Spoiling Tibet: China and Resource Nationalism on the Roof of the World 9781350222762, 9781780324357

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Preface

The pioneering work on mining in Tibet, other than the numerous publications of Chinese geologists, was done by Jane Caple, then of the now-defunct Tibet Information Network. Her 2002 book Mining Tibet came at a time when data other than official propaganda w as scarce. Now we are deluged with information, in the midst of China’s resource-hungry boom. Thanks to Paul French, who commissioned this book and imagined its scope, to the editorial team who shaped it, and to an anonymous reader of the first draft whose bold suggestions were extremely helpful. Thanks to our indefatigable mapmaker Michael Dowad, not only for making the map of key mineral deposit locations and key mines, but also for researching those locations, even if the result, on the page, lists Tibetan names only in Chinese pinyin English. Although the book does use Tibetan names wherever possible, some locations where minerals are found are so remote it is hard to identify the Tibetan name.

A note on the geogr aphy of Tibet Confusingly, Tibet can mean quite different things, depending on who is speaking. China defines Tibet narrowly as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), which is the southern portion of the Tibetan Plateau, furthest from Beijing. But only half of all Tibetans live there, and the area includes only half the Tibetan Plateau. The

preface  vii other half of the 6 million Tibetans live in the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan, making them less visible. When Tibetans in areas outside the Tibet Autonomous Region protest mining, environmental destruction or religious repression, media coverage is confused and confusing, as if it is a surprising anomaly that there are Tibetan communities so far from what China narrowly defines as Tibet. China labels the inclusion of Tibetan areas beyond TAR a claim to a ‘greater Tibet’. There is no greater or lesser, inner or outer Tibet. There is just the Tibetan Plateau, a single cultural and geographical space occupied by the Tibetans. ‘Tibet’ and ‘Tibetan Plateau’ are used throughout this book interchangeably. This seems the simplest and most neutral solution to the endless confusion arising from Tibetans referring to all three traditional provinces of U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo as Tibet, contrasting with China’s much more restrictive definition. Adopting a natural geographical unit as the definition of Tibet seems appropriate because there is a remarkable congruence of nature and culture, unique to this central part of continental Eurasia. Whether one takes as the frame of reference the geography of a plateau 4 km in the sky or uses linguistic identifiers, diet, crops, mode of production, everything points to the Tibetan Plateau as a single and distinctive entity. Fortunately, if one looks at the counties, prefectures and regions officially designated by China as areas of Tibetan autonomous governance, the result is almost the same, covering nearly all of the Tibetan Plateau, despite fragmentation into TAR, Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. This overcomes the tedious, fruitless and inconclusive arguments over where Tibet is. Unless otherwise specified, mention of Tibet means the Tibetan Plateau. Amdo/Qinghai is usually called, more neutrally, northern Tibet here; and TAR/U-Tsang is here simply called central Tibet. Kham is called eastern Tibet in this book. A reading list follows the main text. Readers who wish to explore further are invited to go to the author’s website, www.rukor.org, where further references are available, and where the map and the database from which it was drawn will be updated.

Mineral Deposits of the Tibetan Plateau

indi a

k a za k hsta n

nepal

Lhasa

bhu ta n

tibet

m ya nm a r

china

Urumqi

Xian

v ietna m

Kunming

Panzhihua

Chongqing

Chengdu

Lanzhou

mongoli a

Fuzhou

Hong Kong

Guangzhou

Changsha

Wuhan

Changchun

ja pa n

 mi

 km

philippine se a

Shanghai

s.kore a

n.kore a

Shenyang

Nanjing

Qingdao

Beijing

Zhengzhou

russi a

Introduction

The whole Qinghai–Tibet Plateau is expected to have reserves of 80 million tonnes of copper, 2,000 tonnes of gold and 30 million tonnes of lead and zinc, making the Plateau possibly the largest resource reserve base in China, as shown by a survey on national land and resources over ten years. Innovations in geological theory and key breakthroughs in prospecting in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau programme have found thirty-three large and supersized deposits with a potential economic value of RMB 2.7 trillion.1

There remains something dangerously primeval about mining. It remains a gamble, and is not for the faint-hearted. For all the rationality of cost–benefit calculations, the ability of software to model mineral deposits, and the most efficient design of open mine pits, mining transgresses the earth. Despite our capacity to detect, from far above, minute gravitational anomalies that signal highly mineralized areas within the earth, mining remains transgressive, laying bare the treasures concealed. In this age of late capitalism, where the material basis of all the stuff we consume is taken for granted and almost invisible, mining nonetheless has connotations of plunder, leaving us uneasy. That uneasiness expresses itself as concern for indigenous communities who may be

  spoiling tibet shoved aside to make way for the mines, in the campaigns over toxic spills, fish kills and polluted rivers caused by mining. In China, such campaigns are rapidly growing, as communities impacted by mines and smelters find their voice and lose their fear of repression. The giant global corporations that do most of the mining and speculative trading that drive commodity price cycles have learned to normalize these transgressions by spending money on good relations with local host communities, and on environmental technologies that mitigate discharges. The transnational miners have learned, the hard way, that their old reputation for single-minded rapacity only led to protests and uprisings, which impacted on corporate reputations, share prices and the cost of borrowed money to build the next big mine. The global environmental and indigenous rights movements have halfway tamed the big brands in mining, commodities trading and metals manufacturing. The world is watching. Mining can never become fully routine, no matter how much investors prefer to distance themselves in every way from the actual places of mining, by referring vaguely to location as ‘a geography’, just one of the many variables that affect the price of a stock. We live in an unbundled world where old truisms no longer hold. No longer is it necessary that a mine and its power supply for transforming rock into metal should be as close as possible, or that producer and consumer should ideally be nearby. The division of labour that is the bedrock of modernity is now fully global, as if fuel minerals will inexhaustibly enable us to ship billions of tonnes of rock, oil and coal around the planet forever. It is now of little importance that copper mined by a Chinese corporation in Peru, Zambia or Tibet becomes part of a car manufactured in Chongqing, shipped 2,000 km down the Yangtze to Shanghai. As long as this energy-guzzling commodity chain is financially efficient, that is all that matters. The world’s hunger for minerals is endless, and economists cheerfully predict it will fast double again. Nowhere is hungrier than China, the world’s factory. Mao’s master narrative, now ingrained,

introduction   was that China fell disastrously behind by failing to have its industrial revolution, and fell victim to predators. Now, China has stood up. From the outset, the revolution was about heavy industry and mining. In plays and films, the geologists who went forth into the wilds of Tibet and other remote areas were praised as exemplary model heroes, the ‘guerrillas of the era of socialist construction’. China has regained its rightful place as the centre of the world because it too conquered nature and can now extract minerals out of the ground worldwide. In Chinese, the words for mineral and mine, as in English, are similar – kuangcang means mineral resources in the ground; kuangchan means mineral products that are being extracted. In the 1950s revolutionary China set British steel production as the supreme benchmark of what mobilized revolutionary human should match and then surpass. The result was a famine in which 40 million people starved to death. Attaining the goal was postponed, but never changed. It mattered little if production was wasteful of fuel and raw materials, as long as quotas were fulfilled. Even now, it takes more ore and coal per tonne of metal or unit of GDP than in other countries. However, China is today committed to efficiency and profit by reducing the energy-intensity and material-intensity of production. China has not only surpassed Britain; it now makes close to half of all the steel produced worldwide, in the most efficient mills in the world and in highly wasteful, polluting plants. China tells itself that this mastery of metals, and of modernity, comes from the decisive turn, in 1949, away from old feudal beliefs, such as finding gold underground by looking for shallots, finding copper by locating ginger plants.2 Year zero was 1949: New China was born. It sought to repudiate the medieval thinking of the past. Tibetan beliefs, such as that earth spirits are angered by mining, are now treated as contemptible feudal relics. Yet the past lives on. The newest fetish is gold, to which is attributed magical powers rivalling the claims of medieval alchemists.

  spoiling tibet As recently as 2005 it seemed inconceivable that China’s demand for gold would ever rival that of India, where gold has been the primary wealth of women for thousands of years. China’s gold jewellery consumption was 215 tonnes in 2000 and 478 tonnes in 2012. 3 Demand for gold bullion bars totalled 10 tonnes in 2005 and 250 tonnes in 2011, an extraordinary leap on a planet that produces 2,800 tonnes of gold a year. The 2013 gold price in China is at record levels, over RMB 360 per gram. The price of gold in China – and thus the world – rose in lockstep with rising demand. As prices rose, the use of gold in industry, technology and dentistry fell.4 The driver of demand is accumulation for its own sake, not for beauty, industry or science. This, more than any other single factor, is responsible for the despoiling of Tibet.

Four key minerals, four modes of production Mining is not a straightforward process of finding a deposit and digging it up. China’s modes of mining production have varied greatly in the six decades since China gained actual control of the whole Tibetan Plateau. While those modes have a historic order, it does not mean the centrally planned command economy has disappeared in Tibet, even if it has been transformed elsewhere in China. The statist nation-building projects of the command economy morph into the railway- and mine-building statist projects of contemporary Chinese state capitalism. This book consists of four case studies of minerals of Tibet and how they have been – or soon will be – exploited: oil and salts, gold, chromite and copper, in rough chronological order. Extraction of molybdenum and lithium is also analysed. The book is also a series of case studies of dramatically different modes of exploitation: (1) the command economy of the revolutionary state (oil and salt); (2) a Wild West frontier rush (surface gold); (3) a failing experiment in statist large-scale exploitation (chromite); (4) a burgeoning experiment in globalizing Tibet’s underground

introduction   copper and gold deposits through state capitalist exploitation on a world scale. Again, these four modes are in roughly chronological order; and the four minerals match the four modes of extraction. So in four main chapters the modern story of the Tibetan Plateau is told through four geographies, four minerals and four economic models. Tibet is usually framed as a human rights question, focused more on religion than mining. But Tibetan communities see mining as a central issue, a core concern. In many remote areas of a plateau the size of Western Europe, the only presence of Chinese power is the miners, an intrusive, transgressive presence backed by the repressive apparatus of party-state coercion when Tibetans make it clear mining is unwelcome. Debate about Tibet focuses on environmental impacts of mining, and social impacts on Tibetan communities, often as if they were remote indigenous tribes living in harmony with nature, now disrupted by mining. This is a familiar move, dwelling on dystopian consequences of modernity, by romanticizing the objects of the modernizers as innocents whose culture is fatally disturbed by intruders. This familiar dualistic narrative is nothing more than the inverse of the standard narrative of progress, science, modernity and development as self-evident goods, even historic necessities or laws of social evolution. This dualistic opposition tells Westerners a lot about themselves: the enduring ambivalence about science, modernity and the restless energies of the capitalist cycles of creation and destruction of value. But it is almost entirely a debate about the West, in which China has firmly taken sides. So this book is not about saintly Tibetans who never disturbed the earth, now overrun by rapacious miners determined to rip and rape the mineral wealth of Tibet, at any cost. Nor is it a book about backward, unworldly Tibetans mired in poverty being brought into the light of modernity and history by a benevolent Chinese elder brother, so Tibet can end its isolation and inwardness, to join the rest of ‘modern’ China. These are heavily reified clichés which

  spoiling tibet have become naturalized by repetition, losing sight of the Tibetans themselves. This book, the first since 2002 on mining Tibet, 5 tackles its subject through several lenses. In a time of rising resource nationalism, and China as the world’s factory consuming minerals and other resources from around the planet, and on a global scale, we can locate Tibet and its mineral wealth globally. This connects Tibet with the frequent headlines announcing that ‘the Chinese are coming’ to grab the minerals of Africa or Latin America. But this is a story not only of the current moment but also of the revolutionary decades, and the future, as China is soon to begin large-scale extraction of Tibet’s minerals, in ways that have been long foreshadowed, but usually failed to materialize. That needs explaining, to express the drama of this liminal moment, as Tibet transitions from small-scale, inefficient exploitation of surface minerals, to world-scale, capital-intensive, hi-tech mining very soon, and in many places across the Tibetan Plateau.

Geologists as guerrillas of socialist construction The world approaches Tibet from afar, and with presuppositions onboard. A plateau so big has to be rich in minerals. So the world has thought, ever since Herodotus named the fox-sized, furry ‘golddigging ants’ beyond Persia, in Tibet, as an endless source of gold brought to the surface by their burrowing. Herodotus, preoccupied with clashing civilizations, certainly never saw a Himalayan marmot, the likeliest burrower. Centuries later, the Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder repeated the same story of the gold digging ants in the mountains beyond Persia. So too in China, where the Tibetan Plateau was known only vaguely as the great obstacle forcing the silk road to deviate. If one thing was known about Tibet in the lowland capitals of Chinese dynasties, it was that it was a source of mineral wealth, and an impediment to trading caravans.

introduction   Mao said in 1956 that China’s problem was that in its eastern half were nearly all the people but very little arable land, while in the western half – including Tibet – there was a vast land but few people. Extracting the riches of China’s far west, to save China, was a persistent concern of Republican China, in the decades prior to the victory of communism. The Kuomintang (KMT), beset by invasion and civil war, recognized the value of opening up Xinjiang, Qinghai and Tibet, but lacked the capacity. The difference between the KMT and the communists was not in policy but in effective capability. Unlocking the buried treasure of Tibet was the task of the geological exploration teams. These explorers were treated as heroes of revolutionary China, braving all hazards, eating all forms of bitterness in order to identify the best mineral deposits. It was not long before they began reporting staggering finds of minerals. The Chinese Communist Party made geology, and success in finding mineral deposits, a high priority. The geologists used language that blurred distinctions between a promising concentration of ores found in a single drilling and a fully proven deposit; propaganda announcements did not differentiate deposits from mines. This routine reporting of amazing finds, often accompanied by monetized estimates of the total value of extracting every tonne estimated, created a self-fulfilling cycle. It achieved the primary objective of state-employed geologists, ensuring their ongoing funding. President Liu Shao Qi in 1963 militarized the role of the geologists, announcing that ‘Geological workers are the guerrillas for the period of peaceful construction’.6 Communist construction called for heroic sacrifice for the common cause, keeping alive the revolutionary ardour, intensity and devotion to duty, as in waging revolutionary guerrilla war. In the same year, a new play was published, The Young Generation (Nianqing de yidai), whose heroes, and slackers, are geologists. Those who choose a comfortable life in head office lack the right stuff; while those who brave all hardships to conquer nature to identify the mineral wealth of Qinghai are the exemplary

  spoiling tibet heroes. Lin Lan, the heroine, is torn between returning to civilized Shanghai with her brother Lin Yusheng, whose legs have failed him after the rigours of working in Qinghai. Lin Lan is tempted by Shanghai, but is also drawn to join her classmates in their bold dreams of attaining happiness for China and themselves by enduring all hardships of working in Tibet. This collective passion culminates in their singing ‘The Song of the Geologists’. The comfort-seeking geologist Lin Yusheng is exposed as a fraud, his ailing leg a fiction, and he returns willingly to the frontier to build a communist heaven on earth, as the playwright Chen Yun, writer of The Young Generation, called it. This play paved the way for the Cultural Revolution, renewing the demand that endless arduous struggle is needed for socialist construction.7 Published recently in an English translation in the Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, the play revives stern revolutionary morality, exhorting young people to be like their ‘iron man’ parents, and to volunteer to go to Qinghai to find minerals, to make revolutionary construction a success. The Young Generation rhapsodizes the task of identifying economic ores in Tibet: It’s poetry just living out there with the soaring mountains, dense forests, deserts, and rivers. There’s ‘battles’ everywhere; there’s poetry everywhere! The more work we do, the more I believe that there is just too much treasure under the ground. It’s a pity there aren’t enough people available. The province [Qinghai] decided to start a geology training class. …

This is pure Maoism, conflating the young generation’s struggle to wrest minerals from Tibet with the older generation‘s struggle to conquer imperialists. Even the malingering young geologist realizes where his duty lies: ‘I’ve been terribly confused. I let the party down that trained me all these years, let down the teachers that instructed me, and also let down my parents, who sacrificed their lives…’ And so, in Act 3, they all depart for the frontiers, for Xinjiang, Qinghai and central

introduction   Tibet. The play’s climactic speech, delivered by the youngest and most revolutionary of the young women, promises to be faithful seed of the revolution, transplanting China in the wastelands: Soon we’ll be leaving you, going to our different posts, and like seeds scattered over the ground, we’ll grow roots in those places, send up sprouts, blossom, ripen. Goodbye! My dear comrades, we’re leaving, with your hopes and your wishes, to create a beautiful, beautiful future.

This may seem quite unlike real life. Yet the life of Wen Jiabao, China’s premier from 2003 to 2012, uncannily resembles this idealized script. Wen graduated from Beijing’s Institute of Geology in 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. As an undergraduate, he majored in geological surveying and prospecting. Only the heroic image of geologists saved them from the persecution and struggle sessions of the era. He worked his way up as an engineer in Gansu, close to Tibet, for a decade, specializing in geomechanics, the engineering of mine shafts for safe and profitable extraction of minerals. He worked as an instructor, as head of Gansu Provincial Geological Bureau and as vice minister of geology and mineral resources, before he was promoted to the Party’s Central Committee. While the patriotic task of the geologists is to master nature, they are depicted as almost a force of nature in themselves. They were sent to ‘advance towards nature’ (xiang da ziran jinjun), which meant willingness to ‘eat in the wind and sleep in the dew’ ( fengcan lusu), climb mountains and wade across rivers (bashan sheshui) in their revolutionary task of seeking underground treasure through arduous struggle (kantan dixia baozang). Not only in this play, but in dramatic works decades later, geologists, tanned and physically strong, embody all the ideals of the revolutionary era: patriotic dedication, socialist consciousness, scientific knowledge turning rocks into resources, traditional Chinese communal ethics and team spirit, perfect health. By the 1990s, when more plays about heroic geologists appeared, those virtues

  spoiling tibet of a past age were nostalgically remembered, when China shared a collective purpose and discipline, and believed in something nobler than getting rich. China theatre specialist Xiaomei Chen describes elderly audiences in 1998, delighted at a play that ‘recorded an entire generation’s aspirations, dreams, sacrifices and life journeys’, as well as reviving their ‘Song of the Geologists’. They recalled how geologists used to be asked to give inspirational talks to young people, ‘to foster a fearless spirit to overcome the hardships in life and give our best to the country and to the people’.8

Perspectives: global, national, Tibetan We need to look at Tibet from China’s national perspective, through the eyes of central leaders in Beijing, and from the viewpoint of provincial cadres, whose interests and motives are quite different. What are the complex decision-making processes of central planners, local governments and Chinese mining corporations? They can and do invest in obtaining their chromium from Tibet, Kazakhstan, South Africa or Turkey; their copper from Tibet, Peru, Zambia or the Congo. What role is played by the party-state, with its endlessly deep pockets, capable of building a sports stadium in Zambia as a deal sweetener, or a railway and hydropower station in Tibet to ensure a mine has profitable access to subsidized long-haul freight routes? What is the relationship between the state-owned mining corporations and the party-state? In China’s developmental state model, is there any real difference between ownership and control? Only by exploring the fusion of politics and economics in today’s China can we get to grips with the corporate capital expenditure decisions that determine the fate of Tibet. These are all views from the outside looking in. We also need to look at mining, and the land of Tibet, through Tibetan eyes. Tibetans have plenty to say about mining, and have backed their words with action to protest mining plans in many regions, even risking

introduction   and losing lives to protect their mountains and pastures. In the chapter on alluvial gold, Tibetan voices speak most directly, because it is pervasive gold mining that has impacted most on Tibetan lives. Even where gold extraction produced only modest tonnages, the impacts were major on land and livelihoods. That denied, ignored legacy is now bound up in China’s new master narrative of Tibet as China’s ‘Number One Water Tower’ to be protected, even if that means banning routine grazing, coercing the pastoral nomads to sell their herds and leave the land. The central policy of watershed conservation, by cancelling pastoral livelihoods, sits uncomfortably with evidence of ongoing gold mining, and consequent erosion, inside the protected areas from which nomads are now excluded. China has discovered a match between Tibetan supply and global demand, which enables the party-state to achieve what has eluded it so far: the assimilation of Tibet. Despite China having a centuriesold model of assimilating newly conquered territories, in Tibet it was climatically impossible to settle large numbers of Chinese peasant farmers, whose crops would feed the large number of soldiers garrisoning every town in Tibet. It was the nature of the land of Tibet that made it impossible to populate the Tibetan countryside with non-Tibetan immigrant farmers, despite intensive efforts to find new crops suited to agriculture with Chinese characteristics. China’s central leaders say development is the answer to all the problems of Tibet. The development of the two pillar industries, mining and tourism, will forever bind the upland and lowland, highland plateau and industrial basin, in mutual embrace, as never before. This is the ultimate solution, the central planners say. Baima Chilin (Pema Choling), a key Communist Party cadre and chairman of Tibet Autonomous Region, managed to mention development eleven times in a paragraph: We must always persist in development being a task of primary importance. This is the basis and key to resolving all problems in Tibet. In narrowing the gaps and changing the features, we must rely on development; in working for the benefit of the people and

  spoiling tibet improving their lives, we must rely on development; in securing stability and unity and maintaining the harmonious situation, we must all the more rely on development. Only by strongly implementing the economic development strategy of ‘elevating the level of the primary industry, paying attention to the focal points of the secondary industry, and pushing for large-scale development of the tertiary industry’, further updating the concept of development, transforming the mode of development, and improving the quality of development, will we able to push Tibet towards leap-andbound development onto the track of scientific development.9

Mining is to be the pillar industry of central Tibet. Already it is a pillar of northern Tibet, or Qinghai. Far from being irrelevant or incidental to the primary questions of civil and political rights, mining is one of two core strategies pursued over decades by central planners seeking lasting solutions to ‘the Tibetan problem’. The other pillar, equally capable of generating wealth, employment, immigration into Tibet, profit for investors and revenue for governments, is tourism. These are the pillar industries China has long sought, in order to integrate Tibet into the Chinese economy, and secure China’s frontiers. Tourism can be mentioned briefly. Both industries are set to boom, and for the same reason. The central planners have spent decades, and billions of dollars, in establishing, at public expense, the necessary infrastructure for them to boom, constructing the railways, power stations, highways, new towns, phone networks, oil pipelines and engineering corridors that are the sinews of modernity, the prerequisite for corporatized mass tourism and intensive mineral extraction. These two industries will determine whether China has at last found the mechanisms for an economic take-off in central Tibet, key to securing, integrating and assimilating Tibet. China’s quest for linkages between Tibet and lowland China has been long and, until now, largely unsuccessful. There has been little connection between the livestock-based food and fibre economy of the Tibetan Plateau,

introduction   based on extensive, mobile land use, and the industrial economy of booming downstream, lowland China. The only exception has been the intensive enclave of mineral and energy extraction in northern Tibetan Tsaidam Basin, now highly industrialized. Mining Tibet conveniently sources raw materials that the world’s factory needs as it steadily shifts inland, away from China’s coast, and towards the Tibetan Plateau. It will not be long before major global brands, including Ford, Volvo, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Asustek, Dell, Apple, Lenovo, Quanta and Foxconn, supply the world with cars, computers and smartphones made in their factories at the foot of the Tibetan Plateau in Chengdu and Chongqing, from Tibetan copper, gold, chromium, lithium and other minerals. The Tibetan Plateau has always been of planetary significance, as the source of nearly all major Asian rivers, from Pakistan, through South and Southeast Asia, all the way up to northern China. Even more powerfully, this island 4 to 5 kilometres in the sky profoundly influences global atmospheric circulation, even diverting the jetstream. It is a major engine of the monsoon rains on which all Asian civilizations, from India to China, rely. Now the Tibetan Plateau is about to be globalized economically, as the source of the lithium in your mobile phone or iPad; the chromium that makes your new car or refrigerator shiny and stainless; the copper that transmits hydropower from Tibetan rivers across China to the coastal factories that make the world’s manufactures. If Tibet is industrialized, at the bottom of the global commodity chain, as a supplier of cheap, unprocessed minerals, unable to set prices or make profit from resource exploitation, some will say ‘welcome to modernity’. If that is the fate of so many ‘underdeveloped’ areas, why not Tibet? Tibetans in exile assume that China’s ‘leap-and-bound’ plans for Tibet’s pillar industries are either inscrutable or inexorable, incomprehensible or unstoppable. But the story told here is full of stops and starts, of Chinese dreams of Tibetan mineral wealth that have not been matched by extractive reality; of internal contradictions in China’s wealth-generating process. Far from making Tibetans

  spoiling tibet wealthy, or including Tibetans in the new mineral economy, China’s grand narrative of development is likely to further alienate the Tibetans, whose affections for China have long been deeply alienated by decades of rampant, indiscriminate, gold-rush mining of streambeds all over Tibet. In short, there is such a gap between Chinese plans and lived reality that we might conclude that China’s interventions in Tibet are consistent only in being counterproductive, with frequently self-defeating outcomes. The coming phase of intensive mining tries to distance itself from the gold rush, but it will be hard to persuade Tibetans that corporate mining has better intentions. That is a key Asian Argument of this book.

Nation-building through mining New China, born in 1949, was dedicated to science, development, rationality, the conquest of nature and industrialisation – all reliant on access to minerals. The Kuomintang regime defeated by the Communist Party was also dedicated to scientific modernity, the suppression of Buddhism as feudal backwardness, and integration of the Tibetan frontier into China. The KMT and CCP differed sharply in their capacity to implement policies, but their ideological stances, repudiating China’s past and embracing speedy industrialization, were similar. China’s will to catch up to and surpass the industrial West has led Tibetans to assume that the rich mineral resources of the Tibetan Plateau were and still are the core reason why China took, and insists on holding, Tibet. A core argument of this book is that China has so far profited little from taking Tibet, and its inability to extract much from the earth of Tibet, other than surface gold, is the gap between China’s reach and its grasp. If there was a time when China badly needed the minerals of Tibet, and could argue that the social and environmental costs of exploitation were justified by the mineral output, it was in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Those were the decades

introduction   in which China grew into the world’s factory, losing self-sufficiency in minerals and energy production. Sourcing minerals from Tibet would have made a difference. That is when China could have made maximum use of Tibet’s comparative advantage as a storehouse of mineral treasure. The Chinese word for central Tibet, Xizang, can be taken to mean treasure store of the west. Yet in practice China consistently found it cheaper, easier and faster to source its minerals globally, shipping them across the oceans to China. From 2003 China’s insatiable demand drove up global prices of almost all commodities, the start of the commodities ‘supercycle’. By the second decade of this century the global material flows into China reached such intensity that the minerals of Tibet, even if fully exploited, could no longer play more than a minor part in feeding the world’s factory. Nonetheless, China is set to exploit Tibetan minerals as never before, a belated response that has slowly gathered momentum over decades, and is due to result in big mines, at a time when their contribution to China’s needs no longer matters much. Chapter 5 is a study of those big new mines, nearly all state-owned, and what they will do to Tibet. The unfinished agendas of the Qing dynasty, and of the KMT, remain, in Tibet, unfinished. The standard model, of moving in large numbers of Han Chinese peasant settlers growing familiar crops on small plots to feed the ready market of Chinese soldiers garrisoning the frontier simply did not work in Tibet. Even now, the non-Tibetan population in Tibet is overwhelmingly urban, concentrated in extraction zones, towns, cities and transport corridors that link them to lowland China. There are almost no Han settlers in rural Tibet, because agriculture with Chinese characteristics is a climatic impossibility. Thus the party-state itself is ambivalent about how hard it can or ought to push its own state corporations to ‘go out’ to Tibet, because they are the national champions meant to stride the world stage. These state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are to be bulked up, agglomerated, their industries rationalized and consolidated, so they

  spoiling tibet can become big enough to be global players. There is an urgency to the state-orchestrated strategy of building up the national champions, because mining globally, in all aspects, including extraction, processing, trading and shipping, has been increasingly dominated by a handful of giant transnationals. These are high-profile global brands such as BHP Billiton, Vale, Rio Tinto, Glencore/Xstrata, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Gazprom and so on. China wants to ‘go out’ to the world not only to reliably source its minerals, oil, gas and even coal, but to have the capacity to buy the best deposits, at the best prices, to keep the world’s factory growing. Although there is a popular perception that China is already a dominant player in Africa and Latin America, as well as among its poorer Asian neighbours close to its borders, China has made only limited acquisitions, often in high-risk areas of the world, and at premium prices. It is not yet in the biggest of leagues, and knows it. With each merger of global transnationals, such as the 2012 Glencore/Xstrata deal, the big league gets bigger, the price of entry gets higher, the barriers to new competition grow. For China’s miners to take their place in the Fortune 500 would take capital that might alternatively be deployed in Tibet. But the developmental party-state, through its extraordinarily profitable state-owned banks, has ample capital for mining projects. However, learning to compete with the biggest resourced mines and speculators/traders takes much more than capital. China’s budding national champions are on a steep learning curve which absorbs their attention. Tibet is somewhat old news, an ongoing problem for the central leaders, but for the corporations a distraction from the glory and personal wealth accumulation opportunities of ‘going out’. This does not mean that nothing is happening in Tibet, far from it. But things happens more slowly than in a monolithic state. China’s state-owned miners are moving into Tibet, in the steps of the state’s infrastructure construction programmes. The mines are under development and by 2015 major mining will be operational. By 2020 mining could be the pillar industry that radically reorients

introduction   Tibet, in a different economy and a different demography. The onset of major mining enclaves may have been slow in building up, but the situation may soon reach a tipping point. The transition from a land of light, extensive, mobile land use to a depopulated land in which nomads have been sedentarized will soon leave the emptied land to miners big and small, turn Tibet into a depleting asset whose soils are stripped, along with the minerals beneath, with rampant degradation growing unchecked, and with no one left who knows and cares deeply for the land, able to defend and rehabilitate degrading areas. Mining is by definition intensive, sedentary, occurring in enclaves that concentrate capital, technology, workers and environmental impacts in a small space. Pastoral nomadism is by definition extensive and mobile, traditionally able to move on before grazing pressure compromises the regrowth of grasses. The intensive and extensive uses of land contradict each other, and cannot coexist, especially when the state actively removes the nomads and cancels their land tenure rights. They compete for water and land. Seasonal pastoral herd migration routes (which are often wildlife migration paths too) clash with the sedentary enclaves that extract minerals and monopolize limited water sources.

