The organization behind the project is called the Asia Pacific Exchange and Cooperation Foundation (APECF), a quasi-governmental non-governmental organisation. Its executive vice president, Xiao Wunan, is a member of the Communist Party and holds a position at the National Development and Reform Commission, a state agency.

The Walt Disney Corp. tried to do the same sort of thing with Disney’s America, an American history theme park planned for Loudoun County, VA in the early 1990s with the help of outgoing Virginia governor Doug Wilder, though citizen groups’ resistance was enough to save Sally Hemmings from total obscurity.

But this proposed Lumbini project may actually be a blessing for Tibetan Buddhism, legitimizing them as the only non-sellouts to the Chinese ‘religious machine’ and their who’s in/who’s out classifications. Will other international Buddhist leaders have the stomach for the Chinese determining who is and who is not a Buddhist? We’ll see, but money has always been the catalyst for powerful, selective ignorance. And in the dueling Buddhist circles – “my lineage is truer than yours” – sidelining the Tibetans may be seen by some as the fortuitous thing to do. Right thinking is not as easy to attain as one might think, even in the sphere of the venerables.

According to Chan, “Some 500,000 visitors already make the pilgrimage to Lumbini every year. This could balloon to millions of visitors each year when the project is complete.” So, the question that needs to be asked is if the Chinese secure this project and “as Chinese construction companies line up for a portion of the $3bn pie,” how many of the current pilgrims would be able to afford a trip to the Buddha’s birthplace? If ticket prices in China for once affordable tourist sites are any indication, it will not be the low-income faithful who will be able to cough up the admittance fees. Chinese economics and Buddhist economics are cloths cut from entirely different bolts.

But the Dharamsala boys have always been much better at international spin than the Chinese. After all, they have a lot more practice at it than the Chinese. While China was frenetically feeding on itself throughout the entire Mao era, the monks were out and about weaving a tale of the peaceful warriors and spreading it throughout the financially comfortable West. You can bet they’re doing their best now to get out in front of this Lumbini affair, too, though Nepal, a regional lapdog of China  - and a key stepping stone for Tibetans escaping to Dharamsala – will do what they are told to do by their northern neighbor. Look for Gere and the Gang to go into smiling overdrive. Perhaps someday they’ll also turn their attention to the deeply imbedded misogyny that still rules the Tibetan world and keeps the monkish set anchored in the dark ages. Until the Tibetans can begin to see that their women are their most valuable asset (many Tibetan men still firmly believe that women are women because of past life karmic indiscretions, a primitive view at best), they will muddle about and continue to lose ground to the more powerful and moneyed Chinese. But Lumbini? I have a feeling that they’ll be onto that. It may very well be another case of Chinese overreach. After all, it’s about time for another Chinese Olympic Torch equivalency. Let’s hope the international Buddhist community is up to it.

________

Update, July 29th, 2011

Ths from the China Digital Times announcing the rejection of the Lumbini project by the Nepalese gorbernment:

Less than a fortnight after a Chinese nongovernmental organisation announced its plan for what amounted to a virtual takeover of Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha in Nepal, Nepal’s government on Thursday unceremoniously rejected it, saying it would not entertain any deal struck in a third country without the participation of the actual stakeholders.

“Nepal is the actual stakeholder,” said Modraj Dottel, spokesperson of Nepal’s culture ministry that governs Lumbini, the town in southern Nepal that is the destination of thousands of pilgrims and Buddhist scholars worldwide, and a Unesco-declared World Heritage Site. “How can we own a deal struck in a third country without the formal consent of the actual stakeholder?” […]

Since the announcement of the MoU, the Foundation has been under media glare in Nepal, which has been less than flattering. The Nepali media has specially highlighted the fact that the Foundation’s members include Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda and his bete noir, ousted crown prince Paras Bir Bikram Shah.

Needless to say, the Dalai Lama, who was in Hong Kong at the time, did not fly or teleport in to Kumbum, and after a day and a long tense night of faithful/police standoff, the Tibetans returned back to where they’d come from.

