DAMMING TIBET TO SAVE CHINA:
HYDROPOWER’S COMING GOLDEN DECADE
Gabriel Lafitte, January 2011
China’s 12th Five-Year Plan, for 2011 through 2015, is about to become public.
The ongoing massive infrastructure investments typical of a centrally planned economy will persist, and perhaps even accelerate, as China continues to finance its infrastructure construction by borrowing from future generations. China’s growth remains state-driven, and tightly focused on creating the necessary preconditions for the elite to get even richer, with the state picking up the tab for putting in place the expressways, railways, power stations,cities and ports needed to enable profitable businesses to follow.
While the overall amount to be spent on infrastructure construction contracts to be won by the well-connected may be as big, or bigger, than in the previous central plan, the focus will shift, from the coast to the inland, and from encouraging energy intensive heavy industries to encouraging heavy industries whose intensive energy use is supplied
partly by “green” sources of power.
High on the list of construction programs, designed to distract attention from the massive program of building more coal fired power stations, is the increased use of nuclear power, solar power, wind power and hydropower. In order to maximise the impression that China is the world’s leader in renewable energy, the Party’s 12th Plan will result in maximum publicity presenting China as the global capital of hydropower and green energy. Although the 12th Plan will not be formally released until the 2011 session of the National People’s Congress in March 2011, already key media are publishing the core targets, and they are indeed ambitious, though hardly on the scale of the intensifying use of Chinese and imported coal, and the weekly commissioning of new coal fired power stations. China’s coal consumption is already around three thousand million tons and, even if every planned hydro dam and nuclear power station is built, will still rise to 3.8 billion tons as soon as 2015.
Since a high proportion of the new hydro dams are in Tibet, or on the edges of the Tibetan Plateau, how will China’s reinvigorated hydraulic economy impact on Tibet?
A GOLDEN DECADE FOR THE RED ENGINEERS
What is also becoming clear is that the Party leaders intend to sweep aside the growing strength of the environment movement in China, which in recent years grew in its ability to persuade Beijing to override local boosters of dams that would inundate areas of exceptional beauty or cultural significance. Not only is the party-state signalling its determination to vanquish the environment movement, but also the social unrest that frequently erupts when intensively farmed valleys are commandeered for inundation behind a dam wall, with farmers, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, offered inadequate land and compensation in a country with no unused arable land left. The coming two Five-Year Plans taking China to 2020 are to be a “golden decade” for engineers. The rise and rise of the red engineers, who dominate the Politburo of the Communist Party to a remarkable degree, is not yet over, even if a new generation takes over in 2012.
Shanghai Daily reported on 6 January 2011: “WITH 2020 clean-energy targets to meet, China is set to accelerate the building of hydroelectric dams, reversing a long halt caused by environmental concerns and the social upheaval of relocating people living in the shadow of dam sites. The trend will create a “golden decade” for the nation’s hydropower sector, analysts say, as high fuel prices continue to squeeze margins of coal-fired power plants that comprise the bulk of
China’s electricity-generating capacity. Renewable energy sources like solar power have been slow to come on line on a big scale because of high costs and grid-configuration problems.
“The Chinese government now aims to have 430 gigawatts of -hydropower capacity by 2020, increasing its earlier target of 380GW, the China Securities Journal reported last month. ‘That means each year, the equivalent of one new Three Gorges Dam will be added in China over the next decade,’ said Shao Minghui, an analyst at China Post Securities, using the 2020 target of 380GW as a base. ‘The market is really sizable.’ The 18.2GW Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtze River, is the world’s largest.”
Shanghai will be a major beneficiary of this renewed investment in diversified energy sourcing. Not only will the industrial belts surrounding Shanghai be major users of hydropower transmitted from afar, there will be less reliance on coal hauled from Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in northern China, and fewer bottlenecks on a rail freight system overloaded with coal shipments. Shanghai will proclaim its green credentials as a city that directly emits less greenhouse gases, by sourcing its hydropower from as far away as the fringes of Tibet, where arrays of dams will cascade down the mountain rivers that pour from the Tibetan Plateau.
The Tibetan Plateau is increasingly divided geographically between two different purposes, in the minds of China’s planners. One land use, covering big areas on the map, is conservation and watershed protection for China’s downstream users, preserving landscapes often called pristine and unspoiled by Chinese economic and tourism industry
planners. The other land use, concentrated narrowly in corridors of development, is concentrated urbanisation, industrialisation, minerals extraction and processing, and all the transport corridors that connect these zones of high productivity, high capital investment, and high immigrant population.
While these two kinds of land use pull in opposite directions, they could live side by side, if uneasily. But China has further decided that the nomads are to be sedentarised, emptying the land, leaving it officially designated only for conservation and watershed protection, with traditional pastoral use excluded. The displaced nomads are now becoming an urban fringe, dumped into high density concrete block settlements, with no skills, no livelihoods and few of the inhibitions essential to living in the urban crowd.
The land of Tibet is being pushed to contradictory extremes, with huge emptied areas badged to materialiseChina’s green credentials, while the engineering corridors and urban hubs monopolise almost all available investment. The existing corridors of highways, railways, optical fibre cables and oil pipelines across Tibet are to be joined by a new corridor, of hydro dams and high voltage power lines. The dams sometimes are to be in a cascade series, on Tibetan rivers, establishing the river system of Tibet, source of most of Asia’s great rivers, as a newly industrialised corridor comparable to the highways and railway. While there is little likelihood these mountain rivers will, in Tibet, be navigable, they can be made to generate enough electricity to see power pylons marching across Tibet, both to the new boom cities in Tibet, and far away to the east, to China’s major industrial cities.
The power of the hydropower engineers, far from waning as some have supposed, is reaching its peak. But the targets are, by any standard, ambitious; and will require massive injections of capital raised by issuing bonds to be repaid by future generations. Rather than encouraging domestic consumption, which would enable China’s factory workers to buy what they make, investment capital will, as usual, be primarily directed at massive projects that retiring leaders like to associate themselves with as their lasting fame.
But is it actually possible to add a Three Gorges dam once a year, for a decade? The reality is that Three Gorges, athwart China’s greatest river, the Yangtze, is unique, the world’s biggest hydro dam for good reason. There aren’t many rivers where a single dam of such wonder-of-the-world size could be contemplated. Instead, China will build an enormous number of smaller dams, and maps charting known sites on the Tibetan Plateau are now readily available online http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.com/search?q=dams&updated-max=2010-01-21T13:06:00-08:00&max-results
DWARFING THE THREE GORGES
But there is one river, or to be more exact one stretch of a specific river, in a far corner of China, that has the potential to be another three gorges, in fact to generate double or even triple the power generated by the Three Gorges colossus. This is the great river of southern Tibet, the Yarlung Tsangpo, in its gorge in eastern Tibet, pinned beneath towering ranges on all sides, as it curves in a great bend before plunging south into northeast India and Bangladesh, known better to the world as the Brahmaputra. The great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo is so remote and inaccessible it was charted only in the 1990s. On paper, its potential for generating hydropower is extraordinary. Over a 300 km stretch, it falls from 3000 meters to just over 500 meters at the point it leaves Tibet. The gorge it has cut through the rising Himalayas is itself a channel for laden monsoon clouds to penetrate Tibet more than anywhere else on the plateau, resulting in heavy rainfall. Hemmed in by glacial peaks above 5000 meters, with the highest mountain of eastern Tibet, Namche Barwa, at 7760 meters, the whole area not only attracts moist monsoon clouds, but captures almost all of them for the river. In the 300 kms of the great bend, the Yarlung Tsangpo’s flow more than doubles. China’s hydro engineers calculate that two great hydro projects could be built, Metok (in Chinese Motuo), with 38,000 megawatt generating capacity, more than double Three Gorges 18,600MW; and Daduo, which could generate even more, 43,800 MW. Either of these projects would add more to China’s electricity supply than all the dams planned for other Tibetan rivers put together.
The idea is quite simple. Both involve diverting water from the river through a man-made short-cut that avoids much of the great bend, sending huge volumes of water straight across from intercept points where the river is just below 3000 meters, rushing down to rejoin the river on the far side of the bend, where it is only at 850 meters (Metok/Motuo) or 560 meters, at Daduo, an even greater drop. This makes maximum use of a drop of more than 2000 meters -2 kilometres- to drive enormous turbines and produce electricity on a scale that dwarfs even the Three Gorges. Not only have Chinese hydro engineers sketched such plans, they have published proposed routes for the ultra high voltage cables that would then step across the deep gorges of nearby rivers in order to reach the core cities of western China, Chongqing and Chengdu. China’s Xinhua newsagency published a map in 2003 showing power lines heading east to
the Sichuan basin.