A note on sources This book is richly footnoted, so readers can check sources for themselves, and even research further. But some sources cannot be footnoted. A major source of information on mining is Tibetans themselves. It is their direct experience of incoming miners, big and small, that matters, and every effort has been made, through many interviews and access to interview transcripts recorded by others, to provide as many Tibetan voices as possible. Tibetans almost always are fearful of speaking plainly about mining, knowing that beatings, long prison sentences and torture are common official responses to speaking frankly from experience. Tibetans are not free to form

  spoiling tibet environmental NGOs to protect their lands, mountains and pastures, or to articulate their concerns in the public sphere. Any attempt to do so is quickly labelled dangerous separatism that must be firmly quelled before it threatens China’s unity. Almost every Tibetan interviewed asked that their name or village not be identified, for fear of official retribution, and this book honours the promises made.

one Tibet in its own right

It is the contention of this book that Tibet should be seen through Tibetan eyes, as a land conducive to material comfort and ease, available to feed those who know how to gather skilfully what nature provides; and a land conducive to mental comfort and ease, a source of deep inner strength and mental stability through training the mind, in mountain caves, to discover the full capabilities of the human condition. The millions of Tibetan pastoral nomads see themselves as gatherers of what the landscape generously provides; all that is necessary is to remain mobile, never overstaying. These pastoralists live what they consider an easy and bountiful existence, not a desperate struggle to subsist, at the mercy of the forces of nature. Gatherers are conventionally considered an inferior group. Even those who are uncomfortable with ‘man’s dominion over nature’ are leery of going too far in the opposite direction, living entirely dependent on whatever is to be found naturally. But nomads live off uncertainty, unpredictability, in extreme climates that generate knee-high flower-filled alpine meadows and barren alpine deserts; paralysing blizzards and gentle drifts of monsoonal virga. The nomads survive, and thrive, not despite uncertainty, but because of

  spoiling tibet it.1 A flexible, mobile, adaptable way of life is both a prescription for successful pastoralist productivity and a definition of the goal of Buddhist practice. It is not an accident that Buddhism thrived, to the fullest extent, in the landscapes of the Tibetan Plateau. Spaciousness is a key outcome of the Buddhist path; it is also necessary as a tool on the path, so as to not get claustrophobically bound up in the little world of the accreted self. Spaciousness is the attribute of the Tibetan Plateau evident even to the casual visitor to an area the size of western Europe that had but 6 million people until Chinese immigrants swept in. China has never learned to see Tibet through Tibetan eyes, or even guess that there might be any reason to bother. Imperial China and Republican, revolutionary and contemporary capitalist China have been consistently incurious as to whether there is anything to be learned from backward and remote Tibet. Nor has the wider world learned to see Tibet as Tibetans see it, due to the grand romance of Shangri-La, and the compulsory silence of the Tibetans who are criminalized when they attempt to speak for themselves. In the absence of Tibetan perspectives, the Plateau is readily dissected, categorized into useful and useless, farmland and waste land, alpine meadow and alpine desert. Categorization, selecting the most favourably endowed locales, is how modernity proceeds. Modernity’s difference engine particularizes and fragments whole landscapes. Except as a source of water and minerals, Tibet now has little instrumental value. Everything above the treeline is waste land, good only for capturing what little monsoonal moisture reaches the high peaks, to be held there as glaciers, melting slowly to provide all of Asia’s lowlands with a steady source of water. The pastures below the snowline cannot be made to sustain intensive cropping with Chinese characteristics, yet the slopes above the forests and meadows have even less use, except as Asia’s ‘water tower’, a favoured trope of China’s central leaders.

tibet in its own right   Mining old Tibet Tibetans never mined anything, because the land was sacred. A lot of people believe such nonsense. In Western countries, supporters of Tibet have peddled a dualism in which the saintly Tibetans never dug or cut the earth. In the romanticized version of Tibetan values in the 1997 movie Seven Years in Tibet, it seems Tibetans spent more time saving worms from the spade than any other activity. The idealized proto-Tibetan Ba’ku people of Star Trek Insurrection, peace-loving earth mothers all, would never dream of doing anything so crude as mining. This is just another crude dualism, the obverse of a resource-hungry Western modernity. The reality is that Tibetans chose whether or not to mine, in moderation, for reasons that modernity finds almost unintelligible. Archaeologists say metalworking goes back thousands of years in Tibet. Scholar and explorer John Bellezza says: Thogchags are Tibetan talismans made of bronze and meteoric metals dating as far back as the Bronze Age. Archaeological evidence from various sites indicate that it started around the beginning of the Second Millennium bce. An unbroken tradition of producing amulets extends into the Iron Age and Buddhist periods creating a cultural legacy several thousand years old. Highly prized by Tibetans, thogchags were traditionally worn for protection and good luck. In the pre-Buddhist Bon religion rituals to dispel evil and attract good fortune were prevalent. The function of thogchags closely reflects this ancient religious preoccupation. Although they were often hung around the neck or attached to clothing, thogchags were also sewn on amulet pouches or tied to religious articles. They were frequently used and displayed by healers, spirit-mediums and magicians, the so-called shamans of Tibet. Thogchags have a close association with indigenous Tibetan religious beliefs and their practitioners and form a very important part of the country’s pre-Buddhist and Buddhist heritage.2

In 2006 New Yorkers were amazed by a display of Tibetan chainmail armour twelve centuries old:

  spoiling tibet The exhibition highlights stunning examples of pierced ironwork embellished with gold and silver, masterfully crafted swords and sword blades, and extremely rare examples of decorated leatherwork. Complete armour for men and horses was kept for use on ceremonial occasions, particularly the Great Prayer Festival, a massive event held in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa as part of the New Year celebrations at the start of each year. Several rare and complete lamellar armors and helmets dating from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century are included as well. Superb examples made of hundreds of small plates laced together with leather have been brought together here. Many different types of helmets are also featured, including multiplate helmets made of up to forty-nine narrow iron plates and a helmet decorated with a popular Buddhist symbol known as the Three Jewels. A few of the helmets in the exhibition are so unusual as to have almost no stylistic parallels. The exhibition features unprecedented displays of stunning Tibetan horse armour, a type that did not exist outside of Tibet. On view is a complete figure of a Tibetan heavy cavalryman from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century. Several shaffrons (armour for a horse’s head) are also included, one of which is the fourteenth–fifteenthcentury piece reinforced with iron plates and densely embellished in gold and silver, the most highly decorated piece of armour of this type known. Made from hundreds or even thousands of small, interlocking iron rings, mail armour was used in Tibet from a very early date as described in texts from the period of the Yarlung Dynasty (the seventh to the ninth century), during which Tibet’s empire extended through much of Central Asia. 3

China was acutely aware of the high quality of Tibetan metalwork: To judge by records of gifts from Tibet to T’ang, which over and again list large objects of gold, remarkable for their beauty and rarity and excellent workmanship, the Tibetan goldsmiths were the wonder of the medieval world. One of the largest gifts of Tibetan gold was one of the earliest. Late in 640, Gar sTongtsan, the minister of the great King Songtsan Gampo, came to Chang’an to arrange a marriage between his lord and a Chinese princess. To bind the engagement he presented golden vessels weighing a thousand catties, and many other precious things. A gift sent by the same Tibetan king in 641 to his father-in-law, T’ai Tsung, was

tibet in its own right   a golden wine jug in the form of a goose seven feet high. Early in 658 the Tibetans sent another marvel of metalwork: a golden city, populated by golden horsemen, and the figures of horses, lions, elephants and other animals. There were many other metallic wonders. Tibet was a golden land. In the ninth century its king lived in a sumptuous tent, decorated with tigers, leopards, and fierce reptiles executed in gold.4

Paul Pelliot, citing T’ang dynastic records, says this golden ewer held 60 litres.5 Art historian Amy Heller says: At present, a silver jug stands in a wooden frame in one of the chapels of the Lhasa Jokhang, traditionally regarded as the oldest temple in Tibet. This jug is approximately 80 cm in height. It was hammered from silver sheets, cut and assembled in four parts, two hemispherical sections joined at the diameter of the circle, a long thin neck, surmounted by an animal head with round mouth from which liquid can be poured. It weighs some 35 kg when full of liquid, and monks fill it daily with offerings of chang, Tibetan barley beer. The gilded designs on the upper bowl of the jug are raised scrolling in heart shaped medallions, while on the lower bowl, there are three scenes representing Central Asian people, two lively solo dancers and three men in drunken revelry. The people represented on the jug reflect Tibetan familiarity with their neighbours’ appearance and customs. Early records document Tibetan export of armour and weapons and salt as well. The Tibetans were so skilled in metal craftsmanship that the 3000 meter gorges of the Mekong river were crossed by Tibetan iron-chain suspension bridges by the early 8th century. Tibetan chain-mail and lamellar armour was renowned in the Tang Annals and judged to be invincible. The Tang historians wrote, ‘The men and horses all wear chain mail armour. Its workmanship is extremely fine. It envelops them completely, leaving openings only for the two eyes. Thus, strong bows and sharp swords cannot injure them.’6

In 2007 the Environment Desk of the Tibetan government in exile explained:

  spoiling tibet There is a long history of the use of metals in Tibet, for sacred images, temple finials, oracular mirrors, iron chain bridges, armour, coinage, reliquaries, jewellery and ceremonial offerings.7 Tibet has a rich tradition of metalworking, with the government of pre-communist Tibet employing 150 gold and silver smiths in a workshop just below the Potala. There are many Tibetan words for the tools of these expert craftsmen, their techniques and products. These craftsmen could stretch a mere 11 grams of silver into necklace wire more than a kilometre in length. Metalworking, especially in Tibetan villages, was a winter livelihood, a valuable source of off-farm income in a season when nothing grows and there is no work in the fields. Yet Tibetan culture frowned on mining, disturbing the earth and its spirits, and on forging metals in the blacksmith’s fire. Metalworking was defined as a ‘deplorable’ occupation, forbidden to monks. Tibet often preferred to buy its metals from others. Tibet turned to the growing kingdom of Gorkha Nepal to mint its coins, ceasing this arrangement only after a Nepali invasion was repulsed. The mines providing raw materials were invariably small, and were worked without tunnelling, chemicals or explosives. Today they would be called artisanal mines. Gold was obtained almost entirely by sluicing alluvial gold flecks from stream beds, rather than by digging. There are many recorded instances where gold nuggets found in the earth were returned, out of respect for local gods. Because gold is plentiful in many Tibetan places, its use was common. An English traveller in Tibet in the 1880s noted that ‘in Lhasa even the poor people wear gold jewellery’.8

The aristocratic Tibetan historian Tsepon Shakabpa wrote One Hundred Thousand Moons Reflected in the Luminous Pond of the Playful Lake in which Young Intelligent Bees Take Joy as an encyclopaedic account of pre-communist Tibet, including a survey of the natural endowment of the earth of Tibet. He catalogues the known minerals of Tibet and their uses. 9 He lists fifty-seven minerals, sometimes as they appear in the periodic table, mostly defined by their use. Writing of old Tibet in the present tense, Shakabpa observes: ‘These minerals are extracted by the government or the landowners a little at a time, as they are needed. Beyond that, no

tibet in its own right   large scale mining takes place.’ Shakabpa attributes this to attitudes more ingrained in Tibetan society than any official edict. It is said that such minerals were being extracted from the land in the ancient past, that was actually owned by spirits. They became jealous and annoyed; consequently, rain did not fall during the rainy season, and an epidemic, a famine, and a war resulted. The second legend says that when minerals were being extracted, the fertility of the soil declined in that area; the productivity and resources of the famers and nomads suffered.

These are the ‘primitive’ beliefs of premodern peoples, proving, to modernist Chinese, the backwardness and superstitions of the Tibetans. To many modern minds, such beliefs are laughable, signs of a slavery to nature that must be resolutely repudiated so the bounty of the earth can be ours. Tibet’s culture heroes, the lamas, are also sceptical of the powers ascribed to earth and water spirits, yet they bind them rather than abolishing them. These spirits, so prone to jealousy or annoyance, have no objective existence. Nor does everyday reality exist as solidly as we suppose, the lamas say. So a belief in spirits is no more deluded than materialist literalism. From the perspective of the lamas, most people are addicted to that which causes them repeated dissatisfaction, fleeting pleasure and endless suffering. So the task of those who have more fully experienced the nature of reality is not to deny everyday lived reality, including the presence of spirits, but to wrestle with those spirits openly, powerfully and forcefully, to subdue them. In much the same way, the lamas wrestle with everyday popular delusions, fixations and beliefs, in their effort to turn minds.

The land of Tibet: foreground of enlightenment The Tibetan Plateau is huge, but sparsely populated by the standards of today’s urbanized world. On a global scale it is the size of western Europe, or India’s eight largest states put together. It is one-sixtieth of the land surface of the planet. But by Tibetan standards it is also

  spoiling tibet immense. It took months to cross, and few did. In the days when high lamas regularly were invited to Beijing to bless the emperor and safeguard his rule, the journey took many months. Even now, with a new rail track traversing the plateau, the journey between the two biggest plateau cities, Xining and Lhasa, takes twenty-four hours even with almost no stops. Despite the great expanse of Tibet, and the extreme climate, almost all of the plateau had human uses. Tibetans learned 9,000 years ago how to live on this land of earthquakes, a young land geologically, by living lightly, by mobile land use, always moving on before grazing pressure exhausted the grass. A mobile civilization based on the seasonal cycles of the hardy sedges and grasses of Tibet made use of all terrains where plants grow. Because the plateau is only 10 degrees beyond the tropics, the snowline is high, with bare rock, snow and glaciers only above 4,500 metres from spring through to autumn. Yet even these barren mountainsides had – and today have – crucial roles in maintaining and transmitting the core values of Tibetan culture, as places of deep meditative retreat, where yogis spent years undistractedly investigating the nature of mind, before coming down to rejoin society. Tibetans talk of Tibet as a body, the body of the Sri Sinmo, the earth spirit and mother of all Tibetans, who lives in the earth and, if annoyed, causes earthquakes, landslides and other disasters. Her limbs remain pinned down by the greatest of Tibetan temples, and rituals to renew their power to subdue (but never destroy) her are led by high lamas, today, as in past centuries. A mobile civilization, with elaborate mobile courts of high lamas, is what made Tibet humanly habitable. Tibetan civilization was light on the land; China is heavy. A light touch is suitable for a land so cold that organic life takes centuries to establish itself, and does not recover when cut for railways, highways, mines, towns and so on. China is creating a manufactured landscape, remaking Tibet in its own industrial image, and it won’t work. It may take a long time before this is realized. By then, it will be too late, the damage will be irreversible, the nomads

tibet in its own right   will have been long removed, the land depopulated, the minerals exhausted, the Tibetans remade into factory workers in Chinese cities. Only then will it become obvious that the modern project of making the land of Tibet submit to human will was mistaken, unworkable, even disastrous. That is what happened in Siberia. Geology has now had sixty years of intensive investigation to assemble a coherent story of the uplift and formation of the entire Tibetan Plateau, including the formation of the mineral deposits. The complex story is of the upheaval of the shallow Tethyan Sea and the Indian subcontinent as it ploughed inexorably into Eurasia, creating the mountain chains that crown the plateau. The uplifted result of the tectonic collision is the most distinctive feature of Eurasia. Not only is the plateau unlike its surrounding lowlands geologically; it is as distinctive meteorologically, hydrologically, climatologically, botanically and zoologically. To zoologists, the cold plateau was probably the origin of many species that spread widely during the Ice Ages. What is more remarkable is that in its human uses the Tibetan Plateau has been as distinct. The traditional Tibetan economy of barley cropping, wool and butter production; the evolution of a mobile civilization based on nomadic pastoralism; the extensive land use; the fusion of sacred and secular power; the spread of the Tibetan language – all of these correlate closely with the geographical extent of the plateau. Nowhere else in continental Eurasia is there such congruity of physical and cultural boundaries. Even now, the sum of officially designated Tibetan ‘autonomous’ counties, prefectures and regions adds up very closely to the scientific map of the Tibetan Plateau. Tibetans see Tibet, the land of snows, as a unity, to be respected and cared for, not overused by concentrating too many people or too much investment in one place. Tibetans see the thousand plateaus and the nine mountain ranges as a landscape conducive to full awakening to the human condition. Pilgrimage is something everyone should do at least once in a lifetime, so almost all Tibetans believe. Pilgrimage is a yoga, one of the practices which, if done

  spoiling tibet with sincerity and faith, leads to the liberating discovery of the inner depths of mind. But why bring Sri Sinmo into this? Why rake up a half-forgotten past in this scientific age? The reason is that Tibet is a body, a coherent whole, a plateau thrust into the sky, a land surrounded by mountains, and Tibetans have always understood this. China cannot bring itself to accept, even for scientific purposes, that the Tibetan Plateau, a quarter of China’s area, is one. Officially, it is the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or QTP. Officially, Tibet is fragmented, and not a whole. Bureaucratically, Qinghai and the Tibetan prefecture of Gansu province are part of the cluster that add up to China’s northwest administrative and military region; while the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and the Tibetan prefectures of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, are clustered into China’s southwest administrative and military region. Thus is the singularity of the Tibetan Plateau administratively conjured away.

Roiling the gods Inside Tibet, the anger of the earth spirits at mining, railway construction, tunnelling and dam building is obvious to all Tibetans. No one is embarrassed to speak of this. Some even willingly die to protect and defend the gods of the high peaks, the spirits of the pure earth, the goddesses of the lakes. This is not Shangri-La romanticism; it is the voice of the land. It is everyday knowledge that the places where Tibetans live, and make pilgrimage, are animated with pre-Buddhist spirits and deities with Buddhist orientation. The landscapes of most Nyingma monastic communities clearly bond together humans, spirits and local ecosystems. Humans’ topophilia, in this context, is not just an affective bond between nature and humans. It is not merely born of the aesthetic value of the material, inanimate environment. Rather, it signifies a total relationship of the sentient world in which natural, super­ natural, and spiritual powers are in contiguity, interaction, counteraction, and communion.10

tibet in its own right   So writes Chinese cultural anthropologist Dan Smyer Yu, one of a small number of non-Tibetans who have lived in Tibet with meditation practitioners, who respects and understands their world-view. This is more than earth-mother cliché. The sacred is ever-present. To Tibetans, what seems to outsiders a thinly populated land is dense with meaning, agents and actors, reminders that this lifetime is the right time to prepare for the next, by behaving responsibly and mindfully. The land is crowded with minor local spirits and major deities who bound the horizon, who point to the possibility of training the mind to awaken, transcending selfish habit. Tibetan landscapes are rich sources for the metaphors that cascade through the poetry and songs of liberation of the yogis and meditation masters, who took to solitude to concentrate uninterrupted on the sciences of mind. Abundant as such imagery is, evocative of awakening as a phenomenon as natural as sunrise, this is a land where human use is not superimposed, an afterthought opposed to a pristine ecology. The landscapes of awakening are as innumerable as the thousand and more plateaus, not restricted to caves and mountains and untouched nature. The land of Tibet abounds in blessings, in places consecrated by past yogis, whose place-specific songs continue to circulate widely, are readily remembered and brought to mind. Writing from experience, Dowman says: The physical exertion and the sensual feast that is an integral part of pilgrimage in Tibet can become the mode and the means of attaining the Buddha’s enlightenment. The rarity of the Tibetan atmosphere stretching the lungs to their limit; the sense of immense space and isolation; the unpolluted purity of the environment; and the unfiltered rays of the sun: the body and mind are transformed and cleansed.11

However, the modern quest to connect people and nature is rooted in the thoroughly modern assumption that man and nature are actually separate, occupying distinct realms which by definition compete, which are harmed by their coexistence. Even ecology, as a science, makes this assumption that man and nature are mutually

  spoiling tibet exclusive. The modern quest seeks to somehow reconcile ‘wilderness’ with the human presence, as if humans inevitably destroy what is pure. Wildernesses, including the Tibetan upper catchment of China’s rivers, must be left entirely devoid of human touch. This results in an unresolvable tension. For Tibetans there is no such tension. The Tibetan landscape is a curated land, shaped everywhere by nomadic mobility, by sustainable grazing pressure that limits the extent of forest, keeps the meadowlands open, protects the rivers and provides space for wild and domestic herds to mingle as they cross an unfenced land. Humans and other possessors of a sentient mind are not categorically separate; the land and the people are intimately connected. Far from struggling to make such connections, to bridge the dividing chasm, these myriad connections arise naturally to the minds of nomadic gatherers. Outsiders, whether Westerners or Chinese, revolutionaries or colonialists, all tend to see the nomadic life as little better than animal: risky, dangerous, poor, a way of life only for those with no better choices. That is not how Tibetans see the land and livelihoods that arise from their mobile use of a wide range of landscapes, from the wetlands and lake shores up to the bare rock of the high passes. Where even the hardiest yaks cannot graze are the cliffs, caves and mountains of the yogis, the meditation spaces of those who set aside all routine ambitions for their uninterrupted programme of experimental discovery of the nature of mind. China has persistently described most of Tibet as wasteland, especially the mountains, unless redeemed by mining. To Tibetans those wild places have been where one may fully experience the depths of the human mind, uncluttered by distractions. Innumerable popular songs attest to this, perhaps the most famous being those of the yogi Milarepa, whose spontaneous songs of realization were sung in a cave high in the mountains. This is the paradox at the heart of Tibetan culture: in order to become fully human, to realize the power of mind, and transcend habitual limitations, one must retreat to the mountains, and then re-enter society. The gur songs, filled

tibet in its own right   with imagery of the animals, birds, forests, skies and mountains, call the urban comfort-seeker away, to find a deep inner happiness in the fearless, solitary encounter with the nature of mind, which is the nature of all phenomena. While only a minority of Tibetans fully abandoned society, to go within, those who did were supported by nearby villagers and were revered. The Tibetan culture heroes’ call to flee convention is one of the great recurring popular themes of Tibet, challenging all that is normal and familiar. A nineteenthcentury hermit, Shabkar, challenges his hearers: They have wandered around mountain hermitages like the sun and moon / They are fearless, like the lion / They are detached, like the vulture / I bow to people like that. As for you laypeople in this village home / Your anger burns like fire in a hearth / Your lust boils like tea in a cauldron / Your delusion spreads everywhere like smoke / Your greed is unyielding, like a mouth filled with food / Your envy pierces, like a watchdog’s fangs/ Your arrogance grunts, like the household cow / And you indulge in suffering as if it were food and drink / Hasn’t it been crazy to stay so at ease / In your homeland, an ocean of suffering? If you go somewhere / Go to an enchanting solitary place like the holy forefathers did / There is a wondrous, solitary forest / On a mountain whose gurgling streams fall among rocks / Where many kinds of fruit / Are as plentiful as a householder’s wheat and barley. Ignorance, obscuring emotions, and the five poisons / Are as rare as a householder’s gold and silver / Qualities of profound experiences and realisation / Grow like a householder’s bounteous crop / Haven’t you been deluded to stay so obstinately / In the blazing pit of a household? / Wouldn’t it be good if you stayed instead / In the cool shade of a mountain hermitage?12

Modernity has long turned its back on such urgings, opting instead for speed, urban density and endless distractions. Tangtong Gyalpo was a hermit and a miner; a spiritual virtuoso and blacksmith; a meditator and a doer. Tangtong Gyalpo, whose name means ‘king of the empty plain’, wrangled worldly gods and demons to subdue them, in order to proceed with mining iron and building iron chain bridges. He is probably Tibet’s most famous miner and

  spoiling tibet manufacturer of heavy iron chains used to bridge Tibetan rivers. By the time his long life ended in 1485 ‘Tangtong had constructed fifty-eight iron bridges, sixty wooden bridges, and 118 ferries.’13 He is famous in Tibet as a subduer of earth spirits, a tamer of wild minds, an engineer who made life easier for people divided by raging rivers that cut gorges as fast as continental collision could raise the Tibetan Plateau into the sky. He is famous also as the creator of Tibetan opera. But he is revered for more than these accomplishments. Tangtong Gyalpo was no orthodox lama, nor a wearer of monastic robes. He was an unorthodox yogi, who returned to society after going deep within the mind, during intensive retreat.14 Having awakened, he sought as many means as possible to awaken others from their delusions, even spontaneous behaviour that transgressed social norms, and building all those bridges. The tangible services he did society by mining iron, forging it into heavy chain links, hauling hundreds of man-loads of chain lengths to remote spots all over Tibet, were outward signs of a classic motivation: to be a bridge for others to cross the raging torrent of suffering and conflicting emotions, and awaken to the nature of reality. In Tibetan Buddhism there is a kindness to others that is even greater than bridging rivers, making lives physically easier, and that is to ease minds into fully awakening. That is how the biographers of Tangtong Gyalpo put it. The lineage of reincarnate lamas that followed were the Chaksampa Tulkus, the iron-bridge-builder lamas. Tangtong Gyalpo was famous equally for his operas, and his outrageous behaviour was endlessly retold. The thread running through all his energetic activity was the intention to awaken others to the existential condition. As a young man, deep in meditation, a vision came to him of a large crowd of people crossing an expanse of water on iron bridges and ferries. He took this to symbolize that he would be able to save all living beings from the four rivers of birth, old age, sickness and death. Moreover, he would liberate them from the sufferings of the ocean of samsara by means of the ferries and bridges of skilful means and wisdom.15

tibet in its own right   Tangtong’s own phrase was jangchub kyi gyulam chagsam, ‘ironbridge pathways to enlightenment’. To a trickster such as Tangtong Gyalpo, mining was a drama, the outward enactment of the inner drama of taming the mind by going deeper than the surface layer of confused concepts and surges of conflicting emotions, to discover how all phenomena, inner and outer, mental and material, exist. He was above all a tamer of minds, beginning with taming, confronting, threatening and subduing the earth and water spirits, ‘without whose permission the violation of soil and the removal of its wealth from the area would have been a dangerous act’. The traverse of a bridge is between limens, riverbanks, a liminal act in which all that is normal melts away. The bridge crossing concentrates the mind, brings it into the present, which, in the Tibetan traditions of mind training, is the first step towards taming the mind, and ultimately awakening fully. His bridges were theatres, suspended above the raging waters, reminding all who crossed that life is a perilous journey, requiring mindfulness in each step, rather than the dullness of habit. To step onto a swaying bridge is to leave the seeming solidity of land, clambering through the air on planks and logs held from crashing only by chain links the thickness of the wrist of an 8-year-old child, which is how Tangtong defined his specifications. Staging these theatrical bridges was a major undertaking. The iron ore was mined in Bhutan and the far east of the Tibetan Plateau, far from where bridges were needed. Each chain link was so heavy that a man could lift and carry no more than fifteen connected links. In what is now Bhutan, ‘blacksmiths forged seven thousand links of iron for him. By the time he returned to Tibet he had accumulated fourteen hundred manloads of iron chain, each composed of fifteen links.’16 These were then carried by men as far as western Tibet and Kashmir, a thousand kilometres away, and more. Tangtong Gyalpo was not only a gifted iron- and woodworker, builder of bridges, monasteries and shrines, he was also a metalworker

  spoiling tibet in gold and silver, making many statues of the Buddha and of bodhis­ attvas. ‘By the end of his life, Tangtong is said to have made many hundreds of large and small images from precious materials, five thousand large and small clay images, innumerable paintings, and to have built 120 assembly halls and temples.’17 Tangtong’s metalwork was singled out for special revolutionary revenge during the Cultural Revolution. The gold and silver statues inlaid with turquoise, red coral, amber and lapis lazuli were superstitious abominations to be smashed, yet the metals were held to be the product of honest proletarian sweat, so the metal images were taken by Red Guards for small payments according to their weight.18 Many of the bridges, stupas and monasteries Tangtong Gyalpo built survived for centuries, lasting long enough to be destroyed in China’s Cultural Revolution. A few survived even this. China’s revolution promised lasting human happiness, through violently inverting the class structure, ruled by an institutionalized party in government, whose power was, by definition, proof that the revolution had attained its goals. To Tibetans, it seemed improbable that abiding happiness could arise from liquidating landlords and declaring a new class in charge, whose power was in fact monopolized by the Party. From a Tibetan perspective a simple inversion of a dualistic good/bad, upper class/lower class system is unlikely to produce lasting happiness. Tangtong Gyalpo sought to overcome the deepest sources of human unhappiness, and flouted social convention to do so. He was a divine madman, willing to risk a beating if it would lead to people awakening. Tangtong behaved like a revolutionary, challenging all givens, habits, conventions and the status quo. He was frequently beaten up by guardians of ‘the normal’. His fifty-eight iron bridges made tangible the vow taken by all who enter the Buddhist path, the vow of the bodhisattva: ‘May I be protector for those without one, a guide for all travellers on the way; may I be a bridge, a boat, a ship for all who wish to cross the water.’

tibet in its own right   Modern imaginaries of Tibet Since the highest peaks on earth collect water from the sky, they are best left alone, categorized as natural wilderness to remain uninhabited. Their slopes, thousands of metres above sea level, and the endless green plateaus of the mobile pastoralists, through which Asia’s riverhead streams flow, should all be as pristine, unused and as uninhabited as possible. That is current official policy in China, so precious is water for lowland China. Yet the high peaks and the pasture lands are rich in minerals, and China has an insatiable need for the raw materials that make it the world’s factory. The peaks, slopes and high plains below, and especially the riverbeds, are rich in gold and many other minerals needed by Chinese industry. Geologically, the Tibetan Plateau is young enough to have been uplifted kilometres into the sky quite recently, in a metallogenic orogeny that concentrated metal ores in rich seams. The Tibetan Plateau is also old enough for the molten magma chambers to have cooled slowly, taking as much as a million years to cool so gradually that molten minerals could separate and concentrate, and then be exposed to the surface by later weathering. Tibet is now shovel-ready. So this is a book about China’s hunger for the mineral wealth of Tibet, and its drive to extract those resources, whether Tibetans agree or not. Because Tibetans are so severely punished if they do object, the book has a lopsided character, as if all agency is in Chinese hands, making the whole story sinocentric. Yet Tibetans, despite the cost, do speak, making their true feelings known. Wherever possible, Tibetan voices appear in this narrative. When China reconceptualizes Tibet into mineraliferous zones, pastoral production and exclusion zones, into useful and useless, endowed and waste, it follows the standard operating procedures of modernity worldwide, though with certain Chinese characteristics. Modernity promises a rational, secular life of comfort, even opulence. Modernity’s efficiency is grounded in a division of labour. Not only must uneducated people accept a lower role in the global division

  spoiling tibet ‘Both sky and earth belong to the government’ There is a big mountain in Nyima township called ‘Drung’. On the right side of that mountain the government is mining. When the government started mining, local Tibetans protested in the name of protection of the environment. Local nomads consider Drung mountain a holy mountain and they don’t want to allow the area to be dug up. The matter was decided by a provincial government department, which said that children of Nyima township don’t have to pay school fees, and it is said that they made regular handouts of RMB2000 [US$320] to each household. At that time I was young and so I don’t know in detail how things happened. Even though the government granted such privileges, locals still said that they would not allow digging on any side of the mountain. Later the provincial and county officials intimidated them, saying that the government is very kindly giving out money and providing free school for their children, because both sky and earth belong to the government, so if they continue to protest then it is not difficult for them to imprison many people. Locals got frightened and could not put a stop to the mining. It started around 1980 and they are still mining. … The cash payments have been stopped since 2001 but we are still exempt from school fees. … Trucks take the mineral to a processing centre in the county town. It looks like coal and it is called ‘golden mud’ in Tibetan and ‘ten’ in Chinese. The factory is called Yi Langtring in Chinese, and it is huge. It probably covers an area of over 10 mu [two-thirds of a hectare]. I don’t know how many people work inside; it is said that there are some Tibetan workers. There are uniformed soldiers on guard on either side of the main gate and it seems like only concerned people can go inside. Amdo Golok Machu (Qinghai Guoluo Huanghe in Chinese), March 2007

tibet in its own right   of labour, global landscapes too must specialize the labour they do, according to their factor endowments. In China’s view, Tibet is unnaturally and dangerously cold, its air so thin that one might die at any moment, and the land is at best minimally productive. The one exception, which redeems what is largely wasteland, and has been named as wasteland in Chinese for many centuries, is the mineral deposits. These ores alone make Tibet attractive, despite the twentieth-century failures in Tibet of Chinese agriculture, exhaustion of logging and the failure to commercialize nomadic meat production. Mineral ores are attractive precisely because they are concentrated in a specific area, and are not dispersed throughout the earth. Economic ores are by definition exceptional, uncharacteristic, the result of complex causes and conditions arising over many millions of years. In modernity, their destiny is to become enclaves, into which is poured investment capital, technology and an imported, educated workforce; from which come metals or energy, fungibly transforming into accumulations of wealth. Thus is Tibet completely reimagined and remade. From a whole landscape of pastoral and crop production surrounded by mountains of meditative experiments in the sciences of mind, Tibet is now valued for its enclaves of minerals, and its glacial water sources. The enclaves of high mineral or water production, being far from the lowland markets where the demand is, are joined in networks of transport corridors, highways, railways, fibre optics, pipelines, high-voltage lines from hydro-dams high in the mountain rivers, and urban centres created for the new immigrant workforces. These nerve centres of modernity are what matter; all else is hinterland, an invisible rural backwater of poverty, neglect and bare subsistence. The highly selective gaze of the developmentalist Chinese state sees only the nodes of accumulation, while the rural subsistence economy blurs into an unseen background. The productivist ideology of the world’s factory has no time for the extensive, integrated land use of old Tibet. All spaces of the Tibetan Plateau are either intensive enclaves of development or are invisible background.

  spoiling tibet This switch of perspective is so routine and familiar that it is hard to imagine any other way of seeing the land. Attempts to see the land through Tibetan eyes usually veer off into romantic suppositions about harmony with nature, an otherworldly Buddhist reverence for life, saving worms from the spade and the plough. That is just the obverse of the dominant instrumental view. These standard dualisms are not generative of insight, or anything fresh, still less of an emic perspective, seen through Tibetan eyes.

Mining into history China is deeply shaped by its history, by grand narratives of past humiliation, current renaissance and future greatness.19 This triumphal history of the conquest of nature, and of all obstacles, climaxes in the creation of the most advanced, civilized and exemplary class of humans, who should be emulated by all: the Chinese Communist Party.20 Tibetans compulsorily have a role in this march of history; if they were omitted, it would weaken China’s onward progress and stain China’s reputation. Backward, timeless peoples, for their own good, must be brought into history, in the hope that eventually, after what the Party always calls ‘arduous struggle’, they too become modern, even worthy of Party membership. However, since history is unidirectional, a ladder to be climbed, one must start at the bottom. There are no short cuts. Starting on the lowest rung means mining, quarrying, resource extraction, becoming a supplier of raw materials for the world’s factory, in lowland Chinese cities. Initially, in China’s central plans, there will be extraction but little mineral processing in Tibet, little value-adding or manufacturing, little employment of uneducated, illiterate Tibetans. Very little economic benefit will stay in Tibet. That’s what it means to start at the bottom. To Marxists, and post-revolutionary Chinese central planners alike, this is an objective law of history. In reality, there is no such objective law, no mandatory entry-level portal into modernity. Not only were Tibetans traditionally mobile,

tibet in its own right   mobility is also a defining characteristic of contemporary modernity. China’s conquest made local nomads global. It decanted Tibetans into global circulation, with the most adept and fluid of Tibetans, the lamas, the most mobile. With no home territory to defend, literally or, as awakened ones, figuratively, these irrepressible meditation masters have discovered, by trial and error, how to transform modern minds. They are the contemporary world’s service nomads, to borrow a term invented by Yuri Slezkine to describe the Jews of Tsarist Russia.21 By skilfully leading the machers of modernity to awakening, by playfully liberating the minds of film-makers, artists, therapists and opinion leaders of modernity, these highly nomadic lamas now do on a global stage what they once did solely for the Tibetans. This is not entry-level stuff. The lamas meet the highest of human needs in Maslow’s hierarchy, the need for self-actualization as a non-self capable of living a meaningful life uncluttered by the compulsions of I. The yogis, crazy wisdom lineage lamas, learned khenpos and geshes, easing self-obsessed narcissists into spaciousness, now circulate globally. It is not hard to imagine an economic future for Tibet based not on mining, but on its global attraction to the mobile modern seekers of an awakened life.

Extraction and distraction: twin pillars of China’s Tibet Now China pins all its assimilationist hopes on two industries with the capacity to modernize Tibet: tourism and mining. Mass domestic tourism is concentrated so far in towns and scenic spots with convenient airports and highways. Lhasa has become a destination that confirms one as a modern Chinese citizen, consuming Tibet as a packaged product. Most Han Chinese arriving in Tibet are tourists, in such numbers – around 15 million a year on official figures – that the built environment of Tibet is overwhelmed, the most sacred places deluged with happy snappers. Traditionally, Tibetan towns were small. A largely nomadic population built mostly monasteries, for their sons and daughters to practise full time the

  spoiling tibet path to enlightenment. China says development is the answer to all the problems of Tibet, and development comes down to the two ‘pillar industries’ that are, for the first time, generating serious wealth for Chinese enterprises based in Tibet. Mining and tourism, in their quite separate locations, both encroach on the power places, the landscapes of awakening. In the tourism marketing aimed at urban Han Chinese customers, Tibet is a timeless and pristine land: mining is never mentioned. In development economics, urban centres are the hubs, while mines are remote spokes. But to Tibetans the land is all foreground, the means to enlightenment, whether it is a cave, a mountain, a lake, a monastery or an urban temple blessed by past yogis. China’s Tibet policy has two thrusts: security and development. Clamping down on protests against mining and other intrusions into Tibetan lifeworlds is the consistent approach to securing Tibet in the short term, an official preoccupation so strong that it can seem to be the sole approach. But the policy of central leaders, enunciated many times, is that security crackdowns are the short-term response, while development is the long-term answer to all the problems of Tibet. Mining and tourism are the future.

Enriching whom? It has taken five decades of geologizing to identify the mineral secrets of the Tibetan mountains, to build the extractive infrastructure of railways, highways, new towns, power stations and thoroughly mapped mine sites, ready for intensive extraction. The era of exploitation is about to begin, in a way that has never been seen before in Tibet. It has taken China more than sixty years to get to know Tibet, locate the treasures it always believed could be had, and gear up to exploit them. Yet the minerals to be extracted will make minimal contribution to the demands of the world’s factory; the size of the mining industry will never be big enough to become a pillar industry that secures Tibet for China; and the wealth generated by mining

tibet in its own right   will not enrich Tibetan communities nearby, nor trickle down to the Chinese masses, or even remain in China. The mining will be done by mining companies that, even if state-owned, are effectively controlled by managements adept at transferring their wealth to safe havens, for private consumption. This is perhaps the deepest irony. Mao’s dreams of Tibet making China rich are coming true in an era of primitive accumulation of wealth by an elite who publicly espouse central planning, nationbuilding, securing the borders, state investment in remote areas and building pillar industries at public expense, but who in practice subvert those very plans and capture wealth for themselves. The rent-seeking senior cadres whose sons, daughters and business partners monopolize the wealth crated by mining Tibet are able, in the name of security and development, to direct huge state capital expenditure to Tibet, to establish the infrastructure essential to profitable extractive enclaves. It is this combination of bond-financed public expenditure and privatized gain that makes exploitation of Tibet likely.

