China revives Tibet rail link plan

Surveys by the ministry of railways identified two possible routes, from Qinghai province in the north and from Yunnan province in the southwest, the official China Daily said. Two teams of engineers concluded that the two routes were the most feasible of four routes examined, the newspaper said.

The Qinghai route would be the simplest and cheapest, at 2.4 billion dollars, and could be built in seven to eight years, it said. The idea of a rail link to Lhasa, the only city in a sparsely populated region with an average altitude of 4,000 metres, has been raised many times since engineers completed a line to the Qinghai military outpost of Golmud in 1984.

Earlier surveys found that even the relatively flat route from Golmud to Lhasa, which would need to cross the 5,100-metre Tangula pass, was unfeasible. The creation of a link to the Chinese railway network would cement Tibet's economic ties to China and would be an important political symbol for the Communist Party government, which has ruled the region for 50 years.

But it would almost certainly draw opposition from Tibetan exile groups and other critics of China's economic and cultural assimilation of Tibet. The National People's Congress is likely to decide on the route for the railway next March, China Daily said.

(la/dpa)