Source: Scientific Atlas of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, 1990, map 80
Such projects would forever be linked to their progenitors, the engineers who dominate the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, as Three Gorges is a lasting monument to its patron Li Peng, otherwise known as the driver of the Tiananmen massacre. Either of these great Yarlung Tsangpo dams would also showcase the technical mastery of Chinese engineers, whose worldwide work building railways, oil pipelines and refineries in Africa, or mines in Latin America, extend China’s global reach. Three Gorges relied on imported turbines from Siemens in Germany as the high precision heart of making electricity from water; but a new generation of turbines can now be made in China, after western manufacturers were induced to transfer their intellectual property to Chinese partners.
Source: Scientific Atlas of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Geographic Publishing House 1990, map 2
China’s mapping of routes for these hyper mega dams makes full use of existing river valleys feeding into the Yarlung Tsangpo gorge on the downstream side. Rather than having to channel diverted water all the way along a 50km shortcut, the plan is to utilise as much as possible the existing fall of water as it rushes down to join the Yarlung Tsangpo not far from where it reaches India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, a state still contested by China, which loses no opportunity to remind India that China’s armed forces occupied Arunachal in 1962.
But there are enormous obstacles facing the prospect of ever building these dams. Between the sides of the great bend is a major mountain range, peaking at 7760m, the highest mountain anywhere in eastern Tibet or western China. The spine of mountain ridges is mostly above 5000m, a full 2kms above the river bed; and it is underlain by a deep fault line,
in a region subjected to enormous mountain building pressures and big earthquakes as pressures build and seek sudden release. The only way through would be to tunnel massive shafts on a down slope through the fault line, at a depth of 2kms or more, deep enough to be so naturally hot that water entering at close to freezing point might heat by as much as 50 degrees. No one really knows. So far it is all on paper, with little preliminary work done to test even the technical feasibility, let alone the financial cost/benefit case. Continuous tunnels would need to be up to 30kms long. In order to generate enough power, many parallel tunnels, each probably eight meters wide, would be needed. In addition, on a river that rages in the summer monsoon and slows greatly in winter, dams to regulate flow would be needed across the river. All this in an area so steep, jungled and inaccessible that the 1990s saw a Sino-American race to be first to actually traverse the full length. One result was a number of books, Ian Baker’s The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet’s Lost Paradise the best of them.
Source: Scientific Atlas of Qinghai Tibet Plateau 1990, map 138
The great bend occurs for a reason. This is the area of maximum thrust of the Indian subcontinent into the heart of Eurasia. What forces the river northeast, then east, and then southwest is a series of faults deep in the mantle of the planet, which are at right angles to each other. Across most of Tibet the fault lines run roughly parallel, trending from northwest towards the southeast, and it is these which force the Yarlung Tsangpo to turn south towards India and Bangladesh. But before reaching the walls of rock pushed up along these faults, the river must first find a path between other fault lines that are oriented southwest to northeast, resulting in parallel ranges trending the same way, that the river must squeeze between. This is a highly active seismic area, with deep-seated forces pushing in differing directions, not a secure environment for deep drilling on a massive scale. The risks are enormous.
Construction of the Three Gorges dam occurred in a highly populated area, with full urban services nearby, in fact the population that had to be removed as the dam filled was over one million people. From the perspective of the logistics of infrastructure construction the location was challenging, but workable, with ready access for the machinery needed to shift rock, blast and built the massive reinforced concrete walls. Everything needed, even huge and awkward items such as turbines, could be transported readily to the site, not least by large ships steaming upriver from Shanghai and China’s most industrialised belt.
By comparison, Metok county is the very last of China’s 2000 counties to be accessible by any road at all. It was only in December 2010 that Chinese engineers blasted the last rocks separating tunnels coming from both ends of a 3.3km shaft which is to enable road traffic from Pome (in Chinese Bomi) county to get through to Metok. Then road making machinery will be able to enter, and construct a road to Metok town, the county capital on the Yarlung Tsangpo. The tunnel is not big enough to handle huge items such as hydropower turbines, nor can they be brought up a raging mountain river via Bangladesh and India. The news of the road tunnel connection was reported in Indian media as further evidence of China’s threat to Indian rivers. The last thing India would ever do is to facilitate the portage of heavy equipment enabling China to dam the Tibetan river relied upon by north-eastern India.
Metok is also the last of China’s 2000 counties to have any Chinese, Han Chinese, living there. The official 2000 Census lists Metok (Motuo) uniquely as having no Han at all, and only a small Tibetan population of 1300. Most of the people are neither Han nor Tibetan but are officially classified as Lhoba (Luoba in Chinese), an ethnicity that counts as one of China’s officially recognised 56 ethnicities constituting China. In Metok and nearby counties there are 2500 Lhoba, and about 4000 over the border in northeastern India, where they are more often known as Mishmi and Tani. They were classified by Chinese ethnographers as living in the evolutionary stage of “primitive communism”, an egalitarian tribalism which meant they were spared the compulsory class warfare China forced on Tibet. In China’s rigid social evolutionary ladder, which all people must pas through, primitive communism is the lowest of all, prior to the feudal slave owning stage of history which is where Chinese investigators fixed the Tibetans, necessitating compulsory struggle sessions in which educated Tibetans were denounced and liquidated.
The Lhoba were spared, partly because the official Chinese ethnologists who decided how everyone was classified, resisted the pressure on them to radically simplify reality and lump many peoples together, for the sake of administrative utility. Elsewhere, people’s own preferred identities were ignored, but the Lhoba got to be one of only 56 minority nationalities, down from over 400 in the early 1950s. Rather than colonising Metok county with Chinese cadres, Lhoba children were taken to schools in China’s interior to be taught how to be Chinese citizens, and become the cadres transmitting Beijing’s policies to these rugged borderland gorges.
The Lhoba have been further beyond the reach of the Chinese party-state than any minority, living in small villages close to raging rivers, hunting, trapping and trading with Tibetan farmers. Should the world’s biggest hydro dams twice or thrice the power of Three Gorges, come to Lhoba land, the Lhoba will have no way of even expressing their true feelings to the world.
Undeterred by the multiple impracticalities of this paper dream of a double sized Three Gorges on the Yarlung Tsangpo, Chinese armchair engineers have fancifully proposed the use of small nuclear explosions to blast the necessary tunnels. This wildly improbable fantasy has been seized upon by Indian hawks who enjoy ratcheting up Indian fears of China, and their Tibetan friends who take all opportunity to portray all Chinese speculation as fact, all Chinese plans as malevolent. Perhaps the most popular retelling of the nuclearisation of the Yarlung Tsangpo is in the film Meltdown in Tibet, by Canadian film maker Michael Buckley. No evidence is presented to back the assertion that these dams are to be built, and nuclear explosions are a key construction method. The fashion for nuclear explosions as a tool of civil engineering was popular in many countries, which faded as reality dawned that blasting is no substitute for digging and tunnelling. In Australia in the 1960s mining entrepreneurs with a penchant for simple solutions to complex problems proposed nuclear blasting of canals to take seawater to the dry salt lake beds of the inland, or to blast a canal from monsoon northwest Australia to the parched inland rangelands of West Australia a thousand or more kilometres south. Such ideas were quietly dismissed, as not worth a second look. In China such enthusiasms still surface. In 1996 Scientific American reported a macro-engineering plan involving peaceful nuclear explosions bruited during the December 1995 Beijing meeting of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, to excavate a 20 km long canal through an intervening mountain range north of the Yarlung Tsangpo in order to convey irrigation-quality water on its way far to China’s arid north. Somehow a number of reports have muddled two Chinese plans which both begin on the Yarlung Tsangpo. One is an extraordinarily ambitious plan, of which nothing has been heard for years, to divert water far to the north, all the way to China’s over-used Yellow River, to replenish its depleted flow. The nuclear option was mentioned as a way of dealing with intervening mountain ranges which stand in the way. Some reports, based on hazy knowledge of Tibetan geography, assume nuclear explosions deep underground, are also proposed, not for blasting a canal but tunnels to link the Yarlung Tsangpo with itself further downstream across the sides of the great bend. While both of these massive projects based on extracting water and/or electricity from the Yarlung Tsangpo do have their supporters, they remain too big even for the red engineers in charge of today’s China, with no sign for several years that either plan is under serious consideration.