Though I have no insider’s special info on the chain of events that led to what could very easily have been troublesome confrontation, I can’t help but wonder where the SMS text originated. That the messages were allowed to spread via China Mobile without being choked off has always been a question I’ve had, from the moment I first heard of the incident. (I happened to be in Qinghai at the time.) A monk with a vision? Perhaps, though I always thought that it would have made more sense for the originating message to have come from a more materialistic secular official source: what a good way to get potential troublemakers to congregate at a single point where they could be observed. China has a long history of cleverly dealing with the border peoples, and despite the official harangue that “We are all Chinese,” the game on the ground is, has been and will continue to be one of profound separation. Were the Tibetans played in July 2006? I have no idea, though I do have some not-too-far-fetched guesses. If you read Sunzi you can probably find a few dozen strategic one-liners that could be jacked into shape to support this particular kind of deceptive tactic.

Which brings me to the last two Sundays here in Beijing, unimaginatively dubbed the Jasmine Revolution, though a revolution that reeks of official Chinese characteristics. There is so much wrong with how this thing has gone down that it feels like a telegraphed sucker punch. In Beijing the starting point of the supposed demonstration was a McDonalds restaurant, with the requisite KFC close by, on a tourist walking mall (Wangfujing) – a public space that I suppose already has a much higher concentration of security and cctv cameras than most public spaces with the exception of Tian’anmen Square. The flaming seed of the revolution was a posting on Boxun, a U.S. based website. The call for a Jasmine Revolution immediately set off a series of security measures to pinch off the blossoming uprising: words blocked on Chinese microblogs; known activists detained; Boxun cyber-attacked, security people out in force in the heart of the tourist zone, and even a guest appearance by the leather-jacketed U.S. ambassador Jon Huntsman who may be running for the U.S. presidency (or Orrin Hatch’s Senate seat) in 2012 and may have been grooming a future political ad. That was the First JasRev Sunday.

The Second JasRev Sunday saw the area in front of the McDonalds turned into a construction zone and international reporters warned to stay away. How’s that for an invitation? By all reports, it seems that the overwhelming majority of people who showed up were battalions of security personnel, international reporters and fast food workers who were kept busy supplying the security people with seats and reporters with things that look like food.

This whole things appears very much like an official drill: let’s get this thing going, have plenty of personnel in place to handle anything that can happen, then let’s see who shows up, including those we told not to show up. Even the name of the event was a co-option, a classic IP steal. Manipulation is their game, being creative with naming is not. What a great excuse to round up a few more dissidents, have a few more trials, send a few more off to jail, and have something else to hold over the heads of foreign journalists.

Will disobeying the Public Security Bureau’s warnings to steer clear of Wangfujing threaten international reporters’ futures in China? Who knows? Though it is China where anything can and might be used against any and all who are within the borders. Adam Minter, Shanghai Scrap, and @AdamMinter tweeted what I consider to be the best take on this farce: “No offense, but the behavior of some foreign correspondents in Beijing reminds me of nothing so much as Timothy Treadwell in Alaska.” (For more on Treadwell see Grizzly Man.)

Were the international media played? I have no idea, though I do have some not-too-far-fetched guesses. And if you’re into Sunzi, play a round of “The Art of War Roulette,” where you pick any page, find a line that fits this present fiasco, then ponder. You can even hum Ommm as you reflect.

Global Times particularly focuses on expressing Chinese people’s real feelings, sharing their opinions and standpoints on significant international issues and promoting their understanding of the global views on China.

When I see “Chinese people” and “real feelings” in the same sentence, there’s no question where this one is heading. When I see it on an About Us page I have no question where it’s coming from. Other than to say that I’ve heard the term “nationalistic rag” used on more than a few occasions when the GT is mentioned, I will leave it at that. Well …, almost. The English language edition has been Onion-ed in the past, my personal favorite being Alessandro is a man. He lives in Beijing now.*

Women who have enjoyed Alessandro are 24 percent more profoundly aware that light years are a measure of distance rather than time when compared to their less attractive counterparts, according to a recent study by the Space Probe Italy Center. Alessandro has loved many women, very much.

Alessandro goes on to answer the age-old question: “If unused for a long time, can vaginas really grow closed?” Suffice it to say that his answer was hilarious. I apologize for not being able to provide the link, but it was taken down after it made the Twitter/Facebook rounds, which, no doubt, boosted its page stats through the roof, though it probably earned the clueless editor some long weekend classes.

