the armed forces may be deployed. With its legislation, the Communist Party is seeking to codify regulations for dealing with emergencies- decisions which up until now have often been made informally.

Whether it be floods, earthquakes, epidemics, plane crashes, mining accidents or protests, if it were up to the officials, the Chinese people would soon only be informed about things the authorities wanted them to know. Indeed, the legislation would ban any real reporting -- be it eyewitness accounts or research on the authorities' crisis management -- without the prior blessing of the government. According to the draft, newspapers that violate the law could be subjected to fines of up to 100,000 yuan (€10,000).

Of course, there's nothing new about the efforts of the Communist Party to muzzle the Chinese media. Even today, the Communist Party's propaganda apparatus continues to temporarily or permanently shut down newspapers or fire editors. Still, the draft law has been the subject of fierce criticism amongst the Chinese public. "News should be free. I am absolutely against this draft law," one Internet user complained. The Cantonese Southern Metropolis News -- which is known for its courageous features and is banned from Beijing newsstands -- lamented the draft as a "step backwards" and anticipated "absurd" consequences if it were passed.

The paper also reminded its readers about the SARS epidemic, when two senior Chinese officials were removed from their positions because they lied to the public about the number of people infected with the illness. As a result of the scandal, Beijing fell into a major crisis when huge cross-sections of the Chinese population lost faith in the Chinese government. Since that incident, the paper wrote, few doubt that "public transparency ... plays an important role in unanticipated events."

Under the new law, cautioned the Southern Metropolis News, independent media reporting on disasters like severe mining accidents could be suppressed. Indeed, there will always be functionaries in bed with mining companies and have a vested interest in hiding these accidents out of fear of having to report them to their superiors in Beijing. "According to the regulations in this draft law, local governments and the individuals seeking to cover things up, will have the ability to punish the media. Is that not absurd?" the paper asked.

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Copyright DateRichard R. Wertz