THE GOLDEN DECADE OF DAMMING BEGINS
Perhaps these mega dams will be built one day, given that China’s modern hydraulic economy has, as a matter of revolutionary pride, built more dams than anywhere on earth in the past 50 years, displacing as many as ten million farmers in the way of progress. But that day is not soon. The Yarlung Tsangpo gorge does not go in a decade from being a heroic discovery of Chinese (or American) masculinity, to being an industrial worksite for a statist development project bigger even than Three Gorges.
Focussing on the impossibly over scale megaprojects distracts attention from the large number of smaller dams that are planned for Tibet. But even these are caught up in the chronic tension and suspicion in India about China’s intentions. The plan for a dam across the Yarlung Tsangpo, much upstream from the great bend, capable of generating electricity for nearby Tsethang town and the city of Lhasa, has been met in India with claims of Chinese malevolence. Supporters of India’s military establishment have even suggested that, in the event of hostilities, China could use the dam under construction at Zangmu as a weapon, opening the floodgates to inundate Indian towns downstream. The Zangmu dam will take a substantial portion of 12th Five-Year Plan funding, but it is not in any way designed as a water diversion dam, only as a generator of electricity, after which the water will be returned to the river. This does not reassure Indian critics, who depict the dam as massive, either depriving India of much needed water, or flooding it, or both.
Many dams will be built, and this is of great concern to the many southeast Asian downstream users of the waters of the Mekong, as well as Tibetan communities distressed at their powerlessness to in any way speak up for themselves or those downriver. The painstaking research pieced together by http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.com shows dozens of hydro dams under active consideration, or already under construction, around the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau, and deep in Tibet, where dams are the primary source of electricity to power China’s urbanisation strategy for Tibet. Some are modest in scale, yet still raise issues of displacement of farmers, interruption of fish migrations, and risks of siltation as rivers swell in monsoon months and erode their course, then dump their load when water is slowed by a dam. Many concerns are raised by these dams, especially the bigger ones on the faster flowing mountain rivers of Tibet as they begin their descent from the Plateau.
But no debate is possible in Tibet. All contributions from Tibetan civil society are quickly criminalised, declared to be an illegal discourse, part of the “splittist” plot to destroy China’s unity and stability. Although the wider world may soon know which of the many proposed hydro dams in Tibet are to be constructed as part of the 12th Five-Year Plan, the Tibetan villagers most affected are neither told what to expect, nor given any public space to participate in decision making. While there is limited freedom for Chinese environmental NGOs to speak up for protection of Tibet, Tibetans themselves must remain silent.
International organisations are sometimes caught up in this untenable situation. UNESCO was persuaded to declare the parallel gorges of three great rivers leaving Tibet to be the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage UNESCO protected area, but UNESCO allowed China to exempt from the protected area boundaries the actual rivers, leaving China free to build dams, while proclaiming the gorges rising above the river beds to be a global tourist heritage wonder protected by UNESCO listing.
China is now determined to roll back the advances in recent years of the environmental movement, in order to ensure there are no obstacles to the coming “golden decade” of dam building. Popular resistance to being displaced by development, and environmental objections are to be swept aside, as dozens of new dams are constructed all along the flanks of the Tibetan Plateau, proclaiming China’s credentials as a “green energy” power. China’s next Party Secretary Li Keqiang says of the 12th Five-Year Plan: “In the coming five years, China will vigorously develop the green economy and low-carbon technologies to bring down significantly energy consumption and CO2 emission per unit of GDP.” (Financial Times 10 January 2011) This is a carefully crafted formula to raise energy efficiency and reduce energy intensity while accelerating total energy use as production continues to increase as fast as China can manage. What this formula masks is that coal use in China, dug domestically and increasingly also imported, is set to rise and rise over the 12th Five-Year Plan. Between 2007 and 2035 China’s use of coal to generate electricity will triple, even if China fulfils all its “green” plans for hydropower, wind power, solar power and nuclear power installation.
Source: International Energy Outlook 2010, International Energy Agency
Much of the new 12th Plan dams will be in the heartland of Tibet, to power the copper smelters, ore concentrators, rock crushers, urban infrastructure and glossy tourist hotels of central Tibet, the essential power supply enabling the 12th Plan’s “leaps-and-bounds” development of Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to be achieved. Even the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo and the several hydro dams well upstream of the great bend are all in TAR, where Tibetans are especially disempowered, under constant surveillance and suspicion of harbouring splittist tendencies the moment they speak up against dams or other environmental costs Tibet must pay. The harsh prison sentence given in 2010 to Karma Samdrup, a Tibetan businessman, environmentalist and community leader, indicates the price of speaking that questions Chinese governmental practice in Tibet.
GREEN TIBET, BROWN TIBET
Tibet has been offered to the world as a sacrifice for China’s greater good before. Tibetan nomads have been removed from their pasture lands, forced to lead idle lives in concrete block settlements, in order to grow more grass for protection of China’s upper watersheds in Tibet. These hundreds of thousands of “ecological migrants” are officially voluntary patriots sacrificing their lands and livelihoods for the greater good of China’s downstream. The creation of “paper park” protected areas covering large portions of Tibet’s alpine deserts has been engineered as a zero/sum game pitting wildlife conservation against the presence and life of nomads. Similarly, other official Chinese schemes for reforestation, converting sloping land to ecological plantations, “grain-to-green” and other slogan-led programs with international backing, invariably exclude Tibetan farmers and nomads from pursuing their livelihoods while also contributing to the conservation effort. Instead of enlisting local Tibetan communities as participants essential to the success of reforestation, degrading grassland rehabilitation and de-desertification, Tibetans are fenced out, declared redundant and are resettled elsewhere.
China makes much of its contribution to global campaigns to conserve biodiversity, mitigate climate change, step up investment in green energy, protect watersheds and reduce energy intensity and each time it is the Tibetan Plateau that is further disempowered, and divided into zones of exclusion, adjacent to zones of intensive investment in dams, highways, railways, mines and urban boom centres, all of which attract immigrants, adding to population pressure on a plateau the size of western Europe that has never sustained a human population of more than six million. China’s overall pattern of intervention in Tibet divides the plateau between areas developed intensively for production, and large areas mapped out of bounds for Tibetan use in the name of environmental issues. Excluded from the land use conversion zones and outnumbered in the urban production zones and dam construction sites, Tibetans increasingly have nowhere to live Tibetan lives, pursuing Tibetan livelihoods making extensive, mobile use of the whole plateau below the snow line of the Land of Snows.
China’s various slogan-driven “green” mass campaigns may each make sense taken in isolation, but what they add up to is an incoherent, deeply contradictory vision of Tibet as China’s salvation, providing China all at once with abundant clean water, minerals and hydropower, a mass tourism boom and green credentials globally.The new Tibet of the 12th Five-Year Plan is a patchwork landscape of intensive, exclusionary conservation; and intensive productivist development. China wants Tibet to be both pristine and unspoiled; and a productive supplier of hydropower, oil, gas and minerals to distant Chinese manufacturers and cities. It is this dual vision that has portioned Tibet into productivist brownand post-productivist green zones, chopping up a land which required no such interventions by state power until Chinese governmentality reached far into the rangelands in the 1950s, setting off a chain of policy failures that the 12th Plan golden decade of dam building greenwash is meant to correct.
Sweeping aside those displaced by hydro dam development, and dismissing the concerns of environmentalist objections to dams may not be as easy as the announcements in China’s official media suggest. Social unrest is growing, and rural Chinese are better aware of their legal rights. They are less willing to accept eviction from their farms, to make way for dams, when compensation for lost livelihoods and promises of better substitute land and higher incomes than ever prove yet again to be meaningless in practice. The rise of popular blogs exposing official expropriations of land is one sign of popular resistance among those most immediately displaced. But these days the environment movement in China attracts well-connected city dwellers, the sort of Chinese citizens who read the English-language Shanghai Daily and are not at all pleased to be informed that the state is about to end the “long halt caused by environmental concerns and the social upheaval of relocating people living in the shadow of dam sites.”
In Tibet protests are declared splittist, and are crushed. Who are the people most directly affected by the new dams on the Tibetan Plateau?

An open letter to Hu Jintao
19 Jan 2011
The Asian Age
Dear Hu Jintao,
As the Chinese leader most closely associated with Tibet, you have declared Tibet to be one of the most sensitive “core issues” in the US-China relationship. We expect that it will be high on the agenda of your discussions with President Obama this week.
Mr Hu, you began your rise to power as Party chief in Tibet (although you didn’t enjoy the altitude in Lhasa), and you have been instrumental in setting and implementing policy on Tibet. As the succession process begins in the Chinese Communist Party, what will be your legacy on Tibet?
