New train to Tibet will mean influx of Chinese commerce and culture

For the first time, relatively isolated Tibet is accessible to the Chinese masses, even if you have to briefly don an oxygen mask to get to the land of clouds.

For $46 any Chinese can now hop on a 15-car daily train in Beijing and be listening to wind chimes in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, two days later. Three trains from cities around China will now surmount 16,000-foot mountain heights, traverse a world-record 240 miles of permafrost, go through the longest tunnel built on frozen earth, and disgorge an estimated 1,000-2,000 passengers daily in the heart of Shangri-La – formerly approachable only by air or bad roads.

The new high-altitude passenger train service, which opened this week after 50 years of effort may well represent one of the largest single shifts of cultural boundaries in decades here, experts say.

Inside China, where trains still symbolize a vision of modern life and progress, state media has covered the rail opening with unvarnished pride, as a significant engineering feat. President Hu Jintao set the tone by calling it a "miracle railway" at a July 1 inauguration that coincided with the 85th anniversary of the Communist Party.

Scholar Yuan Weishi notes that for 140 years, "the history of railroads in China is the hardship-laden history of China's pursuit of modernity."

Yet many Tibetans and foreign interest groups worry that the train will accelerate a process already under way to swamp the distinctive identity of the ancient land – turning Tibet into a strip mall of Chinese commerce, and further alienating the local population from its Tibetan identity and spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

"The railway will have devastating consequences for our people, as Beijing wants to submerge our population ... and exploit our lands," argues Ngawang Woeber, a Tibetan exile living in India.

Such views rarely if ever receive mention in China's state-run media. Rather, official coverage stresses the benefits of Chinese building and business in Tibet, as part of a "western campaign."

Media reporting on the launch of the new train continued this trend. Local Tibetans were shown to be uniformly cheerful about the rail. Beijing Daily, a tabloid, ran a giant cover page photo of a Tibetan woman in traditional hat and braids with a plastic lunch box and chopsticks, looking out the train window, delighted to be on her first ride. A peasant is shown by the tracks, holding out a bronze Tibetan prayer wheel as the train whizzed past, in another.

Tibetan culture, food, and the train are the cover story in top glossy magazines like Life Week, National Geographic China, Global Travel, and Geography.

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