CB: Point taken. And I wouldn’t argue with anything you say. My only question is, would Tibet be better without the railroad? As for seeing Tibetan culture to the east, you’ll note that I was there earlier this year.

As for overland travel, trains are vastly superior vehicles to buses: no traffic, you can see more remote locations, you can get up and walk around to stretch your legs, you can sleep more comfortably, you can meet more people, not deal with poorly built roads, etc etc etc.

Actually Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, you are wrong regarding riverine transportation and freight within China. China’s internal water borne transportation system is actually the largest in the world and more freight is moved through it than the rest of the world combined (I wish I had the proof of this on hand but I remember it from the set of special maps that had geographic size based on different variables such as population, economics, etc). Besides, canals are so 5th century BCE, China has been there and done that.

Regarding the efficacy of passenger train transportation, the problems associated with it in the U.S. are not particularly applicable to China. It is two entirely different markets and not particularly comparable.

P.S. Colour me shocked Curzon that you have never been to Beijing.

1. train is vastly more comfortable compared to bus. and allow you more space to walk around and tralk with people, han or tibetan while on trip, and possibly get you a few friend in tibet locally.

2. car allows you to stop more frequently on your way and veer off the arteries. however, you may have to rent a jeep (which is not expensive in china, including the driver and a guide, they charge by km. wouldbe great if you have a few people to share the cost). also true is that car is slower and allows you to adjust to the pressure.
however, train is safer before there is doctors and equipments on the train. while by bus, you may not be proximal to good medical service.

note, WSJ has a great account of how they pump the oxygen into the cabin (pressure remaining similar to outside so that the cabin does not have to be air-tight like in airplanes) so that O2 percentage is 25%+ in cabin (vs 20% normally). they used a filter to filter away the larger size nitrogen molecules, quite an ingenius design. (see links from my tibet video post)

3. by all means venture into small cities and villages to meet with tibetan and do business with them directly. that is what i would suggest. to this i think carpetblogger has made a good point.

4. however, i have to disagree with carpetblogger’s rhetoric prejudice agaiinst everything china.
a) han probably dominates the tourism industry. it is a result of tibetan’s lack of exposure to doing business. the railway and more tourist, especially foreigners, will lift the tibetan competitiveness as well. you can impost ‘bumiputra’ policy like malaysia, but even mahatir himself later realized protectionalism/discrimination ended up hurting the malays there.
b) but as curzon probably noted, they are best at opportunistic cheap consumer tourism. they are areas (such as cultural events) that han cannot replace tibetans.
c) the railway not only brings you to lhasa, it make travels into the rest of tibet easier as well.

5) i am skeptical of the military importance of the railway, because you only have to bomb a small segment to paralyse the network (for normal road a 4WD can easily bypass the damaged road). but yes, transportation is in general easier

6) you may also want to note that a branch has been planned to connect lhasa and yadong, near the border to Sikkim.
Meanwhile, near Yadong/Sikkim, Natula Pass has been re-opened for trade between China and India.

Curzon, it depends on how you define Tibet. As a Chinese colony, absolutely better off. As a unique culture under a foreign occupier, no.

It’s good for Chinese. Not good for Tibetans.

Well JK, I guess I should say thank you! I can go to bed now that I have learned a new word for the day – ochlocracy!! No more likeable than ‘mob-rule’, but perhaps it sounds a little better??
And if you are ever in Newark, New Jersey, the museum has a lovely Tibetan exhibit
http://www.newarkmuseumshops.org/newark/dept.asp?s_id=0&dept_id=3011

“Trains are ideal for shipping bulk commodities”

And fewer emissions than cars, which is why I nearly always support trains. One will not stop the Hans by stopping trains, but one can keep prices up. Railroads lower prices of much-needed goods like basic foodstuffs (carrots, vegetables from the south, rice, and other things that might not be available in the same quantity in the north), medicines, etc.

This rarely drives many locals out of business because most people are substistence farmers who eat most of what they produce. The people who lose out most are the middle-sized producers. Still, trains and transport are almost always good, on balance, for nutrition and consumption.

Nothing to say about the Han question, but I’m happy for all of the poor people who may now be able to afford one more tomato per week, or oranges at New Years, or who might taste lettuce for the first time.

(I don’t remember who it was who was last amused by my obsession with nutrition- as a pregnant woman and humanitarian aid worker, I can’t help it, it’s the world as I see it, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.)

Yago, that is why I suggested the Tibetans protesting in NYC need to rethink their own demography and wealth creation. Do try to remember that there aren’t so many more Jews in the world than Tibetans. There is a model of sorts for how a relatively small population can stand up to goliaths on the world stage. In the very same history however there is just as clear a model for how these Davids are so vulnerable to extermination by the larger populations. This is why I think the Tibetans should be looking at their current situation as a short term window of opportunity where they can expand their population base, their economic power, and their network cohesion to better gulliverize and/or balkanize their much larger foe. Would it be easy? No, of course not. But history rarely is.

Left wing racism? Apartheid state?

1. I’m not a leftist. Your snarky response here is more at home on the left than I am.

2. Racism… oh yes, wonderful accusation to trot out anytime you want to drag discussion down into a flame war. Try a real argument will you?