Tibetans have not forgotten that you presided over that terrifying time of martial law in Lhasa in 1989 – and you were one of the first regional leaders to congratulate those who ordered the troops to open fire on Tiananmen Square three months later.
Today, there is a deepening crackdown in Tibet. Tibetans have risked their lives to express their loyalty to their leader the Dalai Lama and their anguish as a result of more than 50 years of suppression. Your response has been to strengthen the very measures that caused the largely peaceful wave of protests that swept across Tibetan areas of the PRC from March, 2008 onwards. You have tightened control to suffocation point, imposing new measures that weaken the institutions of Tibetan Buddhism and undermine Tibetan language, bedrock of its culture. Although you are leader of a Communist state that promotes atheism, you have even declared that Tibetan lamas cannot be reincarnated without
government permission.
Your actions point to profound contradictions in China’s leadership today. While you demonstrate increasing strength and aggressive authority in your assertions towards global leadership, you regard peaceful disagreement with the juggernaut top-down policies of the Communist Party as a threat to your nation’s “security”. The latter is not the approach of a strong state. As Tibetans, we are not alone in believing that the measure of greatness of a nation is not only based on turbo-charged mercantilism. We believe that ultimately if China is to achieve greatness you must lead with a moral authority and take into account the wishes and genuine grievances of the Chinese and Tibetan people.
The need for change is urgent. Your government and Party have engaged in a systematic attack on the rule of law and civil society. You characterise two of the most progressive and important voices for peace on the world stage today – our leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Chinese scholar Liu Xiaobo – as “criminals”. Tibet is under virtual lockdown, with ever longer prison sentences being imposed as ultimately futile attempts to silence the peaceful expression of views. Do you want the leitmotif of your legacy to be a hellish, constricting fear?
Mr Hu, you can no longer say that what happens in Tibet is simply a matter of China’s “internal affairs”. Tibet is a “core issue” for the world, not just for China. Tibet is the earth’s ‘Third Pole’ with the world’s largest reserves of freshwater outside the Arctic and Antarctic. The fragile ecology of the Tibetan plateau, the source of most of Asia’s major rivers including the Yangtze, is of critical importance to the water-dependent societies in downstream nations. And yet you have developed and are pursuing fast-track economic strategies and damning projects that are known to contribute to the adverse effects of global warming and risk devastation in downstream communities, including India.
Twenty-first century thinking requires us to move beyond 19th century nation-building based on the exploitation of natural resources. There is an increasing consensus among Chinese, Tibetan and Western scholars that your policy of settling nomads in Tibet is leading to environmental degradation and increasing poverty. Scientists say that the traditional ecosystem knowledge of Tibetan nomads protects the land and livelihoods and helps restore areas already degraded. The involvement of Tibetans is essential to sustaining the long-term health of the land and water resources that China and the rest of Asia depends upon.
Mr Hu, a new generation of leaders has a responsibility to listen to voices for change from Tibet and China, and to deal responsibly with Tibet policy.
It is not too late for you to take an important and historic step before the succession runs its course, with regard to another important succession.
The Dalai Lama is recognised by the world as the pre-eminent representative of the Tibetan people. The potential for instability increases, not decreases, after he passes away. Now is the time for a far-sighted Chinese leadership to engage with this moderate, influential leader – who is revered by thousands of Chinese, too – before it is too late.
We hope that your visit to Washington is fruitful.
Tencho Gyatso, Tsering Jampa, and Pema Wangyal are from the International Campaign for Tibet

Hu Pushed on Tibet Dialogue
2011-01-19 RFA
The U.S. president calls on his counterpart to restart talks with the Dalai Lama for greater Tibetan autonomy.
U.S. President Barack Obama raised the plight of the Tibetan people directly with visiting Chinese leader Hu Jintao on Wednesday, calling on Beijing to resume talks with the Dalai Lama on greater autonomy for the Himalayan region.
As Obama and his counterpart sparred over human rights at a rare press conference, the U.S. leader said Beijing should make better efforts to reconcile differences with the Tibetans, who complain their rights are being eroded under Chinese rule.
“Even as we, the United States, recognize that Tibet is part of the People’s Republic of China, the United States continues to support further dialogue between the government of China and the representatives of the Dalai Lama to resolve concerns and differences, including the reservation of the religious and cultural identity of the Tibetan people,” Obama said.
Some see Obama’s move to publicly raise the Tibet issue as an attempt to make amends for what was widely considered to be a snub of the Dalai Lama during the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit to Washington last year.
Obama finally met with the Dalai Lama at the White House in February 2010 after declining to meet with him during his previous visit to Washington in October 2009.
But some advisers had argued against the delay, which was widely panned at home as an appeasement of China. At the meeting that was finally held, the president agreed only to a brief meeting with the Dalai Lama that was closed to the press and held in the White House basement Map Room.
Little progress
The Dalai Lama’s representatives have met with Chinese officials a total of nine times to discuss Chinese rule in Tibet, but little progress has been made in the talks. The last time the envoys sat down with Chinese officials was in January last year, when the two sides met in Beijing.
Hu did not respond directly to Obama’s comment about Tibet, but did admit later that as a developing country with a large population and in the midst of reform, China could do better to protect the rights of its people.
“China still faces many challenges in economic and social development. And a lot still needs to be done in China, in terms of human rights,” he said.
He added that China would be willing to engage in dialogue and exchanges with the United States “on the basis of mutual respect and the principle of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.”
‘Make change happen’
Mary Beth Markey, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, said that while it was atypical of Obama to make such a strong statement about Tibet on the public stage, his message was “nothing new.”
“That is what the president has been saying to the Chinese privately. And yes, it’s enormously gratifying to have him say it publicly. But again, it’s not new … and it’s something that Hu Jintao would have heard many times before,” Markey said.
“It is Hu, and it is only President Hu, who has the authority to make change happen in Tibet. So it would have been much more gratifying to then have President Hu say something and … he was pretty dodgy on those human rights issues,” she said.
“[But] the Chinese do not like to appear to be acting at the behest of U.S. concerns for Tibet.”
Many Tibetans have chafed for years under Chinese rule, which they say has eroded their national culture and curbed their freedom to practice Buddhism.
The Dalai Lama has accused China of perpetrating “cultural genocide” in Tibet, and is regarded by Beijing as a dangerous separatist.
Call for concern
As Obama and Hu fielded questions at the joint press conference, hundreds of Tibetan and other demonstrators converged on Lafayette Park outside the White House, protesting against what they called China’s human rights abuses.
Some chanted “Who is a liar? Hu Jintao is a liar” and “Killer, killer, Hu Jintao.”
Two actors wearing 12-foot-tall skeleton costumes played out an attack on others portraying a Chinese dragon in front of a banner that read, “Hu has Tibetan skeletons in his closet.”
“We’re here to urge President Obama to raise the issue of human rights and freedom for the Tibetan people during his talk with President Hu Jintao, publicly and vigorously, because these are universal values and especially ones that us Americans … cherish,” said Tenzin Dolkar of Students for a Free Tibet.
Written by Joshua Lipes.

Transcript of Video-Conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Chinese Activists
TibetNet[Thursday, January 20, 2011 17:53]
Questions put forward to His Holiness the Dalai Lama by Chinese people from various cities in Mainland China.
1. Your Holiness, what is your view about Ngabo Ngawang Jigme? He was the representative delegated by you to negotiate with the People’s Republic of China and also the one who signed the 17-Point Agreement [in 1951]. Even if you had not granted him [plenipotentiary] powers [to sign the Agreement], you had later accepted that agreement. Eventually, most of the time, he stood against you and acted like the spokesperson of the Chinese government on the Tibet issue.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: I knew Ngabo even before 1950. People who knew Ngabo at that time viewed him as an honest person, someone of integrity. I also viewed Ngabo as progressive and trusted him. He was then one of the main people who had my trust and confidence. After the signing of the Agreement, when I met Ngabo in Lhasa, he told me that they were compelled to sign that Agreement because, had they refused to sign, it would have resulted in an ‘armed liberation’ of Tibet. Thus, he felt that a ‘peaceful liberation’ was better than an ‘armed liberation’. He, however, also said that when they signed the Agreement, even though they were carrying the Chamdo governor’s official seal, they did not use it. They instead had to use a forged seal provided by the Chinese government.