Tibetan resistance Tibetans see their mountains as sacred, as the necessary wild places wherein the mind may be tamed and realized. They see Chinese miners as bandits out to rob Tibet of its natural wealth. Wherever possible, they try to rush the bandits, and in some places, where miners had few protectors in the local government, they have succeeded in driving the bandits away. Tibetans have died defending mountains and pastures against mining. Four were shot and killed in Sharchu Gyashoe village of Tromtar township in Kandze prefecture in 2010, while protesting a further expansion of gold mining by Chinese companies in the mountains on the eastern edges of the Tibetan Plateau.22 They protest the environmental and social impacts of mining on land, wildlife and society, but their objections are wider. Tibetans

  spoiling tibet ‘I don’t know if they really have permission’ It has been only about one year since mining started at Zapu, but in other places it has been three or four years. I don’t know which office they are from. The miners wear uniforms like Chinese soldiers and construction workers and they are all Chinese. Some Tibetan labourers work in mining but they are not allowed to work at the actual mining site where the minerals are packed; they only do transportation. The mountain in Zapu is holy. It is called Terlung Chuksum. It is said that due to mining, there were many hailstorms that destroyed the crops. …The county probably gave permission but I don’t know if they really have permission. In any case, locals don’t have any power, no one could say anything against whatever the Chinese do in our place; they can only talk about it among themselves. Since Zapu is a holy mountain, there have been hailstorms like never before. It is said that they take out gold and diamonds. Tibetans are not even allowed into the site. But there are Tibetans working for the mining company in our native place and they get paid 25–30 yuan per day (US$4–5). There are over a hundred nomad households and it is their herding ground. Households of our village also herd our livestock there. One group of nomads have moved their tents to the other side of mountain, but it is no use because it is said that they will have to move from there also, though it is not yet known where they would be moved. …There was only a horse trail to the mining site but then these Chinese came, they examined the mountain and discovered the mine and so they built a road up to near the mining site. … We farmers and nomads live our lives even without roads on the mountain. The road has some benefit for us now, but it is said that the nomads have to move, so if they don’t live there any more then what is the use of road! They made it for mining, not for us. Local Tibetans want to stop it but they could not. According to educated people, our environment is getting damaged heavily and the elders are saying that we are losing the fertility of our land and if the holy mountain is destroyed then there would be disaster in the future. Namling county, Shigatse, west of Lhasa (Rikaze Nanmulin in Chinese), July 2007

tibet in its own right   object to theft, especially when the costs of the loss are borne, for decades and generations to come, by those who inherit the despoiled landscapes, toxic tailings dams and mullock heaps. Tibet is on the verge of being spoiled. The ongoing disempowerment of Tibetans has reached a point where people are willing to burn themselves to death, as a distinctively Tibetan way of energizing the communities of the plateau to stand strong against theft engineered at the highest level by a predatory state. Since 2008 not even the most intensive crackdowns have silenced the Tibetans, whose unhappiness runs deep. Security and development may go together in the minds of China’s central planners, but Tibetans see only contradiction. The relentless emphasis on security above all else means that Tibetans are excluded altogether from decision-making about mining, or active involvement in mining when it happens. The extractive enclaves are zones of exclusion for Tibetans. The exclosure of the nomads, and intensification of mining, transform the land, the body of Tibet. China is ending extensive, low-impact, mobile ways of life that have sustained, over centuries, a use economy based on partnership with yaks, sheep and other animals, which made the entire Tibetan Plateau below the peaks humanly habitable. China’s policy of banning grazing, while still allowing mining, in fragile landscapes, in extreme climates, converts extensive land use to intensive extraction enclaves, turns a use economy into an exchange economy, as Marx would have put it, and depopulates the Tibetan Plateau, concentrating both Tibetans and immigrants into towns and cities. Tibet is now destined to become like everywhere else: a network of mining enclaves, towns, cities, highways and transport corridors, part of the global commodity chain based on intensive reliance on capital investment, fossil fuel energy use, and the technologies of intensive extraction. The move from extensive to intensive, subsistence to productivism, mobile to sedentary, sustainable to non-renewable extractive, on a plateau that is close to 2 per cent of the land surface of the planet, should concern all of us.

  spoiling tibet How can China decide between the competing merits of mining copper in Tibet or Zambia? Unless there is a common denominator, such decisions are impossible. It has become fashionable among environmentalists to monetize the environmental services provided by a river, or a landscape or perhaps an entire plateau the size of western Europe, as a way of staking a claim, in a monetized world, for nature. A preliminary attempt has been made for Qinghai, bundling together all the naturally occurring services, from carbon sequestration by forest and grassland, to water supply for downstream China.23 The preliminary valuation of Tibetan ecosystem goods and services provided by the Qinghai forests, grasslands, scrub/shrub lands, wetlands, lakes, ice and snow, urban green space and bare lands is between US$12 billion and US$123 billion. Such figures don’t compute the unfigurable, such as human uses of the wild places of Tibet, in the mountains where the mineral deposits are. The mountains of Tibet were defined by communist revolutionaries as wasteland, to be conquered by human will. In postrevolutionary-reform China, they became ‘China’s Number One Water Tower’, the glaciers symbolizing purity, glistening far above the accelerating speed of developing lowland China. Despite decades of heroic geologizing by work units of the guerrillas of socialist construction, very little of the mountains had been mined by the start of this century. The extractive economy that sprawled across the Tibetan Plateau, in gold-rush waves, focused on the river beds and surrounding pastures, destroying all before it. The yogi and the commissar inhabit different, incommensurable subjective realities. To the yogi, life is not a struggle to conquer nature or one’s enemies, or to simply fill in time with endless online chat. Life is acceptable, even joyous, as it is, whatever the circumstances. The commissars take it as a natural right, and a historic inevitability, that Chinese should and soon will consume natural resources with the same intensity as Europeans or Americans. That it would take the minerals and energy of two planet Earths to live like Americans is brushed aside.

tibet in its own right   Tibet’s territorial charisma Buddhism, and specifically Tibetan Buddhism, is re-entering China. There are now millions of Han Chinese devoted to the Tibetan lamas. There is a deep spiritual hunger in China (jingshen weiji), for guidance as to how life can be made more meaningful than the endless consumer pursuit of endless wants. Anthropologists who have studied the increasing appeal of Tibetan Buddhism to Han Chinese note that it appeals especially to ‘those who have higher incomes and social mobility, such as media professionals, artists, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, mid- and high-level administrators, corporate managers, university professors, and Party members.’24 These are the opinion leaders, the shapers of culture, the exemplars others are encouraged to copy. They have had opportunity to experience the pleasures of consumption, and find them lacking in abiding satisfaction. It is hardly surprising that the sincere Han practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, willing to set aside other pursuits for the intensive practice of Buddhist mental training, are to be found among the educated and affluent. Buddhism has always appealed to those who have it all and find it wanting. The historic entry of Buddhism into many Asian civilizations, including China, was led by courts and kings. Tibetan Buddhism has long been influential in Beijing, especially during the long Qing dynasty (1648–1911), when high lamas were invited to make the long journey to the capital, to bless the emperor and his reign. Several Qing emperors were sincere Buddhist practitioners, whose motives cannot be reduced simply to manipulative hegemonic soft-power diplomacy. Awakening is natural, even inevitable. Emperors can awaken. Yet guidance that is effective in overcoming the force of habits that obscure awakening is hard to find and must be seized, wherever it can be found. The discovery that awakening is not the dawning of a new world but a fresh, radical return to the familiar world gives those who awaken a deep confidence that, in the midst of confusion, awakening is present, and

  spoiling tibet will prevail. Yet obscurations are also persistent, none more so than the inborn privileging of I over other, subject before object. One may have access to many texts, teachings and teachers, yet still remain perplexed. So one must seek out a teacher capable of perceiving the blockage, able to dispel it, through skilful choice of words or more direct methods. There are no national boundaries on where such a teacher, rich in means of pointing to the nature of mind, is to be found. Tibet is fast becoming China’s treasure house of authentic, transformative Buddhism. If it is possible, in Milwaukee or Moscow, to point out the entire path to enlightenment and how to deal with the innumerable distractions on the way, it can be done in Chinese cities too. In fact, many of the lamas who have discovered by close interaction with their modern audiences how to work around the delusions of their hearers adopt similar approaches when invited to speak to Chinese audiences. Bookshops in China are laden with popular translations of teachings by many lamas, who earlier had the opportunity to read the minds of devotees in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, before it became possible to reach audiences in China. The Gyalwa Karmapa has achieved the extraordinarily status of living in India, yet being officially recognized by China’s leaders, as well as by his myriad Tibetan and Chinese followers, as the authentic holder of the lineage of the Karmapas. Having grown up under Chinese tutelage, this young master, born in 1985, is fluent in Chinese and Tibetan, and increasingly in English. His teachings circulate widely. How do the lamas turn the minds of the thousands of Tibetans and Han Chinese camped on remote hillsides in obscure corners of Tibet?25 Realization requires complete withdrawal from society, from projects, distractions, habits, obligations and expectations, to retreat in solitude, in the mountains. In retreat there are many methods for wearing out even the most persistent of habits, for collapsing the privileging of self, for going more deeply inwards and awakening. The myriad methods of the tantric path are usually assembled, by a retreat master, as a schedule of practices to be done throughout the

tibet in its own right   waking hours, and even in sleep too. The schedule is exhausting, since the intention is to exhaust even the most stubbornly innate, inborn delusions of a subject presumed to be different to objectively existing others. In all retreats the landscapes of solitude matter. This is more than getting away from the usual pressures of family and society. The landscape is not the mere absence of humanity; it is the positive inspiration to realise that all is as is, as it arises nakedly, before thought and habit ascribe attributes and labels. The landscape, just as it is, in the instant it appears, is no longer out there, an object to be viewed; it becomes the ground of all being, foreground rather than background. The one who sees, the act of seeing and the seen dissolve; distance between subject and object collapses. There is no existential difference between me and you. This is evident in the songs of realization of past masters, sung spontaneously from their retreat caves, such as those of Godrakpa, ‘the hermit of Go cliffs’, in the twelfth century. In successive verses he charts the dawning of deep inner strengths, almost always drawing on landscape as his metaphor. ‘While practicing alone / like the rhinoceros who is king of wild beasts / an experience of being happy alone dawned. / That was the birth of certainty in the meaning. // While wandering in isolated mountain ranges / like the lion who is king of the beasts of prey / an experience of fearless mind dawned. / That was the mastery of great confidence.’26 Godrakpa’s mindscapes are populated with animals not seen in Tibet for a very long time. All Tibetans have heard of the ‘Copper-coloured Mountain’. The colour of copper ore is everyday knowledge, yet the name does not signify a ‘natural resource’ awaiting mining, or a geological prospect to be mapped. It is a pure land, accessible only to those of pure vision, whose purity of mind comes from rigorous training in the mental disciplines of bracketing the self and collapsing any distance between self and other, subject and object. It is as real as anything on earth, and as illusory. Purification of egocentric mind is achieved through embodied experience of the land, walking or prostrating

  spoiling tibet the length of a pilgrimage circuit, body-length by body-length. The land is the foreground of enlightenment, not incidental background, or an unproductive wasteland to be traversed. There may be similarities with the French concept of terroir, an untranslatable term that means far more than land, or district. To the producers of the best French wines, terroir is the sum total of landscape, soil, sun, rain, slope and the winemaker’s intimate connection with everything conducive to an exceptional crop and exceptional vintage, including the subtlest, subjective indications, to which a winemaker responds with both delicacy and decisiveness. To Tibetans, cultivating mind rather than grapes, there is a similar fusion of land and mind, outer and inner signs that are to be apprehended and acted on. If China is the world’s factory, we could say the mineraliferous mountains of Tibet are the world’s most consistent source of cures to a global addiction to speed, stuff and mindless connectivity. Communism decanted the yogis of Tibet into the modern world, who are now doing their work of encouraging enlightenment worldwide. A Chinese anthropologist of Tibet has recently observed that physical landscape or natural environment is not a background before which human actions take place; instead it is a foreground, or an integral part of an event-making process in an entire eco­ system. The Tibetan word for nature is rangbyung, referring to the realm inclusive of both animate beings and inanimate things. The relationship between mindscape and landscape may have started with the manner in which humans projected their religion and cultural meanings onto the physical landscape in a remote time; however, after thousands of years, the landscape has become the mindscape itself. Nature is thus not independent from culture. The psyche of humans and the spirit of the landscape mutually penetrate each other. At an unspecified time of the ancient, mythological past, Tibetans marked the current sacred and spiritised mountains; however, from that time on, the marked landscape has also marked Tibetans who have lived there for countless centuries. There is mutuality of place and people. Places become emplotted with

tibet in its own right   human narratives, while humans become emplotted with the rules of the spirit world embodied in the landscape.27

Becoming the mountain The snow mountains that encircle Tibet and criss-cross the plateau, and constitute the Tibetans’ emic definition of Tibet, have long had uses crucial to Tibetan civilization. Meditators maintained their mental training practices right through the intensive persecution of the Cultural Revolution. In the caves and cliff faces of remote mountainsides, they continue today. It is in such places of solitude that it is possible to look deep into the nature of mind, and return to society transformed. Away from all distractions, habits, the call of family, society, duty and convention, it is possible to cut through the most ingrained, inborn biases and beliefs in self, and awaken to the full power of mind. That is the consistent, insistent message of the culture heroes of the Tibetans. Milarepa may be the best-known such hermit, whose fame and magnetism grew the more he withdrew from society, but his spontaneous songs of realization, familiar to nearly all Tibetans, are only some of the voices coming from the mountains. They challenge their hearers to abandon the struggle to get ahead, through selfish striving, and face reality, alone, with only the wind, clouds, forests and wild animals around to reveal reality. With utmost persuasiveness, with every metaphor that comes to mind, they urge all who lead conventional lives to take to the sacred places, the hidden lands, and there discover the existential condition. Some yogis never leave their retreat, but most return to society, with a deep inner strength that enables them to become leaders and exemplars, revered by all for their impartial leadership qualities. Having faced all fears, having offered their bodies to any demon that may desire to devour them, they are untroubled by adversity, undistracted by success. They see the potential in everyone. They don’t play favourites, or flatter the powerful. They resolve disputes

  spoiling tibet among nomads about trespassing cattle, not by authority but by persuasion, honesty, impartiality and force of personality.28 They put daily life in a wider frame, a constant reminder that there is more to life than seeking gain at the expense of others. They cup one hand to an ear and pour forth songs of place, groundedness and sanity, to a world maddened by speed and obsessed with accumulation. These are the songs that renew Tibetan veneration of sacred mountains, goddess lakes, rivers filled with water spirits; that make Tibetans hesitate to hunt wild animals. There are no commandments imprinted on Tibetan minds, only exemplars of authenticity, immediacy and the ground truth of fully experiencing whatever arises. The ecological services provided by 6 million Tibetan people extensively spread across the whole plateau are guaranteed by the ongoing lineages of retreatants who transcend normal neurosis, and return to remind everyone what truly matters in life. There is nothing remotely romantic about those who go within. They are not on a quest to discover a nebulous mother earth. They experience, as a lived reality, the philosophical insights which Tibetans have written hundreds of thousands of books about. They train in the power of the mind, to discover the sources of all frustration and dissatisfaction, and cut through all attachments. The Dalai Lama calls them scientists of the mind, experimentally discovering that it is possible to transcend hard-wired inborn selfish prejudice that favours me over you. No one has yet dared to monetize their yogic services, to the land and people of Tibet, to biodiversity conservation, to the billion people in Asia who daily drink Tibetan water, to the world. Their number is small, but their influence is great. In Tibetan they are called by many names, including naljorpa, togden, repa, lhaba, gomchen among others. Despite the intensive repression of religious freedom in the established monasteries of Tibet, these yogis and god-men wander throughout contemporary Tibet, their long hair the outward sign of a chosen liminal life in but not of society. Like water, they slide

tibet in its own right   past obstacles, including the surveillance state. They are not a lost tradition of a past golden age. They live among us today. These are meditation practitioners living under the radar of the state, in the eyes of cadres the epitome of irredeemable backwardness, best left alone. Tibetans deeply respect the wandering yogis, because they speak and live fearlessly, and embody the inner strengths of Tibetan civilization, a strength no apparatus of repression can crush. Their presence, in a cave or in the village marketplace, is a reminder that what matters is not only this life but also the next, not only humans but all mind-possessors. They are a refreshing alternative to Chinese anxieties about security, gain and loss, and the cruelty of a partystate that dwells in a remote mindscape of social engineering and central planning. The influence of these great meditators is out of all proportion to their numbers. Their incalculable value to society, and to maintaining a habitable, productive and sustainable Tibetan Plateau, has not been hazarded by the monetizers of environmental service. The influence of those who retreat to a cave in the snow is pervasive; the benefits they bring, so Tibetans say, are beyond measure. Many Tibetan householders, unable to go into retreat themselves, which usually requires at least three years, do the next best thing, and embark on lengthy, arduous pilgrimages to the mountains and lakes, now threatened by mining. Pilgrimage, like retreat, is meant to be a stepping out of everything homely, predictable and comfortable, taking one’s chances in the remote places that open the door to a more profound reality. Some of the mountains scheduled for mining attract pilgrims in cycles, once every twelve years, who walk a hazardous circuit around the mountain, usually at least three times, even if it takes days without much shelter or food.29 Pilgrimage purifies the mind, if done with the right attitude, as the famous nineteenth-century pilgrim Shabkar explains: For those few months, one should share whatever comes / Good times or bad times / Helping each other as much as possible / Without quarrelling or fighting / Withstanding hardships of cold

  spoiling tibet or hunger, he works well / He pitches tents, unloads and stacks the luggage / Fetches water, collects firewood, and starts up the fire with the bellows / Whatever is needed. When resting or on the move, he eagerly says ‘I’ll do it’. / When he sees bandits, he tries to reason with them / If they don’t listen, he rushes at them, spear in hand/ No question of his losing his own things / He even takes away the bandit’s hoard. 30

Long before the modern invention of the nation-state, Tibetans had the most grounded definitions of themselves as a distinct nation, and the Tibetan plateau as a distinct physical entity. ‘We Tibetans are the tsampa eaters’, they said, referring to the barley, dry roasted and ground into flour which is the staple Tibetan food. ‘Tibet is the land surrounded by mountains’, they said and still say. Those mountains were and are the abodes of gods – which does not make Tibet a magical mystery tour, the antithesis of modernity, a relic of a bygone age a crowded world can no longer afford.

two Gold rush in Tibet

Surface wounds By far the biggest impact that mining has had on Tibet – both the land and its people – has no existence officially. It is gold mining that has most damaged the productive landscapes of Tibet, especially by chewing up and spitting out streams and riverbeds all over the plateau. This has caused grief among Tibetans, alienating them more from China’s ‘civilizing mission’ than any other intervention. The dredging, sluicing, panning, centrifuging, blasting, rechannelling, digging and mercury-poisoning of Tibetan streambeds, small and large, has been so pervasive that it has undermined any trust Tibetans might have been willing to extend to China. Unlike a popular image of China as a tightly controlled state, in which nothing moves unless authorized, what happened across the Tibetan Plateau starting in the 1980s was a Wild West gold rush, which rewarded the most daring or desperate miners willing to thrust Tibetans aside, in a lawless zone beyond the frontier, beyond the reach of the party-state. This gold rush does not show in official statistics. Documentation in this chapter comes in the verbatim testimony of Tibetans, who

  spoiling tibet risked punishment by speaking out when interviewed by professional human rights monitors. Tibetans greatly value pilgrimage to holy places, to purify the mind. While they are on pilgrimage, it is sometimes possible for trained interviewers to approach them, and slowly persuade them to speak their minds, always on condition that their names not be used. Many who were approached dared not speak, having experienced China’s established practice of punishing not only individuals who contradict the Party line, but whole families, whose life chances can be ruined by official vengeance. The standard practice among human rights monitoring agencies worldwide is to accept the responsibility to protect interviewees by concealing names. This convention is followed here. The testimonies below invoke a deep respect for land and living ecosystems; and manifest a deep distress when outsiders despoil lands and habitats, under a blanket immunity that punishes complainers, not despoilers. If ever there was a land cursed by its resource wealth, it is Tibet. The ongoing protests by Tibetan communities, including a wave of Tibetans publicly burning themselves to death, correlate closely with the intrusive impacts of mining. Although the Tibetan issue is usually seen purely as a question of religious freedom and individual rights, an explosive grief has built most strongly in those Tibetan communities closest to extraction sites. One can map the protests, as many who follow reporting of Tibet do, and map the miners, and observe the strong overlap.

Gold rush and rent-seeking Outsiders often suppose mining in Tibet is done by the state, on a big scale, with big impacts. Yet, with exceptions, the large-scale mining that is carried out by big corporations worldwide hardly exists in Tibet, although could happen soon. Instead, it is the gold rushes that do the damage, poisoning both the riverbeds and ethnic relations. Gold rushes worldwide have been notorious for rapaciously

gold rush in tibet   Tibetan voices On the top of the mountain, people with metal fangs Tear off the skeleton of the mountain, Blue sheep Start on the hillside, hawks hover in the sky Unable find a rock to stay on, feathers Shed in the wind On the silent grasslands, those Tracks of wheels, like a scar on a young girl’s face Oppress the vessel of the mountain, while those Irrelevant rocks, exposed Shapeless blood, whiter than milk Drop by drop, flows along With the wound of the hillside. This is part of a poem by Adong Paldothar, a Tibetan inside Tibet who posted to a blogsite and was rapidly censored. This 2011 poem was one of a series called ‘Straying Far from Myself’, which many Tibetan poets contributed to. http://highpeakspureearth.com/2012/ poetry-series-straying-far-from-myself-part-5.

stripping the land, ruining rivers, lawlessly evicting indigenous communities, operating with impunity beyond the frontier, out of the reach of law and state and regulation. Frontiers are not populated by the civil or the civic-minded. Reducing all of China to a single actor makes it easy to write books about ‘China in Africa’ as if ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ are identical, and as if there are no competing and antithetical groups, corporations or state ministries in China. The populist alarm that ‘the Chinese are coming’ is based on a simplistic assumption that China remains a monolith, of a single mind and single intent.1 That ‘blue ant’ view may have once been true, but not for decades. So we need a more nuanced, close-up look at the shifting, complex, multi-level drivers of what actually happens. The forces at work may be undocumented, both because the gaze of the state fails to register

  spoiling tibet their unregistered intrusions into Tibetan spaces, and also because the state chooses to look away. Officially – in the provincial statistical yearbooks relied on by central planners and multilateral institutions – there is almost no mining in Tibet, especially in central Tibet or the Tibet Autonomous Region, the southern half of the Tibetan Plateau. Other than limestone for cement, gravel and stone for road-making and building, the only mining that shows up in TAR official statistics is chromite, on a scale so modest that it is now accounts for no more than 3 per cent of China’s chromium use, the rest being imported, as Chapter 3 shows in detail. Rent-seeking by local cadres has afflicted gold mining in Tibet. It was never on the project lists of central planners, and was left to local governments to extract the rents. Thus we have a Wild West with distinctly Chinese characteristics. Far from being a lawless frontier, as in the myth of the nineteenth-century American west, government has been present throughout, playing a wide range of roles, all of them predatory. At township, county, prefectural and provincial levels the many layers of government, and the many vertically structured national ministries with staff at local levels, all had the opportunity to extract rents, and to repress the protests of Tibetan communities that had to bear the social and environmental costs of mining. The roles available to cadres staffing local government are many, and ongoing, in remote areas where wealth creation through mining is the only opportunity for accumulation, in the absence of other value-adding enterprises. The national master narrative of wealth creation plays out in remote parts of the Tibetan Plateau as the absence of opportunity. Cadres opportunistically grab what they can, partly in response to the pressures on them from above. China’s famous opening up and process of reform, initiated by Deng Xiao­ ping, were also a dramatic downshifting, to local government, of responsibility for financing and running education, health, welfare and poverty alleviation. In counties with growing economies this was

gold rush in tibet   ‘Suwa village did not receive even one yuan’ They say that a big Chinese businessman signed an agreement with the government and his company is mining. Even we don’t know where he is from. It is a coal mine in between Suwa Village and Suwa monastery and the site is in a line across the mountain. People were not consulted at all. They just went ahead and started mining. I don’t know exactly but the elders were saying that the businessman was working in collaboration with a department of the Ngaba county government. From the past to the present, Suwa village did not receive even one yuan, but it seems like some government officials are reaping benefit from it. It is only about half a kilometre from the village. There is environment pollution and it is dangerous to human life. For example, children go to watch and one child even lost his life. The mining has created lot of pits around the place, which many cattle fall into and die. Then, all the black stone and earth waste falls on the farmland, and crops do not grow well. Rainfall has decreased, and pests and drought ruin the harvest and it is a big problem. People led by the village leader appealed many times to the township government but they are not looking into the matter and no one is listening and so it is probably the people who will lose. There are so many workers, I think there are over 200 people. They have built houses near the mining site and are living there permanently. The houses are not big and beautiful. Four to five people could sleep in one room. There are many vehicles, motorbikes, machinery, drills etc., about 100 in total, that I saw and it seems like there is a lot of equipment inside the mountain. They shift about 100 trucks of coal in the morning and evening. It is said that they transport it via Ngaba county town and on to some Chinese city. Kham Ngaba (Sichuan Aba prefecture, Aba county in Chinese), June 2007

  spoiling tibet manageable, but in poor areas, including almost all of rural Tibet, local cadres had added responsibilities without added revenues to finance them. The national policy that did open new prospects in remote areas was TVE – township and village enterprises – a policy encouraging rural industrialization, such as processing of local farm products, or mineral extraction. An influx of gold miners was an irresistible opportunity. The most basic, entry-level chance for low-level cadres was simply to look the other way, for a fee, as poor Han Chinese miners swarmed into a Tibetan district.

Chewing the land for gold However, much more organized, systematized and even franchised opportunities for rent-seeking were available, all based on the funda­ mental official duty of cadres at township or village level, which is to suppress discontent and prevent it from reaching to a higher level. In the vast nationwide personnel administrative apparatus, this is a core duty, on which prospects for promotion depend. Nothing could be as fundamental as taking whatever steps are needed to repress protests and quell the masses if they object to their livelihoods being ruined by a gold rush. That gives local cadres a solid basis for the two faces they must display: resolute coercive crushing of anything that remotely smacks of separatism; while encouraging those who can make fresh, productive and wealth-creating use of the land, for a fee. Local authorities have long been renowned for their ingenuity in inventing fees, most of which are never accounted for in official revenues, and are technically extra-budgetary, an economists’ term for rent-seeking on the side, while still crying poverty to higher levels for more official support. Such inventive fees are routinely denounced and declared illegal by central leaders, and are then reinvented. A favourite in Tibet was a requirement that vehicles entering towns and villages had to be washed clean. As it happened, the police checkpoint where this rule was enforced also had the necessary

gold rush in tibet   Death in Amchok Tsering Dondrub, a 34-year-old father of two, self-immolated outside a gold mine in Amchok town in Gansu’s Sangchu [in Chinese, Xiahe] county one morning in November 2012. ‘Now, the Amchok area is full of Chinese police, and Tibetans are finding it difficult to attend the prayer service and funeral’, a resident of the area told Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan service, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘There are several Chinese police vehicles in the area’, he said, adding that one vehicle displayed a large banner written in red ink in Tibetan and Chinese carrying the words ‘Fight Splittism’. Tibetan sources in exile with contacts in the region said Tsering Dondrub was known for his ‘gentle character’ and devotion to the Tibetan cause. Dondrub’s mother was identified as Drukmo Tso and his father as Lubum Gyal. He leaves his wife, Tamdin Tso, and two children, one source said. ‘Right now, the monks of Amchok monastery are conducting prayers for the deceased, and a large number of Tibetans have gathered to express their solidarity and respect for his sacrifice’, another source said. Radio Free Asia, 20 November 2012

hose and detergent, available for a fee. The rationale for charging for a hosing was the lofty official slogans, of building an ecological civilization on the grasslands, and improving quality of life.

Gold, caterpillar fungus and sheep A vehicle-washing fee is inconsequential. Much bigger opportunities exist when a labour-intensive extraction economy materializes, be it gold or, in many areas, the lucrative traffic in caterpillar fungus that grows in the pastures of eastern Tibet every spring. The cater­pillar fungus, Orthocordyceps sinensis, or dongchao in Chinese, yartsa gumbu in Tibetan, generates such extraordinary profits in the traditional Chinese medicine market that diggers flock to the grasslands

  spoiling tibet in season, much like a gold rush, which also is often seasonal, since Tibetan streams freeze over in winter or dry up, making gold sluicing impossible. Whether it’s gold or fungus, the diggers must pay a fee to local leaders for official permission to access areas where finds may be made. In both cases, the fees are imposed in the name of the rule of law, orderly access and administrative rationality. But there the parallel ends. In the case of yartsa gumbu the fee is payable to Tibetan landholders for access to their land, on the basis of a mutually agreed fiction that the applicants are all members of the pasture owner’s family. The role of the local government is to set up the roadblocks that enforce this upfront payment before diggers are allowed in. This is in areas where the local cadres are mostly Tibetan, comfortable with maintaining a regulatory regime in which most of the fees collected go to pastoral nomads for permitting their ‘relatives’ to dig.

Government is the problem In the gold rushes, it is rare that Tibetans actively participate, and if they do it is with minimal equipment. Usually, the diggers are poor Sichuanese, and Chinese Muslims, who can no longer make a living on their own land, who come to seek their fortune, often in a group formed by men of a specific village, who can back each other up if local Tibetans object. If they can regularize their presence with a permit, they can be sure the local authority will take their side if there are clashes. Since they often resort to cyanide and mercury as crude ways of collecting gold, resulting in the poisoning of livestock downstream, Tibetans do frequently protest. In such situations, local government is often a silent partner, tacitly contracting to keep Tibetan villagers under control, allowing the miners free access. But much of the mining is considerably more organized, capital-intensive, high profile and capable of operating beyond the warmest months. Frequently large mechanized dredges are assembled, which crawl along stream beds on tank tracks,

gold rush in tibet   chewing up the landscape, centrifugally separating the flecks of gold from the slurried pasture and rounded rocks, then spitting out the rest. Belching diesel smoke, these huge machines grind up grassland, wetland, habitats, fish and insects, turning everything to mud. All about them is highly visible, not only to the pastoral nomads, helpless to defend their lands, but also to local governments in townships that have just one or two streets. These are not the operations of illegals bribing their way onto the grasslands, they are TVEs established and operated by local governments, which are also responsible for environmental regulation and maintenance of compulsory harmony. Throughout rural China TVEs largely succeeded in establishing industries in villages, which added value to local commodities, processing local crops and fibres to bring better returns to farmers. But on the Tibetan Plateau, especially in areas where few cadres were Tibetan, TVEs either failed, or were extractive, exploitative and even predatory. In extreme instances, they managed to be all of these in turn, at first exploitative, then predatory, then failing. This was the case with the wool-scouring plants established in the 1980s in rangeland areas. There was a clear business case for adding value by taking the raw, greasy, dirty wool of the pastoralists, degreasing and cleaning it before selling on to the woollen mills. These were classic TVEs of the 1980s, seized on by local cadres as their big chance to participate in Deng Xiaoping’s invitation to get rich. As each township or county raced to build its processing plant, they frequently built too big, which meant sourcing fleeces from other local government areas to maintain production. Initially this was good for the nomadic pastoralists, who could choose among buyers. But the overcapitalization, excessive scale and greed of the cadres made for diminishing returns, as the woollen mills, mostly on the coast, could turn to other sources of wool overseas, or switch to substitute fibres. The processing plants were in a squeeze. Then, according to Australian economists who studied the ‘wool wars’ of the 1980s, they made a bad move.2 The woollen

  spoiling tibet ‘You can see the dust floating in the air’ They are mining on the Gyupang hill of Chakge village in Phondo township. In 2002, a few Chinese came to test the area with an ‘earthscope’ to see if it had minerals or not. Then, in the middle of the year, eight or nine Chinese vehicles came. They pitched tents and stayed there for a year. They started mining with machinery. They blasted at least twenty or thirty times a day. There are also blasts you don’t hear, but you can see the dust floating in the air. They say it was a private company doing the work. They dug out minerals day and night for over a year, hiring many labourers. It seems like the township and village leaders accepted big gifts from them, and there is no one who does not love money! But it seems that they were not given any special permit. It was discovered that this was a private company when people made many appeals to stop the mining, because many of their animals were being killed by the blasting, and some died from falling into the pits they dug. The locals complained that the fertility of the land was deteriorating and they have seen many of their livestock being killed. That time, the wife of Raidi [the leader of TAR government] helped. Her birthplace is Chakge village and all her relatives and friends are in that village. She helped to stop the mining. I don’t know what authority she has but Raidi was in mainland China at that time. It was said that she talked to him over the phone. She asked him whether the mining permit was issued by the government, and if not, to please stop the mining. Then it was discovered that the boss of the company did not have a permit from the government. He was not punished, but the mining was stopped. That was in the beginning of 2003. …Nowadays they are mining in the same place as before. Some say that the government is now in charge, and now we cannot stop it. The locals of the area are very worried. The older folks say that the country might be destroyed completely, there is no place to appeal, and what can we do? When I heard them say such things, I was not happy.  Lhundrup county, Lhasa municipality (Lasa Linzhou in Chinese), March 2005

gold rush in tibet   mills paid by bale weight. So the processors added stones, which not only annoyed the mills, but also damaged their machinery. China’s woollen mills decisively turned away from domestic wool, and now rely almost entirely on imports. The TVE wool-cleaning plants went broke. Tibetan wool henceforth could be sold only as low grade, suitable only for felting, at a low price, even though most fleeces include semi-fine wool that could, if handled properly, attract much higher prices. The pastoralists of the vast Chinese rangelands – Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang as well as the Tibetan Plateau – were excluded from China’s woollen fabric industry, at just the time China was beginning its global dominance of the production of fine woollen cloth. TVE mining has been similarly destructive of landscapes and livelihoods, diverting meagre capital away from poor schools and health clinics to buy gold-mining machines capable of extracting every visible fleck of alluvial gold from the riverbeds across Tibet. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, such mining proliferated, with no agency of the party-state interested in regulating it, minimizing impacts or distributing the benefits. At a time when central leaders and big cities were highly ambivalent about rural people migrating to cities, and Maoist residential registration restrictions on movement were still in force, the TVE strategy was the one policy that promised wealth accumulation in rural areas. In Tibet, mining was the best and often the only prospect. This is a story seldom told. Attempts by Tibetans to find out who owned the machines tearing up their best riverbank pastures, and to protest, were stifled, in the name of striking hard against separatists. The world watched Tibetan protests, which erupted in 1987, but understood them as protests about civil, religious and political freedoms. China’s central leaders had, from 1949, extracted as much as possible from the peasantry to finance industrialization, and encouraged local governments to expand their sources of revenue, while expressing sympathy for the burden of taxes and fees imposed on farmers throughout China. Official sympathy took a long

  spoiling tibet ‘Locals tried hard to stop the mining’ Before, people had plenty of grassland and many livestock, and there were no poor households, but since 1999 about 600 miners came to Sershung Lungkhok in our township as part of a government project; every year their numbers have gradually increased and at present there are over 7,000 miners. At the same time, the herds of the nomads have been decreasing and over 20,000 mu of grassland have been lost. More and more families are facing problems and they always talk about that. Locals tried hard to stop the mining. One person from each household in all the villages of our township gathered and over 1,000 people threatened the Chinese miners, shouting that if they don’t return to China they would be killed. It seems they called the county authorities and a leader and over forty soldiers came. The county leader told them: ‘This action by local people is against the law. The miners are here by order of the central government, and locals should welcome them. The land and water belong to the government. …’ First, a road was built in Sershung, electricity was brought, they put up white tents of many sizes. They drilled a big hole in the big mountain about eight years back and they are still drilling. A trolley looking like a small train brings out many things, about forty boxes come at a time. There are three minerals. One is a kind of stone in thumbsize pieces and red in colour, another is white stone and most pieces are big; these two minerals are transported to China. The third mineral is gold. They process gold ore and produce gold. The gold processing plant has been built near the river flowing through the Sershung area. There is a big piece of land on the right side of Sershung where they started building lines of three-storey houses in 2002 and the place has become like a city. There are many shops, the families of over 7,000 miners have arrived and are living there; there are so many people. They draw water through metal pipes from the upper part of the mountain, and local nomads have been facing water shortage since they came. For generations, people have been living near the big Sershung river and both people and livestock drink the water of

gold rush in tibet   that river, but at present many Chinese people are dumping their dirty water into the river, as well as all the effluent from the gold processing plant. Some kind-hearted miners told locals: ‘It is not good for you to drink that water; the domestic sewage is not a big problem but the effluent from the gold processing plant flowing into river could be very hazardous; liquid chemicals are used for refining gold and it is like poison. If you drink water from the river for many years all your livestock will die and you will not live long. You should complain to the authorities and try to solve your problem.’ The locals deputed five or six people, who went to appeal to the county authority and even to the prefectural and provincial authorities, but they merely replied that the matter would be discussed and reviewed and decided on later, and so it did not help. This was in 2004 but I don’t know the date exactly. I don’t know exactly how many times they appealed, but later the government told them that all nomads near the Sershung river should move near the county town and sell all their livestock. I heard that rows of identical houses have been built near the county town but I did not see them. Amdo Tsolho Tsikorthang (Qinghai Hainan Xinghai in Chinese), June 2007

time to translate into action, to lift the burden of taxes imposed by various levels of government. What was happening on the ground in Tibet did not fit any of the usual narratives. Economists worldwide celebrated the ‘China miracle’, specifically for lifting hundreds of millions of peasants out of poverty, through letting market forces set prices for farm produce. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, provided billions of dollars each year to China, but almost none of it was for the Tibetan Plateau, for basics such as improving wool quality, adding value to Tibetan products. China made it sharply clear that Tibet was a domestic issue, no business of outsiders.