Last week a woman named Sirkka Korpela, a Finn and “former United Nations Ambassador to Bolivia,” wrote a piece for the GT entitled “My visit to Tibet” (h/t to Charlie Custer @ China Geeks, via Twitter). It is hard to know where to start with this one, so it is probably a good idea not to get started at all. Here’s a sample:

I had a chance to talk to some educators in Tibet. I asked them about the language used in primary education, weary of the alleged loss of the Tibetan language in the formal education system. I was told the kids learn three languages: Tibetan, Chinese and English! I had thought my own children were something of a special case, as they have been learning French, Spanish and Finnish since they started schooling, but I realize these Tibetan kids will be as internationally literate as my children are, with all the same opportunities that will provide them in life.

Believe me, it gets better. I have no further comment on this other than to say that Ms. Korpela has worked for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), as well as working in the private sector advising “large multinational companies, such as Royal Dutch/Shell and Newmont Mining, on political and socio-economic development and corporate social responsibility issues.” In 2005 she was an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs teaching Corporate Social Responsibility. A search of the current faculty and staff doesn’t include Ms. Korpela. I imagine over the last week they’ve been breathing a sigh of relief.

________

*Update
The GT column was known as Ask Alessandro. As mentioned below in a comment by Choudoufu, Richard at The Peking Duck posted the full piece under the post Ask Alessandro? Another good link to read concerning Alessandro is The impending death of Ask Alessandro at the Heart of Beijing blog. Both of the aforementioned blogs are blocked within the PRC.

Prof. Jan T. Andersson has translated a part of an interview with Wang Mengshu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a senior consultant on China’s domestic high-speed railways, in the German language new(s) magazine Der Spiegel, issue no. 12, 2010. The translation is posted here with Prof. Andersson’s permission. In this interview, Wang Mengshu discusses Beijing’s geostrategic railroad projects … .

Wang’s vision of the future includes a railway tunnel to Taiwan, and a qualified plan that anticipates an internal migration into western China of “200 or 300 million people.”

Spiegel: You invest in railroads also in China. Are you going to pay more attention to the western parts of China?

Wang: In 2009 China invested more than 60 billion euros in the train infrastructure. Our network grows by more than 2000 km every year. We expect to have 120 000 km of railroad tracks in China in 2015. If we expand the network into China’s Western regions and solve the water problem, then in the future 200 or 300 million people will be able to move there. The West will change China’s economy.

Solving the “water problem” is, of course, the kicker, which glosses over the miraculous nature of a “solution.” But, at least in Mr. Wang’s mind, the vision of the West as a place to resettle 15-20% of the population is pretty clear. If this is in fact the plan, why are Tibetans without reservation being forced from their native lands for “ecological” reasons officially stemming from the drying up of grasslands due to the lack of water? Perhaps the railroad folks need to speak with the resettlement folks. But then again, maybe they’re really all the same folks.

Related links:
Yushu Earthquake: Monks and Reconstruction
Policies for an eco-plateau
Restoring the Grasslands
Climigration
Nomadic people in Qinghai to settle within five years.

The odd thing is that no one officially knows why it happened and what it might possibly mean, since the Chinese are not saying. The Vancouver Sun ran the following story on February 6, 2009: University of Calgary becomes latest to receive cold shoulder

Without fanfare, the University of Calgary was dropped in December from the Chinese Ministry of Education’s list of recommended universities for Chinese students going abroad to study.

The operator said the hotline recommends Chinese students choose their university only from among those on the list.

The inquiry was obviously not the first of the day, either. When the operator was asked about University of Calgary, she could be heard saying to someone nearby: “It’s another phone call about the University of Calgary.”

Although no one will say officially that Beijing has blocked Chinese students from going to University of Calgary because the school awarded the Dalai Lama an honourary degree last fall, it seems plausible that is the reason.

Asked why Beijing blacklisted the university, a spokeswoman at the Chinese Consulate in Calgary told the Calgary Herald simply that the university “should know.” [my emphasis]

It may seem a petty move by the world’s nascent superpower, but delisting will be costly for the university. China currently has the largest pool of foreign students looking to study abroad and universities around the world are competing to attract them. Little wonder. The 178,000 foreign students in Canada spent $6.5 billion in 2008, according to Canadian government figures. That’s an average of more than $36,000 each for the 600 Chinese students at the University of Calgary this year.