Similarly, in 1979, after Deng Xiaoping displayed significant flexibility, I dispatched fact-finding delegations to Tibet. At that time, when my delegates met Ngabo, he told them to be aware about the fact that whether in times of the Qing dynasty, or for that matter, the rule of Guomingtang, places within the territory of Ganden Phodrang [Government of Tibet] never paid taxes to them. Ngabo thus gave a clear indication of his patriotism.
Similarly, in 1989, during a session of Tibet Autonomous Region People’s Congress, Ngabo refuted as factually incorrect the official Chinese paper claiming that the Nanjing government (of Guomingtang) made all the decisions regarding the enthronement of the 14th Dalai Lama, as well as on matters relating to the identification and recognition of the Dalai Lama. Ngabo said that the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama was recognized by the regent of Tibet in accordance with religious tradition and that there was no foreign presider at the enthronement ceremony. The aforesaid claims, Ngabo said, were not true as asserted by the Guomintang officials. Even though I was a minor at the time of the enthronement, I still vividly remember that there were representatives of British India, China, Nepal and Bhutan uniformly seated in one row. Thus, in these matters, Ngabo had done his best in clarifying the actual facts. Following his demise, we organized a memorial service. In fact, some of our friends criticized our memorial service for him as inappropriate. We all know it is a fact that people under fear are forced to speak diplomatically according to the given circumstances. This is the reason why I always had complete trust in him. Even though he has now passed away, I always pray for him.
2. Your Holiness, are you losing control over the behaviour of a few Tibetans in exile? What do you think if that happens and how are you going to work on this?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: There are over 150,000 Tibetans living in exile, out of which perhaps 99 percent share common concern and sincerity on the issue of Tibet. Of course, there will be difference of opinions and it should exist since here we are following the path of democracy. I tell my people that they have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and they should express themselves freely. So there will be different opinions. Take the example of the Tibetan Youth Congress. They struggle for independence and criticize our Middle-Way policy. During my occasional meetings with them, I tell them ‘the Chinese government expects that I should arrest some of you’, but we cannot do such things here in a free country and I would never do such a thing.
3. My question to you, my teacher, is the struggle of non-violence and truth (non- cooperation) effective in confronting communist China? If yes, in what ways the Tibetan people are benefited by non-violence and truth?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: I always tell the same thing to Tibetans. And I want to mention here that even though our consistent stand of middle-way policy based on the foundation of non-violence has not yielded tangible result through dialogue with the Chinese government, it has helped us in getting strong support from the Chinese intellectuals, students and those who are interested in and aware of the reality. This is the result of my efforts.It is difficult to deal with the Chinese government, but I think despite our inability to maintain extensive contacts with the Chinese intellectuals and public, our stand will win their support and it will continue to grow. It was some months after the Tiananmen event, I met some Chinese friends at Harvard University as I happened to be at that time in the US. After I explained to them our position, they said the entire Chinese people would support the stand of the Dalai Lama if they know about it.
4. Your Holiness, please explain how reforming the system of reincarnating lamas is permissible? Does such a reform contravene the Buddha’s teachings?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: From the outset, I want to ask the questioner to read a little of the Buddha’s teachings as contained in Kagyur (teachings of the Buddha) and Tengyur (Commentaries by Buddhist masters). The custom of recognizing reincarnate lamas did not develop in India. Similarly, the tradition of reincarnation of lamas did not develop in many Buddhist countries such as Thailand, Burma and China. There is a system of recognizing someone as a reincarnation of an enlightened being, but the system of recognizing someone as Tulku or Lama does not exist. In Tibet, the first ever reincarnation was recognized after a little child who clearly remembered his past life and which was proved to be true. Later on, this system slowly and gradually nearly became a class structure in society. Because of this I have made it well known that there is a difference between Tulku and Lama. A Lama need not be a Tulku and a Tulku need not be a Lama or one could be both Lama and Tulku. The one who is qualified as a result of one’s own study and practice is known as Lama. A Tulku, even without such a standard of education, enjoys status in society in the name of the former Lama. And there are many who lack the Lama’s qualification and even bring disgrace. So I used to say since some forty years ago that there needs to be some system to regulate the recognition of Tulku. Otherwise it is not good to have many unqualified ones.I consider my interest in the system of reincarnation as a service to the Buddha’s teachings. In the case of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, the four hundred year old tradition of the Dalai Lama as both spiritual and temporal leader ended with the direct election of political leadership by the Tibetans in exile in 2001. In 1969, I made it well known in my official statement that whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not would be decided by the Tibetan people. In future, to decide whether to have the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation and if there is a need, it is not necessary to always follow the past precedence but we can act in accordance with the given circumstances. This conforms to the teachings of the Buddha and do not go against them. When I explain about the possibility of reincarnation of Lamas in general and that of the Dalai Lama in particular, some Tibetans from inside Tibet and as well as Chinese friends wonder if this is in line with our religious tradition.
5. At present there are a lot of people in China who have a deep-seated anger and animosity to you. What do you have to say to them?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: At one point the Dalai Lama was called a demon. On a few occasions I was asked what I thought on the Dalai Lama being called a demon and I told them in good humor, “I am a demon. I have horns on my head”.
This is understandable since the Chinese people have access only to one-sided and distorted information. For example during the Olympic torch relay, I especially requested the concerned people that the Olympic Games were a matter of pride for the 1.3 billion Chinese people and that we must never create any problem. Moreover, even before the right of hosting the Olympic Games was awarded to China, when I was visiting the US capital city of Washington, D.C., some journalists asked me about my viewpoint. I told them that China being the most populous country with a rich cultural heritage and history was worthy of hosting the Games. This is a factual account.But still the Chinese government greatly publicized that we were creating obstacles for the Olympic Games. Because of such propaganda, the Chinese people are not aware of the entire situation and thus we cannot blame them.While on the other side, there are many people around the world who respect me. Therefore, I want to urge my Chinese brothers and sisters to examine the minute details and thoroughly research the information you receive from all sources. When I meet Chinese students, I tell them that being in a free country they should fully utilize both eyes and ears.
6. As far as we know, the central government of the Republic of China participated in the selection process and enthronement ceremony of the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. So, Your Holiness, do you recognize the Taiwan-based Republic of China and how much of an influence do you think the Taiwan government will again have in the reincarnation process?
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: It is similar to my earlier account of Ngabo’s story. Generally, when I am in Taiwan, I have supported the call for ‘One China’. But eventually it is up to the people of mainland China and Taiwan to decide whether they want to be united in the future. What is more important is that Taiwan’s democracy, its robust economy and Taiwan’s good standard of education should be properly safeguarded. This is what I usually say.Wang Lixiong: We have virtually seen the Dalai Lama, just that, as Your Holiness said we could not smell each other. Using the Internet in the 21st century, we consider this opportunity of interacting with Your Holiness as of fundamental importance. Thus, if interactions like these are deemed constructive for Sino-Tibetan relations and understanding each other further, then in the future I think and I hope that many Chinese scholars and concerned people will take part. Tashi Delek.His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Very good. If it is convenient for you, I am always available and fully prepared to interact using modern technology and clear the doubts of Chinese friends. I always say, “Han zang da tuan jie” (Friendly relations between Chinese and Tibetans).If we get the opportunity of frequently holding similar meetings and interactions, it will help build genuine trust and understanding amongst us. We will not be able to build trust by standing far apart. The clearer we discuss our issues the more trust we will gain in each other. If there is trust then there will be cordial relations and with cordial relations, even if there is a problem, we can solve it.
Can you see my face clearly? Can see my grey eyebrows? See you later.
Tashi Delek. Thank You.

25-yr-old first Tibetan to be Indian citizen
Anand Bodh, TNN, Jan 20, 2011, 01.32am IST
CHANDIGARH: Thousands of Tibetans born in India between 1950 and 1986 may have a reason to cheer. They can now become Indian citizens under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 1986. These Tibetans have 25-year-old Namgyal Dolkar to thank, who although born in India was declined citizenship and termed ‘stateless’.
Dolkar became the first Tibetan to get Indian citizenship after Delhi High Court ruled in her favour last month. ”I am a Tibetan at heart, but now I am an Indian citizen. I believe one should be aware of one’s rights, and I got my rights due to my awareness,” she told TOI.
Dolkar is no ordinary Tibetan. She is the oldest of four siblings who claim descent from Tibet’s 33rd King Songtsen Gampo, ruler of Tibet in the 7th century. In June 2004, during a coronation ceremony presided over by the Dalai Lama, her younger brother, Namgyal Wangchuk Trichen Lhagyari, was ordained descendent of the first dharma King Songtsen Gampo.