  spoiling tibet Meanwhile the despoliation continued. Tibetans petitioned local governments, were fobbed off, or paid off if the gold miners lacked powerful local protectors. Sometimes Tibetan communities, having got nowhere locally, tried petitioning higher levels. County and prefecture officials quickly told township cadres that their jobs and promotion prospects depended on suppressing protest. Not only were Public Security Bureau personnel on hand to stifle dissent when Tibetan communities persisted in asking to be heard; the militarized People’s Armed Police (PAP) could be brought in, at short notice, to strike hard. The PAP is a business, with a direct interest in gold mining, which is one of its enterprises in Tibet that finances its operational capabilities. China’s National Defence White Paper of 2006 says: ‘The PAP consists mainly of the internal security force and forces guarding gold mines, forests, water and electricity supply, and communications. The PAP gold mine force has completed 38 geological prospecting projects in a dozen provinces and autonomous regions, and found some rich gold deposits.’3 All lower levels of government understood that the centre did not wish to hear from restive Tibetans, and demanded that they be kept out of view. Cadres knew that central leaders were so fearful of chaos, of China falling apart at a time of fast growth and widespread social dislocation, that they had only to invoke ‘the meddling Dalai clique’ and ‘anti-China separatist forces’ as the locus for depicting all Tibetan attempts to speak, notwithstanding their subaltern status. Several Chinese leaders, most notably Hu Jintao, made their reputations by cracking down hard on ‘separatists out to destroy the unity of China’, whose actual problem was mining. If Tibetan communities could mobilize to defend their land and livelihoods, local authorities would lose their rent-seeking opportunities. Tibetans could not be allowed to become ‘stakeholders’ whose agreement was needed. That would only dilute the profits. Much of the mining that occurred – not only gold but other metals too – happened in ways that make no sense to the global

gold rush in tibet   extractive industry. The transnational corporate mining giants calculate a rational cost–benefit analysis, in which major upfront capital expenditure costs must be factored in, as well as compliance with regulatory regimes and codes of conduct that enable miners to maintain a social licence from communities near the mines. The lead mining at Phenpo, close to Lhasa (close enough for Chinese scientists to detect lead in Lhasa’s air), would make no sense to an economic geologist making a business case for a deposit to become a mine. In a farming district famous for its grains, peas, wheat, potatoes and radishes, the lead mine and smelter are toxic. Chinese scientists based at the Tibetan Environment Change and Land Surface Process Laboratory in Lhasa have carefully quantified both the concentration of lead particles in Lhasa’s air, and where it comes from, including lead naturally occurring in soils that becomes airborne in windy weather, and lead emissions from the Lhasa cement factory and from vehicle emissions. But the biggest source is from lead smelting. This gives Lhasa’s air a lead content that, although it is well below heavily industrialized cities such as Wuhan, is well above that in much bigger cities in Europe.4 Phenpo makes no sense to a globalized mining industry which routinely, and ruthlessly, closes older, smaller-scale, inefficient mines and smelters, especially at a time when big new deposits are being discovered, setting new benchmarks for what is economic; or when global business models must shift due, for example, to China building big new smelters, which are driving older ones to the wall. China’s official statistical yearbooks are silent on lead production in Tibet. Officially it does not exist. The tonnage, by world standards, is small. Yet such a smelter makes sense in the unique circumstances of Tibet. When the Phenpo mine opened, guaranteed prices were paid by the state, plus the opportunity for production above quota to be sold at market prices. The mining and smelting plants, being state-owned, had no need to worry about installing expensive equipment to capture lead particles from the smokestacks. Trucks coming to Lhasa filled with manufactured goods of all kinds frequently

  spoiling tibet ‘There used to be foxes and wolves on the hill’ The place is called Serkhok and there are more than twenty Drokpa nomad households there. The gold-mining is on the hill and the Chinese are living on the grassy plain. That hill is called Drukmo Dralu and considered sacred by the locals. It is said to be where Drukmo, the queen of the legendary King Gesar of Ling, pitched her tent. In 1997 houses and roads were built in preparation and from 1999 the actual mining started. It is said that the mining company came from mainland China. There are many people from places like Zhejiang and Shanghai. More than ten households of our community had to move. Now the mining takes up all the best pasture in our Sertang community, and the Drokpa nomad households which used to live there had as many as 100 yak and 600 sheep each. It is said each household was paid RMB40–50,000 [US$6,400–8,000] and allocated smaller pastures in our area. The Chinese call it ‘Serkhok copper mine’, but the local Tibetans say it is not copper and that they are mining gold [ser is the Tibetan word for gold]. Many big multi-storey buildings are there, a hospital and a school. Those operating the machines are all Chinese technicians; others are transporting the ore, sweeping up and so on; and there are many wage labourers working in house construction. There are maybe 200 Tibetans working there. They say there is a monthly wage of RMB400 [US$64], but sometimes they pay and sometimes they don’t. My brother worked there but stopped after two or three months because he didn’t get his wages. The Chinese get more, but I don’t know how much. … Our local herders do not like mining in our area because we lost more than 10,000 mu of pasture and this mining site is a sacred hill and they are destroying it. There used to be foxes and wolves on the hill but all the wild animals were frightened by the terrible noise of all the trucks and machinery and have dis­appeared. Chinese miners are killing off the birds. A road was built connecting the site with Chungon township 100 km away which has destroyed a lot of pasture land. The Drokpa have it in mind to complain, but no one can complain to the government

gold rush in tibet   and no one thinks it would do any good. Even if we complain to the township it does not have the authority to interfere because the mining company is a higher level of government authority. The Serchu river has become a place for the Chinese miners to dump waste and sewage and it is polluted. They throw garbage there and all over the grassland, like liquor bottles, paper cartons, plastic and so on. Some cattle have died after eating waste on the plain near the mine. Because of the pollution the grass does not grow, and due to the deterioration of the land rainfall is scarce. The pasture has been ruined by the digging of soil, dumping of rock and road construction. In the past the hill used to be covered with cloud and mist, but now there is no mist. Amdo Tsolho Tsikorthang (Qinghai Hainan Xinghai in Chinese), May 2005

return empty, and their drivers, for a fee, can be persuaded to backload. Buyers for lead from Tibet are thousands of kilometres away, in Gansu, but that is where the trucking traffic is headed. As long as someone is making money, the mining and smelting go on. The gold so sought after in Tibet is placer gold, alluvial specks washed by erosion over millions of years into streambeds, where it is just visible to the eye, very occasionally found in nuggets. It may be found a long way downstream from where the deposit formed. Small-scale miners have neither the knowledge nor the capital to trace the origins of a gold deposit, nor much need to go to such trouble when it is on the surface, there for the taking.

Bringing the state back in At a higher level, well above local government, there has been occasional recognition of the deep sadness caused by the helplessness of Tibetan communities to protect the land. Central leaders, at provincial and national levels, often placate persistent complainers by acknowledging environmental damage, peasant burdens, the

  spoiling tibet ‘They didn’t receive any compensation’ There are three mining sites in Guri township: a gold mine, a copper mine and a coal mine. All the [gold mine] workers are Chinese, probably more than 200, not from Qinghai but from different provinces in mainland China. They are private, but they are mining with permission from the provincial and prefecture governments. They are in the third ruka [unit] of Rilung community, mainly the pasture of a Drokpa household called Samgo. In 2003 they tried to stop the Chinese by saying they would not allow mining, but county and township leaders came and told them they should allow mining because the grasslands belong to the nation. Nowadays the pasture of those households has been ruined. The mining trucks don’t use just one road but drive everywhere, so the grass doesn’t grow and the livestock have been reduced. The miners paid compensation to the county and prefecture governments, but nothing was given to the Drokpa households. The coal mine is on the pasture of the first unit of Chukmang community and has been there for thirty years. A couple of thousand mu of pasture has been ruined there and many livestock of nearby households died from the poisonous gases from the mine. There are many cases of animal deaths from falling into the mining pits and drinking water in the area of the mine. Last year many animals from the Kebo household on the edge of the mine died, and they wrote a petition to the mining company and the township government, but they didn’t receive any compensation. The miners told them: ‘We are paying thousands of yuan to the provincial and prefecture governments to mine here, so why should we pay you as well? If you want money, go ask those governmnents’, and there was nothing they could do. … A few years back the Drokpa households of Guri township were given 5–6 mu of farmland at a place called Penchen Shingde near the township centre, but it has remained unplanted because Drokpa don’t know how to farm. The government still collects farmland tax on it, which we call tongtrel [‘tax for nothing’]. This area belonged to Tibetans in the past but at present it is cultivated by Chinese, Muslims and Mongols, and a small town has developed

gold rush in tibet   there. It was said that from this year all the livestock of the Guri township herders would be destroyed, and they would be moved to that place and turned into town dwellers. The county and township governments announced many things about it, and the Drokpa are very worried. Amdo Tsonub Dulan (Qinghai Haixi Dulan in Chinese), July 2005

need to reduce inefficient energy consumption and so on. The excessive damage done by alluvial gold rushes has also prompted regular announcements that the gold rushes are banned. In 2002 the official Qinghai Ribao newspaper announced a provincial ‘Notice forbidding the extraction of alluvial gold within the province’. The paper explained: Although gold digging activities have brought income for the local governments over a certain amount of time, as exploitation has taken place over many years there has been large-scale damage to river-beds, flood plains and so on, bringing about serious damage to the natural environment and to plant life in gold mining areas.5

Similar statements were made in central Tibet in 2005 and 2007, with similar graphic accounts of the damage that had been done: Alluvial gold mines are among the most destructive of all mining sites. There once were 41 mining enterprises and 65 mining sites at the peak of the ‘gold rush’ in the region. Many, if not all, of them destroyed natural vegetation and polluted water systems. In some areas, mining of alluvial gold has resulted in desertification. That is why Qiangba Puncog [Jampa Phuntsok] chairman of the regional government, in a harshly-worded internal speech believed to be the mobilization order against alluvial gold mines, said the game is not worth the candle. These mines contribute little to local farmers and herdsmen, and a limited amount to the local government, he said. The damage to the environment they cause can no longer be tolerated. The comprehensive ban strengthens the drive to restrain what Qiangba Puncog termed the ‘predatory exploitation’ of local resources.6

  spoiling tibet The ban on alluvial gold extraction from Tibetan riverbeds was reaffirmed in 2007, after decades of unchecked degradation of prime riverbank pasture land: ‘The local authorities of China’s TAR are set to ban the mining of gold, mercury, arsenic and peat to preserve mineral resources and protect the environment. “Mercury and arsenic mining can pollute water supplies, peat mining can destroy wetlands and gold mining can ruin grasslands and rivers”, said Wang Baosheng, director of the Land and Resources Department of the Tibet Autonomous Region.’ 7 These repeated announcements in themselves suggest difficulties in implementation. Local governments, as owners or protectors of alluvial gold mining, have managed to find ways to ignore or bypass such regulation, which is implemented locally by local government. Local exceptionalism is strong; there is always a case for exempting this operation or that, if it is making money. Further evidence of widespread predatory mining came in 2012, as a major state-owned copper- and gold-mining company geared up to begin large-scale extraction from the Gyama mine, not far upstream from Lhasa on the Kyichu river. Keenly aware of the way alluviual mining has alienated the affections of Tibetan communities, Vancouver-based China Gold International (CGI) flew a Xinhua reporting team to the Gyama mine, resulting in a story that tried hard to placate wounded Tibetan feelings, and, above all, distance CGI and its Gyama mine subsidiary Huatailong from any association with the rapacious stream diggers. The Xinhua story criticized earlier miners of Gyama: a dozen private miners were caught up in a rat race for the rich ore supplies, ignoring their responsibilities to the local community and environment. Ensuing public complaints forced the regional government to suspend the operations of the private miners, re-examine the local mining industry and seek a proper way to develop Tibet.8

gold rush in tibet   ‘All the workers are Chinese’ There is mining on a mountain near Terdrom and Telnang villages in Mangpa township, and on a mountain near Gartampa and Bangnang villages of Nyimachangra township, and then there is a big mineral processing factory in Gyama valley. All the workers are Chinese. It has been there for about three years now and is still continuing. Grass and water sources have deteriorated and it is said that many livestock are dying due to poor grass and water. Mining started in Gartampa in April 2006 and the place is called Dhunag. It is said that the contractor is a big Chinese businessman, and he is a friend of the Chinese county leader of Medro Gongkar, or they know each other. They planned, decided on and started the whole project. The people of that village protested to the township and county authorities. One person from each household of that village and the village leader, in total about forty people, went to protest. They requested the authorities to stop the mining as it is degrading the growth of grass and fertility of the land, livestock don’t have grazing and crops are not growing well, and if that happens then people will lose their livelihood. First, people complained to the township, but they did not listen, and so they marched to the county town. There is a court where people stayed for three days and slept there at night. It was first done in May 2006 and during that time they were cooking at the roadside. Far from the county authorities hearing their protest, the village leader was arrested and detained for three months; other locals were threatened and sent away. The county authorities told them that it was a political offence as the land belongs to the state and people don’t have any right to stop the work. Only the village leader was detained, because if they arrested everyone then it would become big news. The village leader was accused of leading the protest, and nowadays he is a common man as he was stripped of his post. … In the end it was decided that the mining contractor should give 20,000 yuan to the village, which was divided up between each household, and they promised that

  spoiling tibet all those with vehicles would be given work transporting minerals and those without vehicles were urged to buy one. Such facilities were provided because they have an agreement with the county that mining would go on for over forty years. Four households have vehicles, and they were told they were allowed to transport minerals only up to the processing factory; they could only go once a day, and for transporting 1 ton they would receive RMB100 [US$16]. It is said that they extract iron ore, lead ore and an ore called nyima khacho, a white metal. That was the decision. It was said that the county leader and the mining contractor were friends [supporting each other]. People came to know that the contractor was coming to the mining site during the day and staying at the county leader’s house in the evening. At first, people complained that they didn’t want either compensation or work, but wanted to stop the mining, but nothing happened, and instead they were threatened and told that the land belongs to China and if they complained again then it would be considered a political offence. So people were afraid and did not dare to say anything, although still some people are saying that they will complain again. It was previously the best herding place of that village. People of the village and their livestock live on that mountain in summer and come down in winter. They have little farmland and depend mainly on their livestock. Now they say that there is a plan to open a processing factory at a site near the village because the mine is far from the processing factory in Gyama and so they want to open a new one right there.  Meldro Gungkar (Mozhugongka in Chinese), near Lhasa, December 2006

gold rush in tibet   Unstoppable degradation However, the damage has been done. All scientific research on the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau says it is a very difficult and slow process to prevent erosion, once started, and harder still to repair damaged land. This is because in the intense cold of Tibet soil builds up slowly, as hardy grasses and sedges, which hold most of their biomass in their roots, die and slowly decompose. Once this dense mat of living turf is cut, be it for road-making, fence construction, gold digging or mechanized riverbank dredging, an unstoppable chain of erosion is set in motion. Not only is Tibet extremely cold for many months, it also heats up remarkably in summer, permafrost melts away, draining water from the frozen earth, leaving wetlands in danger of drying out as climate change accelerates. Extreme weather is common, including hail, blizzards and gales, all of which strip exposed soil back to bare rock, a position from which it may take centuries for life to recover and recolonize the land. As Chinese scientists have observed accelerating degradation, over recent decades, without being able to name the policy failures that have caused it, China has grown increasingly worried that the sources of its great rivers are degrading and must be protected. The bans on alluvial gold extraction are explicitly intended to protect watersheds. Yet mining is seldom mentioned, the focus being on pastoral nomads as the irresponsible cause of degradation, necessitating their removal, which is now happening on a large scale. In many areas, the nomads are required to sell all their livestock, move to concrete barracks, sometimes very far from their pasture, and surrender their land tenure documents. All of this supposedly voluntary ‘ecological migration’ is deemed to be a worthwhile sacrifice for the good of downstream China, in which nomads leave behind a backward mode of production for a chance to enter history and modernity. The reality is that in the recently proclaimed Protected Areas set aside solely for watershed protection mining continues. There

  spoiling tibet ‘No one consulted our village’ The mining actually started in April 2006. No one consulted our village. Later, people led by the village chief Mr Drakpa complained to the government many times but there was no reply. They said that compensation would be given after completion of the mining, but I don’t know if that is really true. We see it only from far away because they don’t allow anyone to go near the mining site. It is not far, only about 1 kilometer away. The mountain is called Tangting Ri. Our village is situated on the right side of the mountain and on the left side there is a small village called Trungtrungting with only three or four households. Below the mountain are some of our village fields and there is a small stream and a road also. The boss is a Chinese. I heard that he is from Sichuan. All the miners are Chinese. I don’t know exactly what mineral it is and local people don’t know. It is said that there are sixteen different minerals. Our village people are saying that there are over a hundred workers. They have pitched tents on all sides of the mountain and are living there. There are probably only about two or three vehicles but they keep coming and going day and night. Before, our village was very quiet, but now many vehicles go up and down and children get excited and run along up and down and it has now become a busy village. Before, my children stayed home to do homework after school but now as soon as they hear sound of a vehicle they sneak out to watch. The major impact is damage to our farmland. Mr Kunchok Tsewang of our village is requesting compensation from the government and I think there might be some result. He is an official in Lhasa with a good position but I don’t know which office he works for. Kham Chamdo Markham (Maerkang in Chinese), January 2007

gold rush in tibet   is always a case for exempting this mine or that extraction enclave from the general ban on digging and degrading the Yellow and Yangtze upper source regions. In the upmost source district of the Yellow River, there was a shift in the mapped boundaries of the high-level protected area (PA) encompassing the sources of the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, the Sanjiangyuan PA, in Qinghai province. This accommodated what looks like becoming a major copper and gold mine.9 The redrawn map excluded from watershed conservation the Dachang deposit under development by Canadianbased Inter-Citic. To compensate, and maintain the overall size of the designated protected area, more land was added, but this is the watershed of a different river system, draining away into the desert sands of the Tsaidam Basin, and not in any way connected with the three great rivers whose protection is the purpose of the grazing ban and exclusion of mining. Intensive, modern, scientific resource identification and exploitation are about to open up the Tibetan Plateau as never before. This looming future is explored in the next chapter.

Impacts and consequences Small-scale mining is euphemistically known as artisanal mining, as if independent individuals autonomously decide to seek their fortunes beyond the frontier, attracted by the opportunity to chance upon gold, in a liberal world where every man is Homo economicus, out to maximize his benefit. The reality of ‘artisanal’ mining is different. It is driven by greed, selfish disregard for the land and the people of that land, and utter indifference to the environmental and social costs. In many countries, local populations can mobilize to defend their lands from rapacious small-scale miners, but not in Tibet. The use of mercury by artisanal gold seekers is a major global problem, which, according to a 2013 UN Environment Programme inventory, is getting worse:

  spoiling tibet Artisanal and small-scale gold mining and coal burning are the major sources of anthropogenic mercury emissions to air. The inventory confirms the role of artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) and coal burning as the largest components of anthropogenic emissions, followed by the production of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, and cement production. Annual emissions from ASGM are estimated at 727 tonnes, making this the largest sector accounting for more than 35% of total anthropogenic emissions. This is more than twice the figure from this sector in 2005.10

After decades of negotiations, a global treaty to ban mercury in gold extraction is, in 2013, open for all nations to sign and ratify.11 Whether China will effectively implement this ban, in Tibet, is uncertain. This raises two key issues: the resource curse and conflict minerals. The counter-intuitive idea that a wealth of mineral resources is a source of misery, not prosperity, has been debated for decades. It is not a law of economics, or of any other discipline. It is a simple empirical observation: that districts seemingly blessed by an abundance of minerals are in reality cursed by powerful exploiters who come from elsewhere, monopolize the wealth available for accumulation, while leaving the costs – social and environmental – to the locals. In the case of Tibet, the evidence is straightforward. Decades of alluvial strip mining of pastures and streambeds has been disastrous for the livelihoods of Tibetan farmers and pastoralists. Pervasive gold dredging and sluicing have set off uncontrollable erosion of grassland turf that, over many centuries, had created soil from bare rock, only to be lost irretrievably downstream. Even if the party-state were to admit past policy failures, and actively invest in pasture rehabilitation, it would take decades to re-establish plant life and river health, after the dredging machines have moved on. But China’s central leaders are unwilling to acknowledge past mistakes, and instead the blame for degradation is placed solely on the pastoralists, as if they ignorantly and carelessly destroy the basis of the livelihoods they maintained for 9,000 years.

gold rush in tibet   ‘That driver drove into the protestors and broke the legs of three or four people’ In 2003, they came to collect sand and stone from that area for development construction in the Kanlho prefectural capital, and that is how they discovered the mine. Later two Chinese businessmen invited experts and surveyed the area and discovered that there was a big mine. In 2004, these two Chinese businessmen made a proposal to the government and they started mining in collaboration. It is said that there is a big gold deposit. Local people did not agree, but they started mining regardless. Initially, they say that people did not get any compensation. Later, due to strong opposition from the locals, each household was given RMB3,000–4,000 [US$480–640] according to size, but people still strongly opposed the mining, saying that the land and the mine belong to them and they don’t want the money, but it did not achieve any result. The government did not give any particular reply, but those two businessmen bribed the local police to crack down on protest and prevent locals from doing anything, and mining went on for about a year and a half. They are still mining now, but people staged a second protest last year. It was midsummer in 2006. They went to the mining site saying that they would keep up their protest even if they had to die. During the protest, soldiers were unable to stop the locals, who were shouting that they would beat up those two Chinese. The two men became furious and ordered a truck driver to drive into people and kill them, for which they would pay compensation. The driver drove into the protestors and broke the legs of three or four people. The most seriously injured was 32-year-old Tashi Dhondup, who had both legs broken. He is from Rebtsado village. Then, during that time many policemen came and threatened to shoot and kill if they don’t stop protesting. When they saw people injured and bleeding, they were scared and stopped protesting. …The mining site is located between Rebtsado and Nampa in Achok township. Naturally there is less rainfall and more drought now, the environment is badly polluted, and that is what led people to protest on two occasions. Amdo Kanlho Sangchu (Gansu Gannan Xiahe in Chinese), July 2007

  spoiling tibet ‘This mountain is the property of the local government. No trespassers’ These days the Chinese government is mounting a big operation to mine gold and copper in our area. As far as I know, in Namtang Xiang in Tsigortang county at a place called Sertang [Field of Gold] there is a mountain called Takchen Dronggye Chakar, which is a sacred mountain for Tibetans, and is known throughout Qinghai. At the foot of the mountain is the Sertang monastery of the Gelukpa school, where there is a community of about a hundred monks, studying the Buddhist teachings. It is said that within the bowels of the mountain there is a golden wild yak [drong] and a white crane [chakar], and these are generally acknowledged as the territorial deities of Tsigortang area, and especially of the Sertang holy place. About ten years ago, the Tsigortang county authorities, in partnership with central government, did tests on the mountain using various machines to see if they could find any valuable natural deposits, and in the end they found deposits of gold, silver and iron. First they planted the red flag with five stars [the PRC national flag] at the foot of the mountain, and even put up a metal sign board with a few Chinese characters reading ‘This mountain is the property of the local government. No trespassers’. When the mining work started, the Sertang monastery was hit by falling rocks, and damaged, and this was reported to the government leaders, but to no effect. Then there are three pastoralist villages nearby, Sharong Dewa with over forty households, Lo Dewa with over fifty and Hrewo Dewa with over fifty, whose exclusive means of livelihood is animal husbandry; the pastures on which their flocks live became littered with stone once the government mining operation started. Not only that, but they were forced to move elsewhere. Also, with all the mining machinery, blasting and so on, the livestock in the vicinity were poisoned and some died, and after that the local people and especially the elders strenuously petitioned successive levels of government officials many times to stop the mining, but they do not respect the views of the common people at all, and they replied: ‘You people must be blind, you don’t realize that

gold rush in tibet   mining helps to build the nation; you Tibetans really are dumb.’ So the government, in association with the mainland provinces, has been digging gold, silver and iron out of the Takchen Dronggye Chakar holy mountain for the last ten years; that they continue to do so can be seen from the fact that twenty to thirty truckloads leave the mine everyday. They say each truckload is worth in excess of RMB800,000 [US$128,000]. The excavated material is piled up at the Sertang Trang [factory] from where trucks carry it away to Xining. From there it is transported by rail to many mainland provinces. Because they use blasting to mine these precious metals, they release [fluoride] poisons, which have caused hundreds of cattle to lose their teeth over the years and many to die, which has caused major losses to the people of the three local communities. Since the mining operation is of no benefit whatsoever to local people, their natural environment has been seriously damaged and spoiled, and damage has been done to the territorial deities who are the object of religious reverence for local people, they feel upset and dejected. Eventually, after the submission of many petitions, the local government so far has given the three communities and Sertang monastery compensation of about RMB50,000–60,000 [US$8,000–9,600], or less than RMB1,000 [US$160] per household. Amdo Tsolho Tsikorthang (Qinghai Hainan Xinghai in Chinese), December 2008

The resource curse means government, at local or national level, becomes predatory, either protecting its client miners or doing the mining directly. This too has been true of Tibet. Civil society, in any country, may have interests different to those of government, yet they work together. But in Tibet government is the antagonist of civil society, and experienced as a burden. There is no public sphere in which Tibetans, as citizens of China, can voice concerns without being immediately criminalized as ‘separatists’ and ‘tools of the Dalai clique’.

  spoiling tibet The most fundamental objection of Tibetans to the decades of alluvial mining of Tibet is that it is theft. This charge has not been heard. Environmental objections to loss of biodiversity habitat get a hearing. When Tibetan environmentalists – a new generation who grew up in exile, have postgraduate qualifications from international universities, and work for the Environment and Development Desk, as part of the Kashag (Cabinet) staff in Dharamsala – speak up for the waters of Tibet being despoiled by mining, they have an audience.12 There are treaties, which China has signed, covering climate change, desertification, wetlands and biodiversity, to which it can perhaps be held accountable. There are fewer forums, other than specialist organizations focused on indigenous and minority rights, to protest the social costs to Tibetan livelihoods of rampant gold rushes that ruin grazing or cropping land, poison livestock, or displace local populations altogether. Tibetans are gradually learning that China does have mining laws that do provide for compensation for lands lost or damaged due to mining. Tibetan villagers interviewed for this book have experienced the difference between illegal alluvial miners and those who enjoy official protection. If you go to the miners and tell them your yaks or sheep are dying because the river is poisoned by cyanide and mercury used in the gold extraction, and they hastily offer to pay double the cost of the dead animals, you know they are mining illegally and have no powerful patron. If you complain, and the next day police or thugs surround the village and beat people, you know the miners are clients of a patron with the ability to invoke the power of the party-state. Then you know they will violently do whatever it takes to silence the protests.

The resource curse Chinese economists from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences are in no doubt that the resource curse applies to the remote areas of China, including Tibet. They say:

gold rush in tibet   Chinese provinces with abundant resources perform worse than their resource-poor counterparts in terms of per capita consumption growth. This trend that resource-poor areas are better off than resource-rich areas is particularly prominent in rural areas. Because of the institutional arrangements regarding property rights of natural resources, most gains from the resource boom have been captured either by the government- or state-owned enterprises. Thus, the windfall of natural resources has more to do with government consumption than household consumption. Moreover, in resource-rich areas, greater revenues accrued from natural resources bid up the price of non-tradable goods and hurt the competitiveness of the local economy.13

These mainstream economists are focused on finding the source of the deep and growing inequality between urban Chinese prosperity and rural Chinese poverty, especially in remote areas. That source, they say, is the power of governments, especially at local level, to monopolize the wealth to be gained by taking rural land, and mining it. Dr Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute says: Due to the arrangement of property rights on natural resources, local residents, in particular farmers, do not enjoy a fair share of the rise in rents associated with the booming natural resource sector. Most rents go to the government and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). A resource boom in rural areas does not necessarily trickle down to the local population and lead to consumption growth. In fact, having abundant resources may be more of a curse than a blessing for rural residents. Overall, from 1949 to 1994, SOEs were the dominant players in the mining sector and the accrued rents did not necessarily improve local welfare. Under the new regulations, local governments were allowed to auction the development rights of mineral resources to the private sector, including multinational companies. Local governments were also permitted to explore and develop mineral resources. However, under the new regulations, SOEs still enjoyed preferential treatment in developing large mineral reserves. Local governments have a strong incentive to generate more revenue. Faced with limited and mobile capital, local governments compete vigorously to attract new

  spoiling tibet investment. In areas with natural resources, selling exploration and mining rights is a quick way to create revenues. As a result, many small-scale mines have been privatized since 1994. In the absence of elections and the associated checks and balances, the interests of government officials may not be aligned with the interests of local residents. When conflicts arise between developers and local residents, the Natural Resource Law stipulates that mediation and resolution are the responsibility of local courts. However, local courts are not independent of local governments, leaving open the possibility of collusion between local courts, local governments and investors. Such collusion allows local governments to meet their objective of generating quick revenues, but may result in the unfair allocation of resource rents. Growth dividends do not trickle down to rural residents in resource-abundant regions. Since many of the poor live in regions rich in natural resources, the existence of a resource curse may help explain the recent widening regional inequality and stagnant poverty prevalent in resource-rich regions, in particular western China. To eliminate poverty and reduce inequality in rural areas, it is critical to reform the property rights arrangements regarding natural resources.14

Conflict minerals and Tibetan resistance In Tibet, protests against mining have sometimes succeeded in remote areas where the population has stood firm, and made clear its willingness to undergo punishment without wilting. But usually the miners get their way. The agricultural economists say: ‘In short, the root of the problem lies in the rules governing resource rent allocations.’ Tibetans may not contest those rules, nor their implementation. The extreme prejudice separating conquerors and conquered has made it impossible for Tibetans to protect their lands from mining, and widespread displacement as ‘ecological migrants’ who have no choice but to leave their lands altogether, ostensibly for watershed conservation but in practice to open mineralized areas to further mining.

gold rush in tibet   Resistance at the sacred mountain Tibetan nomads have driven Chinese gold miners away from a sacred mountain in China’s Qinghai province, vowing to give up their lives if necessary to protect the site, the abode of a local god, according to Tibetan sources. They set fire to the gold miners’ tents and launched twentyfour-hour patrols around the mountain located in the Tibetanpopulated Gade county in the Golog [Guoluo in Chinese] prefecture in a bid to keep the gold miners at bay, sources said.  ‘The nomads are now watching for intruders on the mountain’, a Tibetan living in the USA told RFA, citing contacts in the region and speaking on condition of anonymity. The mountain, called Dringye Ngo Sorma, is known for the beauty of the lake at its base, for the green meadows on its slopes, and for other characteristics ‘typical of a sacred mountain’, the source said. On 10 August 2012, Chinese miners arrived in the valley at the foot of the mountain and made plans to extract gold from the valley, the source said.  And though local government officials warned Tibetan residents of the area not to interfere with the work, the gold miners’ tents were set on fire two days later. On 14 August, Tibetans from the four nomadic groups in the area of Tsangkor Sholma gathered at the mountain, but the Chinese miners had by then fled from the area, the source said. ‘So the Tibetans conducted a grand smoke-offering ceremony at the site and then went back to their homes.’ Two nomadic groups are now watching the lower valley of Dringye Ngo Sorma, while another two groups guard the valley of another mountain, Kyu Ri, the source said, adding, ‘So now the Tibetans are watching these valleys around the clock, both day and night.’ Tibetan residents of the area have refused all orders to let the mining work proceed and have vowed not to allow the extraction of ‘even one handful of soil’ from the sacred mountain, the source said.

  spoiling tibet On 15 August, Chinese security forces shot dead a Tibetan and detained six others as they dispersed a crowd of 1,000 Tibetans protesting the resumption of mining operations in Markham county in Tibet, according to Tibetan sources. Radio Free Asia, 29 August 2012

When the miners have few local connections, when the Tibetan community is united and willing to risk jail, and the cadres are reluctant to repress them, then in many such cases work at mines has been stopped. Even though it is all too easy for miners to invoke the master narrative of security, and claim that protesting Tibetans are dangerous separatists out to wreck the unity of China, collective solidarity has worked on many, though certainly not all, occasions. In such circumstances, the minority of Tibetans fluent in Chinese play a crucial role in reading the situation, defusing conflict, knowing where the invisible boundaries are, and how to pull back before authorities at a higher (county or prefecture) level reframe it as a security crisis requiring coercive force. The educated minority are the schoolteachers and local administrators, whose informal judgements are crucial. Until now, Tibetan communities have had some success in resisting mining, especially when miners were based far away and had no local official protectors. Now that national mining corporations are moving into Tibet, equipped with community-relations rhetoric that is common globally, the Tibetans are losing the capacity to delay or fend off any longer the party-state’s plans for Tibet. This raises the question of designating minerals extracted from Tibet as conflict minerals. This is a concept gradually gaining traction, in the wake of mining in conflict zones such as Congo (where China is now an active player). Attempts at establishing codes of conduct, to stop conflict minerals from being sold and used, are slowly becoming enforceable, through naming and shaming rather

gold rush in tibet   than through legal sanction. The Kimberley Process, for example, tries to limit the traffic in ‘blood diamonds’ mined illegally by predatory states. Documenting the contested conflict mineral extraction in Tibet will be harder than in Zimbabwe or Congo, with less access and such fear among the people that speaking frankly is extremely dangerous. Questions of resource curse or conflict minerals now take on new meanings, as Tibet enters the era of large-scale, modern corporate mining that relies on capital-intensive investment in extraction, which demands a high rate of return on investment. Small-scale mining does still occur, despite the many announcements of a ban, but it is declining, as the state-owned and private corporations now gear up for systematic exploitation on a scale not seen before.

