How China is Plundering the Natural Resources of Tibet.
Peter Terpstra
China is incurring huge expenditure in transferring and consolidating the
Chinese population in Tibet. Massive investment has been made to build a
network of modern highways all over Tibet. China can also boast of having laid
the highest railway track in the world that connects Lhasa with Beijing. In
fact, China often complains that its “civilizing” mission in Tibet is costing
the government and people of China large amounts in terms of subsidies to an
under-developed region. According to official Chinese statistics, the level of
annual subsidies to the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in the late 1980s was
around 1 billion yuan or $270 million. However, all the infrastructure that
China has built in Tibet has not made the lives of the native Tibetans any
better; it has only taken the exploitative apparatuses of the Chinese
government deeper.
China’s Ministry of Land and Resources has announced monumental new resource
discoveries all across Tibet. The findings are the culmination of a secret 7-
year, $44 million survey project, which began in 1999. More than 1,000
researchers were divided into 24 separate groups and fanned out across the
Qinghai-Tibet plateau to geologically map the entire Tibetan region. Their
findings have lead to a discovery of 16 major new deposits of copper, iron,
lead, zinc and other minerals worth an estimated $128 billion. These
discoveries add to Tibet’s proven deposits of 126 minerals, with a significant
share of the world’s reserves in lithium, chromite, copper, borax, and iron.
“Lack of resources has been a bottleneck for the economy,” Meng Xianlai,
director of the China Geological Survey, had once complained in his
statements. The discoveries in Tibet “will alleviate the mounting resources
pressure China is facing.”
Tibet is now said to hold as much as 40 million tons of copper — one third of
China’s total, 40 million tons of lead and zinc, and more than a billion tons
of high-grade iron. Among the Tibet discoveries is China’s first substantial
rich-iron supply. A seam called Nyixung, is alone expected to contain as much
as 500 million tons. That’s enough to reduce Chinese iron import by 20 per
cent. The new copper reserves are no less substantial. A 250-mile seam of the
metal has been found along Tibet’s environmentally sensitive Yarlung Tsangpo
Gorge. One mine there, called Yulong, already described as the second-largest
reserve in China, is now estimated to hold as much as 18 million tons,
according to the government news site Xinhua and could soon become the largest
copper mine in the country, helping to feed China’s increasing demand of the
metal used for electrical wiring and power generation. China, which until now
has imported much of its copper from Chile, is estimated to hold 5.6 per cent
of the world’s copper and is its seventh largest producer.
The riches that China expects to extract from Tibet in the near future,
perhaps better explains the money that China annually spends on Tibet than the
empty claims of modernizing Tibet.
In fact, an official web site of China has itself disclosed that “Once-quiet,
northern Tibet has become a scene of bustle and excitement since a number of
inland enterprise marched into the region in response to the government call
for speeding up the development of western China. Northern Tibet has more than
200 mining areas with 28 kinds of mineral ores, and is rich in oil and hot
springs.”
The China National Star Petroleum Corporation and the China National Oil and
Gas Exploration and Development Corporation have recently dug up the first oil
well in the Lunpola Basin, which has a proven oil reserve of three million
tons. This reserve is in addition to the over one million tons of crude oil
that Amdo’s oil fields produce per year. Further, the Chinese have opened two
alluvial gold mines in Nagqu and built a gem processing plant in Lhasa. Soinam
Dorje, an official of the Nagqu Prefecture, has welcomed inland and foreign
investors to exploit the gold, oil and antimony resources on the plateau of
northern Tibet. This also goes far to explain the need to invest in
infrastructure all over Tibet. Apart from its rich mineral wealth, Tibet has
many other resources that may provide China the edge in its race to emerge as
the world’s richest economy.
The volume of timber that China has taken away from Tibet itself far exceeds
the amount that it has spent to build the infrastructural facilities in Tibet.
In 1949, Tibet’s ancient forests covered 221,800 sq km. By 1985 they stood at
134,000 sq km — almost half. Most forests grow on steep, isolated slopes in
the river valleys of Tibet’s low-lying south-eastern region. The principal
types are tropical montane and subtropical montane coniferous forest, with
spruce, fir, pine, larch, cypress, birch, and oak among the main species. The
tree line varies from 3,800 mt in the region’s moist south to 4,300 mt in the
semi-dry north. Tibet’s forests were primarily old growth, with trees over 200
years old predominating. The average stock density is 272 cubic mt/ha, but U-
Tsang’s old growth areas reach 2,300 cubic mt/ha — the world’s highest stock
density for conifers. Once pristine forests are reached, the most common
method of cutting is clear felling, which has led to the denudation of vast
hill sides. Timber extraction until 1985 totaled 2,442 million cubic mt, or 40
per cent of the 1949 forest stock, worth $54 billion.
Deforestation is a major source of employment in Tibet: in the Kongpo area of
the TAR alone, over 20,000 Chinese soldiers and Tibetan prisoners are involved
in tree felling and transportation of timber. In 1949, Ngapa, in Amdo, had
2.20 million hectares of land under forest cover. Its timber reserve then
stood at 340 million cubic mt. In the 1980s, it was reduced to 1.17 million
hectares, with a timber reserve of only 180 million cubic mt. Similarly,
during 30 years, till 1985 China exploited 6.44 million cubic mt of timber
from Kanlho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. As new roads increasingly penetrate
remote areas of Tibet, China is finding new excuses to increase the rate of
deforestation in the region.