This morning the Global Times, a Chinese state-sponsored English newspaper, is reporting that China allegedly blacklists Canadian university:

China’s Ministry of Education Monday refused to immediately comment on media reports of its decision to remove Canada’s University of Calgary from a list of accredited schools because the latter bestowed an honorary degree on the Dalai Lama last year.

When contacted by reporters, an official from the ministry refused to comment immediately, saying they have to study the case and may reply in three days.

Reporters checked the ministry’s website and confirmed that the University of Calgary, where more than 600 Chinese students are enrolled, is no longer on the list of recommended schools.

The Calgary Herald quoted Danna Hou, a spokeswoman with the Chinese Consulate General in Calgary, as saying that the removal was not a sudden decision and was related to an incident last year.

“They know the reason and they (knew of) the result before it happened,” she told the newspaper Thursday.

The Dalai Lama was granted an honorary doctorate of law degree in September by the University of Calgary, the report said.

While it all still remains inimitably unclear, (has China published and distributed a manual of what universities “should know” or is it something that’s mystically present in the vapor?) it seems obvious enough that China is testing the retaliatory waters by providing a financial disincentive for allowing the Dalai Lama to speak by applying the universal strategy of using students as weapons – an action plan usually employed by individuals, ad hoc and/or longer term special interest groups to squeeze an institution into behaving in ways beneficial to the threatening party, or, conversely, by an institution to help unruly individuals and/or groups to focus on the line that needs to be, at all costs, toed. China is not unique in the use of children as weapons; this sort of behavior can be found at any and all levels of education throughout the world, from the backroom day care center, right through public school board meetings and on up to the highest levels of tertiary school board rooms. It’s a game played by adults where children are treated as pawns, and as such, almost invariably become the victims.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), relentlessly waving a fading page torn from the Book of Brute, would like the entire world to join with them in fingering the Dalai Lama as “an enemy of the[ir] state,” which frankly, is not about to happen. (It’s about as likely to happen as China delivering Tibet to the Tibetans.) There’s that problematic Peace Prize that keeps getting in the way. Also, the Tibetan government-in-exile’s public relations (PR) campaign over the last half-century has successfully set the stage in their ethical favor. While the PRC was slogging through Blooming Flowers, Great Leaps, CulRevs, Gangs of Four and runaway tanks on the Square, the Tibetan PR machine was out in the world sowing seeds of the suffering high-altitude peaceful warriors bubbling over with compassion and bliss. (One seed they didn’t sow, still don’t and never will, is the deeply misogynistic one that keeps sprouting and clogging up the works. Tibetan leaders, both monastic and secular, need to understand that their greatest untapped resource is Tibetan women, and that until the women are empowered Tibetans will continue to unsuccessfully stumble about blinded by medieval levels of testosterone. Many Tibetan males believe that women are in ‘this life’ as women due to the ravages of bad karma, which somehow justifies treating them so poorly. You won’t find that one on the bullet-pointed list of His Holiness’ PR plusses. Though great steps have been made by Tibetan women, often with the support of non-Tibetans, there will never be a solution to the Chinese-Tibetan issue until there are women sitting on both sides of the table. But that is another issue for another time.)

But this is hardly just about the Dalai Lama, though the CCP would like you to think that it is. The Dalai Lama has become the convenient scapegoat for a particular shaping of foreign policy which still pitches China as the perennial victim, though now it is morphing into China, the abused, striking back. And what better way to choke perceived abusers in this time of economic hardship than to threaten them economically. The alleged sanctions against the University of Calgary is the trial balloon that just might have gotten loose a bit ahead of the pack, as someone’s idea of how to strike back, as a pre-retaliation to the one they’ve threatened to use against the U.S. if President Obama follows through with his planned meeting with the Dalai Lama.

The bigger and longer term issue here is speech, and how China, via the threat of loss of accreditation, is crossing borders and indirectly interfering in another country’s interpretation of freedom of speech, a freedom the Chinese claim in Article 35 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China:

Article 35. Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.