Dolkar said she hoped her case would help others Tibetans struggling for an identity in India. ”For one year, Dolkar’s queries went unheard. We sent a legal notice, but after it failed to get a response, we approached the Delhi High Court,” said Roxna S Swamy, Dolkar’s lawyer.
”I found that Tibetans, who are eligible for citizenship as per the amended 1986 Citizenship Act, were not aware of it,” she said. ”According to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 1986, any person born in India on or after January 26, 1950, but prior to the commencement of the 1986 Act on July 1, 1987, is citizen of India by birth.”
Born in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, on April 13, 1986, and brought up in Dehradun, Dolkar never thought her quest for national identity would lead to a legal battle that would turn out to be a milestone for her exiled community.
The battle began after she applied for an Indian passport in March 2008 in Delhi. The passport office rejected her application, saying her parents were Tibetans. In response to her application, the passport office wrote back on September 1, 2009 that the ministry of external affairs had decided that she could not get a passport and be treated as an Indian.
Dolkar then approached the high court. Justice S Muralidhar on December 22, ruled Dolkar was entitled to citizenship. The court had also ordered MEA to pay her a compensation of Rs 5,000, and give her a passport within two months.

A new era for Tibet’s rivers
? 11-1-17 ?? ChinaDialogue Latest Articles ???Jiang Yannan, He Haining
Construction of a massive dam on the Yarlung Zangbo marks a turning point for Tibet, write He Haining and Jiang Yannan. A development boom is coming.
The rushing waters of the Yarlung Zangbo, the last of China’s great rivers to remain undammed, will soon be history. On November 12 last year, the builders of the Zangmu Hydropower Station announced the successful damming of the river – the first public announcement on a matter that, until now, has been kept under wraps.The Zangmu hydroelectric power station is being built on the middle reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo (known as the Brahmaputra when it reaches India) between the counties of Sangri andGyaca. Around 7.9 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) is being invested in the project, located in a V-shaped valley 3,200 metres above sea level. At 510 megawatts, the plant is much smaller than China’s 18,000-megawatt Three Gorges Dam, but still equivalent to the entire existing hydropower-generating capacity of Tibet.The construction workers have now reached the centre of the river. The water is being diverted into sluiceways and rows of grouting machines and stone crushers are working at full pace, while trucks come and go. One worker said that the winter here is mild, so there’ll be no need to stop work. Geologist Yang Yong said the activity represents the start of a new age: “Hydropower development on the Yarlung has begun, marking the start of a hydropower era for Tibet’s rivers.”A series of hydropower stations is proposed for the Yarlung Zangbo. If they are all built, Zangmu will be the fourth in a row of five on the Sangri to Gyaca stretch of the river, between the Gyaca and Jiexu plants. There has been no official confirmation that the construction of these will go ahead. But Yan Zhiyong, general manager of China Hydropower Engineering Consulting, said in a recent media interview: “By about 2020 most of China’s hydropower projects outside of Tibet will have been completed, and the industry’s focus will shift to the Jinsha, Lancang, the upper reaches of the Nu River and the Yarlung.”Several well-known Chinese hydropower firms have already made their way into Tibet. The backer of the Zangmu project, the Tibet Generating Company, has already built a residential area on the open spaces alongside the river at Zangmu and a flourishing town is taking shape, with a supermarket better-stocked than those in the county’s main town. The boss, from Zhejiang, moved here from the Xiaowan dam in Yunnan, south-west China, two months ago and is positive about the future: “There’ll be loads of workers next year, business will be great.”The Zangmu dam is located in the southern Tibetan county of Gyaca, which has a population of around 17,000. “The economy here is going to be among the fastest-growing in Tibet,” said businessman Li Hua, who has already invested in a three-star hotel here – a five-storey building that is now the tallest in the area.Work on a highway to the administrative centre of Lhoka prefecture is to start in 2011, cutting travel time in half. “Hydropower development will very quickly spur mining, and there’ll also be very rapid growth in road and railways. The Tibetan hinterland will see a new development boom,” predicted Yang Yong. Guan Zhihua is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research. In 1972 the academy established a survey team to study the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, and Guan – now in his seventies – was the head of the group charged with calculating the hydropower potential of the Yarlung Zangbo, China’s highest river. As if describing a family heirloom, he said: “The river flows for 2,057 kilometres within China’s borders, and its hydropower potential is second only to the Yangtze. It has more power-generating potential per unit of length than any other river in China.”
Guan’s was the first comprehensive and systematic study of the plateau – a four year field project carried out by more than 400 people across 50 different disciplines. But the study of the Yarlung Zangbo and its tributaries was only a part of the survey, and at the time nobody had any idea of the extent of the river’s potential. The entire basin was found to have hydropower potential of 114 gigawatts – 79 of which was on the main river. And this potential was highly concentrated, with the possibility of a 38-gigawatt hydropower facility at the Great Bend in Medog county, equal in power to the Three Gorges Dam.In 1980, a nationwide survey of hydropower resources was carried out and 12 possible dam locations identified on the Yarlung Zangbo. “This would have been the first hydropower plan for the Yarlung,” recalled Guan. In the 1980s, Tibet twice planned to dam the Yarlung Zangbo, but in neither case did the project get off the groundZhang Jinling, a 76-year old retiree from the Tibet Surveying Institute, recalled the first bid to build a dam here: “In the 1980s, Shigatse [a city in southern Tibet] wanted to build a hydropower station at Jiangdang and that would have been the first attempt to dam the river.” But there were concerns: this part of the river carries a lot of silt and the project would have required swaths of land to be inundated and many people to be relocated – and the dam would only generate 50 megawatts of power. The plan was submitted to Beijing, but was not approved.
On another occasion, plans were drawn up to dam the river outside Lhasa. Zhang’s team carried out preliminary surveys, drilling rock samples out of the mountainsides to acquire geological data. But a large reshuffle of officials in both 1981 and 1982 saw the team lose two-thirds of its manpower. Plans were shelved.Those plans were spurred by a shortage of electricity in Tibet. Zhang recalled that the Tibetan government was seeking a quick way of providing power by any means – diesel-fired and geothermal power generation were also used.During the 1980s, Lhasa, with 120,000 residents, only had 20 or 30 megawatts of power-generating capacity, mostly provided by several hydropower stations each providing a few megawatts. In winter there was no choice but to rotate power supplies to different areas of the city, with those cut off using kerosene for heating.When Zhang retired in 1995, the electricity grid in eastern Tibet was just beginning to take shape, but it has remained isolated from the national grid. A connection between Tibet and Qinghai is due to be completed in 2012, which will relieve the electricity shortages Tibet suffers in winter and spring.”It wouldn’t have been possible to build a large dam on the Yarlung before the Qinghai-Tibet railway was completed – you need a rail line to move the building materials,” said He Xiwu, who was head of the survey team’s water-resources group at the time.In 1994, work started on the Three Gorges Dam, but plans for the Yarlung Zangbo were kept quiet. The low-key approach was unusual given the river’s huge potential. Even recently, a water-resources official with the Tibetan government stressed that developing hydropower in Tibet was mostly about self-sufficiency.
Since the early 1990s, Tibet has built a series of medium-sized hydropower stations, of about 10 megawatts each, such as the pumped-storage hydropower station at Yamdrok Lake and the dam at Zhikong. These are intended to relieve electricity shortages in the Lhasa area. Although government work reports mention it every year, hydropower development on the Yarlung Zangbo was never made a priority. But in the final years of the 11th Five Year Plan, things changed. “The current proposal is an appropriate degree of industrialisation, with a process of capacity building, then focusing on priorities, and then overall development,” said He Gang,research fellow at the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Economic Strategy. “The priorities most often proposed are mining and hydropower.”Behind the scenes, preparations for hydropower development on the Yarlung Zangbo have been constant. In a recent media interview, Zhi Xiaoqian, head of the Chengdu Surveying Institute, said that plans had been drawn up for all of Tibet’s major rivers, including the middle reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo. But a lack of clear policy direction has meant approval for those plans has been slow and the projects have not commenced. “Now the time and conditions are ripe. China’s energy supply is becoming ever more pressured, and there’s an urgent need to develop the rich hydropower resources of Tibet,” Zhi said.Currently less than 0.6% of Tibet’s hydropower resources have been developed. In comparison with the rest of China, this is virgin territory.The Zangmu Hydropower Station is only the start. The huge potential of the Yarlung Zangbo is concentrated at the Great Bend in Medog county, where two or more dams the size of the Three Gorges could be built. This is also the most spectacular section of the river, where it falls steeply as it makes a u-turn, and is regarded as one of the world’s most striking river sections.
