The gravy train
Lan Xinzhen

WITHOUT the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, there would be no mineral water plant,” said Jiang Xiaohong, manager of the 5100 Tibet Spring, a mineral water company named after the altitude of its water source, 5,100 meters. Jiang had a lot to say on how her two-year old company has benefited from the completion of the highest railway in the world.
First discovered by Doje, a Tibetan geologist and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in 1986 in Damxung County, the spring gushing from a crack between the rocks comes from a 70 million year old glacier that has filtrated through layers of rocks for eight years. According to international standards, water naturally rich in lithium, strontium or meta-silicic acid can qualify as mineral water. The water from 5100 reaches the standard in all three minerals, which is rare in the world.
Before the Qinghai-Tibet Railway began operating in July 2006 the high quality water had merely flowed away. Exploitation of the water had been hindered by capital shortages and high transportation costs. The cost of transporting the water via Tibet’s roads would have made it more costly than fine wine by the time it reached its destinations.
Many companies had given up on plans to bottle the water after field visits to the spring. “As the discoverer of this mineral spring, one of the best in world, it was a shame for me that it wasn’t tapped for so many years,” said Doje. In 2005 blueprints for the Qinghai-Tibet Railway marked Damxung, the location of the spring, as the site of a railway station just before Lhasa. The news sparked a business plan, funded to the tune of 500 million yuan ($66.1 million) by investors, to build a joint venture mineral water company. The result was 5100, which now has a production capacity of 500,000 tons of water per year.
One year after its official opening, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway ferried its first batch of cargo out of Tibet —— mineral water from the 5,100 meter-high spring.
So far, the mineral water has been sold at markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. “Our only concern now is that production cannot meet demand while transportation is not a worry at all,” said Jiang, fully confident about the future of her company. The company had planned to reach an annual production of 500,000 tons within five years of its foundation, but that target was reached more than two years in advance. Jiang is now busy planning further expansion of the company’s production.
Sizzling development
The 5100 Tibet Spring is just one of thousands of projects in Tibet ignited by the completion of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. According to Deng Xiaogang, Vice Chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region Government, more than 5 billion yuan has been injected into Tibet over the past year. Deng said the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway increased transportation capacity and pushed down transportation costs between Tibet and other parts of China, which has given potential investors in the region reason to see a rosy future for their businesses.
According to official statistics, in the first year of operation the Qinghai-Tibet Railway transported 710,000 tons of cargo out of Tibet, mainly mineral water, alcohol and special local products, and transported 684,000 tons of cargo into Tibet, mainly food and construction materials. The cargo transportation cost by railway is 0.12 yuan per ton, less than half the cost of highway transportation at 0.27 yuan. The transportation of one-ton of cargo by rail from Xining, capital of the neighboring Qinghai Province, to Lhasa, saves 293.4 yuan. That means all the cargo traffic on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway can save up to 208 million yuan per year compared with highway transportation.
“About 60 percent of packaging material in our company is transported by railway into Tibet while 99 percent of our mineral water product is shipped out of Tibet for sale. Compared with highway transportation, the time from shipping our mineral water out to putting it on store shelves is halved while the cost is knocked down by 67 percent,” said Jiang. The drop in transportation expenses has boosted the competitiveness of Tibetan products in other parts of China. Tibet specialty products, such as mineral water, highland barley beer and walnut oil, are now for the first time being sold in other parts of China in large amounts. The operation of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway has helped to integrate Tibet into the Chinese market.
The operation of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway has also sparked a change of mindset. Along the railroad, many farmers have given up their traditional livelihoods of farming and husbandry and started to drive taxis, open quarries, purchase heavy trucks and set up construction companies. Seeing business opportunities in the flow of rail passengers, other farmers have opened souvenir shops, restaurants, hotels and travel agencies nearby to the railway stations.
In Tibet, tourism has profited most from the operation of the railway. In the first half of 2007, a total of 1.05 million tourists, including 980,000 Chinese and 70,000 foreigners, visited Tibet, 78 percent more than the same period last year. Tourism income from the first half of 2007 totaled 900 million yuan, presenting a year-on-year increase of 75 percent.
The increased flow of tourists has spurred the opening of home hotels run by Tibetan families. There are now around 40 home hotels, which in total provide over 2,500 beds, a figure that has doubled since 2005. Lobsang, the 44-year-old owner of a Tibetan home hotel, told Beijing Review that the number of guests accommodated by his hotel has doubled since the beginning of 2006. “The Qinghai-Tibet Railway should take the credit,” he said. Lobsang said 80 percent of hotels in Tibet are run by Tibetan people. He also said the railway had linked Tibet, one of the most backward regions in the world, with more advanced regions in China and stimulated economic and social development in Tibet.
Souvenir vendors on Barkhor Street, the oldest street in Lhasa and a must see for tourists, also find their business has never been better.
The opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway has spurred a u-turn in the Tibetan economy from purely relying on subsidies from the Central Government to independent development based on local resources and industries. In the past, for every 10 yuan of local treasury expenses, nine yuan came from Central Government subsidies. Now officials in Tibet for the first time have begun to talk about gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Tibet. According to Deng, Tibet’s GDP grew by 13.1 percent in 2006 and by 14.1 percent in the first half of 2007. He said the autonomous region’s government has set a goal for Tibet’s per capita GDP to reach the national average level by 2010.
Environmental protection
“Look, the grass on the slopes of the rail base has taken root,” said Jin Xiaoyi, a manager from the state-owned company in charge of building and running the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. Jin said that during the construction of the railroad, all the grasslands that were on the route of the rail were peeled and cultivated somewhere else. After the rail was completed, these grasses were moved back to decorate the slopes of the rail base. “This new trial is a complete success,” Jin said.
According to Jin, not only the slopes of rail base have been fully covered in grass. After the completion of this project, an area within two kilometers of the rail was carefully checked for grass coverage and every gap was filled even if it had not been affected by human activity. Passengers aboard a train from Xining to Lhasa can see that vegetation on the stretch of rail between Xining and Golmud, finished in the 1980s, is no comparison to that on the stretch between Golmud and Lhasa, where the line was completed in July 2006.
Along the rail between Xining and Golmud, people, vehicles and stretches of desert line the track. From Golmud to Lhasa, human activity can rarely be spotted and the vegetation is well preserved. Jin, on his fourth train trip to Lhasa, said he had got used to seeing Tibetan antelopes grazing idly out of window. “I saw Tibetan antelopes and Tibetan yaks on my first trip to Lhasa and I was really excited by the scene. But I am no longer excited since I can see them on every trip, “ said Jin. He said the flock of Tibetan antelopes on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau has grown bigger compared with 2001, when the construction of the rail section between Golmud and Lhasa began.
Every train entering Tibet consists of fully closed compartments, which means garbage and sewage can only be discharged from the train at Golmud or Lhasa station and not a drop of sewage is left behind on the rail. All companies making investments in Tibet are strictly scrutinized by environmental protection agencies. In Tibet, routine environmental impact appraisals before the opening of factories are conducted by the State Environmental Protection Administration, which can deny the entry of any project based on environmental concerns. In other regions of China, this environmental impact appraisal is often carried out by local environmental protection agencies. Deng said, “Economic development in Tibet can never sacrifice our environment”.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

