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National Geographic : 2002 Apr
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westward through the mountains and across the great Tibetan Plateau. Like the long knives Tibetan nomads hang from their belts, new roads into Tibet can cut deeply, slicing away millennial layers of isolation and ignorance, clearing access to the world and to almost anything money can buy. But the roads can also cut into a rich-and fragile-culture. Still, although I found no shortage of Tibetans who damned the Chi nese, few criticized the roads. "We have to admit that only China could accomplish this," a farmer with a brown walnut of a face, astride a wheezing one-lung motor tricycle, told me as we waited more than four hours for a pick-and-shovel gang to clear a rock slide. "Our own gov ernment never did and never could." This mammoth construction project is key to Beijing's "Develop the West" program, intended to modernize the lagging economy of western China, which includes the Tibetan Plateau. The eventual objective is to fill this open territory-as vast as Western Europe-with millions of Chinese now living in economically deprived parts of China. Just as Horace Greeley advised an earlier generation of ambitious young Amer icans to go West, the authorities are urging Chinese to move in the same direction. So far results have been mixed, because lowland Chinese find the altitude, the dry, cold climate-and the Tibetans themselves unwelcoming. Beijing's statistics, widely considered extremely low on this point, show that 122,000 Chinese are now living in Tibet. Those who do migrate generally stay no more than a couple of years, just long enough to save some money, before returning home. Mutual animosity runs high: Chinese despise Tibetans as ignorant, lazy, superstitious, and dirty. Tibetans hate and fear the Chinese as cruel and moneygrubbing. The resident Chinese seem genuinely puzzled by the antagonism. "We're bringing them the benefits of a superior cul ture," a couple running a tiny Chinese restaurant in the Wild West town of Dari, near Sichuan Province's boundary with the TAR, told me, with what sounded like utter sincerity. "We don't understand why they don't In a Lhasa cabaret, secular music shares the stage with the illu minated image of a sacredshrine known as a stupa-a pairing that many traditional Tibetans wouldfind deeply offensive. Just down the road,pros titutes tend to their knitting as they wait for customers-likely Chinese laborers in town for construction jobs or Chinese sol diersfrom a nearby army base. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, APRIL 2002
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