Tilting the plateau Mining imposes a new imaginary onto Tibet, which trivializes and marginalizes all customary modes of production. Mining and the repurposing of all the habitable land of the Tibetan Plateau are central to ongoing Tibetan protests, self-immolations and sacrifice. Tibetan objections to mining go deep. The financial benefits of mining are captured by distant Chinese state-owned corporations or small miners who repatriate their profits to their home provinces. Given the structural inequality and their exclusion from political participation, Tibetans feel they bear the social and environmental costs, with none of the benefits. But the problem goes deeper. When resource extraction enclaves, with their adjacent urban centres, hydro­power dams up the nearest river gorge, and transport corridors, all monopolize development, all else is neglected. Enclave development fundamentally disturbs the precarious balance of human life in the extreme climate of Tibet. Objection to mining is at the heart of Tibetan grief at Chinese rule. The Tibetan Plateau, Tibetans point out, is one-sixtieth of all land on the planet, a huge area made habitable by extensive land

  spoiling tibet use. Extensive, mobile modes of production, making full use of efflorescences of vegetation, are a skilful adaptation to the extreme cold, aridity and unpredictability of rain and snowfall in Tibet. Far from being naturally ‘Asia’s water tower’, the Tibetan Plateau is one of the more arid parts of Eurasia, its climate sharply continental, with extreme differences between winter and summer temperatures, and much unpredictability as to whether or when monsoonal clouds might penetrate so far inland. These are all basic facts of existence, to which the light touch of Tibetan nomadic pastorialism responded, always moving on before exhausting the primary natural resource, grass. The opposite of extensive, mobile, flexible, light land use is intensive, fixed land use concentrated in enclaves set aside on account of their factor endowments, designated for capital-intensive, energyintensive and technology-intensive development. Mining is the extreme opposite of the mobile pastoralism that made the Tibetan Plateau humanly habitable. Mining directs attention, investment, status and legitimacy away from pastoral mobility, favouring the sedentary extractive economy. Mining is a gravitational anomaly, which turns the gaze away from the vastness of a thousand seasonally grassy plateaus, focusing instead on those few nodes identifiable as seedbeds of modernity, history and wealth accumulation. The grassland becomes hinterland, a land of irredeemable poverty, condemned to this state because modern service delivery depends for efficiency on concentrations of people in identified places. Or the grassland becomes wilderness, valuable only when depopulated, removed so the natural function of grassland to conserve watershed can be unimpeded. If mining enclaves are to succeed they must be intensively planned, engineered and invested in. Prior to planning and investment, they must become intensively visible, legible to the scrutinizing gaze of the state. In China this was done by heroic geologists with their unique capacity to deduce what lies beneath, in three dimensions, as a deposit big enough to warrant mining in the modern way of optimal intensity and maximal efficiency, over the lifecycle of a mine

gold rush in tibet   which usually is planned to run for decades and then close. Every aspect of the mineral extraction enclave is intensive, starting with the exploratory gaze into the earth of the geologists. Intensive is the opposite of extensive. The intensive scrutiny of the mineral deposit and nearby sites required for processing, concentrating, shipping and housing miners and transport renders the surrounding countryside invisible nowhere. The more intensively focused the gaze, the more all else swims out of view. Mining is embedded in modernity, the starting point of globalized commodity chains, the beginning of the global division of labour in which remote resources are extracted and captured for removal to the metropolitan centres of an urban planet. Mining has become naturalized as an inevitable and necessary, familiar and somewhat boring fundament of modernity, to be taken for granted. Once it is naturalized, how could anyone be against it? It is the precondition of all contemporary materiality. Maybe there should be greater care taken to ensure remote indigenous communities feel included, and greater regulation of environmental impacts, but apart from these concerns mining attracts little interest. It is no longer heroic. The pioneer days of opening up far frontiers by brave men is now gone. Mining employs few people, even when it is on such a scale that it removes huge tonnages. The enclave is initially defined as a space of exception. A specific place, because of its mineral wealth beneath the ground, is exceptionally endowed with the means for creating modernity. It is an exception to the ruling, pervasive rural monotony, low productivity and primitive mode of production everywhere else. But the exception becomes the rule, and the surrounding hinterland becomes deviant. The more a mine succeeds in replacing a use economy with an exchange economy that converts minerals into money, and money into consumption, the more the surrounding land seems to be lagging, underdeveloped, a drag on growth. The mine becomes the new norm, along with its town, power source and transport links to the big market in distant cities and factories.

  spoiling tibet This process of transvaluation creates a new norm. This is possible because of a systemic devaluing of the customary ways of apprehending the land and its uses. The logic of extensive land use, lightly impacting on any specific pasture before moving on prior to an excess of grazing pressure, becomes invisible, no longer a knowledge of any salience or even existence. Historians of empire tell us that this is what empires do. Whether the imperial power is European or Asian, Ottoman or American, Russian or Chinese, colonialism rests on devaluing traditional lifeways as unproductive, inefficient, irrational, static, unhistoric, timeless, marginal, isolated, passive, slavishly dependent on nature, lacking in codified property rights that incentivize enterprise.

The Sioux, the Kazakhs and the Tibetans America’s nineteenth-century colonization of the Sioux and Russia’s colonization of the Kazakhs show a pattern which, in the twentyfirst century China is repeating in Tibet. Historian Steven Sabol observes: Sedentarisation forced both peoples to abandon nomadism in favour of developing settled, agricultural economies. Perceptions of the Sioux and Kazakhs as uncivilised peoples reinforced government sedentarisation policies and land allotment programs in both countries. In the nineteenth century, the United States and tsarist Russia, two expanding powers that seem particularly far removed from each other in every way, pursued conquest and internal colonisation policies that proved remarkably similar. Assimilation became the goal of both governments. While pursuing internal colonisation, Americans and Russians denigrated and destabilised the structures, particularly leadership and land utilisation, which exacerbated relations between coloniser and colonised. In both cases the coloniser destabilised socio-political structures in order to ‘tear down’ leaders ‘opposed to civilisation.’ When the Sioux or Kazakhs failed to comprehend or comply, outsiders perceived their inaction as stubborn resistance or clinging to

gold rush in tibet   antiquated traditions. Both Americans and Russians regarded it as a failure or inability to adapt and a reaffirmation of indigenous social, political and economic inferiority. Americans and Russians easily depicted nomadic communities as neither farming nor claiming proprietary rights to land. Each government considered their respective regions to be sparsely populated, underinhabited or underutilised. Situating Sioux and Kazakhs within a hostile geographic environment seemingly explained their depraved, backward nature. In Aleksei Levshin’s view, ‘everyone Kazakh without exception was avaricious, false, and faithless.’ Ellsworth Huntington claimed that the Kazakhs ‘are so primitive, their manner of life is so simple and so closely bound up with their physical surroundings, and they are so little influenced by outside forces, that they furnish an unusually good example for the study of the influence of the environment on human life.’ In 1864 Russian Foreign Minister Prince Alexander Gorchakov issued perhaps the most important policy statement justifying the country’s expansion into the region, explaining that for all ‘civilized States which are brought into contact with half-savage, nomad populations, possessing no fixed social organization … it always happens that the more civilized state is forced … to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whom their turbulent and un­ settled character make most undesirable neighbours.’ Therefore, he continued, ‘the tribes on the frontier have to be reduced to a state of more or less perfect submission.’ It is, he claimed, a ‘peculiarity of Asiatics to respect nothing but visible and palpable force; the moral force of reason and the interests of civilization has as yet no hold upon them.’15

Substitute China for Russia or the USA, over a century later: it is an uncanny fit.

three Reach of the revolutionary state

The Tsaidam/Qaidamu Basin The most intensively explored, exploited and recently settled portion of Tibet is the Tsaidam Basin (Qaidam or Chaidamu in Chinese). Ringed by mountains, this great basin was uplifted by the formation of the Tibetan Plateau to over 2,600 metres above sea level, still lower than the vast plateau stretching far to the south, west and east. The steady uplift of an ancient shallow seabed brought a sedimentary basin far above sea level, largely undisturbed. The oil and gas formed as long ago as 400 million years.1 Today this basin is proving to be a treasure house of the basic building blocks of China’s manufacturing economy, being rich in lead, zinc, asbestos, gold, salt, potash, magnesium, lithium, oil and gas. The Tsaidam Basin covers 220,000 square km (85,000 square miles), slightly smaller than Great Britain, slightly larger than Utah, Idaho, Kansas or Minnesota. The Tsaidam Basin was occupied by Tibetans in the seventh century, at a time when the Tibetan Empire stretched far into China.2 Tibetan herders have occupied it ever since, sharing its pastures with Mongolians, who arrived in the twelfth century with conquering armies, and more recently with Turkic peoples, especially the Salar.

reach of the state   From the eighteenth century, the Chinese imperial court in far-off Beijing exercised nominal authority, but there was no effective actual Chinese presence until the early decades of the twentieth century, when Chinese Muslim warlords brought Muslim settlers from poor and overcrowded Chinese provinces to start a new life in this arid frontier. The warlords captured the oases, pushing the nomads into more and more marginal territory. 3 This pattern was repeated under the rule of the CCP, which used its power to mobilize labour and capital to engineer a massive resettlement of prisoners, demobilized soldiers, warders and their families to the new frontier. In recent years, with the rudiments of Chinese civilization already established, voluntary settlement by poor Chinese displaced from their ancestral lands by the mechanization of agriculture has sent further waves of transmigrants into the rangelands of the nomads. The Tsaidam Basin was a magnet, despite its aridity, because its mineral wealth was quickly apparent to the early prospecting teams despatched in the 1950s, and Beijing was willing to back the new settlements and garrisons with sufficient finance to establish outposts of Chinese civilization on the edge of the desert. All settlement of the Tsaidam Basin had state sponsorship. Only the state had the capital to establish enclaves of miners, petrochemical plants and irrigation schemes on a scale sufficient for intensive oasis agriculture. For the early settlers it was tough. To their amazement, the local nomads subsisted without even the basics of the Chinese way of life. They didn’t even have sugar, cooking oil or soy sauce, and felt no need of them. Not so the settlers adapting to dryland, extensive, broadacre open rangeland. The spaciousness of the Tsaidam Basin, its dry heat and occasional summer downpours, its vast distances and unpredictability were unsettling. The scale of Tsaidam resources essential to Chinese industry, and to sustaining agricultural productivity, prompted China to invest heavily in opening the Tsaidam Basin to exploitation. It was during the Cultural Revolution that resource extraction began. A 1971 account emphasizes the heroism of those early pioneers:

  spoiling tibet Known in the past as a ‘buried treasure basin’, Tsaidam is now dotted with factories and drilling derricks. New towns have appeared. In place of camels, the boats of the desert, a web of highways is handling petroleum, asbestos, lead, zinc, potassium fertiliser and chemicals destined for various parts of the country. Contingents of builders marched into the western part of Tsaidam to open a new oil field in March 1969. The party and government sent thousands of road builders to the area in 1954. Tens of thousands of people have arrived from various parts of the country to join the people of various nationalities in Tsaidam in socialist construction. Building bricks had to be brought in from a place over 200 km away in Kansu province. Even such daily necessities as soy sauce, vinegar and cakes were transported long distances.4

But the minerals were there, and heroic efforts were made to extend supply lines, both road and rail, back to the Chinese hinter­ land, so the soy sauce and cooking oil, rice and wheat, could be brought in. In the 1960s China felt its revolution encircled and threatened by imperialist forces, on all its borders, by land and sea. The revolutionary answer was the Third Front policy, to establish military research and bases, industrial production and the supply of raw materials for industry far inland, in remote hinterland fastnesses beyond the reach of enemy forces. Nowhere was more remote than northern Tibet, and nowhere showed more promise.

Revolutionary oil The story of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) taking its Tibetan oil fields to IPO listing on Wall Street begins over fifty years ago, in the midst of China’s revolutionary enthusiasm. The creation of the Ministry of Petroleum Industry (MPI) is a story of military demands, central planning, security fears and the need to control. The 1960s and 1970s were China’s boom years for oil. China’s determination to achieve self-sufficiency in oil production was more

reach of the state   than a heroic quest to unlock the riches of the earth. The success of the revolution, the prospect of creating communism, the triumph of will over nature, all were exemplified by oilfields discovered and exploited in the 1960s. All of China was exhorted to learn from these models of revolutionary virtue. The direct association between oil and regime survival was impressed on the commanders of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) even before the revolutionary forces took power. The final battles were not guerrilla warfare but conflicts between mechanized, motorized battalions, all reliant on fuel. China’s capacity to fight in Korea depended crucially on oil, which was plentifully forthcoming from the Soviet Union. The Ministry of Petroleum Industry grew out of the barrel of a gun: Many of its recruits came from the army. … While the Ministry thus formally grew from the Petroleum Bureau in the Ministry of Fuel and Power, it also drew heavily from the PLA, and its links to the Logistics Department were intimate. The PLA had what is now referred to as the ‘Petroleum Division’ (shiyou shi), a unit of about 30,000 troops from which a large number of MPI leaders came.5

In 1962, at the far end of extended supply lines, China fought a war with India, from its newly conquered base in Tibet. The Indians, unprepared for an assault from the north through Tibet, were quickly defeated. Had the war persisted, supplying oil to the frontline, through Tibet and the Himalayas, would have been extremely difficult, in a year when millions of Chinese were dying of starvation. Fuel tankers, making their way to Tibet from the Lanzhou refinery to the frontline, used up much of their supplies en route. China’s extraction of so many minerals from the Tsaidam Basin, over many decades, was achieved by a mode of production now long superseded. In the command economy, the party-state has both will and means to mobilize all factors of production: not only land, capital and labour but also the human will to conquer nature, nurtured in mass campaigns by endlessly repeated slogans. Those

  spoiling tibet days seem long gone, yet when it comes to extracting the strategic metal chromite from central Tibet, the command economy lives on (see next chapter).

China’s nuclear power, uranium and Tibet The exploitation of Tibet’s land and minerals in part began with perceived defensive needs. In the heat of the Cold War and the Sino– Soviet split of the 1950s Tibet became China’s nuclear testing ground and the provider of fuel for its newly acquired nuclear arsenal. Initially the Qinghai Lake became the focus of China’s nuclearsubmarine-launched missile programme, while other, equally remote, areas suited China’s defensive needs precisely because they were remote, and thus beyond enemy attack, and so deemed vital. The Thewo county uranium mine was one such location. Thewo (Diebu in Chinese) in Tibet’s far north-east, close to China’s ancient silk route frontier, is acknowledged by several sources as a significant uranium deposit. Thewo remains today a remote area, cut off from its kin ties with the rest of Amdo, now designated as the Chinese province of Qinghai. Thewo remains a high, inaccessible grassland county of lowland Gansu province, a hinterland within a hinterland province. For centuries it was part of the Tibetan kingdom of Chone (or Choni), its prince at the head of forty-eight Tibetan clans.6 According to Chinese statistics, in Thewo secondary industry, such as uranium extraction and processing, generates over two-thirds of all the county’s income.7 China’s nuclear, missile and space industries were and are located in Gansu province, far inland, just downstream from Tibet and well away from the threatening patrols of the US Navy. It was in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu, that key facilities were located, with others situated within the province. And it was in Thewo, 200 km south of Lanzhou, and within Gansu’s borders, that the uranium, the starting point of all nuclear programmes, was sourced.

reach of the state   Due to the local availability of Thewo uranium, a major nuclear complex was built at Lanzhou. According to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Information System database of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, China’s nuclear factories remain concentrated in Lanzhou, even though the Thewo mine is no longer in use.8 The latest addition to the Lanzhou nuclear complex is a uranium enrichment centrifuge.9 The build-up of extremely hazardous waste has been compounded by the closure, in 1985, of the previous spent-fuel reprocessing plant at the Lanzhou Complex, which was also on a pilot scale only, and which had first gone into operation in 1965.10 Despite fears of the toxicity of accumulated spent-fuel collecting at Lanzhou, a full-scale spent-fuel reprocessing plant is not due to be constructed until 2020.11 In the interim, the wastes from China’s civilian and military nuclear programmes are stored in a Centralized Wet Storage Facility at Lanzhou, which began operation in 2000.12 The current programme of hydrodamming Tibetan rivers for Chinese industrial use was begun along the Yellow River in Qinghai, to power China’s military–industrial complex. The present Lanzhou nuclear fuel factory began operation in 1980, making gaseous uranium hexafluoride in a repetitive, laborious, energy-intensive process using huge amounts of hydroelectricity generated on the Tibetan Plateau in the earliest large-scale hydro-dam built by China to enable the weapons programme to proceed.13

Colonizing the Tibetan desert The labour that secured the Tsaidam for China included de­ mobilized soldiers, and cadres fired with revolutionary zeal. But most of the labour came with little choice, or none. The prison camps (laogai) of the Tsaidam Basin proliferated, as the Tsaidam became a place of internal exile for class enemies, youth sent down from the cities to ‘learn from the masses’, bad elements, criminals and former prisoners denied permission to return to their home provinces.

  spoiling tibet The new settlers had no previous experience of such an arid or cold climate, nor understanding of the ancient nomadic uses of such land. The land beyond the walled compounds of the newcomers was to Chinese eyes wasteland, beyond human use. Not only were the Mongolian and Tibetan herders displaced from the oases and watered places; the land itself was treated as barren, and carelessly despoiled. Only much later did Chinese scientists carefully survey the impacts of decades of Chinese intrusion into the Tsaidam’s complex ecosystem of lakes, intermittent streams, wetlands, soaks, shrubland, forest, dunes, saltmarsh and piedmont terraces. Recent Chinese scientific assessments of the impact of the Chinese high road to modernity state: Currently Qaidam salt resources are facing many disasters, such as windborne sand, drought and flood. On the other hand, human activities cause much damage to lake salt and its environment. Unplanned exploitation of lake salt with lower recovery rate make much valuable lake salt resource wasted, industrial pollution under less control makes salt lake contaminated and degraded. Regional ecological environment is deteriorating owing to the uncontrolled exploitation.14

They reported that half the Tsaidam Basin’s primitive forest has been destroyed, and that the rate of deforestation is greater than that of planting. There are few measures, they report, taken to prevent pollution, with the result that wastes pour into the rivers, endangering livestock, contaminating lakes downstream. There is also a steady leakage from oil pipelines. According to Song and Yao, existing laws regulating mineral resource extraction are not implemented, so there is no comprehensive exploitation and mining remains extensive rather than intensive, focused on the quick extraction of the most readily accessed and highly concentrated portion of a deposit, often rendering the rest uneconomic, even despoiled. Another scientist, Fan Guangming, reporting on prospects for reviving agriculture in the area of the potash lakes and oil fields of the Tsaidam Basin, states that the Tsaidam used to be rich in

reach of the state   Protests in Dzogang Chinese authorities have taken into custody two men identified as the ‘ringleaders’ of Tibetan protests against mining in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), according to Tibetan sources. The detentions follow a wave of roundups of other protesters who have sought to block mine operations in the TAR’s Chamdo prefecture during the last three months, sources said. A local Tibetan, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that authorities detained the two – identified as a lama named Tendzin and a layman named Tashi – ‘around July 20. With this, the number of people held in connection with the mining protest is estimated to be around 50’, the source said. Protests in Dzogang began in May, when local Tibetans learned that ‘around 200’ Chinese labourers had been deployed to work at [copper, gold and molybdenum] mines in ‘several locations’ in the county, according to another source. ‘Dzogang county authorities, in order to quash the protest, warned the local people that any demonstrations against the mining would be construed as politically motivated, and urged them to refrain from such actions’, the man said. Police beat Tibetans in Dzogang county’s Bethong township when they appealed for a halt to mine operations, another source said, adding that county officials said the land on which the mines were located had already been sold to a Chinese company. ‘The local people were told that the land belongs to local and county government, and that the people have no say in how the land is used’, he said. On 30 June, nine unidentified Tibetans were detained for protesting Chinese mining on a sacred mountain near the villages of Topa and Sapa in Bethong township, the same source said. ‘A convoy of official cars and four military trucks descended on the villages and detained nine local people at around 9:30 p.m.’, the source said. ‘The detentions were in connection with earlier protests against the mining.’ Chinese military personnel were then deployed at four mining sites, and the movements of local villagers were restricted, the

  spoiling tibet source added. Then, on 2 July, three village officials – Arsong, 56; Tashi Namgyal, 60; and Jamyang Thinley, 62 – who had travelled as delegates to the Tibetan capital Lhasa to protest the mining and detentions, were taken into custody by Dzogang county police and brought back to Dzogang. Radio Free Asia, 5 August 2011

vegetation but is now one of the most barren places in China, necessitating the import of great quantities of food to sustain the large Chinese immigrant population who work the oil, potash and other economic minerals. Fan proposes a plan to re-create the natural beauty of the region, insisting that it is feasible. However, he says, due to human interference, lack of funds, insufficient experience and improper measures, human beings are responsible for causing some big losses, such as destruction of vegetation, a deteriorating ecosystem, and a rapid rise of desertification.15

Minerals boom on the new frontier The Tsaidam Basin is one of the few areas of Tibet below the altitude where Chinese settlers suffer chronic mountain sickness. Situated 2,600–3,100m above sea level in the north-western part of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau and covering an area of some 200,000 sq km, the Qaidam Basin is surrounded by undulating mountains and abounds in underground resources. Known as a treasure house, it is one of the famous three huge basins in China. Being of an enclosed nature, the Qaidam Basin is very conducive to the formation of oil–gas fields. Up to now there have been discovered dozens of such fields whose oil-bearing structures have for the most part been determined by investigation. Moreover the reserves of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, coal and asbestos are also very rich. The Dulan [Qagan Us, 330 km west of the capital Xining] area has been found to have deposits of high-grade iron ore amounting to tens of millions of tonnes. The lead and zinc reserves around

reach of the state   Mount Xitieshan account for as much as one-third of the proved reserves of the whole country. The asbestos deposits in Mangnai near Qinghai’s north-western border are well known not only for their enormous quantities, but for high quality, enjoying a good reputation on markets both at home and abroad.16

China has found a deposit of more than 18 million tonnes of radioactive strontium in the Qaidam, the official Xinhua news agency said in 1994. It quoted officials as saying the deposit was near the surface and easy to extract.17 The other major resource of the Tsaidam Basin is the salts of its lakes, from which can be extracted not only common salt – a major feedstock for petrochemical manufacture – but also potash salts essential to fertilizer manufacture, as well as lithium, magnesium and rare earths. So abundant are these salts that China has built highways of salt to access the extraction zone. Chinese engineers have found its mechanical properties are highly suited to loadbearing for the truck convoys and excavating equipment. Now the coalmines in the Tsaidam Basin produce 2.68 million tonnes of coal a year.18 Salt production from the Tibetan salt lakes of the Tsaidam Basin in 1985 was 346,000 tonnes.19 Some reports suggest annual salt production from Tsaidam Basin as high as 1.5 million tonnes a year.20 The Tsaidam oil wells pumped 15,000 barrels a day in 1989, rising steadily to 23,000 barrels a day in 1994. In those six years the Tsaidam field produced 5,830,00 tonnes of oil.21 Because the state-owned monopoly producer of oil kept the purchase price of wellhead crude oil down, and the mark-up on refined petroleum for consumers high, the profit rate was extraordinary – in 1980, the profit rate on oil and gas was 55.8 per cent and on petroleum refining 98.3 per cent.22 Of all China’s industries, only tobacco was more profitable. In recent years profit rates have declined and state-owned enterprises increasingly made losses, but petroleum refining (and tobacco) remained at the top of the table of the sectors comprising China’s industries.

  spoiling tibet The list of extractable resources of the Tsaidam Basin keeps growing. The Sixth Five-Year Plan (1981–85) announced that Within these five years the state will lay emphasis on the thirtyeight major scientific and technological projects in the following eight fields: 1. Agricultural techniques … Develop the technology for extracting potassium from the Qinghai salt lakes. … and the techniques for producing compound fertilizers with highly effective ingredients.23

By then China’s new reliance on chemical fertilizer, and abandonment of the traditional use of human waste, had so depleted soils across China of potassium that the potash deposits of the Tsaidam Basin lakes became a critical resource. But it took a further two decades, and Israeli investment, before potash production reached a scale commensurate with China’s needs.

four Chromite globalization

In the 2000 hit movie Erin Brockovich residents near an electricity plant were being poisoned by chromium. The Californian corporate villains at the Pacific Gas and Electric plant were using chromium to prevent corrosion in steel pipes carrying hot water. We know how the story ends: real-life self-taught legal clerk and investigator Erin Brockovich won US$333 million in compensation for her clients with cancer and myriad diseases all caused by exposure to chromium. China’s self-taught Erin Brockoviches, such as the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng (now in America), have almost no chance of winning such payouts for those poisoned by chromium, although China has quickly become the world’s biggest manufacturer of ferro­ chrome, using processes that convert inert chromite ore into the highly reactive hexavalent chromium – the substance that poisoned working-class California. China is now experiencing a chromium poisoning crisis more destructive of human health than California’s, and Tibet is the sole domestic source of China’s chromium. China is not only the world’s factory; the factory is kept supplied by the world’s smelter, also located in China. By building metal smelters at an extraordinary

  spoiling tibet Protests end in death Chinese security personnel have shot dead a Tibetan man for taking part in an anti-mining protest in the Markham region of south-east Tibet. According to reports, around a thousand Tibetans on Wednesday marched to the mining site in Markham, protesting the largescale operations, which they said was environmentally hazardous. Chinese security personnel responded by firing tear gas and live rounds on the protesters, leading to the death of the Tibetan male identified as Nyima and the arrest of six others. Lobsang Palden, an exile monk in South India, citing sources in the region, told US-based radio service RFA that Nyima was killed by Chinese gunfire at the mining site. ‘He was surrounded by the security forces, and none of the Tibetans could approach him’, Palden told RFA. ‘Many other protesters ran away into the forest to hide and have not returned home.’ Markham [Mangkang in Chinese], traditionally part of Kham Province, has seen regular anti-mining protests over the years. In 2009, hundreds of Tibetan villagers in the region resisted gold mining at Ser Ngol Lo, considered sacred by the residents. The protests then had gone on for many months, successfully blocking the mining activities. A year later, following China’s resumption of mining operations, local Tibetans renewed protests, which led to injuries and detention of several Tibetans. Phayul.com, 16 August 2012

pace, far in excess of demand, China has brought to its shores the raw mineral resources of the world, for profitable value-adding, and with it produced the world’s toxic metals pollution epicentre. The irony – in a book about mining in Tibet – is that Tibetans have been largely bypassed as a location for the dirtiest smelters, simply because it remains too remote and too expensive, at least for now.

chromite globalization    Chrome-plated modernity Chromium is a metal of modernity, making metals ever-new, shiny and glamorous. When New York’s Chrysler Building was capped with a chromium steel spire it defied the Depression, and declared confidence in the future. When Google decided to compete with Microsoft in the Internet browser market, it carefully researched a brand name that conveyed, in a word, that what it offers is bright, new, shiny, fast, a real competitor: in short, Google Chrome. Destroying one’s brain by inhaling fumes of spray cans is called chroming. But the actual process of finding, mining and processing chromium has little glamour. It is not a metal followed by day traders and speculators; it gets little publicity. The elemental metal chromium is found in the earth as chromite ore, in rich deposits that can account for as much as 30 or 40 per cent of the rock. In Tibet, such high concentrations are found on the south bank of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, in the heart of the area sacred to the ancient pre-Buddhist kings of Tibet. The steep north bank is geologically Eurasia; the south bank is India. This is the continental collision zone. The river valley exists where the Indian plate slid under the Eurasian plate. That collision led over many millions of years to concentrations of chromium forming as bulging molten masses melting their way upward from the earth’s core, without breaking through the upper crust to form volcanoes. Now Chinese geologists say that in the continental collision zone there is at least 20 million tonnes of copper awaiting extraction,1 and vast amounts of chromium. To those who maintain that China has raped Tibet, the chromite mines should be prime evidence. Yet the mining of chromite in Tibet never kept pace with accelerating demand and now supplies only 3 per cent of the total China consumes. China has not exploited the Tibetan chromite deposits to the extent that Tibetan exiles suppose. This is due to the fact that a statist command economy is still in place in Tibet, though long superseded elsewhere in China. China’s

  spoiling tibet inability to extract chromium commensurate with its industrial demand is due to the persistence of the revolutionary-era mode of production, with official work units allocating portions of a deposit to themselves, which are then mined not for tonnage or efficiency of extraction, but to provide guaranteed iron rice bowl employment for life for those who belong to the work unit (danwei). The fragmentation of the Norbusa chromite deposit, parcelled out to various well-connected work units, none of them having sufficient capital for intensive extraction technologies, resulted in faltering production. In a market economy, these labour-intensive, low-tech, undercapitalized work units would long ago have been bought out by more efficient corporations able to reduce costs per tonne extracted, and ramp up production. Equally, under the state capitalist developmental model now entering Tibet on a big scale the small producers would long ago have been compulsorily agglomerated by command into a single SOE with access to loans from state-owned banks to ramp up production. Neither of these scenarios has happened. The dirigiste command economy lives on in Tibet. In Tibet, two chromite deposits, hundreds of kilometres apart, have been mined. The first was Dongqiao, where the East Wind (Dongfeng) mine ceased in 1983, after twelve years of extraction, having yielded 310,000 tonnes of chromite ore, all of which had to be trucked over high passes to the rail terminus at Gormo (Golmud or Ge’ermu in Chinese), and then by rail all the way to the Wuhan steelworks far down the Yangtze. Some available data suggest more could have been extracted, naming reserves at 457,000 tonnes, but the official history of mining in Tibet, written by the geologists in charge, says the mine was exhausted. Dongqiao is in an area remote even by Tibetan standards, in an alpine semi-desert, in Amdo county, TAR, roughly due north of Lhasa. Because mining began at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the geologists who enabled it could look back and say proudly: ‘Under the situation when the channels of chromite importation were

chromite globalization    blocked, the exploitation of the Dongqiao chromite mine solved to a certain extent the nation’s urgent needs.’2 Chromium was designated a strategic mineral, needed by the military to harden steel, to meet specified requirements for a wide range of weaponized applications.

Norbusa/Luobusa The second major chromite deposit of Tibet is Norbusa (Luobusa or Lhobsa in Chinese), on the banks of the great Yarlung Tsangpo River, well upstream of where it becomes the Brahmaputra. Norbusa is currently producing at least 200,000 tonnes of chromite a year, with indications that its output may soon intensify. Norbusa is a bigger deposit than that at Dongqiao, with a more complex history of extraction. It is south-east of Lhasa, much further from any steel plant or industrial chromium user than Dongqiao, and requires expensive long-haul trucking over many passes. The existence of chromium there was known to Chinese geologists as early as 1951. The total available reserve was calculated to be 1.1 million tonnes, double the size of Dongqiao but on a steep slope, and the wrong side of a powerful river. It was not until the early 1980s that further testing settled on 3.96 million tonnes as a verified reserve, in over a hundred scattered orebodies of highly concentrated chromite, later scaled up by a further 600,000 tonnes uphill. The higher deposit is called Xianggashan. Mining of Norbusa began as mining at Dongqiao petered out. The high-altitude Xianggashan mine never produced more than 10,000 tonnes a year. Norbusa became China’s sole domestic source of chromite, and remains so now. The geologists telling the story of how they discovered and verified Norbusa recorded: From the discovery up to the evaluation and exploitation of the deposit there was an experience full of hardships. To date, the Lhobsa chromite deposit has become the largest among the verified ones in China. However, it is rather small on a worldwide scale and is far from meeting the nation’s urgent needs for chromite. 3

  spoiling tibet That was in 1996, before China got serious about manufacturing stainless steel. What was once ‘far from meeting the nation’s urgent needs’ is now insignificant compared to the chromite imports which provide 97 per cent of Chinese consumption. Altogether, Tibetan chromite mines yielded 3.28 million tonnes of chromite for China between 1978 and 2010, according to official statistics.4 That’s an average production of 102,500 tonnes a year, half the current annual extraction rate from Tibet. Contrary to the popular image of China as an insatiable consumer of resources, the exploitation of chromite has been desultory, far from the intensive extraction some might suppose. There is a reason for this: the iron rice bowl. Each work unit involved in exploring the chromite deposits, or giving regulatory approval for mining, expected a slice of the action. They had put in the heroic work of geologizing; now there should be reward. The deposit itself is conducive to such fragmentation, with at least eighteen distinct chromite deposits, spread around an arc 7 km long, making it possible to divide up the spoils.5 The official history of this deposit says the number of chromite orebodies scattered over a 22 sq km area is over 100. Shannan prefecture (Lhoka in Tibetan) and Qusum county (Chusum dzong in Tibetan) maintain separate mining operations, as does Lhasa municipality. Geology Work Unit #2, the Geophysical Prospecting Party and other state enterprises all also operate their own extraction zones at Norbusa.6 Inevitably, the result is fragmentation of responsibility, lack of accountability, undercapitalization, inefficiency, buck-passing and limited output. The purpose of such iron rice bowl operations is guaranteed employment for life, a higher priority than output, efficiency or profit. Only RMB50 million (US$8 million) was invested in establishing the mining operation, which fails to extract the deposit’s rare metals – ruthenium, rhodium, osmium and iridium. Norbusa is pre-reform China, alive and well in Tibet; the anti­ thesis of a market economy or a productivist ethos. Now it may

chromite globalization    be too late, as there is little extractable chromite left, unless fresh geologizing extends the proven resource. The image of China as a statist machine voraciously snapping up planetary resources hardly fits the actual history of the biggest mining operation to date in central Tibet.