As early as 1998, Chen Chuanyou of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences published an article in Guangming Daily entitled “Could the world’s biggest hydropower station be built in Tibet?” He proposed building a reservoir on the middle reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo to raise the water level, and then drilling a 16-kilometre tunnel to carry the water to its tributary, the Duoxiong – a drop of 2,300 metres that would allow for three hydropower stations. For the sake of safety and the environment, they could be built underground, he said.In 2002, Chen published another paper in Engineering Sciences, looking at the positive impact that a hydropower station at the Great Bend would have on electricity generation in south-east Asia, and pointing out that, if there were financial issues, funds could be raised both domestically and abroad, and that electricity could be exported to south-east Asia.He Xiwu said: “I’ve heard there is still no plan for the Great Bend. The state should spend a bit every year on long-term research. There’s 38-gigawatts of potential there, but the geology is complicated and construction would be difficult. It has to be done carefully.””Hydropower development in Tibet has come late, but it is on the agenda now,” said Fan Xiao, chief engineer for the regional geological survey team at the Sichuan Bureau of Geological Exploration. What worries Fan, however, is this: “Tibet’s ecology is extremely vulnerable, and would be very hard to restore if damaged. This kind of full-river development can’t just see the Yarlung Zangbo as a hydropower resource – everything needs to be taken into consideration.”
This article was first published by Southern Weekend.He Haining is a reporter and Jiang Yannan an intern at Southern Weekend. Feng Jie, also a reporter, contributed to this article.

Nepal’s king traded Tibetan refugees for US support
WikiLeaks
Economic Times: Jan 15, 2011
KATHMANDU: After ordering the closure of the Dalai Lama’s envoy’s office in Kathmandu and taking over absolute power with a military-backed bloodless coup in 2005, Nepal’s King Gyanendra dangled Tibetan refugees as bait before the US in a bid to get American support, whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks said in its latest revelation.
Ramesh Nath Pandey, the man appointed foreign minister by the king, met the then American ambassador to Nepal, James Moriarty, saying the royal regime wanted a long-term relationship with the US and would respond better to “engagement” rather than pressure.
The American ambassador emphasised that the Congress was considerably concerned about the Tibetan refugees escaping to Nepal from China-held Tibet and urged the royal minister to ensure the refugees’ transit was proceeded without hindrance.
At time, there were about 1,000 Tibetan refugees at the Tibetan Refugee Reception Center, that facilitates the forward journey of the refugees to India and other countries, and the envoy said Nepal needed to make sure that the process of transiting refugees to India resumed.
The US had earlier proposed it would resettle the Tibetan refugees in Nepal in American cities but the proposal remains stuck officially after Nepal declined, due to Chinese pressure.
The ambassador also pushed for an NGO, the Tibetan Welfare Society , to be given registration. The society, believed to be a new form for the office of the Dalai Lama’s representative in Nepal, was shut down in January 2005. The leaked cables said the Nepal minister’s response was ambiguous.
He first said Nepal needed to have a close relationship with the US and then indicated that given the Chinese support, Nepal might not act on the issues raised by the ambassador unless Washington changed its Nepal policy.
The king’s messenger reportedly said Nepal’s long-term interest was in a relationship with the US, not China or India. He also claimed that though India and the US had stopped providing military assistance to Nepal after the coup, “Nepal would not be short of arms” and that “a plane of material from one of your best friends” would arrive.
The American ambassador advised the king, who was waging a war on the Maoists with little result, to declare a cease-fire with international monitoring and to reconcile with the political parties.
The royal minister countered that saying the party leaders were a major problem and the king should bypass them and ally with middle-tier leaders. He also said the Maoists would exploit the parties against the king and dump them when they had their way. The ambassador noted that Pandey’s proposal meant “essentially… decapitating the parties and was
unacceptable”.
The ambassador also emphasised that Tibetan refugee issues were one of the administration’s and Congress’s key concerns regarding Nepal, and if there were no progress, Nepal could put at risk other parts of the relationship, including development assistance.
The new revelation comes even as the controversial memoir of a former military secretary to the palace claimed China wanted Nepal to deploy its army to prevent Tibetan refugees from escaping and proposed the army should be strengthened for that.

Nepal’s king traded Tibetan refugees for US support
WikiLeaks
Economic Times: Jan 15, 2011
KATHMANDU: After ordering the closure of the Dalai Lama’s envoy’s office in Kathmandu and taking over absolute power with a military-backed bloodless coup in 2005, Nepal’s King Gyanendra dangled Tibetan refugees as bait before the US in a bid to get American support, whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks said in its latest revelation.
Ramesh Nath Pandey, the man appointed foreign minister by the king, met the then American ambassador to Nepal, James Moriarty, saying the royal regime wanted a long-term relationship with the US and would respond better to “engagement” rather than pressure.
The American ambassador emphasised that the Congress was considerably concerned about the Tibetan refugees escaping to Nepal from China-held Tibet and urged the royal minister to ensure the refugees’ transit was proceeded without hindrance.
At time, there were about 1,000 Tibetan refugees at the Tibetan Refugee Reception Center, that facilitates the forward journey of the refugees to India and other countries, and the envoy said Nepal needed to make sure that the process of transiting refugees to India resumed.
The US had earlier proposed it would resettle the Tibetan refugees in Nepal in American cities but the proposal remains stuck officially after Nepal declined, due to Chinese pressure.
The ambassador also pushed for an NGO, the Tibetan Welfare Society , to be given registration. The society, believed to be a new form for the office of the Dalai Lama’s representative in Nepal, was shut down in January 2005. The leaked cables said the Nepal minister’s response was ambiguous.
He first said Nepal needed to have a close relationship with the US and then indicated that given the Chinese support, Nepal might not act on the issues raised by the ambassador unless Washington changed its Nepal policy.
The king’s messenger reportedly said Nepal’s long-term interest was in a relationship with the US, not China or India. He also claimed that though India and the US had stopped providing military assistance to Nepal after the coup, “Nepal would not be short of arms” and that “a plane of material from one of your best friends” would arrive.
The American ambassador advised the king, who was waging a war on the Maoists with little result, to declare a cease-fire with international monitoring and to reconcile with the political parties.
The royal minister countered that saying the party leaders were a major problem and the king should bypass them and ally with middle-tier leaders. He also said the Maoists would exploit the parties against the king and dump them when they had their way. The ambassador noted that Pandey’s proposal meant “essentially… decapitating the parties and was
unacceptable”.
The ambassador also emphasised that Tibetan refugee issues were one of the administration’s and Congress’s key concerns regarding Nepal, and if there were no progress, Nepal could put at risk other parts of the relationship, including development assistance.
The new revelation comes even as the controversial memoir of a former military secretary to the palace claimed China wanted Nepal to deploy its army to prevent Tibetan refugees from escaping and proposed the army should be strengthened for that.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama Urged Not to Retire from Leader of Tibet
Wednesday, 05 January 2011 20:53 YC. Dhardhowa, The Tibet Post International
Dharamsala: Tibetan parliament in exile here Dharamshala Wednesday urged the Tibet’s spiritual and political leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama not to consider retirement or even semi-retirement from his position as the leader of Tibet and the Tibetan people. “Tibetans, both in Tibet and in exile, have been greatly concerned about your intention to retire
completely from governmental roles,” a memorandum submitted to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama said.
The following is a memorandum issued on Wednesday by the members of the Standing Committee of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. “During the conclusion ceremony of the First Tibetan National General Meeting held in 2010 at the Bylakuppe Tibetan settlements, South India; in your response to questions asked during a meeting with the Chinese public in Toronto; at the founding anniversary of the Tibetan Children’s Village at Upper Dharamshala; and in your answer to questions asked at a press conference in New Delhi, Your Holiness expressed an intention to retire completely from governmental roles. Tibetans both in Tibet and in exile have been greatly concerned and grieved by this and have been continuing to petition Your Holiness, beseeching that you never entertain any thought about carrying out a plan for such a decision. We, the members of the Standing Committee of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, too have, likewise, been holding successive meetings with extremely grave concern over Your Holiness’s wish to take complete retirement from governmental roles.