If they press this matter and actually do strip UC of accreditation, we can only hope that it will end up being another public relations disaster for China, since if they are successful they will attempt to use the same tactic to enforce their censure-driven foreign policy will. And the next time it won’t be because of the Dalai Lama. The focus of their future wrath and sanctions might be the appearance of a Chinese dissident, the screening of a film that casts a darker shadow on China’s self-projected image than they are comfortable with, or the simple expression of an opinion that the CCP doesn’t care for. There is much at stake in China’s current Canadian foot stomp. It would do everyone a great favor if the balloon just popped, and life with the basic freedoms set down in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which China has signed off on -  were to continue without odd authoritarian interferences. But don’t expect these sorts of head butts to stop. There is also a much bigger lesson here that is, unfortunately, one that is very rarely learned: choose your creditors wisely. A little late for that now.

And for all you students who want to come to China and unfurl the Free Whatever banners, don’t waste your time. You should be pushing for more visits by controversial speakers, more films, more exposure of censorship issues on campuses, especially campuses with large mainland Chinese enrollments. Engagement at home does much more good in the long run than heading to China chasing the adrenaline rush. Get over that. Trust me, sooner than later the Chinese won’t take it anymore, and someone’s going to get poked with a long jail sentence. It’s a new world out there. Here, too. Think smarter. Crossing borders isn’t what it used to be. Ask China. They’re doing it now in Canada, using students as weapons to hijack basic freedom of speech. It would be a different game if the rest of the world agreed with China’s assessment of the Dalai Lama. But the rest of the world doesn’t, and that’s what China needs to know.

A recent samplings of tweets include ass kicking, very cool and amazing. And it is all of the above, especially considering what it was before. A decade ago it took close to two hours, sometimes longer, and the exit scrums at both ends and the attempts to get taxis (or a subway tickets at the Beijing terminus) were battles that could go either way. For more than a year leading up to the Olympics the Tianjin end of the line got even worse, since the main train station, closed for renovation, meant that all trains were routed into a warehouse district in the eastern part of the city, a temporary situation that added several degrees of pain and inconvenience to the journey.

Though ingress and egress has been vastly improved at both ends, there are still no subway connections at either terminals and unless you want to deal with very crowded buses, a cab is still a must if you need to get away from the stations. At the Tianjin end of the line there is more to see with easier access if a leisurely stroll through the center of the hometown of mahua, goubuli baozi and Wen Jiabao is the point of your visit. Beijing South is quite a different deal, since it really is in the middle of nowhere. A subway line is coming, but I am not sure when. At one time Septembers 2009 was the target date, though a cab is still the only way I get away. I am sure there are buses, though I’m holding out for the subway.

The always informative and ever-exuberant David Feng (TechBlog 86) provided the following info for purchasing an express rail card for those who travel back and forth on a regular basis.

Head straight for the Tianjin Railway Station and ask station staff where to get the “kuai tong ka” (express rail card). Initial load is at CNY 1,000 for standard class (standard card; about 17 rides) and CNY 3,000 for first class (gold card), and the card’s good for two years. Be prepared to pay cash only in one lump sum.

Look for a blue/yellow arrow beneath a fare gate (often to the right in Tianjin, but at times left at Beijing South). Don’t insert your card on the fare gate, but instead, dip it over the bulls-eye icon. Your credit will be shown and doors will open.

Standard class gets car 6, seats 1-80 reserved; first class gets seats 1-10 reserved in the sole first class car. Within those seats you’re free to pick window or aisle. Show staff the express card when requested.

If upgrading from standard to first, be sure to pay the extra fare difference. Gold cardholders travelling standard do not get the fare difference credited. Cardholders do not have access to Deluxe Class, which are limited to eight per train and can only be bought at ticket counters and are only available for series CRH III trains.

So what does a trip between two sprawling east coast Chinese cities have to do with Tibet? It’s all about the ‘free’ water available to riders.

Tibet Spring water, part of the price of the Beijing-Tianjin bullet train ticket.

(To be continued)

The Chinese scholars who crowded around him afterward, snapping photos of themselves with the Dalai Lama, now know he is nothing like the figure depicted in Beijing’s propaganda.

Equating a post-event photo op with the negation of a half-century of official drubbing with the propaganda club is hardly a measure of scholarly enlightenment. Good that they are talking – and politely listening – but to make the great leap into knowing that “he is nothing like the figure depicted” in the Chinese finely machined version of history is, to say the least, premature and naive.