China’s searoads lead to chrome By the start of this century, China was in a hurry. The 10th FiveYear Plan (2001–05) announced a scaling up of chromite mining in Tibet, an increase in capacity from no more than 200,000 tonnes a year to 240,000 tonnes, which meant turning open pit extraction on steep hillsides into underground mines. However, central leaders had much more on their minds than intensifying the exploitation of the one metal officially extracted from TAR. China was then finalizing its membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which would, on paper, let foreign steel companies into the Chinese market. China was already the biggest steelmaker globally, except for one type of steel: stainless. China had long lagged behind in manufacturing stainless steel, although it is essential in uses such as the turbines of the Three Gorges Dam and nuclear reactors. Part of the problem was that stainless steel is made with chromium, and the sole domestic source was Tibet, from a state-owned operation that had failed to invest much, and located very far from markets. China’s central planners decided on a crash programme of boosting stainless steel manufacture, to lift production capacity in the five-year period, under WTO rules, before foreign steel companies could compete for Chinese customers. This is the sort of state-orchestrated industrial upsizing China does so well. China’s state capitalism succeeded in dramatically boosting stainless steel production. By 2009 American stainless steel producers, far from penetrating the China market, were loudly demanding the US government protect them from imports

  spoiling tibet of Chinese-made stainless steel pipes and kitchen sinks. The key to this success was not Tibet but to source the key missing ingredient globally. For China’s steel plants, mostly located on the coast, and increasingly reliant on buying iron ore in staggering tonnages from around the world, it was not hard to also buy unprocessed chromite ore, from keen sellers in South Africa, Turkey, India and Kazakhstan. The result, within a few years, was that China, having boasted of its self-sufficiency in chromium, became the world’s biggest trader in and importer of unprocessed chromite, and the world’s biggest maker of stainless steel. None of this could have happened if, in a resource nationalist reversion to self-reliance, China had to rely on the chromite ore of Tibet. It would have taken too long, required the building of a railway, at state expense, and subsidies to make economic the longhaul freight from so deep in inner Asia to the coast economic. Yet again, Tibet proved itself to be beyond the frontier; logistically further from the coastal ferroalloy plants and steelmills than South Africa or Turkey. China was in a hurry not only to meet its own needs, but to export to the world, and that required bypassing the resource nationalist aspirations of its trading partners. South Africa, which quickly became a major supplier of chromium, was especially sensitive about wanting to sell value-added ferrochrome, made in South African factories, rather than unprocessed chromite ore. The price difference was almost tenfold. The ferrochrome industry in South Africa employed 80,000 workers, mostly black, in an industry that, postapartheid, could sell to the world. The aspirations of black workers to prosper, in a prospering metals industry, partly depended on the ferrochrome factories receiving more orders. What China wanted was vertical integration, control over all stages of mining, processing and manufacturing, as it has in Tibet, where mines are captive; that is, completely dependent on specific industrial users. China wanted raw chromite, not expensive ferrochrome. That way, the ferrochrome could be made in China, the value-added would accrue to Chinese

chromite globalization    enterprises, but so too would China have to bear the environmental costs. China got what it wanted. China’s preference for raw chromite undermined South Africa’s push to add value, create more jobs for blacks, and ensure black ownership of mineral enterprises financed by future dividends of profitable mineral processing enterprises. William Gumede of Wit­watersrand University argues that Chinese companies will soon be able to buy out ailing black-owned mines: Since most black people lack finance, Black Economic Empowerment deals in the mining sector have often been financed by mining companies lending would-be black buyers the money to purchase the stakes. However, many of these deals have unravelled as the black part-owners could never finance the debts through dividend payments. Many of these black miners are now hoping Chinese companies could buy into them. The ANC government has been under immense criticism by allies and opponents alike for not aggressively and dramatically up-scaling its strategy of benefici­ating the country’s minerals and for being too sluggish in boosting and protecting South Africa’s under-pressure manufacturing sector – now universally seen as the areas where mass jobs can be created. South Africa should tax the exports of raw materials heavily – including or especially those being exported to China – if we are serious about beneficiation.7

China has attained the resource security it wants, achieving vertical integration and a capacity to shift the profit-making parts of the commodity chain to China, maximizing accumulation. Yet China’s acquisition of African and Kazakh resources makes redundant the more laborious and expensive process of capturing and assimilating Tibet.

China’s chromers The industrial users of chromium in China are many, so many that they maintain an energetic and frequently updated website informing members of all aspects of the global traffic in chromium (and the

  spoiling tibet other metals used in steelmaking to produce stainless and speciality steels). By logging in to FerroAlloyNet one can get daily updates, in English, on who is importing into China how much chromium, from where, at which port, and at which price. A search of all posts between 2007 and 2012 comes up with hundreds of stories about the chromium trade, and the political risks chromium users face. One can find out plenty about the availability of chromium supplies from Madagascar, Oman, Turkey, Kazakhstan, South Africa and many other suppliers keen to sell to China.8 What is striking is how little Tibet figures. Actual chromite production from Tibet is mentioned only three times, in hundreds of posts, as a minor source with no expansion prospects, tied to supplying specific industrial plants in neighbouring Qinghai, and in heavily industrialized (and heavily polluted) Shanxi province. In May 2012 FerroAlloyNet reported: Some ferrochrome producers in northwest China are likely to use Tibet chrome ore lumpy to replace imported chrome ore lumpy. Although the production of Tibet chrome ore: around 250,000 mt/ year can’t fulfill the large demand in China, the main consumers of Tibet chrome ore are Shanxi and Qinghai ferrochrome producers because they are far away from China ports.9

Tibet is a sideshow, even in the one Chinese industry able to make use of what is mined in Tibet. So much chromite, of high quality, floods into China that in 2012 the main topic on this database platform for buyers and sellers was the low price of the mineral, and the number of ferroalloy factories getting out of the business altogether, especially those closest to Tibet, in Qinghai and Gansu, on the one rail line from Tibet.10 The last thing on their mind was getting more chromite out of Tibet. Yet China is now a major producer of stainless steel, which always includes chromium, and has also become a major exporter of stainless steel, led by the two biggest producers, Baosteel, based in Shanghai, and TISCO, based in Taiyuan. Neither has any need of

chromite globalization    Tibetan chromite. In 2010, according to the US Geological Survey, China imported 8.66 million tonnes of chromite and chromium. Annual production of unprocessed chromite from Tibet is at most 250,000 tonnes, or only 3 per cent of China’s needs. If China’s statistics are accurate, the percentage in most recent years has been even lower. The state-driven development model has not succeeded in industrializing Tibet, or in making Tibet a significant source of industrial raw materials, despite the targets announced in successive Five-Year Plans, which never failed to list chromium as a ‘pillar industry’ of Tibet.

Chroming your next car made in China This may not always be so. China’s manufacturing hubs are moving inland, as far as western China, drawn by the prospect of abundant and cheap hydroelectricity, lower labour costs and lax enforcement of environmental regulations. Chongqing and Chengdu, in the southwest, are fast growing, with massive state investments in upgrading the transport corridors that link them to markets to the east, and source regions for raw materials to the west. Ford and Volvo (now owned by the Chinese car manufacturer Geely) are just two of the manufacturers setting up in these cities, which will need chromium, both as stainless steel and to make their products shine. The rail line out of Tibet through Qinghai and Gansu will soon have a fast connection to Chongqing, financed by US$300 million from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).11 A direct rail line from Sichuan to Tibet has also been announced, which will take many years to overcome the engineering challenges of traversing such a seismically unstable and steep landscape.12 The state-owned corporation that owns and operates the Norbusa chromite mine on the banks of the Yarlung Tsangpo River below Lhasa, Tibet Mineral Development Co. (TMD), is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange,13 one of many companies languishing,

  spoiling tibet undercapitalized, but with prospects. In 2012 TMD announced a deal to invest a modest amount in further exploring the Norbusa deposit: ‘According to the company, if sufficient chromite is discovered, it will result in direct economic profit. Tibet Mineral Development Co. recorded a 75.1 per cent year-on-year drop in 2012 first quarter net profit to RMB3.21 million despite a 6.44 per cent increase in revenue to RMB3 87.77 million.’ The exploration work is a collaboration between the company and National University of Defence Technology, based in Changsha, very far from Tibet, but with a strong interest in the military uses of chromium in special steels,14 in aerospace hi-tech and satellite controls.15 China’s ferrochrome producers will not remain small-scale intermediaries between mine and metals manufacture for much longer. Margins are low, the central government’s agenda is to merge or close them, and they will be absorbed into the big steel producers, with ferrochrome just one of many inputs needed for specific speciality steels. As the big companies move in and take over, it is increasingly likely that Tibetan chromite will be integrated into the production lines of global players such as Baosteel and TISCO. Rationalization of the ferrochrome industry will publicly be presented as a mitigation of environmental impacts, after a series of scandals in China recently in which toxic chromium contaminated many foods and pharmaceuticals. Improved environmental performance is a popular concern, but for central leaders improved industrial efficiencies of scale are just as important, which means concentrating production in fewer but bigger plants. Already the price of ferrochrome is largely set by the big steelmakers, and their dominance of what China designates as a strategic industry, set to remain state-owned, will only intensify. The major steel plant of the Tibetan Plateau, Xining Special Steel, is on Baosteel’s list of likely acquisitions,16 which will leave its major shareholder, Western Mining, also based in Xining, as an upstream miner with fewer growth options, even as it attempts to dominate mining across the Tibetan Plateau.

chromite globalization    Chromium and health Chinese populations living anywhere near waste dumps containing chromium bear the burden of ill-health, with scandals erupting frequently over chromium contamination of water, and even of medicinal drug capsules. In getting the chromite it wants, China gets more pollution, and less purchase on Tibet. Long-term goals of the party-state, such as assimilating Tibet, take second place to short-term demands of steelmakers for raw chromite feedstock from anywhere with ore to sell. China, as the world’s biggest user of chromium, pays the biggest price environmentally. To make chromite ore usable industrially, for almost any application, requires processing the chemically inert and unreactive naturally occurring chromium III into highly reactive chromium VI (also called chromium 6, or hexavalent chromium, or simply hexchrome). Since hexchrome does not occur in nature, living organisms have no natural defences against it, and readily absorb it into body tissues, causing great damage to health. It is readily breathed into lungs, with terrible consequences. The processing of chromite ore is done in ferroalloy plants. Far from being concentrated in a few technology-intensive plants equipped with advanced pollution control equipment, there are 150 ferrochrome producers across China,17 making little profit, and with no incentive to obey environmental regulations. Since chromium, in a thousand uses, became integral to modern life, the health and environmental costs have become abundantly clear. So toxic is chromium that the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) ranks it as second only to iron in its global impact, ahead of all other metals.18 Most of the uses of chromium are not obvious, unlike the shine of chrome plating. Most uses are integrated into industrial processes which citizens know nothing about, until a health crisis erupts. Meng Si, a Beijing-based freelance journalist, says: ‘Globalisation has moved chemical production towards China and has turned

  spoiling tibet the country into the world’s largest producer of chromium tailings – a waste product of chemical processes. According to Ministry of Commerce statistics, 10% of all manufactured products involves chromium at some point.’19 That chromium has greater environmental impact than uranium, aluminium, copper or zinc is extraordinary. The global chromium trade is small. In 2011 the world produced 24 million tonnes of chromite ore.20 Global production of iron ore, in 2010, was 1,820 million tonnes. For each tonne of chromite dug, there are 76 tonnes of iron, yet these two metals top the environmental impact list. The reasons why chromium damages the environment more than aluminium are evident to Chinese scientists, who in 2011 reported that China’s ferrochrome manufacturers persist in using a process that generates two tonnes of chromium-bearing waste for each tonne of chromium extracted: It is reported that 2–3 tonnes chromium ore processing residue (COPR) is generated in the production of 1 ton sodium dichromate by the high lime process. The high lime process has been superseded by the non-lime process in the UK and the USA; however, it is still being used in Russia, China, India and Pakistan. About 6 million tonnes of COPR have been disposed of in China until now, and the annual amount of COPR is nearly 600,000 tonnes. Two problems are observed at COPR deposition sites: one is the persistent leaching of Cr(VI) from COPR and the other is the heaving and uncontrolled expansion. Hence, COPR has become a major geoenvironmental and geotechnical hazard in many urban areas. Remediation of COPR is still an urgent problem throughout the world.21

These chromium-laden waste piles, growing in China at 600,000 tonnes a year, are highly alkaline and in the open they swell and harden like cement, making any further treatment to reduce toxicity difficult. The extreme alkalinity persists for decades. Hexchrome in this waste slowly leaches out into the surrounding air, water and soil, as Chinese scientists have long known.22

chromite globalization    Yellow water – hexchrome contamination One of the more notorious cases of hexchrome poisoning in China is in Liaoning, in the north-east, where ferrochrome manufacture began in 1959. Villagers nearby soon discovered that the water they drew from their wells was yellow, and by 1965 hexchrome was identified as the contaminant, with some attempt at remediation. Stomach cancer rates began to rise, and in 1987 the Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine reported the findings of Chinese scientists of higher than usual rates of stomach and lung cancer, attributable to the hexchrome. However, those same scientists later reported no connection between cancer and hexchrome, in a study found, much later, to have been financed by the chromium industry, and eventually discredited. The saga took place over decades, and the health effects are ongoing.23 It was not until 2008 that the causal connection between the Liaoning hexchrome waste dumps and the villagers’ cancers were proven, by a team from the California Environment Protection Agency.24 That 1987 Chinese scientific report was one of the first to show that hexchrome causes cancer not only by breathing it in, but also from drinking water contaminated with small amounts of the substance. At that point Erin Brockovich’s case against Pacific Gas and Electric got to China and got entangled with the rewriting of the Liaoning evidence. A Californian judge recognized that the 1987 Liaoning report, by Zhang Jiandong, was crucial evidence, so the US chromium industry arranged for Dr Zhang to contradict himself, cancelling his original findings.25 Since much of the world takes its cue from California, this effectively delayed tightening the rules on exposure to hexchrome, in air and water, by many years. But the 600,000 tonnes of chromium waste dumped each year in China was building. Now there is a widespread popular movement, in the absence of official action, to identify the hundreds of ‘cancer villages’ across China, and the mines, factories and waste dumps upriver or upwind of them.26 The ubiquity of dumped chromium

  spoiling tibet contaminating products supposedly safe to swallow went nationwide in 2012: ‘At the end of May 2012, the State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) announced the results of inspections of nearly every pharmaceutical company. The report found that 5.8 percent of all capsules on drugstore shelves contained excessive levels of chromium, a toxic heavy metal substance.’27 Occasionally, as with the tainted pharmaceutical capsules, the chromium pollution is detectable, the source can be traced and the polluter identified. This was the case in Yunnan, in 2011, where a local blogger revealed that a nearby factory in south-west China – Luliang Chemicals – had dumped 5,000 tonnes of toxic chromium tailings on a hillside in the township of Yuezhou. The resulting water pollution killed fish and livestock, endangered the drinking water of tens of millions of people and attracted widespread media attention across China.28

But the link between cause and effect is seldom so obvious, and the waste dumps continue to grow. It is the workers in China’s ferrochrome and chrome electroplating factories, along with nearby residents, who are the most exposed. Chinese epidemiologists have intensively monitored chrome-plating workers, finding that their work is damaging their DNA.29 Scientists have known for decades what Erin Brockovich discovered, that exposure to hexchrome, even in modest amounts, causes cancers, serious respiratory diseases and many other illnesses. In hindsight, the customary Tibetan approach, maintaining that such minerals are best left undisturbed, or used only minimally, seems sensible.

China eats the world Chromite is the first mineral extracted from central Tibet on an industrial scale. During the decades of chromite extraction, still on a command economy model, the world has been transformed by Chinese demand for not only chromite but all metals, and

chromite globalization    agricultural commodities too. China’s consumption and intensity of use have risen sharply. China’s domestic material consumption (DMC) by 2005 had already surpassed that of the USA, but no one noticed. Since no agency tracks global material extraction and consumption, it was not until 2012 that a team at the Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna joined the dots. Their calculation is that ‘Domestic extraction of resources increased significantly on the global level, from 46.4 billion tonnes in 1995 to 57.4 billion tonnes in 2005 (up 24%).’30 The total extraction of the stuff of modernity rose fast in the decade in which China emerged as the world’s factory, a decade which ended with sharp rises in the prices of all stuff, from rice to iron, wheat to copper. Those prices have stayed high ever since, despite temporary dips due to global recessions and financial systems freezing. The tonnage of different stuffs rose differentially, none faster than the use of metals, which rose 36 per cent in that decade, much faster than anything else. Of the 57.4 billion tonnes flowing annually through global commodity chains, two countries stand out, to an extraordinary degree: the USA, which consumed 8.05 billion tonnes, and China, which consumed 8.52 billion tonnes. So China consumed 14.8 per cent of planetary resources that year, and the USA 14.02 per cent. Since 2005 total global material consumption has continued to grow fast, reaching 68 billion tonnes in 2009. Meanwhile manufacturing in the USA has slowed, with many factories closing, unable to compete with the lower wages and less rigorous environmental compliance in China. Ecological economics is such a new field that there is no agreed method of calculating global commodity flows, and the data is so hard to gather and crunch that any figures are years behind real time. By another measure, called raw material consumption (RMC), the USA in 2005 still consumed more than China. But the trend is clear. China is eating the world, especially its metals. Chromite mining in the TAR has been the first experience for many Tibetans of the industrial age, the command economy and the

  spoiling tibet Gold panning In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of outsiders poured into Matö county to look for gold. Outsiders flooded into this Tibetan area, engaging in mining and gold digging, grasslands were destroyed, the river-bed dried up, wild animals were hunted, and caterpillar fungus as well as other precious medicinal herbs were dug out; all these various different factors came together and, taken as a whole, finally led to what we see today. Online surveys reveal that between the 1980s to the 1990s, excessive and uncontrolled gold digging has not only damaged the gold resources, but also severely devastated grasslands and destroyed the eco-system and virtuous cycle, leading to the disappearance of fertile soil and the desertification of the land. In 1999, 47.8% of the entire county area was covered in desert and sand or bare ground and the percentage of wild animals dropped to 31%. These people were competitively engaged in gold dredging and panning right from the river water. The gold panners were mainly Hui and Han people. Wang Lixiong does not remember ever seeing any Tibetans engaging in gold panning. In fact, Matö is not famous for the Yellow River, but because it contains rich mineral resources such as gold, which has attracted many avaricious people who came swarming into the area. By Tibetan blogger Woeser, who has managed to speak up, despite censorship, because of her family’s impeccable revolutionary credentials, which count for a lot in today’s China. Her father, a photographer, took the only surviving shots of educated Tibetans persecuted and ‘struggled’ to death during the Cultural Revolution. http://highpeakspureearth.com/2011/impoverished-mato-county-by-woeser

reach of the central state into their lives. But the dirigiste command economy, largely redundant elsewhere in China, is only one mode of production in today’s China. In the next chapter, private enterprise enters Tibet; and in the chapter after that, the biggest of Chinese mining enterprises enter, not private but proudly state-owned

chromite globalization    national champions. Tibetans are discovering that they not only have many minerals but that China has many modes of exploitation. With mining, it matters much to distinguish between mines operated by local governments, or with their tacit consent, and provincial or national enterprises, operating on a very different scale, and with different agendas. It matters to know whether a mining company is private or state-owned, foreign or domestic; has a share price and reputation to protect, or whether its local connections enable it to ignore local feelings and environmental regulations. This is the art of reading between the lines, and being alert to who the real beneficiaries are. As long ago as 1962, the late Panchen Lama showed how deeply attuned he was to the revolutionary jargon of those times, as he petitioned Mao to desist from starving Tibetans en masse.

five Capitalizing on Tibet: privatizing the treasure house

None of the famous global mining companies operate in Tibet. That may be one reason why the words ‘Tibet’ and ‘mining’ seldom occur in a sentence. In Tibet only a few global minnows are at work preparing deposits for mining, ever ready to be bought out and take their cut. Nor is there much involvement of Chinese private enterprise, except for a few showy investments yet to achieve much. This chapter investigates the paradox: on the one hand, everyone supposes China’s hunger for minerals inevitably drives private and public enterprises, Chinese and global, towards Tibet; yet, on the other, in reality China’s grand plans to quarry Tibet are state-driven, burdened with statist agendas that have little to do with profitable extraction. Familiar names such as BHP Billiton, Vale, Rio Tinto, Glencore/ Xstrata are absent from Tibet, both because China wants the riches of Tibet for itself, and because the big names are big brands whose share price depends on reputation, and the risk to reputation of operating in such a politically high-risk area is too great. But that does not mean private enterprise has no role, or that global capital is absent from the exploitation of Tibet. This chapter is about the newly available extraction opportunities that attract global capital and private enterprise exploitation in Tibet.

capitalizing on tibet   China’s private entrepreneurs have shown almost no interest in the minerals of Tibet, leaving the heavy lifting to the big state-owned mining corporations. But this too is starting to change, especially when it comes to hot mineral commodities that promise big profits, such as lithium, molybdenum and gold. There are fashions in minerals, as in anything else consumable. Rare earths are hot because they are rare, and China almost completely monopolizes their production, is positioned to decide who gets what, and is quite unashamed about playing favourites. Japan has been singled out for denial of service, as punishment for maritime disputes. China’s primary source of rare earths, in Inner Mongolia, is so abundant that there has been little reason to look elsewhere, such as in Tibet, even though deposits have been located. As usual, Chinese mining companies have been more interested in buying rare earth deposits abroad, to maintain the monopoly, not only to make windfall profits, and play favourites, but also to force hi-tech users of rare earths to relocate to China, which will require them to share their tech secrets with Chinese partners.

Lithium and the snow li-ion The two minerals found plentifully in Tibet which are commercially hot, and attract hot money, are lithium and molybdenum (and, always, gold). Globally, the lithium needed for li-ion batteries that power mobile phones and tablets is sourced from high-altitude dry salt lake beds, where the salts that were left as the water evaporated are not only common salt (sodium chloride) but also salts of industrially valuable elements, including potassium, magnesium and lithium. The dry salt beds of the Tibetan Plateau, as in the heavily mined Atacama desert salt lakes in the Andes, supply China’s industries with the potassium for potash fertilizers, magnesium metal, and abundant common salt as a feedstock used in huge amounts in the manufacture, in the Tsaidam Basin of northern Tibet, of urea fertilizers, petrochemicals, pesticides and plastics.

  spoiling tibet Now it is lithium’s turn as metal of the month, driven by speculation that electric cars will become popular, requiring a sharp jump in lithium production for their manufacture and urban use in a scenario which envisages several sets of batteries per car, to be quickly swapped at special locations throughout each city, to keep drivers on the move, despite the limited mileage available from one set of batteries. It was Warren Buffett, famous for spotting and investing in the next big thing before it goes big, who proved lithium was hot when he took equity in an obscure Shenzhen-based battery manufacturer with big plans to build electric cars around their batteries. BYD (Build Your Dreams) has a great pitch, and the party-state, eager to promote its green credentials and the prospect of becoming the dominant player in a new technology, was willing to subsidize handsomely the sales of electric cars. Part of BYD’s pitch was that they had arranged exclusive access to a Tibetan salt lake rich in lithium. This got the thumbs-up from investment advisers, and a buy recommendation. It mattered little that hardly anyone could say where the Drangyer Tsaka (Zhabuye in Chinese) is on a map, or that it is extremely remote, in the alpine desert of western upper Tibet. It was an astute brand-building move, guaranteeing supply of the metal set to power the green-tech revolution. It also mattered little that other Tibetan salt lakes, rich in lithium, were more accessible, in the Tsaidam Basin, and were already heavily mined for more familiar salts. And it mattered to no one that the only way to separate the mingled salts is with heavy-duty solvent chemicals that must be kept, at all costs, from entering the air or water at treatment plants. Lithium’s boom soured as the worldwide demand for electric cars faded, and BYD found it hard to manufacture an electric car that actually worked. BYD had sold the sizzle long before it had a steak to put on the market. By 2012 the boom was over, BYD’s shares had slumped and many investors, following the recommendations of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, burned their fingers. Central leaders

capitalizing on tibet   faced the reality that demand and supply of electric cars will be slow, and dropped much of the subsidies on offer to buyers. Lithium, for the moment, had enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame, and the smart money was ready to move on. But that moment showed how Tibet could play a part in pumping the next hot stock, giving it an exotic glamour best captured, in an immortal 2011 YouTube segment1 of Buffett and Gates enthusing about BYD, under a banner saying: ‘Let innovative New Energy technology power the philanthropic light in Tibet and the world.’ It seemed that far from exploiting Tibet, BYD and the famous philanthropists were bringing the light of civilization to a grateful Tibet just as Communist Party leaders often say they are bringing the light of modernity to the darkness of feudal Tibet.

Molybdenum and the trade wars of resource nationalism By 2012 the smart money had moved on, adding molybdenum to the rare earth family of metals with the best prospects for making quick fortunes, on rapidly rising prices. As with rare earths, China dominates global production of molybdenum, a metal with many uses, chiefly in the making of stainless steel, and other steels that need to be especially hard, corrosion-resistant or able to withstand very high temperatures. In a market economy it does not take much for prices to rise spectacularly, if demand is consistently a little greater than supply. When the global mineral commodity boom began in 2003, driven by accelerating Chinese demand, molybdenum, hitherto an obscure metal, rose sharply and attracted speculators. No longer was it a boring commodity of interest only to miners and steel mills. By 2008, leading metals futures markets were trading bets on future prices of molybdenum, led by the biggest such market, the London Metals Exchange, which in 2012 was bought out by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The involvement of futures traders inevitably made the molybdenum price more volatile and prone to extremes,

  spoiling tibet mostly upward. In turn, that brought in new investors seeking new molybdenum plays, new mines to add to global supply, able to take best advantage of the profit potential of a metal that had gone from US$8 per pound in 2009’s global financial crisis to US$45 per pound by 2011. Sure enough, Chinese professional gamblers jumped in, buying up new mines that promised to quickly produce more molybdenum. A Sichuan-based property developer, Hanlong, which had prospered building infrastructure for the party-state, proudly announced in 2011 that it had acquired a molybdenum deposit that was being brought into production fast. Yunnan Copper Industry, a subsidiary of the Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco), bought into a molybdenum prospect in partnership with Rio Tinto. The race was on to get more molybdenum into production before the inevitable overcorrection and prices fall as too much supply finds it has outpaced demand. That’s the minerals cycle, over and over. There is plenty of molybdenum in Tibet. Chinese geologists, working ‘in accordance with the objective laws’ of science, found molybdenum at Yulong, in Jomda county, eastern Tibet, at the height of the Cultural revolution, in 1971. Since then, many deposits have been found. But none of the private Chinese capital, or the state-owned Chinalco corporation, sank their money into Tibetan molybdenum. Chinalco’s partnership with RioTinto is in Chile; Hanlong’s turn from property developer to miner brought it not to Tibet but to Australia. The reason is that molybdenum often occurs in deposits rich in copper, but ‘rich’ means at best that copper is 1 per cent of the rock to be mined, and molybdenum is about one-quarter of 1 per cent. This means a major mining, crushing, concentrating and smelting operation; which in turn means major capital expenditure, which means deep pockets and patience, not qualities associated with hot money generated by casino operators and real-estate developers. What averted the gaze elsewhere was the speed of the minerals cycle. What has saved Tibet – so far – from further despoliation

capitalizing on tibet   is the greed of investors for quick returns. This is a slender protection, which will fade as Tibet becomes more accessible, with more infrastructure built at state expense, enabling smart money to move in fast, while the price cycle of the next fashionable metal is peaking.

Compulsory modernity: gold-mining corporations move into Tibet By 2020, the mineral industry would contribute 30 to 50 percent of Tibet’s GDP. According to the plan, mineral resources will contribute at least 30 percent to the regional GDP in the next decade as China intensifies efforts to build a strategic natural resources reserve in the plateau region. Rational and orderly exploitation of Tibet’s mineral resources will power the region’s ‘leapfrog development’.2

The source region of three great rivers – the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong – even before it had an official name, was known as ‘China’s Number One Water Tower’, and it was that name which grabbed attention in Beijing, giving the remote and unappealing province of Qinghai some cachet among central leaders. The concept of ‘China’s Number One Water Tower’, popularized in the 1990s, was a new imaginary, repurposing a province known only for its labour camps, poverty and dependence on Beijing subsidies, giving it for the first time a positive image. Not only did the phrase become well known; it encapsulated in a simple slogan what became self-evident: that the Yellow River can be saved only if the source is reserved exclusively for water production. China’s concern over degrading watersheds is focused on the arid northern districts of the Tibetan Plateau, too far inland for monsoon rains to reliably reach. Yet it is in the glaciers of the snow mountains above the plateau desert that the great rivers begin. The snow mountains which define Tibet have an extraordinary capacity,

  spoiling tibet because they reach 6, 7, sometimes 8 kilometres into the sky, to capture and hold what little moisture there is in the atmosphere. From the glaciers to downstream China below the Tibetan Plateau is a traverse of thousands of kilometres, for both the Yellow and the much bigger Yangtze. The Yellow River (Huang He in Chinese, Ma Chu in Tibetan) is so overexploited as it crosses northern China that in some winters it dries up altogether and fails to reach the sea. Hence China’s anxiety to do all possible to conserve the upper reaches. The result is a clash of master narratives, all of which claim to define future land use policy. On the uppermost Yellow River, fishing has been banned on the twin lakes Ngoring and Gyaring, although there was once a fleet of Chinese trawlers. Much of Chumarleb county, and especially the Hoh Xil district, has been declared a wildlife conservation reserve, famous as a breeding ground for migrating Tibetan antelopes, 3 and known for aggressive poachers whose indiscriminate slaughter was stopped by Tibetan rangers taking extraordinary risks, with little backup, to arrest the killers, work that made for a powerful documentary Kekexili or Mountain Patrol. Consequently the entire area is accorded high priority for protection, and inclusion in the Sanjiangyuan Three River Source Protected Area, as well as the Hoh Xil wildlife sanctuary. The new wave of large-scale state-owned mines coming to Tibet show acute awareness that they need to win a social licence to operate, from Tibetan society around the mine, as in any large mine anywhere in the world. The owners of the big copper and gold mine at Gyama (Jiama in Chinese), upstream from Lhasa, have a carefully developed script aimed at local communities (and their worldwide supporters) that differentiates them sharply from the indiscriminate miners at the site who came before them, who didn’t care what Tibetans thought, and relied on the coercive power of the party-state to do as they wished. The previously mentioned Canadian miners, Vancouver-based China Gold

capitalizing on tibet   International (CGI), a subsidiary of state-owned China National Gold Group Corporation, is investing heavily in intensive mining at Gyama, scheduled to hit peak production output in 2015, and remain operational for seventy years. CGI goes to great lengths to depict previous miners of Gyama as negatively as possible, so they can then assert that their approach is much more sympathetic to the local community. Mine operation is by Tibet Huatailong, a subsidiary of CGI. In June 2012 a team of four Xinhua reporters accepted CGI’s invitation to visit the mine, where they reported: in late 2009, a dozen private miners were caught up in a rat race for the rich ore supplies, ignoring their responsibilities to the local community and environment. Ensuing public complaints forced the regional government to suspend the operations of the private miners. The local mining industry was heavily criticized for jeopardizing the ecology and environment of the ‘roof of the world’. For Han employees, Huatailong has established a number of behavioural taboos. For instance, they are banned from speaking disrespectfully to locals, not fulfilling a promise, shirking their duties, littering and feeling self-important.4

Another Xinhua story at the same time attributes to local Tibetans a keen awareness of the automotive brands by which rich Chinese advertise themselves: They were gravely concerned before 2007, when a dozen (private mine) bosses camped here and drilled holes wherever they wanted. ‘Those selfish people thought only about getting rich quickly. I saw many coming with briefcases under arms but leaving in Audi A8. They left behind only garbage’, a local resident Ngawang said.5

Model citizen Ngawang voluntarily sold all his seventy yaks, renounced the pastoral way of life, is now employed as a ‘doorman’ by a mine subsidiary, and thinks this huge new mine is a posiive presence. ‘I didn’t want yaks to roam into the mining areas and cause unnecessary trouble’, he is quoted as saying.

  spoiling tibet Dachang: gold in the alpine desert of Tibet China is likely to launch its first exchange traded funds backed by physical gold this year, boosting demand for the metal, according to the World Gold Council. The launch of gold ETFs in China has been hotly anticipated by some gold bulls, who believe it could trigger a new wave of demand for the precious metal. Gold ETFs have been enormously successful elsewhere in the world, contributing to a surge in gold prices since their launch in 2003. The launch of gold ETFs would be the next step in the liberalisation of China’s bullion market, which has seen investment demand surge from just 15 tonnes in 2006 to 274 tonnes last year.6