Out of a feeling of great kindness for us, Your Holiness led the Tibetan people to the fine path of democracy, beginning with the introduction of reforms in the functioning of the Tibetan government the moment you assumed spiritual and temporal powers in Tibet. And as soon as you stepped foot on Indian soil after escaping into exile, Your Holiness introduced election to allow the Tibetan people to vote for their own representatives, and in 1963, Your Holiness also promulgated a Tibetan constitution. In 1991, Your Holiness approved to us the Charter of the Tibetans in Exile, under which you expanded the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile and made it into a lawmaking body which was in full conformity with the definition of a modern national legislature. In particular, Your Holiness, in 2001, introduced the system of direct election of the Kalon Tripa, thereby ensuring that the Tibetan people themselves vote for the head of their government.
To state it simply, no amount of offerings of precious materials can make up for even a fraction of the gratitude the Tibetan people owe for what they have received solely as a result of Your Holiness’s enormously great wishes and deeds. Besides, it does not bear mention that Your Holiness’s successive speeches of the recent times were, no doubt, motivated by your very kind desire to ensure the well being of the entire Tibetan people both for the present and in the longer term future. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that all of us of the Snowland of Tibet have been sustained thus far by Your Holiness’s kindness and generosity. On the basis of the Buddha’s sacred prediction, Your Holiness has been firm in abiding by the oath you had been moved to take over your chosen realm of religious teaching or temporal rule especially in these apposite times for fulfilling it.
Thus, it is inconceivable that for as long as this aeon endures, there can ever be a moment at which the people of Tibet can at all be separated from your excellent religious and temporal leadership. The very first point in each of the reports and resolutions adopted in a series of recent relevant meetings have made this point clear. They included the report adopted at the end of the First Special General Meeting of Tibetans held in 2008 in accordance with the provisions of Article 59 of the Charter of the Tibetans in Exile; during successive sessions of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile; and, in particular, Document Number of 63 of 2010, which was a unanimous resolution adopted during the ninth session of the fourteenth Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile.
Also, at the conclusion of the First Tibetan National General Meeting, which was held at the Tibetan settlements at Bylakuppe, in south India, a report was compiled which brought together the opinions and suggestions of all the delegates who attended it. The very first point of the political section of the report stated: “His Holiness the Dalai Lama has thus far assumed responsibility as the leader of the great Tibetan nation and as the head of the Tibetan government. On behalf of the Tibetan people both in Tibet and in exile, we offer immense gratitude to His Holiness. At the same time, His Holiness the Dalai Lama remarked in his speech that he was already in semi-retirement. This has plunged the entire people of Tibet, both those in the county and outside it, to such depth of despair that they are no longer able to digest their food or to go to sleep in peace. In view of this development, this general meeting appeals to His Holiness the Dalai Lama never to carry out any plan for such a decision.” This was unanimously adopted by the entire meeting.
Giving due consideration to the above series of pleas, we beseech and pray with heartfelt devotion that Your Holiness never ever contemplate going into either semi-retirement or full retirement.”

“How I Met His Holiness the Dalai Lama Without a Passport”
By Woeser
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2011
http://www.highpeakspureearth.com/2011/01/how-i-met-his-holiness-dalai-lama.html
High Peaks Pure Earth has translated a blogpost by Woeser that was originally written for broadcast on Radio Free Asia on January 5, 2011 and posted on her blog on January 10, 2011.
As reported on the Dalai Lama’s official website, the Dalai Lama participated in a video conference with Chinese human rights lawyers Jiang Tianyong and Teng Biao on January 4, 2011. Organised by Woeser’s husband Wang Lixiong, this video conference followed on from a series of Twitter conversations between the Dalai Lama and Chinese netizens that Wang Lixiong organised in 2010.
High Peaks Pure Earth has used the translation by Ragged Banner of Woeser’s poem “On the Road” that appeared in the volume “Tibet’s True Heart” and that she quotes in her article below, it is a poem that she wrote in Lhasa in May 1995. Follow this link to read the whole poem: http://raggedbanner.com/pOTR.html
It all started with a video conversation in cyberspace. On January 4, 2011, His Holiness was in Dharamsala engaging in a video conversation with the two human rights lawyers, Teng Biao and Jiang Tianyong, as well as the author Wang Lixiong. And I, I was standing behind Wang Lixiong, attentively listening to every word. When the Dalai Lama appeared on screen, I could hardly believe it, tears started streaming down my face.
“How I Met His Holiness the Dalai Lama Without a Passport”By Woeser??
Seven years ago, in my essay collection “Notes on Tibet”, I wrote this about a group photo showing a father with his son quietly making their way from Lhasa to Dharamsala: “he who conveys an air of humility and modesty on both sides but embraces the centre, is the most illustrious of all devout Tibetan people, the most affectionate, eager person – the Dalai Lama.” Because of this sentence and because of a few articles that touch on the truth, the local authorities labelled my work as “containing severe political errors”, “praising the 14th Dalai Lama and 17th Karmapa, and promoting serious political and religious opinions are wrong. Some essays already to some extent contain political errors.” After this, I was removed from my public position, this is when I left Lhasa.
Even earlier than that, already 16 years ago, I composed a poem implicitly conveying: “On the road, I clutch a flower not of this world, Hurrying before it dies, searching in all directions, That I may present it to an old man in a deep red robe. A wish fulfilling jewel, A wisp of a smile: These bind the generations tight.” Later on, I turned this poem into lyrics, openly saying that “old man in a deep red robe”, “is our Yeshe Norbu, our Kundun, our Gongsachog, our Gyalwa Rinpoche …” all of which are Tibetan terms of respect for the Dalai Lama.
Just like so many Tibetans, hoping to be able to see His Holiness, to respectfully listen to his teachings, to be granted an audience, this has also been my innermost wish; from a very young age, I have always longed for this moment to come true. But, I cannot get a passport, just like many other Tibetans, it is almost unthinkable that this regime that controls us will ever grant us a passport, which should, in actual fact, be a fundamental right that every citizen enjoys. Last year, Lhasa gave out passports to anyone above 60 years of age, albeit only for the period of one week. As a result the office in charge of passports was full of the grey-haired, limping elderly; and it was clear that they were all heading for the foothills of the Himalayas to visit relatives, pay homage to the holy land of Buddhism, as well as to fulfil that dream that no one speaks of but everyone knows. I am sorrowfully thinking that I may have to wait until I am 60 years old until I get hold of a passport.
However, the internet gave my passport-less self a pass to travel; in the New Year, it helped me to make my dream come true – through the internet I met, as if in a dream but still very vivid and real, His Holiness the Dalai Lama!
It all started with a video conversation in cyberspace. On January 4, 2011, His Holiness was in Dharamsala engaging in a video conversation with the two human rights lawyers, Teng Biao and Jiang Tianyong as well as the writer Wang Lixiong. And I, I was standing behind Wang Lixiong, attentively listening to every word that was spoken. When the Dalai Lama appeared on screen, I could hardly believe it, tears started streaming down my face. This miracle facilitated by the technological revolution, making it possible to overcome geographical distances and man-made barriers and building a bridge that enables the Dalai Lama to speak with Chinese intellectuals, is unquestionably of tremendous magnitude. I heard His Holiness saying to the three Han Chinese intellectuals: “it’s just as if we were together, we only can’t smell each other’s breath”. At the end of the 70-minute long conversation, His Holiness asked in a concerned voice: “Can you see me clearly?” When all three of them said that they could, he light-heartedly pointed at his eyebrows and laughed: “so, did you also see my grey eyebrows?”
I cried and I cried. When I, as Tibetans do, prostrated three times, silently reciting some prayers, holding a khata in my hands and kneeling in front of the computer with tear-dimmed eyes, I saw His Holiness reaching out both of his hands as if he was going to take the Khata, as if he was going to give me his blessings. I am unable to describe with words how I felt…I am really such a fortunate person; in Tibet, many people get into trouble simply for owning a photo of the Dalai Lama.
In fact, today, many people from all over China have met with His Holiness and they have not at all lost their freedom, since we are all citizens of this country, Tibetans should also not be punished for having an audience with His Holiness.
Facing the image of me on the screen, the Dalai Lama instructed me in an earnest and tireless way: “Do not give up, keep going, it is of the utmost importance that Han Chinese intellectuals and we Tibetans always tell each other about the real situation, that we communicate with and understand each other; you have to internalise this. Over the past 60 years, the courage and faith of those of us Tibetans living in Tibet has been as strong as a rock. The international community is paying close attention to the real situation in Tibet, people from all over the world see that there is a truth in Tibet, Chinese intellectuals are increasingly aware of this, looking at it from a broad perspective, big and powerful China is in the process of transforming. Hence, you must remain confident and work even harder, do you understand?”
By then, I had already calmed down and kept the words spoken by His Holiness in my heart.
Beijing, January 5, 2011