3. Israel is not anywhere close to an apartheid state. You insult those who lived under real apartheid. Israel is a good model of how to build a strong nation in extremely difficult circumstances and for how a diaspora community can build well above average accomplishments. Yes, I’m a proud Zionist. Don’t like it? Tough.

4. I’m not calling for the Han to be second class citizens. I’m calling for a strategy from Tibetans themselves to stop the slow extermination of Tibetans in Tibet by the Chinese. If you disagree on that being what’s happening in Tibet, fine make an argument saying so. But to bait and inflame in such an infantile way won’t serve as a replacement for a good argument.

5. Damn right they need food. I said right from the start that I disagree with those Tibetan protesters who think the railroad is a totally bad thing. The policies of the totalitarian Chinese government attempting to erase the Tibetans predate the railroad and will continue with or without it. That the railroad will provide cheaper food and other goods to the region is a great thing. So too is it’s potential to bring travelers like Curzon to the roof of the world to explore the region firsthand. But that doesn’t mean the Tibetan diaspora shouldn’t be doing much more themselves to create wealth and demographic strength and funneling much of that back to their homeland.

6. Associating yourself with well regarded commenters like Curzon by suggesting I’m calling him or Elizabeth a grinch, and using their well reasoned comments to act as a shield for yourself while you hurl your slime, should be beneath the contributors to the comments here on CA. Sadly the 7th grade (at best) attitude of smear first discuss never that has become so popular in small but vocal parts of the blogosphere makes it’s appearance even here.

There are approximately 5 million total Tibetans in China, but only 2 million Tibetans living within the geographic boundaries of the TAR. There are significant Tibetan populations in neighbouring provinces such as Sichuan. These areas were not included in the TAR even though these areas were historically “Tibetan”.

Not quite sure why, it may have been because the Tibetan communities there were already heavily interspersed with Han communities.

As to the feasibility of a “free” Tibet, I am highly skeptical if the Tibetans can recreate the Israeli experience. I think it’s apples and oranges. Israel exists because of certain specific geopolitical circumstances that allowed for it’s formation. It exists today because it’s enemies, although tenacious, had largely been ineffective in destroying her.

Tibetans are in a whole nother school of fish. Barring a third world war in which a defeated China is occupied by a coalition of “allied” powers reforming a new government alas Germany & Japan or Iraq for that matter, Tibet’s ultimate independence or autonomy will depend solely on Chinese suffrance.

The US (300m people) is having problems to secure it’s southern border, and an independent Tibet (2m) would be able to keep Han migrants out? If Mao invaded in the 50s was because, well, it was an easy war.

I mean we’re all sorry about the death of traditional Tibetan culture, but that’s how things work. Nations who cannot defend themselves eventually die. Countless similar cultures have died or are in the process of doing so in today’s China, and nobody said a thing.

“This is why I think the Tibetans should be looking at their current situation as a short term window of opportunity where they can expand their population base…”

Tibetans are not in a position as to be able to ‘plan’ in such a way. Jews had a European culture before establishing Israel, they knew what they wanted to do and how to do it. Tibet was flashy and interesting, but a third world country. Let’s not forget it.

Extermination is the act of killing with the intention of eradicating demographics within a population. – wiki

can you quote any evidence that such thing occured? tibetans were slowly drugged? or is there a gas chamber? or reward for head-hunting?

Anything more serious than what is happening in the Gaza Strip? I’m sorry, but I missed when the Chinese pullout from Tibet followed by months of Tibetans rocketing China instead of building up their own proto-state.

Israel is an apartheid state because its citizenship requirements include religious conversion and/or proof of heritage. All others are not granted citizenship. There are arab and christian slums in Israel, filled with non-citizens.

You say you are a Zionist and that if I don’t like it, though. That’s really cool. I wasn’t talking about what I like or don’t like. And what people personally go for and don’t isn’t what’s discussed here. The facts? The Palestinians were expelled, they were not granted return, and under international law the Israeli state is comitting atrocities and war crimes in an effort to skirt what a vast consensus of historians and politicians (and nearly all the countries of the world represented in the UN) agree is their obligation. They need to pull out from the pre-1967 borders, accept the amazing compromise on half of Jerusalem, and get with the international order on things. They’ve been stripped of most of their weapons, and reduced to throwing rocks in the street and comitting suicide in crude bombing attacks just to get what they are entitled to under law. Oh yeah, but they’re “terrorists”.

I don’t care if you “like” international law or anything, but you could consider it as a valid place to start a discussion. And by denying that Zionism itself is a kind of racial or religious apartheid, you’re getting ridiculous. If you “like” it, say what it is: a state organized on the basis of religion and race, with all those not conforming being expunged, threatened or killed. The atrocities of the Iraeli state have been exhaustively documented by countless human rights organizations and observers. They’re comments are not like yours, where we use war terminology to describe non-violent, though regrettable things.

Good luck on getting an Israeli-type gruesome record on contemporary Tibet. “Extermination”? Good enough hyperbole to cleanse your guilty soul, but not believeable enough to rational human beings.