Nepal's highway of dreams
Cross-border trade and tourism in the Himalayas are to get a boost from ongoing road improvement. The Chinese are making progress on the trans-Himalayan ‘superhighway’, which they say will guarantee economic prosperity for the people of the Himalayan region. Vaughan Yarwood takes a look at the busy ongoing construction schedule on the rooftop of the world.
High in the Himalayan mountains, Chinese construction workers have been blasting their way through a flinty mountain pass, labouring to turn an old trading track into a paved road. The US$20 million project, which stretches from the Chinese border to the Nepalese town of Syabrubesi, is more significant than its modest 17 km length suggests. The old mountain pass not only links Nepal with Tibet, it is the most direct land route from the Tibetan Plateau to India’s capital, Delhi.
Many of Nepal's roads are notoriously dangerous (see picture). By turning the old yak and mule track into an all-weather vehicle road, the Nepalese government hopes to attract Chinese tourists and business people, and stimulate trade in an impoverished part of the country. The new road is also expected to make life easier for local Nepalese traders who, until now, were obliged to use pack animals or backpacks to carry their wares over the rough terrain. The government’s larger vision is of a trans-Asian highway through the Himalayas, which will connect China and India, and in the process open up secluded Nepal.
However, as often happens with cross-border traffic, when it comes to routes across the Tibetan Plateau, economics is not easily disentangled from politics. Nepal is home to a sizeable Tibetan population, many descended from refugees who fled across the border in the years following China’s occupation of their homeland 60 years ago. With Beijing worried that opening the border could increase volatility in an already unstable region, Nepal has been at pains to reassure its neighbour that political agitation by dissidents would not be tolerated.
‘China has only one concern, that is the concern of Tibet’, Madhav Kumar, the country’s former prime minister, said in January 2010. ‘That is why our policy towards China has been consistent. We believe in the One China policy, Tibet is an integral part of China and the soil of Nepal will not be allowed to be used against Tibet and China’.
The pass to Syabrubesi is not the first to get a makeover. In 2006 the Himalayan pass of Nathu La (pictured), a part of the ancient Silk Road linking the eastern Indian state of Sikkim with Tibet, was reopened with much fanfare after almost half a century of disuse due to border tensions.
The renewal of border trade in this region was a triumph of Indian diplomacy according to Jayantanuja Bandopadhyay, a professor of international relations at Jadavpur University. ‘By allowing trade through Nathu La, China has accepted Sikkim as part of India that it refused to do earlier’, he said.
The pass was closed during the 1962 war between India and China, and in 1975 Sikkim, a former Buddhist kingdom, became part of India — a move opposed by China which also claimed the territory.
The reopening of Nathu La came just days after the first train service began between eastern China and Tibet. The first 815-km section of the 1957-km-long Qingzang railway - the section between Xining and Golmud - opened in 1984, and the second 1142-km section, to Lhasa, in July 2006.
The railway has been the subject of several critical reports. In its World Report 2007, New York-based Human Rights Watch claimed that the railway ‘exacerbated concerns among Tibetans that they would be unable to compete economically with an anticipated influx of Han migrants’. The Washington DC-based International Campaign for Tibet was more forthright, calling it ‘the most visible symbol of a political and strategic agenda aimed both at strengthening the Chinese state’s authority and control over Tibetan areas, and beginning large-scale extraction of Tibet’s natural and mineral resources...’.
Unmoved by such qualms, and with an eye to fostering trade and tourism, Nepal asked China to extend the Qingzang railway from Lhasa to Zhangmu on the Nepali border. In April 2008 a high-level Chinese delegation met Nepalese prime minister Girija Prasad Koirala to announce that the extension had been included in Beijing’s eleventh five-year plan, along with five additional linking tracks.
Meanwhile, the China-Nepal Highway, which connects Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, with Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, has recently been asphalted at a cost of some US$100 million. Built in 1958 and opened to traffic in 1965, the road is Tibet’s only international highway but in recent years it has struggled to meet the demands of increased traffic between China and the countries of South Asia. At the Tibetan border, the highway passes through the customs town of Zhangmu (pictured), China’s largest conduit to the subcontinent and a sign of the potential prosperity such infrastructure can bring.
As Chinese engineer Zhang Peng told the BBC’s Joanna Jolly, quoting an old Chinese proverb: ‘To get rich, build roads first’. He might have added, ‘then lay rails’.
The golden path to prosperity
Lauded as ‘the golden path to prosperity’, the Qingzang railway — the first to connect China proper with the Tibet Autonomous Region — is considered by the Chinese government to be one of its most significant undertakings.
Running at the highest altitude of any railway in the world (5,072 m at the Tanggula Pass), its construction and operation presented formidable technical obstacles. The locomotives were built in Pennsylvania by General Electric specifically for the rarefied air of the plateau and the Chinese-made carriages incorporate individual oxygen supplies for passengers. Several oxygen factories were built on the route, along with seismic monitors — the line passes through a mountainous earthquake zone.
With a large section of the railway built on permafrost which is subject to partial thawing, sun shades and hollow pipes beneath the track have been used to keep the bed frozen. Sections of track are also cooled with ammonia-based heat exchangers. Nevertheless, the China Meteorological Administration has expressed concern about the possible threats to the track from global warming.
As its descriptive name suggests, the main purpose of the railway is as an instrument of economic policy. Planners hope that it will significantly increase the volume and reduce the cost of freight in and out of Tibet.
Less than a million tonnes of goods are transported by road each year between Tibet and the adjacent Qinghai province. That volume is expected to increase to 2.8 million tonnes in 2010, with some 75 percent carried by rail. As a result, it is anticipated that the cost per tonne will fall from 0.38 RMB to 0.12 RMB and therefore further spur development in the region.
- by Vaughan Yarwood
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Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons and Topten.org