Also on May 5, 2009, a half-a-world and 12-hours  ahead of Harvard, a piece in the China Daily by Wang Linyan Dalai Lama visit may ‘affect ties’ focused on the upcoming visit of the Dalai Lama to France where “he could become an honorary citizen of Paris.” What is most obvious in this piece is the lack of shrill ‘splittist’ rhetoric that has punctuated official public dispatches regarding all issues “Dalai Lama.” Even the title heralds a softer approach by going subjunctive rather than imperial imperative. There is no mention at all of the scholars and the Dalai Lama’s Massachusetts getaway in today’s China Daily. I think we’ll have to wait for the private pictures to surface, which will, no doubt set off a nationalistic frenzy.

Whether this means that a positive step is in the offing is anyone’s guess, though it is hard to see this as anything more than a Ministry of Propaganda’s softer tactic, not to be confused with any sort of policy shift. This may be nothing more than a mopping up of the froth, which may only mean that they are listening to what everyone has been telling them: that their Cultural Revolution sloganeering sounds adolescently dangerous, at best, and extremely ignorant when used as the public expression of official policy.

What would herald any shift, for better or worse, would be the replacement of Zhang Qingli as secretary of the Party Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region. He walks his talk with a big beating stick. If that situation were to change for the better, then we can get all gushy over the possibility of substantive policy change. But nothing newworthy will happen until positive actions are taken from the Chinese side of the empty table. All the photos and softer words may, in fact, be prelude, but at the moment they are nothing more than what they are: softer public words and private photos. Is it a step in the right direction or is it just more a cleaning up of the act? Way too soon to tell.

Today Mr. Schott reports on climigration as a globally troublesome and very real issue that has already worked it’s way into the new vocabulary of how we need to resolve some extremely difficult social, biological and cultural problems. Climate change/global warming is real, despite the loutish railings of a fringe and loud minority. What has been set in motion is neither adequately recognized nor understood, which means that it has been impossible to effectively address it.

In issues a little closer to my heart and current home, I am stunned – though not surprised – how the most sensitive part of the planet is being affected by the political interpretation of very real facts. Official actions have been aggressively implemented that support a political agenda rather than the search for acceptable solutions to some very difficult problems.

As the climate of the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau radically changes, the Chinese government has “helped” with climigration by forcing the dislocation of more than one (1) million Tibetans in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces, removing them from their traditional grasslands into fringe, more officially controllable, areas. An indigenous nomadic ethnic group is being required to move into population centers where they live on top of each other, often with rules that disallow them their customary livestock or grazing lands, ensuring a rise in crime as job unavailability exacerbates the new social instability. While the official argument is that life on the grasslands is too difficult and educational opportunities are not available, there is no concession made for tradition, religion and human dignity.

This depopulation of a vast territory for unbridled mineral exploitation, and eco-tourism “with Chinese characteristics” is having terrible human results. No one’s making friends here, though there are plenty of people making lots of money, which always seems to be the trumping point. This is a creative use of the evolving weather/climate vocabulary to further state control! Perhaps there needs to be a new word for the oppressive displacement of a large and officially troublesome indigenous population by a predominant culture and controlling government under the pretense of ‘Saving the Planet.’

‘Planet rescue’ has become quite the buzz-concept over the last two decades. Unfortunately, global popularity of a word/term is usually a measure of the relative toothlessness of what, at first, seemed like a meaningful and good weave. (To wit: “Give peace a chance” is more of a fluff-brained, moneymaking jingle than a viable, constructive solution to war, despite the number of children who have learned the words over the past three decades. It hasn’t seemed to do much at all for stopping war, or stopping those folks who learned the words from paying their taxes, which is the life support of war-making efforts.)

I am not tossing climigration into that category, since it is obviously a very real problem that requires pointed attention that leads to creative solutions. But how it is hijacked and used to support other, more official agendas will be the bigger problem, especially for, though not restricted to, authoritarian states. (The past U.S. administration’s agenda exacerbated the problem by failing to deal with these pressing issues since they were not perceived as making the wealthy wealthier.) And especially as we watch the Tibetans as they slowly disappear before our eyes, as ‘climigration’ becomes the latest weapon in the arsenal of enforcing a political will to bend and break them into being “just like us.”

