China to exploit Tibet's resources

By Abrahm Lustgarten | FORTUNE Magazine | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
February 21, 2007

When China opened its controversial new railway to Tibet last July, international critics howled at the prospect that the region's culture and environment would be ravaged in search of resources. China repeated a solemn refrain, its officials insisting that the $4 billion project was aimed not at plundering the disputed territory but at bringing prosperity and economic development to Tibetan society.
So much for that. Now China's Ministry of Land and Resources is disclosing monumental new resource discoveries all across Tibet, and it turns out the findings are the culmination of a secret seven-year, $44 million survey project which preceded the railway construction in the first place.

In 1999 more than 1000 researchers divided into 24 separate regiments and fanned out across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, geologically mapping an area the size of California, Texas and Montana for the first time ever. Their findings: 16 major new deposits of copper, iron, lead, zinc and other minerals worth an estimated $128 billion, according to articles published last week on the website of the China Tibet Information Center, a government-run portal.

"Lack of resources has been a bottleneck for the economy," Meng Xianlai, director of the China Geological Survey, said in the statements. The discoveries in Tibet are prompting China to re-evaluate its potential domestic resources, and "will alleviate the mounting resources pressure China is facing."

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