After decades of small-scale panning for gold in Tibetan river beds that flow only after summer rains, the upriver source of the alluvial gold has been found, in a deposit of remarkable size, in which gold is finely disseminated, almost invisible to the eye. Inter-Citic, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, says there is a proven resource of 1.9 million ounces of gold at Dachang, which it plans to extract in a nine-year operation beginning in 2014. Further, the company says it is likely there is another 1.93 million ounces of gold, all of it close enough to the surface to be dug as an open pit, awaiting confirmation. A total of perhaps as much as 4 million ounces sounds somewhat modest, until one remembers the price of gold, and the amount of rock to be dug, crushed and processed in order to extract the gold, which at best is 3.4 grams of gold per tonne of rock, much less in parts of the deposit. Because all of that host rock will have to be blasted, pulverized and chemically cooked to extract the gold, a total of 38.5 million tonnes of rock will have to be extracted. Remote as Dachang is, its location is iconic. Not only is it within the watershed of the uppermost source stream of the Yellow River, it is on the designated Ur-source of the river that cradled China’s civilization. The threat to that watershed, from Tibetan pastoral nomads grazing their herds, has been deemed so great that, in the name of watershed conservation, the nomads are rapidly

capitalizing on tibet   being removed to concrete ghettoes, grazing banned, their livelihoods ruined. The sanctity of protecting ‘China’s Number One Water Tower’ and the antelope from relentless poaching has been publicized globally as evidence of China’s green credentials, commitment to biodiversity conservation, watershed protection and carbon sequestration. Yet a new gold mine in the ultimate source of the Yellow River is allowed. This is a mine on a scale completely unlike anything seen in Tibet before. Because it was for a few years owned by Vancouverbased Inter-Citic, with mandatory public disclosure to Canadian corporate regulators, we know a lot about Dachang. Inter-Citic told its investors that the cost of producing gold will be US$404 per ounce; the global gold selling price has averaged US$1,000 per ounce over recent years, sometimes peaking close to US$2,000 per ounce. The profit margin, then, is spectacular, and the demand within China is insatiable. Dachang is arid, receiving only 200 mm of rain a year. There is almost no rain at all from November to April. Initial extraction of gold is to be done by using bacteria. The bacterium Theobacillus ferrooxidans thrives on the sulphur in the gold-bearing ore, squirting out copper and gold as waste. This process needs water and power to keep the bacteria at the right temperature, without overheating – a constant danger. The mine may need a gas pipeline from the Tsaidam Basin, and a gas-fired power station of its own. Pumping in sufficient oxygen, from the thin air at 4,400 metres altitude, will also take a lot of power. Then comes the cyanide. The combination of extreme acidity, high temperature, energy intensity and toxic cyanide used on an industrial scale add up to a dangerous and wasteful process, to extract, at best, 3.4 grams of gold from every tonne of rock mined and pulverised to dust. This makes for massive waste dumps. Although the extreme acidity may be neutralized by adding limestone, massive thickened tailings will remain for a long time after the nine years of mine life. They must be kept from affecting the same headwaters of the Yellow and Yangtze

  spoiling tibet Rivers that are so precious to China that the removal of pastoralists throughout the river source region of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres is warranted. Although Dachang is arid, the rain it does receive often comes in great cloudbursts, with hail and gale-force downdrafts. Tibetans have seen such summer storms sweep away roads, bridges and other engineered structures. The tailings dams will need to be well made. If regular grazing by sheep and yaks is such a threat to the watershed of the Yellow River that both herds and herders must be removed, who will police the abandoned tailings? Inter-Citic, developed the Dachang mine, readying it to begin full-scale operations in 2014, boasted that it already has on board the Ho family of Macau, famous for their long but recently broken casino monopoly, and the Lee family of Hong Kong’s Henderson Property real-estate developers, which also experienced a downturn in 2012. Are casino operators and property developers concerned with long-term environmental impacts, over many decades, at least to the end of this century? Or is it more probable that their sole interest is in making a quick, legal profit? On Inter-Citic’s 2012 data, gold worth US$1.7 billion will be sold, based on the certified inventory of what is there, which may be only part of a bigger deposit.7 After the US$404 per ounce cost of extraction is deducted, actual profit will be over US$1 billion, over the nine-year life of the mine, or US$110 million a year. That is the prospect facing Inter-Citic, a junior miner with paid-up capital of less than US$20 million, able to access the gold without even having to expensively tunnel underground. Inevitably, Inter-Citic in mid-2012 found its opportunity to sell to one of the fast-rising state-owned Chinese mining corporations, Western Mining, the only major miner headquartered in Tibet, in Xining city, northern Tibet, as its springboard for major acquisitions and growth. Inter-Citic made a handsome profit on the $250 million sale.8 Dachang can be made into an extractive enclave quickly and cheaply, largely because the gold is so close to the surface, and

capitalizing on tibet   because there are few Tibetans around. According to the detailed mining plans prepared by Inter-Citic’s consultants, filed for public scrutiny on Canadian regulatory websites, it will take only an investment of US$104 million to get a fully operational mine going, and only nine years to extract all the gold that can be removed. That’s cheap and fast. In today’s China it would be no surprise if Inter-Citic, having documented the deposit and planned the mining operation in detail, was muscled aside and bought out by a much bigger, domestic state-owned corporation with plenty of retained profits to invest in getting the mine operational. Already the state-owned giant Zijin, a major player in other Tibetan mines, has taken a 17 per cent stake in Inter-Citic, close to a controlling share. Also in from the start is the necessary state partner, in this case the Qinghai Geological Survey Institute, which first identified the deposit, and remains essential to steering the project through all regulatory approvals. The Qinghai state geologists have retained 10 per cent of Dachang throughout, seizing their rent-seeking opportunity. Backed by this characteristically Chinese fusion of politics and economics, Inter-Citic made light of the wider issues, namely damaging the source of the Yellow River, harming the breeding grounds of the migratory chiru Tibetan antelope, the plan to dig and dump 2 million tonnes of pulverized rock each year, and the amount of water required, in an arid area that also experiences ferocious summer storms and winter gales. All of these are externalities, or incidental costs of being in business, cost centres to be lumped together, as Inter-Citic’s consultants do, as an operating expense itemized as ‘tailings & social/community’, costed at 50 cents per tonne of rock extracted, a very minor cost compared to the US$15.20 assigned to the actual processing of each tonne of rock. That is the plan so far. Nearby gold deposits are undergoing further testing. Altogether the area pegged out is 15 km wide, east to west, and 12 km from north to south, all of it in the Burhan Budai mountain range, branching off the Kun Lun Mountains,

  spoiling tibet which divide the Tsaidam Basin to the north from the sparse rangelands of Chumarleb county to the south. Inter-Citic, with a studied vagueness, says only that its operation is ‘proximate’ to the Sanjiangyuan Three River Source Protected Area. But the precise maps on Inter-Citic’s website, such as a 2005 arsenic geochemistry map, 9 show that nearly all of Inter-Citic’s gold is in Chumarleb, in the most northerly source of the Yellow River.10 On one Inter-Citic map, the source streams of the Yellow River are clearly shown, well within the area over which Inter-Citic plans to mine.11 Yet the Dachang gold mining tenement, an area of 279 square kilometres, is in the snow-capped range and source streams that are the fount of the Huang He/Yellow River. The rock to be mined is naturally very high in arsenic. The mine will actually be three separate steeply angled pits, requiring three waste dumps and two large tailings dams meant to trap the thickened sludge left over after processing, forever holding it back from leaching, or being washed in a storm into a river. Maps published by Inter-Citic’s consultants show that, even after Inter-Citic persuaded Qinghai’s leaders to amend the boundaries of the Three Rivers Source Protected Area, the mineralized zone is still extremely close to the Protected Area, as close in places as 1 kilometre. The boundary change was made around 2005, at a time when the full extent of mineralization had not been mapped, and little planning had been done regarding where the mine’s waste dumps and tailings dams could be located, as well as the processing plants and worker accommodation. Before mining can begin, over 200 million tonnes of rock covering the gold deposit has to be shifted and dumped. On a hilly site, the obvious place is downhill, to the south, but immediately south is where the Three River Source Protected Area begins. So the mine waste has to be hauled instead uphill to the north, where it will form a cliff, 2.5 km long, of loose, unstable rock between 60 and 100 metres high, towering above the mine pits, in an area that has experienced very serious earthquakes up to 7.8 on the Richter scale.12

capitalizing on tibet   The consultants say this waste rock ‘has no cohesion’ and there will be some sliding, but that the risks are manageable. The extra fuel required to haul hundreds of millions of tonnes of rock uphill is a major carbon cost. Similarly, the tailings dams are also to be uphill. They must contain – permanently – the semi-liquid wastes left over after the gold-bearing rock has been treated. Again, on a slope, these dams would normally be downhill, but not at Dachang. Laden with dissolved arsenic (in the form of ferric arsenate), its extreme acidity neutralized by adding limestone, these dams are also perched above the operating mine pits. As the gold discoveries continue further into the Yellow River catchment, the contradictions multiply. It is important for China’s national pride to have a scientifically mapped precise source, not the heavenly origin that satisfied previous imperial dynasties. In fact, there has to be one primary source, which is the farthest from the sea, and it is precisely the stream running through Inter-Citic’s gold field that was designated in 2008 as the source.13 The purity of this source matters in the national imaginary. China’s netizens mobilized to defend nature would be horrified to know that the source of the Yellow River is assaulted on all sides by blasting, heavy earth moving, arsenic and cyanide. These source regions appeared on the map only in this century, as competing expeditions sought to find the farthest, remotest stream draining the snow mountains.14 This became a popular media topic, as China replaced a vague imaginary of a heavenly origin with specifics of latitude and longitude. Nonetheless, even now, many maps and books dedicated to the Yellow River still show the river beginning in two Tibetan lakes, Ngoring and Gyaring (Eling and Zharing in Chinese) with no catchment upstream. As China’s concern for safeguarding the purity of river sources grew, both Ngoring and Gyaring lakes, at China’s request, were declared world wetland protected areas under the global wetland Ramsar treaty, in 2004.15 The 131,000 hectares now officially protected would be the first to

  spoiling tibet Kumbum Monastery The geology of Kumbum Monastery is a naturally formed and extremely sacred eight-petal lotus created by Mendan Gorge and the holy Lhamo Mountain, which has created the local beautiful waters, beautiful mountains, beautiful land, beautiful people, and beautiful heaven on earth where the holy mountains and holy waters raise people of all nationalities. Moreover, Lhamo Mountain is the place of enlightenment of the protector deity Lhamo, and occupies a very special and sacred place in the heart of pilgrims. But in recent years, the Ganhetan Industrial Park has been constructed in the vicinity, causing serious damage to the lie of the land, to the shapes of the mountains and to the water courses, polluting water sources, and destroying the plant cover. In 2006, more than a hundred local children fell ill and suffered from lead poisoning, a matter which to this day has still not been properly addressed. High-polluting and wanton extractive business practices have brought bitterness and disaster for the local people. Local villagers have obstructed the mining on many occasions, demanding that the sacred mountain not be mined and requesting Kumbum Monastery to act as an official protector. The monastery management committee submitted a report on the situation to the higher authorities, but there was no response. As of this year, the situation has become more serious, especially during the months of May to July, when eight villages had serious contamination in their water pipes with the water becoming muddy and foul smelling. Monks and local people became nauseous, their bodies became listless and they felt dazed and some even had to be hospitalised from drinking the water. The area surrounding Kumbum Monastery is full of enterprises that are high in energy consumption, excavating ore, destroying sacred mountains, adversely affecting the historical environment and landscape; and highly polluting enterprises, emitting toxic gases and dust. Blue skies and clear waters are no longer visible through a mass of muddy

capitalizing on tibet   air. This is not good for the progress of unity of the nationalities, not good for stability and harmony in Tibetan areas, not good for the local people’s livelihoods and economic development, and not good for the strategy of sustainable development. Please issue measures for the protection of Kumbum Monastery’s eight-petal lotus mountains and natural heritage, correctly carry out duties for the protection of important state-level cultural heritage, protect nationality cultural heritage, and protect holy Buddhist sites, and resolutely put a stop to the heinous practices of reckless digging and wanton excavation. 30 June 2011, http://savetibet.org/media-center/ict-news-reports/ bold-online-appeals-address-persistent-lead-poisoning-qinghaiwater-supply

suffer if, at any future time, the Inter-Citic tailings dams or waste dumps were to fail. All of this has the sole objective of extracting 53 tonnes of gold over nine years. In the context of China’s booming demand for gold that is not a lot, but for the owner, Western Mining, it will make a fortune. Western Mining is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), and its financial health is monitored in monthly Englishlanguage reports by the Taiwan Economic Journal.16 Western Mining took over the Dachang deposit in 2012, as it neared going into full extractive, profit-making mode. Western Mining, a dominant, state-owned corporation headquartered in northern Tibet (Qinghai), was one of the corporations named by monks of Kumbum Monastery in a 2011 petition. Dachang is one example of the big newly discovered mineral deposits of the Tibetan Plateau. Their discovery was made possible by advances in geological understanding of continental collisions and their consequences. The Tibetan Plateau is fascinating for geology as a profession, which does not differentiate clearly between scientific

  spoiling tibet investigation of planetary processes and profitable exploitation or ores. The June 2013 ‘Roof of the World’ conference of the Geological Society of America conflates tectonic science and mineral extraction, in a Special Session: The mineral deposits in continents are important metal sources for social developments. Important metallic deposits formed in continental environments include copper, gold and uranium deposits. In the past ten years many new advances regarding ore-genetic processes, ore-forming settings, and ore-targeting technologies have been achieved. The session will provide a new platform to exchange academic ideas and promote mineral exploration.17

six Intensive exploitation

Planning the industrialization of Tibet In 2012 China’s Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) issued a warning and a plan, a problem and a resource nationalist solution: China’s import reliance has surpassed 50 per cent for five key materials, including refined copper at 69 per cent, oil at 54.8 per cent, iron ore at 53.6 per cent, bauxite at 52.9 per cent and sylvite at 52.4 per cent. China’s minister of land and resources has called for renewed efforts to develop domestic resources in order to lessen the country’s dependence on overseas supplies and ensure its sustainable development. Under its work plan for 2012 issued in January, the MLR aims to identify new reserves of 1.5 to 2 billion tonnes of iron ore, 2 to 3 million tonnes of copper, and 2 billion tonnes of bauxite. Domestic exploration has an increasingly important role to play amid growing competition over global resources and the rising risks and costs of prospecting overseas, Xu Shaoshi told a conference in Beijing on Sunday as part of Earth Day 2012. In October 2011 the State Council published a 10-year strategy for resource exploration in the period up to 2020 which focuses on oil, gas, uranium, iron, copper, aluminium and sylvite (the salt from which potassium is extracted), and aims to encourage government spending in the sector. The document proposes developing the country’s major

  spoiling tibet production areas and shifting the industry’s focus to west China. The Tibetan Autonomous Region meanwhile is becoming an increasingly important source of copper, said Essence Securities analyst Ye Xin. Certain limitations on Tibet’s potential remain. High altitudes can shorten the production season by two to three months. Infrastructure is underdeveloped, and, as the region is 80 percent reliant on hydropower, electricity shortages are particularly acute in winter and spring. Tensions between the local Tibetan population and Han Chinese immigrants also add to the risks. China National Gold Group started developing a deposit containing resources of 2.3 million tonnes last year, while several other projects are in the pipeline. The region is expected to have annual copper production capacity of 300,000 tonnes by 2015 – accounting for about 22 percent of the national total.1

This announcement, issued with the authority of both the State Council (China’s Cabinet) and the Ministry of Land and Resources, mandates intensive exploitation of Tibet, with a specific target of 300,000 tonnes of copper metal to be extracted annually by 2015, rising thereafter. To those who suppose China’s central government is in command, can issue orders and without fail they are implemented, this fulfils the industrialization of the least industrialized part of the Tibetan Plateau, called Tibet Autonomous Region by China. Target annual copper production of 300,000 tonnes from TAR in 2015 requires the extraction of at least 30–40 million tonnes of rock a year, usually in open pit mining, plus prior removal of the layer closest to the surface, in which there is almost no copper. The removal of at least 30 million tonnes of rock a year, in at least four locations, along a copper belt hundreds of kilometres long, sharply contradicts the image of Tibet promoted to visitors – overwhelmingly Chinese – of a pristine wilderness.

Tibet work: industrializing the TAR A new mining era is dawning in Tibet. The copper story is in sharp contrast to both the gold rush and the chromite stories told

intensive exploitation   previously. Unlike chromite, copper deposits were discovered gradually, exploited slowly, but are now poised to become major mines, even the ‘pillar industry’ China has long sought in Tibetan mineral wealth. Unlike the alluvial surface gold rush, these copper/ gold deposits of Tibet are major, below the surface, requiring huge upfront capital expenditures, not only to mine but also to process and transport ores and concentrates to distant markets. While the gold included in the copper deposits is modest by weight – at most a few tens of tonnes, compared to 20 million tonnes of recoverable copper – its value (and that of silver) in these underground deposits can make all the difference between a profitable mine and one that cannot compete with an international alternative that China’s mining industry could instead choose to buy. Where copper and gold occur together, often with recoverable molybdenum, lead and zinc as well, a much bigger mining operation is required, and in this China’s private entrepreneurs, focused on quick returns for minimal outlays, have shown little interest. If China is to extract copper plus gold from Tibet, it will be done by highly corporatized yet still state-owned corporations that are being groomed by the party-state to become national champions. This is the new China model; the state capitalism that is sent out to buy up and mine the minerals of Africa, Latin America and the wider world. This chapter is focused on state capitalism and its appetite for the copper and gold of Tibet. Copper demand has soared, yet there are still major copper deposits awaiting the investment needed to mine them. The economic case for mining the 20+ million tonnes of copper spread across southern Tibet in many deposits competes with the deposits available to China in Peru, Congo, Zambia and elsewhere. Even though China is a recent entrant to global mining, and has not yet had the opportunity to buy a big deposit, the Tibetan ores are marginal, from a strictly commercial perspective. None of the Tibetan deposits has more than 7 million tonnes, whereas the world’s biggest and most efficient mines, in terms of extraction

  spoiling tibet costs per tonne, have as much as 100 million tonnes of recoverable copper. Then there are the major deposits that have been long known but are still not economic to mine more intensively. An example is Olympic Dam in the deserts of inland Australia. Geologists call this a supergiant deposit. It holds a staggering 318 million tonnes in a high grade ore that is 1 per cent copper, a much higher concentration than anything in Tibet. Yet the Olympic Dam deposit, discovered in 1976, has long awaited a major upgrade, and even in the midst of an unprecedented global mineral commodities boom the deposit owner, BHP Billiton, continues to say that the decision whether or not to proceed is borderline. Even the biggest deposits, which certainly will one day be mined, take their place in the queue, behind existing major deposit mines, some of which have the added attraction of being near existing mines, enabling a sharing of infrastructure. Does this have much relevance to Tibet? Mining in Tibet has until now not cared about global standards, either economic or environmental. Whether mining occurs or not has been unaffected by global prices, or the existence of more attractive deposits elsewhere in the world. The previous example of chromite mining is evidence of this. That era is definitively over, according to official policy, which is now about efficiency, competitiveness, reducing the intensity of resource use, and maximizing returns. No longer does China seek self-sufficiency in resources, whatever the cost, as it did in the autarkic revolutionary Mao years. China has fully bought into the economic orthodoxy that global trade and interdependence benefit everyone, especially those who may be big enough to set the terms of trade. China’s decisive turning, to ‘go out’ to the world to source its minerals and energy, has already created global mining companies to whom the existing real world choices are to source chromite from Kazakhstan or Tibet, copper from Congo, Peru or Tibet. Once that becomes the calculus, mining Tibet must justify itself on a comparative cost–benefit analysis, with a compelling business case

intensive exploitation   that ranks it ahead of alternative investments. That is how market economies are supposed to work. In reality, market economics is often distorted by governments subsidizing mines. In democracies, governments frequently offer companies tax concessions, tax holidays, minimal royalty requirements, export subsidies, research facilities, cheap access to land or subsidized rates for the supply of electricity essential to mineral processing. These are still common in a world officially committed to ‘free trade’. Resource nationalism often subsidizes mining costs and even extends to government paying for transport and urban infrastructure, or building power stations specifically for ore concentration and smelting. Such corporate welfare payments often pass unnoticed, but are substantial and common. So too in China, which has since 1949 regarded industrialization as the core strategy of growth. It is now fashionable in China to talk of the need to reduce resource intensity and energy intensity, making a transition to an economy replete with service providers as well as miners, smelters and metal fabricators. Most of this rhetoric remains just that. In 2013 China officially committed to a dramatic halt in the rising use of coal, to be capped at a massive 4 billion tonnes, a target unlikely to be achieved given the number of illegal mines. Global demand for copper is strong, but deposits of copper that are economically profitable to mine are few. Copper is rarely found in high concentrations; in fact even the biggest copper mines in the world seldom have more than 1 tonne in a hundred of copper, the remaining 99 per cent being waste that nonetheless has to be mined, crushed and processed to access the copper finely disseminated through the rock, usually in tiny fissures. The ideal copper deposit, almost never found in reality, must be big, and close to the surface, amenable to open-cut mining, and containing many millions of tonnes of copper metal, perhaps even as much as 100 million tonnes of recoverable copper. The large size is essential because of the big upfront investment required to establish a mine, especially if it is in mountainous terrain, which is usually

  spoiling tibet the case. Despite a century of intensive exploration, technological innovation and a massive increase in copper production, there is hardly a mine that fulfils all these criteria. But the few copper mines in Chile set the standard for all others, since their cost per tonne of copper produced is the lowest, and their profits the highest, so they become the benchmark by which all proposed mines are judged. The scale of the recently discovered subterranean deposits in Tibet ushers in an entirely new era in resource exploitation of the TAR. Everything about these ores demands energy-intensive, capital-intensive and technology-intensive exploitation. This means massive upfront investment in creating an open-pit mine, rock crushers and highly acid chemical processing of the powdered rock to concentrate the copper (also gold and silver in the many Tibetan deposits). Only the biggest mining companies, usually state-owned, can afford such upfront investment, and usually only when they know they can rely on the state to emplace all necessary supporting infrastructure (power stations, roads, railways, urban centres, schools and other incentives for labour mobility). The logic of these deposits, with their tempting blanket of highly enriched ores on top, just below the surface, pushed China’s central leaders to intervene decisively to ensure that small-scale miners do not move in, cream off the supergene top blanket and depart, leaving to someone else the long haul of deep pit mining. In planning for a mine designed to operate for decades, that rich blanket is crucial to overall profitability. The quick profits from capturing the copper, gold and silver in the blanket can make all the difference as to whether the entire deposit will be mined. Although the windfall profits may last only a few years, they can quickly pay off the capital borrowed to finance mine construction. After that the mine can settle down to three or more decades of steadily blasting its way down to the base of the deposit, since the costs of production no longer have to cover the costs of servicing and repaying the loans that established it. But are the Tibetan deposits world class? Will China achieve its targets for copper extraction from Tibet?

intensive exploitation   All is not as it seems. Extraction targets have been issued before in Five-Year Plans, to limited effect. China’s Ministry of Land and Resources, although technically in charge of mining, is not a powerful ministry, since land and resources remain under effective local control, with the central government having only a limited role. MLR spends most of its energies fending off criticisms that it does little to protect land from being grabbed from farmers by speculators who then sell it as urban land at a massive profit. MLR strikes a patriotic note of warning, that China now obtains less than half its copper, oil, iron, bauxite and sylvite domestically. It seems that resource nationalism is arising, after being lulled asleep by the mantra of the benefits of trade. China’s resource security requires greater domestic production, less reliance on overseas sourcing. MLR wants to be well funded by central leaders, to carry out its work of proving new reserves. By positioning itself as a saviour of national self-sufficiency, it hopes to improve its budget. MLR is a ministry that was established only in 1998, growing out of the older Ministry of Geology and Resources. Geologists are no longer heroes of the revolution, exemplary model workers eating bitterness for the sake of China. But appealing to patriotism is a standard move, especially under a nationalist such as Xi Jinping. However, China has moved on. Of the minerals on the MLR list that are most dependent on imports, there are serious plans for import-substituting domestic production only for copper. China’s state-owned corporations which do the actual mining, smelting and metals manufacturing have no problem with sourcing supplies globally. China’s ‘go out’ strategy, though still in its early stages, has already reached a point where global sourcing not only meets China’s needs but also enables its state-owned mining giants to profitably own ore deposits globally, at the forefront of extending China’s reach. They profit from owning the foreign deposits, doing the mining, often with foreign partners, arranging the shipping to China where they do the smelting, benefiting from the high prices of the commodities supercycle, and enriching top management, with

  spoiling tibet access to overseas bank accounts. State-owned corporate China no longer has much need of the heroic geologists of the revolutionary era, or their nationalist rhetoric. Today’s state-owned, corporatized, globalized, marketized Chinese mining corporations once were ministries too (Ministry of Coal Industry, Ministry of Petroleum Industry, Ministry of Metallurgical Industry), but they morphed, corporatized, enriched their bosses, while retaining state ownership and with it privileged access to finance, power and markets. But back in the days when the state was the economy, there was demarcation between the finding and the extracting of underground wealth. It is the Ministry of Land and Resources which still shows its origins, despite the rebadging, as the department in charge of finding minerals.2 Copper, the key metal determining the fate of Tibet, is imported in huge quantities, is expensive and generally maintains its historically high prices even in the midst of global financial crises. China’s 12th Five-Year Plan includes massive transfer of electricity from hydro-dams on the mountain rivers that rush from the Tibetan Plateau, all the way east across China to major metropoles such as Guangzhou and Shanghai. These ultra-high-voltage power lines must be made of copper; anything else would be too resistant and dissipate the electricity en route. MLR has many prospects for coming up with new copper deposits, even on the bed of the South China Sea, currently disputed by several nations. That is a long shot. More immediately, China’s best prospect is central Tibet.

Overriding the provinces: recentralizing power For more than a decade the dominant official slogan has been xibu da kaifa, opening up of the great west. But implementation has been ineffective in Tibetan areas. That slogan was reinforced by a 2010 Work Forum on Tibet that brought together all Party organs and government departments involved with Tibet, in a highlevel, whole-of-government attempt at a new approach, capable of

intensive exploitation   accelerating the opening up, or exploitation, of the Tibetan far west. The central state was asserting greater direct control of Tibetan areas, backing its renewed will to impose a single policy on the Tibetan Plateau with a long list of projects that would work, because they were inter­provincial, or even nationwide, in their consequences. It covered all the Tibetan Plateau, not just the half designated as TAR. They had actual target markets for the metals of Tibet, in lowland China. Gold and copper are at the heart of China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for Tibet. Only tourism has a similar wealth-creating potential. Like tourism, intensive exploitation of Tibet’s mineral wealth has been prioritized repeatedly in successive Five-Year Plans. Official media routinely announce stupendous mineral finds in Tibet, making it seem as if deposits – proven or not – are already mines. China’s massive investment in infrastructure across Tibet – railways, highways, power stations, urban centres – makes profitable mining feasible. Both copper and gold prices have risen steadily to record highs, at a time when China’s demand is at an all-time high, the global price rise being the result. China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for Tibet centres on copper and gold, with not only dramatic intensification of extraction but also a state-driven agglomeration of the entire Chinese copper industry, in order to create copper giants sufficiently capitalized to finance major expansions in Tibet. Beijing’s fifth national Forum on Tibet Work public statement read: China has made plans to achieve leapfrog development and lasting stability in Tibet Autonomous Region in a bid to ensure China’s development as a whole, according to a high-level meeting held here this week. Chinese President Hu Jintao and other senior leaders attending the fifth meeting on the work of Tibet agreed that more efforts must be made to greatly improve living standards of the people in Tibet, as well as ethnic unity and stability. The work was also vital to ethnic unity, social stability and national security, as well as a favourable international environment, he added. He urged

  spoiling tibet all the Party members to further realize the strategic significance and pressing needs of the work of Tibet. During the meeting, senior leaders also meted out plans to develop Tibetan-inhabited areas in Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai. 3

The newly announced projects make sense only if their crossprovincial impacts are understood. China is officially committed to a massively engineered extraction of minerals, electricity and water from Tibet. The new industrial development strategy builds hydropower dams in Tibet and runs ultra-high-voltage power lines across China to feed electricity from Tibet to Shanghai and Guangzhou. The boom cities of western China, Chongqing and Chengdu are to become manufacturing hubs accessing the mineral wealth of the adjacent Tibetan Plateau. Water from most of the major rivers of the Tibetan Plateau is to be diverted into a grand canal sending enormous volumes of water to the overused, exhausted Yellow River of northern China. These projects are enormous, both financially and as engineering challenges, as well as in their potential environmental impacts. They will not be completed in one Five-Year Plan, but may take decades to realize. But the commitments have been made, and the will now exists, at the highest level, to override not only the intense desire of Tibetans for space, especially cultural space, to be themselves, but also the provincial, prefectural, county and township officials who have been able, until now, to interpret national policies to their own advantage. The 2005 moratorium on hydrodamming of remote Tibetan Plateau rivers was quickly cancelled by incoming leader Xi Jinping.

Inventing Tibet work China remains committed to ‘scientific development’. But the Politburo that took power in 2013 no longer dominated by engineers. Hopefully, this could mean an end to the insistence that industrializing Tibet is the only way forward, to build the nation and Tibet. More railways,

intensive exploitation   highways, hydro-dams and power lines; more new towns and cities; more tourists and airports; more mines, smelters and canals would, taken together, transform Tibet. The new programme would integrate Tibet into China, and provide China’s inland metropoles of manufacturing, the newest centres of the world’s factory, with cheap electricity, cheap minerals and cheap water, from Tibet. Tibet work is a special kind of official duty, onerous, arduous, unrewarding but essential. That hard work has borne few results. By 2010 it was self-evident to central leaders that almost no Tibetans could be fully trusted to implement the Party line; China has for decades been unable to find anyone with the authority of the previous Panchen Lama, who died in 1988, to retain the respect of the Tibetans, and legitimate Chinese rule. The Party failed to reproduce itself in Tibet, and had to rely more than ever on non-Tibetan cadres to do the actual work of governing. The state also failed to impose mandatory ‘harmony’ from above by purely coercive means, despite the enormous growth in coercive technologies, practices and personnel all over Tibet. Tibet work could no longer be solely the thought-work of the Party persuaders, or the strike-hard (yanda in Chinese) work of the enforcers of the will of the state. Tibet work had to be reinvented as something more than thought-work and disciplinary policing. Until the new industrialization succeeds in assimilating Tibet, the old strategies of Tibet work will have to hold the line. Repression and party-building must continue, even though they have had little success. According to the current Five-Year Plan it will take another decade or more until Tibet is sufficiently industrialized to attract an immigrant workforce incentivized by the prospect of wealth and thus loyal to the party-state. For at least another decade, then, the slogans and mass campaigns will suffice. For individual cadres, Tibet work may be arduous, but it is also a short cut to career success. Promotion can be speedier, the rewards greater, if one does a stint, a rotational period of a few years, working in Tibet. To volunteer or go willingly to Tibet is to show an

  spoiling tibet advanced outlook that puts nation-building first, ahead of immediate opportunities for enrichment. The Stalinist nomenklatura system of centralized personnel management by the Party, holding senior positions in ministries, state-owned corporations, institutions and official media, persists in awarding promotion to those who display enthusiasm for implementing central agendas. All the incentives reward overenthusiastic compliance. For Tibetans that often means coercive insistence on ritual submission to Chinese authority, and ritual behavioural denunciation of the most revered Tibetans.

If development is the answer, then what is the question? Is development the solution to the problems Tibetans experience daily, or is it intended to solve China’s problems? Will the process enable China to populate Tibet with politically loyal immigrants? Will industrializing Tibet provide the world’s new factory hub with cheap electricity, water and minerals that, together with cheap labour, guarantee China’s role as the global manufacturing centre? The speeding up of development has turned out to mean speeding up China’s access to Tibet Autonomous Region; not only to Lhasa but also to the Shetongmon (Xietongmen in Chinese) copper and gold mine near Shigatse, with a rail extension announced in 2007, and another rail line from Lhasa to Nyingtri via the Gyama (Jiama in Chinese) copper and gold mine, announced in 2011, as part of the 12th Five-Year Plan. China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for Tibet centres on copper and gold. Not only is dramatic intensification of extraction planned; there is also to be a state-driven agglomeration of the entire Chinese copper industry, in order to create copper giants sufficiently capitalized to finance major expansions in Tibet.4 The targets are ambitious. China will push for further consolidation in its copper manufacturing sector, aiming to create three to four big producers during the 12th five-year plan period from 2011 to 2015, a senior official at the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association (CNMIA) said. The

intensive exploitation   country wants to achieve 30% self-sufficiency in copper production by the end of the 12th plan period and build new processing and recycling plants in the central and western provinces, said Duan Shaofu, head of the CNMIA copper department. Speaking at China International Copper Conference 2010, Duan said Beijing will encourage miners to step up mineral exploration in the southwest, northeast and Tibet. China wants to develop new mines in Yunnan, Tibet, Jiangxi and Qinghai, said Duan. China has phased out 400,000 tonnes of outdated copper smelting capacity during the 2006–10 11th five-year plan period, Duan said.5

The key target is 30 per cent self-sufficiency by 2015. In 2009 China produced 4.1 million tonnes of copper but mined only 1 million tonnes, a self-sufficiency of around 25 per cent. Production in 2010 grew, to 4.65 million tonnes. But by 2015, China’s copper smelters expect to produce at least 7 million tonnes of copper. If 30 per cent of this is sourced domestically, copper mine production must quickly double, from 1 million tonnes in 2009 to 2.1 million tonnes by 2015. China’s copper industry is growing fast. In 2009 alone, copper consumption rose by 38 per cent, despite the global downturn in demand in a year of acute financial crisis. China is by a long way the world’s biggest smelter and biggest consumer of copper. However, it is far from being the world’s biggest miner, and relies instead on importing copper ore concentrates, finished smelted copper metal, and recycled copper scrap. China’s demand, which dipped only briefly during the global financial crisis, is the long-term driver of global prices, and there is little sign prices will come down in the foreseeable future. Hence China has strong incentives to increase copper mining, and reduce reliance on expensive imports. The consistently high price of copper changes the global economics of mining, processing and smelting, making marginally profitable mines highly profitable. In 2009 China’s copper industry was dominated by fifteen companies, each of which had smelting capacity of at least 100,000 tonnes of copper metal a year. In the 12th Five-Year Plan, if central leaders

  spoiling tibet succeed in overriding provincial bosses protecting their provincial champions, the top fifteen companies will, by command, be reduced to only three or four big players, all state-owned. At present the biggest companies are Jiangxi Copper, with capacity to smelt 900,000 tonnes of copper a year, and Tongling Nonferrous. These are the two giants. The copper mines under construction in Tibet will struggle to be as big, and to achieve competitive economies of scale. From the Shetongmon mine west of Lhasa to the Yulong mines to the east is several hundred kilometres, so the distances are too great to allow sharing of infrastructure. The only significant smelter in inland China that is even remotely near Tibet is Jinchuan Non­ferrous, in Gansu, with a smelting capacity of 400,000 tonnes. Jinchuan now owns the captive Shetongmon copper mine near Shigatse in Tibet, after buying out Canadian investors. Shetongmon depends totally on Jichuan to do the smelting, in Gansu. Which top Chinese copper manufacturers will emerge as China’s favoured national champions? By 2013, the 2010 plan for consolidating smaller copper companies into bigger national champions had been quietly dropped. In 2013 the Ministry of Industry announced plans to compulsorily merge many companies in several key industries, including automobile manufacture, steel, shipbuilding, aluminium smelting and rare earths. In each case the plan is to have the top few companies control between 60 and 100 per cent of their industry. But copper is no longer scheduled for such agglomeration.6 The big state-owned enterprises never publicly contradict official policy, but they are adept at not implementing it, even when they are supposed to follow the Five-Year Plan. The managers of such large corporations cannot simply be ordered to invest in Tibet, if the returns from investing worldwide are quicker and bigger. Jiangxi Copper is determined to stay number one, announcing in February 2011 plans to increase production from the current 900,000 tonnes to 1.5 million tonnes by 2015.7 There is no certainty that the 12th Five-Year Plan 2015 target will be attained, since the mines are powerful and have strong backing at

intensive exploitation   provincial level to retain their identities. But the push to consolidate the copper industry and scale up production is being driven from above, and may prevail. Most of these companies already have a global presence, and will have to choose where their investment capital is best deployed. Will they invest in buying deposits around the world, mining them, concentrating and perhaps smelting the ores internationally, then shipping to China? Or will profitable returns be better achieved by investing in Tibetan mines? All of China’s copper companies are making extraordinary profits, due to the rise in world prices, with Chinalco benefiting further from its significant equity stake in the global Rio Tinto. Although China’s national government invests hugely to put in place the basic infrastructure needed to attract commercial investors to Tibet, the barriers and risks remain daunting. From a conventional Chinese perspective, Tibet is very cold, the people are unwelcoming, the air is perilously thin, there are very few amusements and distractions, and very few of the local population are literate in Chinese and thus employable. Since 2008, despite the consequences, Tibetans have frequently protested at mining and made it clear they see mining as theft. From the viewpoint of senior mining executives, a posting even in a remote part of Africa routinely offers flights home to China, often with stopovers in major shopping centres such as Dubai or Bangkok en route. Tibet is for all these reasons not an attractive choice. Risk analysis usually tips the balance in favour of ‘going out’ abroad, even if Chinese companies feel they not only have to source their raw materials internationally but also buy the ore deposit and even build the railway to get ores to port. A major consideration is scale. China wants its copper-mining companies to operate globally, which means the cost per tonne of ore extracted has to compete with the cheapest – usually the biggest – mines worldwide. The biggest copper mine in the world is BHP Billiton’s Escondida mine in Chile, able to extract 1.3 million tonnes of copper content a year, which means digging up, crushing to powder, chemically cooking and smelting over a hundred

  spoiling tibet times that amount of rock to extract less than 1 per cent copper. Of the twenty biggest copper mines worldwide, even the smallest, La Caridad in Mexico, produces 195,000 tonnes of copper a year. In addition, new mines are fast coming on stream, some conveniently close to China, in Kazakhstan and Mongolia; and existing mines are being scaled up. One example is the Oyu Tolgoi deposit in Mongolia,8 which has an orebody that is over 3,000 million tonnes, containing on average 0.67 per cent copper and also 0.24 per cent gold. That is a massive orebody. It is due to start production within the 12th Five-Year Plan period. Oyu Tolgoi sets the benchmark for its competitors, including the major copper/gold deposits in Tibet, at Shetongmon near Shigatse; at Gyama, upstream of Lhasa; and at Yulong, near Jomda and Chamdo – all mines in Tibet Autonomous Region. All three Tibetan mines are already in production on, by world standards, a modest scale (Yulong and Gyama) or soon to begin production (Shetongmon). Yet ownership of all three has changed hands with remarkable frequency, not unusual in a global mining industry where deals are common, and minnow miners sell out to big miners who can access the capital to turn a proven deposit into actual extraction. But the frequent changes of ownership of these Tibetan deposits also suggests that the rotating succession of state-owned owners are not keen to put in real money. Instead they show Beijing they are willing to comply with Five-Year Plan targets, but actually do little, since other alternatives beckon. Having held a Tibetan deposit for a few years, they then sell to another minerals SOE, which is also unenthusiastic about scaling up to a major mine. Thus several Five-Year Plans have rolled by, each announcing a major emphasis on mining of copper in Tibet, as a ‘pillar industry’ that will hold up the rest of the Tibetan economy, and generate economic take-off. Will the 12th Five-Year Plan, for 2011–15, be any different? The current Five-Year Plan emphasis on speeding up development means speeding up China’s access to Tibet Autonomous

intensive exploitation   Region, not only to Lhasa but also to the Shetongmon copper and gold mine near Shigatse, with a rail extension announced in 2007, and another rail line from Lhasa to Nyingtri via the Gyama (Jiama in Chinese) copper and gold mine, announced in 2011, part of the 12th Five-Year Plan. A rail facility to freight bulk metals from Tibet is essential. On the basis of latest available data from the US Geological Service9 and the International Copper Study Group10 it is possible to situate China’s Five-Year Plan for Tibetan copper within a global context, since China is simultaneously reducing the diversity of its copper industry, bulking up a few national champions to be big enough to compete on a world scale. Where will the copper come from? The 12th Five-Year Plan identifies the location of new mines in four provinces, three of which are Tibetan locations, in Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai and Yunnan. The only other province named is Jiangxi, a traditional copper production base far from Tibet. The copper mines in Jiangxi are already the largest in China. How likely is it that Tibetan areas – not only Shetongmon, Gyama and Yulong, but also copper deposits in Tibetan areas of Qinghai and Yunnan – will together produce 1 million tonnes of copper metal a year? The best known, yet-to-be-exploited copper deposit in Tibetan portions of Yunnan is Pulang/ Xuejiping, which is also rich in gold and silver,11 with other copper deposits in Yunnan beyond the Tibetan Plateau. It is in Qinghai that there is considerable potential for intensified copper mining, at Ridanguo12 and at Saishitang, where a well-established mine has been producing for some years.13 Saishitang is in Golok prefecture, about 400 km from Xining, the industrial capital of Qinghai. It is a deposit of 50 million tonnes, with remarkably high concentrations of copper, at 1.13 per cent of the ore, and of gold, at 0.48 per cent. In 2008 copper mining in Qinghai produced 22,700 tonnes of copper.14 Golok is remote, demographically the most Tibetan of Tibetan areas, with very limited employment opportunities for Chinese immigrants, making the Saishitang mine a magnet for immigrants.