How a word is ‘activated’ will eventually determine its viability and half-life. The Chinese word for climigration is shengtai yimin, literally “ecological migration.” It’s the policy to “save the grasslands.”
________

Related links from The People’s Daily:

470,000 Tibetan herds people in Sichuan to move into brick houses
Nomadic people in Qinghai to settle within five years
Nomadic Tibetans in NW China’s Gansu to settle into permanent homes

On March 10, 2008  the following article appeared in the China Daily: Five-star Beijing-Tibet train to run after Games.

Luxury passenger train service from Beijing to the southwestern Tibet Autonomous Region will be launched on Sept. 1 [2008].

The tickets were gaggingly expensive – $5600 USD per person – and the projected departure schedule was brisk, to say the least – three trains leaving Beijing every 8 days, beginning on September 1, 2008.  On August 21, 2008, nearly two weeks into the Olympics, the AFP reported that

… an official at the Qinghai Tibet Railway Company, who also asked to remain anonymous, told AFP Thursday there was no timetable yet for the train’s maiden voyage.

With a schedule like that and the cost of the tickets, someone was dreaming monster dreams. For a variety of reasons, no train of this stripe has ever left the post-Olympic station. I have continued wondering about this train touted as the “world most luxurious” for some time now. By chance, while reading through a Danwei feed recently, an ad popped up for the New Oriental Express, leaving Beijing on March 30, 2009 (the tour begins on March 27, but the first three days are all-Beijing: Peking duck, King Wing Hot Spring International Hotel, and a dizzying whirl through traffic to the normal tourist venues, including the colossally empty Olympic venues.)

I had mistakenly assumed that this was the same ride as the one hailed as the “five-star train … decorated according to the standards of a five-star hotel,” the one that was scheduled prior to last year’s troubles in Lhasa. But this new train, leaving in just three weeks is not that train. This one is much less expensive and not nearly as luxurious. The train accommodations are normal soft sleeper – four people to a berthing compartment – and instead of the 40,000 RMB price tag on the 5-star ride, this one is only 25,500 RMB, with most nights, with the exception of four or five, being spent in hotels along the way.

But still I pressed on. There is a ban on foreigners in much of Qinghai and Xizang through the end of March, I was told. Yes, I knew that, but the train was not scheduled to leave Xining until April 4, heading into the heart of the Tibetan cultural region after the March ban. Still, there was a problem; the travel company could not guarantee that, as a foreigner, I would be able to get the necessary travel permits to be a part of this tour in April either, since travel permits in April are still questionable, no matter how much I wanted to experience what it is like to travel in the style “normally reserved for celebrities and government officials.”

So, it looks as if the New Oriental Express will be very oriental. Or, more specifically, totally Chinese, since the travel company cannot guarantee that they will be able to get permits for anyone with a foreign passport. Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to wait. It will give me more time to stumble upon that bag full of money I’d need to purchase a ticket w/permits. I’m betting I probably won’t get to go. Sigh.

But a side-thought to all of this has to do with the reported investors of the original, most expensive train in the world, the one that never left the station and, as best I can tell, has not set the date for their maiden voyage. Last year it was reported to have been backed by Hong Kong’s Wing On Travel (Holdings) Limited to the tune of US $52.9 million. That’s a chunk of change. I wonder what the status of that bag full of money is? If I stumble upon that I might really see what life is like for the celebrities and officials. My nose is to the ground.

An official at the tourism office of northwestern Gansu province’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, home to a major monastery and large Tibetan communities, said the region was closed to foreigners and would not be open until late March. The official, who did not identify himself as is customary in China, did not say when the restrictions were put in place.

In Sichuan province, many areas open just two weeks ago are now closed to foreign tourists until April, according to officials at the Ganzi prefecture tourist bureau. Only three counties in that prefecture will remain open to foreigners. Qinghai province’s tourism bureau also said that many areas remain closed to foreigners.

No specific projected date for lifting the ban in Qinghai, though there’s that New Oriental Express blowing its whistle about leaving Beijing station on March 27, 2009, heading right through the heart of Qinghai. But I guess if you’re paying that much money you can go just about anywhere.