China launched its Western Development Strategy (WDS) in 1999. The goal was to cement its control over the restive western regions of China, particularly Tibet and Xinjiang where separatism remained strong. The government immediately began to promote major infrastructure and industrial projects in Tibet, the cornerstone being the Gormo-Lhasa Railway.

The railway was finally opened in June 2006 by China’s President, Hu Jintao. An initial budget of $4.2 million dollars had risen by a further 50%, a cost borne entirely by the Chinese government which openly admitted the political nature of the project. Tibet had historically looked southwards towards India and, since invading Tibet in 1950, China had sought to drag the newly occupied Tibet westwards into China. By providing a rail link for the first time between Tibet and the main Chinese rail network, China has gone a long way towards achieving this goal, tying Tibet irreversibly into China and consolidating its control over the region.

The Chinese government has always claimed that the motivation for the railway is to bring prosperity to Tibet and, as part of the overarching Western Development Project, to reduce the economic disparity between the richer eastern seaboard of China and the poorer western provinces. The true aim, however, is to cement control over China’s restive western frontier regions, including Tibet. The railway is a crucial component of this strategy:

Tibetans had always feared that construction of a railway would quicken the influx of Han Chinese in search of the better paid jobs offered by the Chinese government as an inducement to migrate. Before construction of the railway travel to Tibet was either expensive via air, or arduous on the lengthy bus trips from the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai. Tickets on the railway are affordable and the journey time is far less, and more comfortable, than on the bus.

 The impact of the train has been immediate. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, reported in November 2007 that 3.62 million people had arrived in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in the first ten months of 2007, an increase of 62% over the same period for 2006. Many, of course, are tourists and stay only for a limited period. But as travel between Tibet and China is far easier due to the train, many Chinese are deciding to stay. This effect is most visible in Tibet’s urban areas where Tibetans are quickly becoming a minority. Lhasa used to be a city of 50-60,000 but its population has recently soared to 300,000 of which 200,000 are Chinese, prompting the Dalai Lama to refer to China’s “demographic aggression” and speaking of a kind of “cultural genocide”.

Heavy state subsidies promote businesses such as tourism and construction where jobs go almost exclusively to Chinese migrants, advantaged due to Chinese language skills and experience of the Chinese work culture and access to government and business connections. As detailed in Employment and investment, as Chinese become increasingly dominant in Tibet’s towns – the political and economic levers of Tibetan life – Tibetans become increasingly marginalised in their own country. Many travellers comment that Lhasa is increasingly resembling other Chinese cities with billboards and shop fronts all written in Chinese.