Gul Presidency puts Turkey at the crossroads
Mushtak Parker

ABDULLAH Gul has finally been sworn in as the 11th president of Turkey, a feat which only in April seemed impossible. He succeeds the outgoing President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, perhaps the most criticized president in the country’s history. It took two separate rounds of parliamentary balloting in April and on Tuesday this week; a warning from the country’s powerful armed forces in a midnight e-memorandum sent to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the threat to the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk; and a snap election called by the Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party in July which saw the prime minister returned with a landslide, that finally paved the way for Gul’s marathon presidential election victory. In the end, he won a handsome victory mustering 339 votes out of 448 votes. On his way to his new official residence, Cankaya Palace in Ankara, President Gul stopped at Antkabir, the mausoleum of Atatürk, to pay his respects to the founder of the modern republic in 1923. He signed the guest book pledging his loyalty to Atatürk’s principles and the basic values of the republic.
For any other occupant of Cankaya Palace this would have been a routine ritual. But Abdullah Gul is no ordinary president. He carries a huge political baggage which precipitated a boycott of the swearing-in ceremony by the army top brass led by chief of General Staff, Gen. Yasar Buyukant. Gul’s visit to Anitkabir was a clear statement of intent to the armed forces. Despite suffering a bloody nose from the electorate, who displayed a newfound maturity in decisively rejecting the military and left-wing Republican People Party’s fears of the so-called threat to secularism, the Turkish armed forces have remained true to themselves. They have displayed an uncanny disdain for the democratic process and the will of the Turkish people. They have shown what sore losers they are and have displayed an unhealthy inability to move on. With an army top brass like this, no wonder Ankara’s road to Brussels has been plagued by political potholes, diversions and even the odd temporary closure.
Even a day before the presidential poll on Monday, Buyukanit warned that “centers of evil were trying to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic,” without directly referring to then presidential candidate Abdullah Gul. Ironically, it was Gul as foreign minister for the last five years that has played such a crucial role in persuading the European Union to open accession talks with Turkey. Not surprisingly, the EU, US and Britain have quickly welcomed his elevation to the presidency. European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso was quick to stress that the election was “an opportunity to give fresh, immediate and positive impetus to the accession process to the European Union through progress in a number of key areas”.
Indeed, Gul displayed a flair for pragmatic diplomacy, which many pundits believe will stand him in good stead in his challenging tenure at Cankaya Palace. If the stunning July election victory of AK Party was a watershed for Turkish politics, then the election of Abdullah Gul to the presidency represents a brave new era for it. For the first time in the history of the republic, the president, prime minister and speaker of the Parliament, the three top posts in the state, will all be held by members of AK Party, essentially a “Muslim Democratic Union” akin to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “I will be loyal to the constitution and the principles set out in the constitution. I will be the president of all of Turkey and will be totally impartial,” said President Gül, during his address to Parliament following his election.
While the majority of Turks believe their new president and acknowledge his sincerity, the armed forces in an unholy alliance with the extreme right and center left, are effectively calling Gul a liar. To them it is a case of “once an Islamist, always an Islamist,” referring to Gul and Erodgan’s alleged radical Islamist past. To them the acid test is that both Gul and Erdogan’s wives prefer to wear headscarves, as if this was not an issue of personal piety but a defiant political statement. Indeed, Turkey’s first lady, Hayrunisa Gul, fearful of the frenzy of a fundamentalist secular media, did not witness her husband’s swearing-in. She did not want to become the news of the day, when it should be her husband’s historic elevation to the presidency. The irony is that should she have decided to attend the swearing-in ceremony wearing a head scarf, it would technically have been against the law of the land, which proscribes the wearing of head scarves in all state institutions. Such is the fragility of Turkish democracy, which still today operates under the military-imposed constitution of Sept. 16, 1980.
One of Gul’s first tasks in statecraft was approving the new government of his prime minister. Erdogan is keen to get on with the business of ruling and to start delivering on his election promises — further strengthening of the Turkish economy; rolling back the state; creating more jobs; speeding up European accession talks; drafting a new civilian constitution; improving the democratic polity of Turkey, especially press freedom and minority rights. —Arab News

