CHINA is to build the world's highest railway across the frozen wastes of the Tibetan plateau in a step which Tibetans fear will severely jeopardise any hopes of future independence.
The first railway across the Tibetan plateau, which will travel for 675 miles across some of the world's highest mountains and most inhospitable terrain, would be a major feat of engineering.
The project has already attracted widespread protests from the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile and Tibetan activists who believe it will see Tibet overrun by Chinese settlers and troops while increasing the destruction of the environment with increased mining and logging.
China's ambition to build a railway to Lhasa, Tibet's capital set on a 12,000ft-high plateau ringed by towering peaks, was born soon after China invaded eastern Tibet in 1950. For years it has been thwarted by the seemingly insuperable problems of construction on Tibet's deep permafrost, the elevation, and the vast expense.
In the 1970s construction began on the cheapest of four proposed routes across the salt marshes of the vast Tsaidam basin in Qinghai, the former north-western Tibetan province of Amdo; but the line ended at Golmud, a dusty frontier town, and further work was abandoned.
Two years ago Beijing announced that feasibility studies had been completed for the Quinghai line and for an alternative route from Yunnan province bordering Tibet's south-east. Two other routes were also proposed. A meeting in Beijing last September considered the viability of all four routes. The Qinghai route, which will stretch for 675 miles and cost about $2.34 billion (£1.58 billion) is the shortest and cheapest.
The route from Yunnan, preferred by some officials because it traverses the milder rainforests of south-eastern Tibet and originates in a popular tourist area, is about 300 miles longer and will cost more than three times as much. The other two are longer and costlier.
A decision is expected in the next three months but railway ministry officials have already said that they have recommended the route through Qinghai and work has just begun on enlarging the existing Xining-Golmud stretch of the line.
Whichever route is chosen, it involves one of the world's greatest engineering challenges: crossing the forbidding ice-bound Kunlun mountains through 18.6 miles of tunnels and two 16,000ft-high passes before making a hair-raising descent to the Lhasa plateau. Work is expected to be completed by 2010.
Recent statements from Beijing have made clear that the main reason for the project is strategic. A report in the Qinghai Daily described the railway as "the political front line" in consolidating border defences, particularly in the wake of India's nuclear tests and as a means to subdue unrest by the "Dalai clique" within Tibet.
Beijing is also keen to exploit Tibet's vast untapped natural resources, increase migration from China's over-populated cities and accelerate Tibet's "assimilation into the motherland".
Thubten Tsamphel, spokesman for the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in Dharamsala, said: "It's our biggest nightmare. It will greatly increase the number of Chinese workers and fundamentally change Tibet's natural environment with no benefit to Tibet's people."
Tibetans believe that China invaded Tibet in 1950 mainly to exploit their country's enormous mineral wealth. More than 126 different minerals lie beneath Tibet's frozen ground, including some of the world's most significant deposits of uranium, chromite, lithium, boron, borax and iron.
Tibet also contains vast reserves of gold, copper, silver, titanium and zinc, as well as dozens of other minerals, oil and gas. China already mines significant quantities of all these resources, including uranium and strontium, which have provoked protests about open toxic waste dumps around uranium mines and missile sites on the Tibetan plateau. Tibetan activists now fear that the railway will accelerate mining and further harm the environment.
Increased deforestation is another worry. In the last 50 years almost half of Tibet's trees have been felled, causing Asia's great rivers, 10 of which flow from Tibetan glaciers, to silt up. Two years ago, this caused China's worst floods in half a century when the Yangtze overflowed and, in north India, the Brahmaputra flooded.
The greatest fear, however, is that an easily accessible rail link will finally obliterate Tibetan society. Tibetan activists point to the disastrous effects of an earlier railway line to Kashgar in Xinjiang, which they say virtually destroyed the local Uighur population's livelihood; and there are already 7.5 million Chinese settlers in Tibet, drawn by financial incentives and tax breaks, to six million Tibetans.
Lhasa, in particular, where the Potala palace, the magnificent seat of the former Dalai Lamas, now rises above grey concrete Chinese tenements, has almost lost its Tibetan character.
Prostitution is rife in the city, with an estimated 3,000 brothels and countless karaoke bars catering for Chinese workers. Tibetan culture and religion have been forcibly stamped out and the few ragged Tibetans circling the Jokhang, Tibet's holiest Buddhist shrine, now seem like a quaint curiosity in their own country.