China’s primary objective of constructing roads in Tibet is to deploy
occupying forces like the People’s Liberation Army, along with defence
materials, and immigration of Chinese, as well as to exploit the natural
resources of Tibet, which are transported primarily to China. Roads may run
through most Tibetan villages, but a public transport system is almost non-
existent in the majority of rural Tibet. The Chinese modern means of transport
do not benefit the majority of Tibetans. Tibetans in most places continue to
use horses, mules, yaks, donkeys and sheep as modes of transportation. Thus,
the Chinese claim of investing heavily in “civilizing” the Tibetans is one of
the most shameless lies that one can perpetuate.
The Tibetan plateau gives birth to some of the longest rivers of the world;
The Machu (Huang Ho, or Yellow River), the Tsangpo (Brahmaputra), the Drichu
(Yangtze), and the Senge Khabab (Indus). Tibet also has over 2,000 natural
lakes spread over a combined area of more than 35,000 sq km, some of which are
sacred and play a special role in local culture. Steep slopes and the abundant
water of these rivers and lakes make them extremely valuable as sources of
hydroelectric power. Tibet has an exploitable hydropower potential of 250,000
megawatts, the highest of any country in the world and the TAR alone has a
potential of 200,000 megawatts. China has built some large hydroelectricity
projects all over Tibet. These projects are designed to tap Tibet’s hydro
potential to provide power and other benefits to the Chinese population and
industries both in Tibet and China.
While the Tibetans are displaced from their homes and lands, tens of thousands
of Chinese workers are brought up from China to construct and maintain these
dams. Take the case of the Yamdrok Yutso hydropower project. The Chinese claim
that this project will greatly benefit the Tibetans. The Tibetan people in
general, particularly the late Panchen Lama and Ngapo Ngawang Jigme, opposed
and effectively delayed its construction for several years. The Chinese,
nevertheless, went ahead with the construction and with the help of more than
1,500-strong PLA troops are guarding the construction area and no civilians
are allowed near it. But the environmental, human and cultural toll of these
hydroelectricity projects will have to be borne by the Tibetans. Tibet also
possesses high solar energy potential per unit only after the Sahara, an
estimated annual average of 200 kilocalorie/cm, as well as significant
geothermal resources. Despite such abundant potential from small,
environmentally-benign sources, the Chinese have built huge dams, such as
Longyang Xia, and are continuing to do so, such as the hydropower station at
Yamdrok Yutso. Tibet is made to play a pivotal role in fulfilling the huge
demand for power in China at the cost of its own helpless, poor natives.
Furthermore, Tibet has been made a hub of nuclear facilities. This reduces the
radioactive risks that China could suffer if an accident takes place in such
installations. Again, since such facilities are located in a colonized region,
the Chinese authorities do not take the necessary precautions that are
mandatory for such facilities. Official Chinese pronouncements have confirmed
the existence in Tibet of the biggest uranium reserves in the world. Apart
from Amdo, since 1976 uranium has been mined and processed in the Thewo and
Zorge regions of Kham also. According to reports, the uranium mining and
processing in Tibet is done with unforgivable callousness. The Ninth Academy,
China’s Northwest Nuclear Weapons Research and Design Academy in Tibet’s
north-eastern area of Amdo, is reported to have dumped an unknown quantity of
radioactive waste on the Tibetan plateau, according to a report released by
International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington, D.C.-based organization:
“Waste disposal methods were reported to be casual in the extreme. Initially,
waste was put in shallow, unlined landfills… The nature and quantity of
radioactive waste generated by the Ninth Academy is still unknown… During the
1960s and 1970s, nuclear waste from the facility was disposed of in a
roughshod and haphazard manner. Nuclear waste from the academy would have
taken a variety of forms — liquid slurry, as well as solid and gaseous waste.
Liquid or solid waste would have been in adjacent land or water sites.”
Given the fact that underground water supplies in Amdo have been diminishing
at a rapid rate and usable underground water is very limited, the radioactive
contamination of groundwater is of great concern in the region. Many local
Tibetans have died after drinking contaminated water near a uranium mine in
Ngapa, Amdo. They have also reported deformed birth of humans and animals.
The existence of Chinese nuclear bases and nuclear weapon manufacturing
centres in Tibet has been reported from time to time. China is reported to
have stationed approximately 90 nuclear warheads in Tibet. The Northwest
Nuclear Weapons Research and Design Academy or the Ninth Academy, a secret
organization involved in China’s nuclear programme which is also a high
security military weapons plant, is based at Dhashu (Chinese: Haiyan) in the
Haibei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. It was responsible for designing all of
China’s nuclear bombs through the mid-70s. It served as a research centre for
detonation development, radiochemistry and many other nuclear weapons related
activities. It also assembled components of nuclear weapons. Several missile
bases are located to the south of Lake Kokonor in Amdo, and Nagchukha. Another
nuclear missile site in Tibet is located at Delingha, about 200 km south-east
of Larger Tsaidam. It also houses DF-4s, and is the missile regimental
headquarters for Amdo, containing four associated launch sites. It has been
reported a number of times that China has carried out chemical defence
manoeuvres in the high altitude zones of Tibet. There are also reports that
China has been conducting nuclear tests in several areas of Tibet in order to
determine radiation levels on the human population.
Not only is its economy, China’s military might too is growing because of its
colonization of Tibet.
China is exploiting far more from Tibet than what it is giving back. While
China is proudly hosting the Olympics with its spectacular stadia and dazzling
shows, the future of Tibet is turning gloomier.
- Partha Gangopadhyay
[Quote from Nuclear Tibet, Washington, DC, 1993, p.18]
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resources-of-tibet/
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Amnesty International Report 2009 on China:
http://report2009.amnesty.org/en/regions/asia-pacific/china