The need for an old foe
Basil Markesinis

NEARLY 40 years after the Americans escaped from the rooftops of Saigon, this great country may be on the verge of a second retreat, this time from Iraq. To be sure, this exodus has not begun yet, and President George Bush’s recent speech on the “lessons from Vietnam” suggests that he is in denial. How superficial the parallel was that he drew has been noted by many. The consensus is that the speech was little more than spin, preparing official reaction to the publication of General David Petraeus’s report on the effects of the “surge” of US forces in Iraq. Yet no amount of spin or simplification should conceal the magnitude of the Iraq disaster and the damage to America’s reputation. On all counts, US planners misread how their “liberation” would play in Iraq and in the region as a whole.
Among the numerous lessons that the US must learn from its Iraq misadventure is that the help of Russia is crucial. If Washington hopes to retreat from Iraq without igniting a Middle East powder-keg, it cannot persist with its approach of the last decade, in which no opportunity to humiliate its old foe has been missed. Dick Cheney’s speech in the Baltic states concerning human rights in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is just one example. Worse still, American treatment of Russia on a whole range of issues has nourished resentment and assisted the reawakening of Russian national pride. The Russians had to stomach this in the late 90s. Not any longer, however, given their newly discovered wealth in oil and gas. Here, too, the US has blundered, pushing swaths of Europe to adjust their interests to fit in with Russian energy wealth.
Giving a more active role to Russia in “managing a phased new settlement”, along with a genuine attempt to solve the Palestinian issue, could be the first real steps towards neutralising the American fear of chaos and local strife. For in the region Russia has better links with countries such as Iran than the US does, and acting in concert with the US, it could forestall rash decisions by other neighbouring countries to intervene during the transition. Of course that would mean that American oil giants would henceforth have to share and not monopolise the “action”. But then, are we not told that American involvement in the Middle East was never motivated by financial gain but mounted in the interests of a wider and more lasting stability? Satisfying Russia’s crumpled pride might also help reduce tension even in Europe.
The Anglo-American axis must also swallow its pride and enlist the active support of Europeans, especially France, which was not the only major country to try, rightly, to pull the US back from its folly in Iraq but is also the only continental European state with a network of useful relations in the Middle East. No amount of cosmetic enthusiasm should be allowed to disguise the formidable problems that lie ahead. To minimise the chaos that now prevails not only in Iraq but also in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to let us focus squarely on the threat of international terrorism and the restoration of peace to the Middle East, we hope that Washington learns the lesson of true unilateralism — and also realises that the damage caused by its bad planning and likely to follow its retreat will be mitigated only by involving global partners, not least in Russia and Europe. In short, the days when the US decided and its “friends” demurely followed must end. —Khaleej Times