  spoiling tibet A new master plan for Tibet The ambitious roadmap to 2050 of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) defines the role of the Tibetan Plateau and other mountainous and border areas in the ‘regional division of labour’.15 The division of labour, championed by Adam Smith as the secret of modern efficiency and productivity, makes the whole of China a single enterprise, in which remote regions have a specific role. The mountainous areas in China will become the supply base of energy resources to the whole country, especially the supply of hydropower and coal. The economic and social development in mountainous areas has been long positioned as support to national economic construction, guaranteeing the resource demands of the development in plain areas as its main line of development.16

The lowlands adjacent to the Tibetan Plateau are the densely populated Sichuan Basin, Chongqing municipality and the Gansu Corridor. Meeting their resource demands, rather than China’s national resource demand, is why intensive mining is now under way in Tibet. From Chongqing big ships can sail down the Yangtze, via the Three Gorges Dam, taking products made from Tibetan minerals to the world. China’s fast growth continues, largely financed by state investment and, until very recently, cheap loans from the state-owned banks. Fast growth and massive infrastructure construction mean heavy usage of metals, energy and raw materials. Although the last Five-Year Plan and the new 12th plan for 2011–15 make reference to balancing environmental protection and social needs as well as the fastest possible growth rate, nothing so far has slowed China’s accelerating consumption of global resources. Not only is China by far the world’s biggest producer of copper metal; consumption per person is already higher than in Canada, France and Russia, and will soon overtake Australia, the European Union and Japan. By the end of this decade, China’s auto sales could reach as high as 60–70 million vehicles a year, China Daily reported, citing Liu

intensive exploitation   Shijin, deputy director of the Development Research Centre of the State Council. In 2010 China made 14 million cars and the rest of the world made 44 million. China, already the biggest car maker in the world, has very ambitious growth targets, despite its official discourse of balanced development. Where will the copper come from for all those cars, and for the copper cables built by Siemens transmitting ultra-high-voltage electricity across China, from Tibetan rivers to the smelters and factories? And then there is gold, a metal often found in the same ore deposits as copper, with an allure in a class of its own. Because gold is hard to find, never occurs abundantly, holds its value, and is yet again at a record price, it has many uses beyond industrial necessity. As a store of value, many Chinese investors believe it will always rise faster than bank deposits, outpace fickle stock exchanges, and may even be a better bet than speculating on real-estate bubbles. As a result, to much surprise, China has emerged as the world’s second biggest consumer of gold too, surpassed only by India, where gold jewellery has long been culturally embedded. The World Gold Council confidently expects gold consumption in China to double within a decade, if not sooner.17 Both copper and gold are booming and new mines are coming on stream around the world. Meanwhile prices dipped only briefly during the major financial crises, and then rose to even greater heights. China’s metals manufacturers have ridden the boom. The coastal location of most smelters and their manufacturing customers has helped, giving them ready access to global supplies. The price boom has been a strong incentive for China’s copper smelting companies to also become global traders, and vertically integrated owners of copper mines worldwide, able to maximize profits from price rises. The equation is now changing. Demand continues to rise globally. A contributing factor is that, as wages of coastal factory workers begin at last to rise, increasing numbers of domestic consumers

  spoiling tibet can afford to buy what they make. Manufacturing is moving inland, encouraged by central plan policies aimed at softening the extreme inequality between east and west, coast and inland. In western China, in the Chongqing–Chengdu area, a new industrial hub and a new capital of the whole of the west is fast emerging. Chongqing, directly under the patronage of Beijing, has grown especially fast, even by Chinese standards, readying itself to export to the world via the Yangtze and the promise of the Three Gorges Dam enabling big ships to navigate far inland. It is as if the coast of China now extends 2,000 km inland. But where will the Volvo cars made in Chongqing, the Ford cars made in Chengdu, the Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Asustek, Dell, Apple iPad and Lenovo computer factories in these two cities source all the lithium, copper and gold they will need? The solution, if we are to believe the central planners, has been anticipated and integrated into the plan: tapping into sources of copper and gold even more remote than China’s current mines in Zambia, Peru, Mongolia, Laos, Congo and Kazakhstan. The answer to China’s accelerating demand for copper and gold is the Tibetan Plateau. Gold and copper are found in many places in Tibet, often where India collided with Eurasia, the thickened crust causing upwellings of molten rock from the core, which separated into elemental concentrations as it slowly cooled. Tibet has been too far away, too cold, the air too thin, the local labour force uninvolved, the infrastructure absent. Now a new era is under way. The state has paid for the necessary infrastructure of roads, railways, power stations and urban facilities. State geological exploration teams have spent decades mapping known deposits, preparing sites for full-scale extraction. Chinese mining companies now have every reason to ensure that Tibet will soon supply the car and computer factories of Chongqing and Chengdu with copper, gold and other metals. Tibet Autonomous Region chairman Pema Choling (Baima Chilin), reporting on the

intensive exploitation   achievements of 2010, claimed: ‘With the focus on opening up to the country’s hinterland region, we have actively merged with the Chengdu–Chongqing economic sphere.’ The biggest copper and gold mines are, from west to east, Shetongmon, Gyama and Yulong districts, in which there may be many deposits, many mines, ore crushers, chemical concentrators and smelters. World-scale industrial mining has arrived. Already China says there is a confirmed 20 million tonnes of extractable copper in these deposits of central Tibet. All have silver, as well as copper and gold. Some also have molybdenum, or lead and zinc, although these last two will go to waste, with no attempt at recovery, with only the copper, gold and silver poured off separately while molten. All are in the watersheds of major rivers for hundreds of millions of people downstream – those who live on international transboundary rivers that originate in Tibet. China’s 20 million tonnes of Tibetan copper, recoverable during planned mine lives of at least thirty years, should be seen in the context of China’s 2012 claim to own 80 million tonnes of copper in deposits around the world, all of which will be mined.18 These new mines bring Tibet firmly into the Chinese and world economy. Although there is little involvement by non-Chinese companies, these are world-scale projects.

shetongmon Shetongmon (Xietongmen in Chinese)19 was the first major new mine to attract publicity, partly due to its sensitive location close to the major river of southern Tibet, the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra; partly because it was for some time owned by Canadian investors; and because it is close to Shigatse, the second city of Tibet, the historic seat of the Panchen Lamas. The proximity to a major river raises major environmental concerns, since the steep site will have to hold securely at least 75 out of every 100 tonnes of rock mined and crushed to powder to extract a concentrate that can be sent by rail to a distant smelter. According to recent baseline research by

  spoiling tibet Tibetan scientists, there is already a natural heavy metal load in the river; any leakage from the hillside dam waste tailings could be disastrous.20 Not only would downstream India and Bangladesh be affected; if the planned water diversion of Tibetan rivers to the Yellow River (Huang He) includes capturing the Yarlung Tsangpo, downstream China’s water purity would be threatened too. Much of Bangladesh suffers from chronic arsenic poisoning, which the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra collects far upstream. Mining of copper and gold on this river will increase the arsenic load carried. By the time the rail line to nearby Shigatse is completed in 2014, the mine, owned by Jinchuan, China’s biggest nickel producer, will be operational. Jinchuan is fast shaping up as a new national champion in mining, expanding beyond nickel, and beyond China too. When Jinchuan acquired a Congolese copper mine, Metorex, the company said it was determined to buy more African mines. Jinchuan also knows a good offer when it comes, selling in 2011 a 45 per cent stake in the Shetongmon mine to Zijin, a bigger and more experienced state-owned company.21 The corporate dance continues, while awaiting the completion of the rail line from Lhasa to Shigatse, which will leave only 80 km for Shetongmon copper/ gold concentrates to be trucked to the rail terminus for the long journey to the Jinchuan smelter. The Shetongmon copper/gold/silver mine is part of the long suture zone, where the Indian and Eurasian plates collided, which is studded with copper and gold deposits. Geologists keep finding more deposits, and upgrading the amount recoverable from the longest studied deposits. Close by is an area the owners call Newtongmen. Also close by, on another tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo, is Takmolingka monastery, functioning since 1436. In 2010 five Takmolingka monks were arrested for protesting the mining. The community staged protests for almost one month. ‘[T]he local government of Shetongmon sent riot police to disrupt the demonstrations but the protesters did not yield to police pressure. A large contingent of public security bureau and armed personnel were sent

intensive exploitation   from Shigatse to crackdown on the protesters, many of whom got beaten up and arrested.’22

gyama Gyama (Jiama) is already operational, and already a threat to the purity of the water in Tibet’s most sacred city, Lhasa. Gyama, controlled by Vancouver-based China Gold International, is not far upstream of Lhasa, in an area of great historic significance. Like most of Tibet, the area is seismically unstable, vulnerable to earthquakes. The mine is close to the route of a new rail line to be built, at state expense, from Lhasa to Nyingtri (Nyingchi). In 2010 in the academic journal Science of the Total Environment, a team of Tibetan and Scandinavian scientists, after analysing river water below the Gyama mine, reported that elevated concentrations of Cu, Pb, Zn, Mn, Fe and Al in the surface water and streambed at the upper/middle part of the valley pose a considerably high risk to the local environment. A high content of heavy metals in the stream sediments as well as in a number of tailings with gangue and material from the ore processing, poses a great potential threat to the downstream water users. Environmental changes such as global warming or increased mining activity may increase the mobility of these pools of heavy metals.

Tibetans living near the mine have protested, according to Tibetan Review: Tibetans petitioned a group of visiting TAR officials and demanded the complete withdrawal of the miners. And the miners were indeed removed from the area on the following day. However, the local residents were then visited by a work team which warned the Tibetans against opposing the mine. They were told that they would be charged with engaging in political activities if they continued their protest. But because of the seriousness of the mine’s harmful effects, the local residents have now petitioned the Chinese authorities, the report said. The mining operation was reported to have led to the drying of spring waters, poisoning of drinking water and destruction of flora and fauna in the region.

  spoiling tibet More than 1,000 domestic animals were reported to have died after mine poisoned water.23

The Gyama mine, now with access via Canada to international investors, plans to expand to dig up and crush to powder 12,000 tonnes of rock a day for thirty-one years, with 99 per cent of crushed rock left forever on site after the most valuable minerals have been extracted. This is a highly profitable operation, competitive with copper mines around the world, with mining costs of only RMB200 (less than US$30) per tonne, according to a detailed technical report by commercial geologists.24 This is the first highly profitable project in Tibet, both for the mining company, which will have sales of RMB45.6 billion over the mine’s life, and for China, which will earn RMB4.9 billion in revenue from VAT sales tax, resource tax and corporation income tax. Those figures, from the 2010 technical report, are based on copper and gold prices lower than actual current prices. If mid-2011 prices are used, profit will be a lot higher. Of particular concern for human health is the lead content of the Gyama deposit. Only in the first two years of operation is it commercially profitable to extract the lead, and even then at least 20 per cent of the lead in the ore will not be recovered, and will lie forever in powdery mud, in the mine’s waste dumps. On average, for every ton mined and crushed to powder there is a half kilo of lead. The Gyama mine has already operated for many years on a smaller scale, under various owners, which lacked capital for best practice health and safety regulations. The Gyama deposit contains less than 1 million tonnes of copper metal, but nearby, also upriver from Lhasa, is Chulong, a much bigger copper deposit (7 million tonnes) along with commercially attractive molybdenum metal. Chulong, only 50 km east of Lhasa, is in a mountain chain that drains northwards to the great Ganden monastery and Lhasa; and southwards to Samye, location of the first Buddhist monastery built in Tibet, over twelve centuries ago, and thus deeply venerated. Heavy metals from Chulong escaping to air and water would be an

intensive exploitation   even greater threat to all these places in one of the most densely populated parts of Tibet. The Gyama deposit also contains molybdenum, a metal so dominated by Chinese producers that, along with rare earth minerals, it is at the heart of a case mounted by the USA and Japan against China in the WTO. The formal complaint is that China abuses its near-monopoly in molybdenum and rare earths to restrict exports to buyers willing to play China’s wider game, such as compliance with the country’s foreign policy regarding who owns disputed islands, or the willingness of hi-tech companies to relocate their manufacturing to China, where they must compulsorily share their technology secrets with their obligatory Chinese partners. The WTO has the power to decide this case, since there is a system of global governance for trade, although there is no such authority in cases of human rights abuse. The WTO must decide whether China has used environmental regulations as an excuse to restrict production, limiting the supply of molybdenum and rare earths to favoured Chinese users while excluding foreign buyers. Now that molybdenum is in such demand that trade wars break out over it, Tibetan molybdenum is valuable. As long ago as 2007, Mining Engineering magazine declared that ‘Molybdenum could be the next hot commodity.’25 Gyama is called a polymetallic deposit, containing recoverable lead, molybdenum, copper, gold and silver. But the detailed mine life plan commissioned for Gyama from consultants Behre Dolbear proposes that some 2,000 tonnes of molybdenum concentrate will come from Gyama each year of its life of sixteen years. Assuming a low selling price of US$35,000 per tonne, and an actual molybdenum metal content of the Gyama concentrate of 1,300 tonnes, molybdenum sales will earn over US$45 million, cream on the copper/gold cake. The deposit is large and complex. The 2011 mine life plan submitted to regulatory authorities in Canada in 2011 envisages the mine will operate for sixteen years, but China Gold International is now planning for as much as seventy years of continuous mining, on the

  spoiling tibet assumption that more profitable mineral finds can be confirmed.26 China Gold International (or its fully state-owned parent China National Gold) already has stakes in gold mines in Kyrgyzstan, close to China’s western borders, and in Zambia. It is actively seeking further acquisitions. The Toronto- and Hong Kong-listed firm is seeking targets in Central and Southeast Asia, North and South America, Australia and Africa, chief executive Song Xin told the South China Morning Post in 2012.27 In March 2013 disaster struck. A massive landslide killed eightythree Gyama mine workers, buried under rock loosened by blasting, which swept downhill for 3 kilometres, leaving debris up to 30 metres thick. Immediately, and without evidence, China Gold Group and the Communist Party propaganda department declared the disaster had natural causes.28 If the migrant workers from Guizhou who died were killed by seismic activity, this is not a good sign for the stability of the tailings dams just below the mine, which will have to hold intact the wastes accumulated in decades of mineral extraction, keeping them from leaching into the Kyichu river system below. Well before the disaster China Gold, recognizing the worldwide sympathy for Tibetan protests, flew journalists to Gyama to write glowing accounts of this ‘mining miracle’, as Beijing Review put it.29 This PR effort to acknowledge new global realities, whereby even state-owned Chinese miners need a social licence to legitimately operate, collapsed in the landslide. Only two of the dead mine workers were Tibetan, contrary to the impression created by the PR stories. Even in a mine just upriver from Lhasa, the operating language is Chinese, and few Tibetans have competence in the Chinese language essential for even unskilled employment in an industrial-scale mine.

chulong The latest copper/gold discovery attracting much excitement in China is Chulong, even closer to Lhasa than Gyama, only 60 km

intensive exploitation   due east. Now Chinese and international geologists have a clear story about the process of formation of such deposits, well after India slid under the Eurasian plate, with liquid magma pushing up through the thickened crust. So prospectors know better where to look. Chulong (Qulong in Chinese) seems to be a major deposit. 30 Like Gyama it fascinates Chinese and international geologists, who seek to explore its origins before mining destroys it. Like the other major deposits it also has substantial quantities of recoverable moly­bdenum, placing another Tibetan location within the resource nationalist contestation between China, the USA and Japan. It was only in the 1980s that geologists saw the connection between the greenness of the nearby river and the likelihood of a copper find, and only in 2001 did a work unit of the Xizang (Tibet) Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources begin a detailed survey. Chulong is still in an early stage of preparation for mining, so early that it is still in the hands of a Lhasa-based state-owned corporation that has neither the capital nor the experience in mining to turn it into an extraction enclave. When exploitation looms, it will sell to a corporation capable of mining, and as a reward may get to keep a portion of equity and thus profit. That is the usual pattern: rewarding the geologists who first laid claim, but transferring ownership to more energized state-owned corporations capable of mining, processing and marketing metals. Xizang Zhongsheng Mineral Resources Company (XZMRC) assumed management of the Chulong project in 2006. More commonly known simply as Tibet Mineral, it is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Tibet Mineral has been able to raise modest amounts through placements sold privately to unnamed investors, sufficient to keep working on not only Chusong but also its lithium salt lake deposit in western Tibet and other holdings.

yulong Yulong is one of a cluster of copper and gold deposits in eastern Tibet, in a remote and rugged area between the watersheds of

  spoiling tibet the Yangtze and Mekong rivers. 31 Electricity sufficient to power a smelter will be supplied by hydropower dams on these great rivers and their major tributaries, massive interruptions to wild mountain rivers. There can be no mining, and especially no energyintensive crushing, concentrating and smelting, all due to happen at the mine, without massive electricity supplies. The controversial hydro­damming of Tibetan rivers cannot be considered a separate issue from mining. While the damming of Tibetan rivers further downstream is to supply electricity over great distances to coastal cities including Shanghai and Guangzhou, the further upstream dams under construction are to supply the mines and immigrant towns of Tibet with the energy essential to their functioning. Nor is the supply of hydropower to distant Guangzhou and Shanghai disconnected to the fate of Tibet, since the ultra-high-voltage direct current power cables capable of carrying electricity over such long distances must be made of copper, and Tibet is fast becoming China’s new copper production base. Yulong and nearby copper, gold and molybdenum deposits are, from a Tibetan viewpoint, in Kham, in the steeply folded ranges high above the deep valleys of some of the world’s greatest rivers. Yulong is near Jomda, between Chamdo town and Derge, in eastern Tibet. But politics has placed Yulong inside Tibet Autonomous Region, which may mean its metals will travel west towards Lhasa and then north into the Chinese market, a long roundabout journey. Eventually a rail line will be built, despite the daunting terrain, connecting eastern Tibet with lowland Sichuan, where the industrial demand in Chengdu and Chongqing cities is growing fast, as major global brand manufacturers relocate to western China. The Yulong cluster has long been known as a source of copper, yet it has taken China many decades to get it into production. The nearby chain of deposits is, in Chinese, Malasongduo, Duoxiasongduo and Zhanaga, which in Tibetan are Malasumdo, Toshasumdo and Dralhaka. Chinese geologists say that when they first went to Yulong they found remnant mining pits, relics, hammers and

intensive exploitation   hoes in ancient pits from which lead, silver and copper had been extracted. Modern prospecting began in 1966 just as the Cultural Revolution declared war on all bourgeois scientific knowledge, so ‘prospecting was suspended for some reason’, as the geologists wrote discreetly, three decades later. 32 From the 1970s it was obvious that Yulong molybdenum was a significant mineral, worth considering as economic. In 1978 investigation intensified, with 200 staff assigned to do the drilling. Gradually they realized the deposit was formed by molten rock melting its way upward, then very slowly cooling, which allowed the molten minerals to separate and concentrate. ‘The discovery and evaluation of the deposit was a complex process of cognition and recognition of the objective matters.’ This was the finest moment for the geologists sent to Tibet. It was their greatest discovery, ‘a leap in the process of cognition which led eventually to a breakthrough in the ore prospecting. Despite the harsh natural conditions on the plateau all the staff members of the party forged bravely ahead and found the Malasongduo and ten other large and medium-sized copper deposits.’ The head geologist was declared an exemplary heroic model worker by the Ministry of Geology and Mineral Resources. The cluster of mines at Yulong will add hundreds of thousands of tonnes of copper each year to China’s supply, which is both a lot and not much. For Tibet it is a lot, nothing less than the integration into the Chinese industrial economy of a huge area which until now has not been much industrialized at all, and which increasingly appeals to urban Chinese because of its beauty. It is a lot in Tibetan eyes since Tibetans, even after the mines are exhausted and closed, will have to bear the environmental costs, but are not permitted to establish NGOs to give voice to environmental concerns. Nor do Tibetan communities receive royalties. Yulong is where one of the most globally nomadic and celebrated of lamas, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, and his teacher, Togden Ugyen Tenzin, did their training. In this same mineralized landscape, high in the cliff faces of the mountains, they stayed in solitary retreat,

  spoiling tibet undertaking the rigorous mind training that has empowered Namkhai Norbu’s global charismatic presence in recent decades. Even during the revolutionary class warfare to liquidate class enemies, Togden Ugyen Tenzin maintained his concentrated meditation, according to an insider biography recently published. 33 Namkhai Norbu’s worldwide capacity to turn minds towards a meaningful life34 comes directly from those years in the cliffs of the mountains about to be mined for copper and gold. Yet these mines cannot do much to reduce China’s reliance on global sources for raw materials. The world’s factory is thoroughly integrated into the global economy, both for sourcing raw inputs and for selling the finished manufactures to the world. If China’s copper and gold consumption continue to rise as predicted, the new mines in Tibet will fall far short of domestic self-reliance. Even if the new mines meet production targets, despite several recent delays, China’s imports of copper and gold will continue to rise. China’s copper smelting capacity is just over 4 million tonnes a year, with a further 600,000 tonnes in production soon, but China’s copper consumption is now 7 million tonnes a year, so imports will continue. China’s smelters are used to relying on imported copper scrap and concentrates, as well as domestic sources. Although Chinese state-owned mining companies are now adept at operating globally, and at raising capital by listing shares bought by investors in IPO floats in Hong Kong and Shanghai, they are also good at drumming up resource nationalism. The reality is that the Tibetan deposits being turned into mines are far from being on a world scale. Mining them will be profitable, because the state pays all the costs of bringing rail lines close, constructing the hydrodams and power pylons that electrify the energy-intensive processes of crushing rock to powder, chemical concentration and smelting. Without such heavy state investment in infrastructure it would still be cheaper to import, as it has been for many years.

intensive exploitation   ‘Songtsen Gampo’s hometown is about to be completely excavated’ Gyama is the hometown of the great Tibetan monarch, Songtsen Gampo. It is true that I mention Songtsen Gampo often, always in the hope that those greedy cadres and companies would show some mercy. In Han Chinese culture, the birthplace of all former dynasties’ emperors is considered to be the treasured place of ‘fengshui’, referred to as ‘dragon’s pulse’. Only occasionally dynastic changes destroyed the ‘dragon’s pulse’ of a former emperor, but normally it would be meticulously protected and regularly sacrificed to seek protection and luck. According to this, Gyama, with its many sacred and beautiful places, is where the ‘dragon’s pulse’ exists in Tibet and it should never have to endure such disembowelling hardship as it does today. Huatailong mining industry deprived over a hundred nomad families of their pasture. The local authorities requested the nomads to move away from their pasture and promised to build them new socialist country houses as well as to provide them with a monthly allowance. Yet, the nomads say that away from their life on the grasslands they cannot do anything, it is just a road leading to a dead end. Numerous times, the nomads went to the township and county to appeal to the higher authorities but they were ignored. The Huatailong mining remains relatively quiet during the daytime but at night everything is brightly lit and thundering noise like roaring guns accompanies the mining activities that go on all night long. Blasts in the middle of the night were so powerful that it even made some villagers fall underneath their beds believing that it was an earthquake. Resentment can be sensed everywhere. The Huatailong mining industry has caused most severe pollution, many livestock have died, many villagers have fallen ill but the compensation is not much. Last year, due to a drought, Huatailong used the villagers’ water, causing serious conflicts. Reportedly, Huatailong had approximately up to 10,000 workers at their disposal, most of them Han Chinese, while there were only a few thousand villagers. Yet, immediately, a great number of military police, including

  spoiling tibet special police forces, were sent from Lhasa patrolling through Gyama with armoured vehicles for many days arresting villagers. Songtsen Gampo’s hometown has almost been completely excavated by the China Gold Group. The slogans hanging in the streets of Lhasa were changed into: ‘Showing a New Image, Casting New Brilliance, Promoting the Harmonious Development of Mining Areas’. Does this not imply that in the near future, there will be mining on a much larger scale? By courageous blogger Woeser, who continues to defy the threat of imprisonment for articulating what Tibetans know. http://highpeakspureearth.com/2010/songtsen-gampos-hometown-is-aboutto-be-completely-excavated-by-woeser.

Globally the biggest copper deposits each hold over 100 million tonnes of copper metal; while Gyama holds less than 1 million tonnes, a figure rising as more testing is done. These deposits are currently the biggest in China, a fact strongly emphasized by their corporate owners, keen to elicit state infrastructure subsidies for domestic Chinese resource nationalism. While patriotic Chinese netizens might presume it is better to source copper from Tibet than Peru or Zambia, China’s exportdriven wealth creation also depends on importing raw materials cheaply, in a global competition. China’s mining companies, whether state-owned or not, choose where to invest on commercial grounds, choosing the biggest and fastest rate of return. On such criteria, the new mines and smelters in Tibet struggle to make a good case for investment. Despite being massive compared to mining in Tibet until now, they are still too small, and too far from market, to compete against low-cost copper mines elsewhere. The twenty biggest copper mines in the world each have on average a capacity to produce 345,000 tonnes of copper a year, and none produces less than 200,000 tonnes. That is the global benchmark, if the playing field is level, with no hidden subsidies. By comparison,

intensive exploitation   the first big copper mine in Tibet, at Gyama, will produce 25,000 tonnes of copper a year, a little more in some years. Yulong is a bigger deposit, capable of sustaining a more intensive rate of extraction. The mine currently produces 10,000 tonnes of copper a year, due to rise in coming years to 20,000 tonnes smelted at Yulong and a further 20,000 tonnes smelted elsewhere from Yulong concentrates. After 2015, extraction from Yulong might eventually achieve 100,000 tonnes of copper metal a year, according to official announcements. While bigger than Gyama, Yulong has been slow to get going, having been announced in one Five-year Plan after another as a ‘pillar industry’ of Tibet. Yulong, though frequently announced as the biggest copper deposit in China, actually has a proven reserve of 6.5 million tonnes, which with more drilling might perhaps double. If China could buy a major copper deposit in Chile it would find these Tibetan deposits not worth bothering with. The Chilean deposits are far bigger, and set the standard, in costs per tonne mined. In comparison with Chile, and with many other countries where copper is mined, the Tibetan deposits, though big, are not yet big enough to be competitive. Why are these mines going ahead, if they cannot be justified on market economy grounds? Commercial considerations are only part of the picture. The mining companies benefit from state financing of railways, power stations and much other infrastructure, as well as receiving finance at concessional rates to corporate borrowers, tax holidays, minimal environmental standards and costs, no royalty payments to local communities and subsidized rail freight rates to get concentrates to smelters or metal to markets. It is these state subsidies that tip the balance towards medium-scale mines in several Tibetan locations, rather than towards one more big Chinese copper mine overseas. The subsidies are massive. According to the TAR 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–15), the Tibet mining industry will receive direct governmental financial support of RMB16 billion plus social investment of RMB32 billion in the infrastructure the mines need – roads, urban centres, power stations. 35

  spoiling tibet Chinese mining companies would be reluctant to invest abroad in copper deposits of only a few million tonnes, especially if bigger deposits are on the market. Logistically, Tibet has always been more remote than the mountains of Laos or Peru, where Chinese mining companies are currently extracting copper. The commodity chain infrastructure has simply not existed. Until now. It is China’s state-directed infrastructure investment that makes all the difference. The Shetongmon mine was originally scheduled to begin production in 2010, under Canadian owners, but the operational date has been put back to when a rail line connecting via Lhasa to inland Chinese smelters and markets can be completed. The same is true of the Gyama mine, which is on the route of another new rail line from Lhasa to Nyingtri in southern Tibet. And the Yulong mine has been slow to develop beyond a modest scale, while awaiting the completion, at state expense, of hydropower dams and a rail line, still some years away. A further reason for delay is the difficulty, in steep terrain draining to both the Yangtze and Mekong, of guaranteeing no leakage of toxic metals to rivers. The owners of Yulong, in Jomda county, are Qinghai-based Western Mining and Zijin, China’s biggest gold producer. In early 2011 Zijin was found guilty of a toxic spill that poisoned fish and polluted the drinking water of tens of thousands of people. 36 On 16 March 2011 Xinhua reported that ‘after a short period of trial operation, the Yulong project was suspended due to environmental issues. It is unclear when the project will be continued.’ Shanghai Daily reported that China’s press watchdog has said Zijin had tried to bribe reporters to cover up the toxic spill. The company is also being sued by a city government in Guangdong Province for 19.5 million yuan over a fatal dam collapse at a tin mine there in September, which killed at least twenty-two people.

When Zijin bought its Peruvian copper mine, it announced it would spend $80 million on helping local peasant communities with

intensive exploitation   projects chosen by the communities. 37 In Tibet, there is no such corporate social responsibility; nor do Chinese mining companies belong to industry bodies such as the International Council on Mining and Minerals which promote high standards of local community and indigenous involvement in how mining is done and who benefits. Although ICMM publishes Chinese-language manuals on human rights in mining, no Chinese miner has joined. At a time when indigenous community protests and environmental protests have largely persuaded the global mining giants that ignoring environmental and social harm is bad for business, a new generation of Chinese mining corporations, in Tibet and in Africa, are obeying the party-state’s directive (and subsidies) to ‘go out’, establishing new standards of corporate behaviour that pay little heed to the environment or social impacts. Tracking the major Tibetan mineral deposit owners through endless takeovers, mergers and acquisitions suggests that one company usually ends up with a major stake, or outright ownership: Zijin. The Canadian mining minnows have a role, in the phase of proving a deposit and designing the mine life, but mining Tibet on a large scale remains in the hands of Chinese corporations, mostly state-owned. The exception is Huatailong/China Gold International at Gyama/Jiama, just upstream of Lhasa, both because it is Canadian and looks like being able to finance not only the preparations but also the actual mining, and because it is partly privately owned. China is in the phase of primitive accumulation by its big corporations, unfettered by society. These national champions in the making are at the forefront of exploiting Tibet, Africa and Latin America. They enjoy state subsidies and political support from a party-state determined that they shall succeed on a global scale. When these new giants obey the party-state and ‘go out’, they discover, often the hard way, that there are unfamiliar rules, in Canada or Peru, Zambia or Sudan, that they must follow, or fail. But in Tibet these giants need pay no heed to Tibetan society, to the deep offence mining

  spoiling tibet imposes on land and people, because the party-state, ever fearful, will always silence the Tibetans. While the obvious unhappiness of the Tibetans, over mining as well as religious repression, would count strongly as a political risk factor discouraging foreign mining companies, to Chinese miners it is a guarantee of security, that opposition will not be allowed to mobilize and challenge the miners. Nor is there any sign that non-Chinese mining corporations will be allowed more than minor roles in what China believes will soon be the pillar industry it has long sought. Although more cautious assessments suggest the amount of copper recoverable from the major Tibetan deposits is 20 million tonnes, to be extracted over decades, Chinese geologists now claim 80 million tonnes are there for the taking. After decades of Chinese geologists routinely announcing fabulous finds in Tibet which seldom become mines, some scepticisim is needed, but the serious geologizing of Tibet in recent years suggests the numbers the geologists pump out may now have a solid basis. If there really are 80 million tonnes of copper, 2,000 tonnes of gold and 30 million tonnes of lead and zinc extractable from the Tibetan Plateau, worth US$420 billion (RMB2.7 trillion), then the spoiling of Tibet will soon be on a scale far beyond that of past decades.

Conclusion

China’s new rulers In China, and outside, many voices urge the new leaders to boldly curb the powers of the state-owned enterprises that cause most of the pollution that chokes China’s cities and dominate the economy. This book has shown that Tibet is a fiefdom of the SOEs, and that the same SOEs are feted as China’s national champions going out to the world, as the ‘devouring dragon’ seeks ever more raw materials wherever they can be bought. The SOEs are the engine of China’s wealth accumulation, monopolizing not only available capital but also profits. They have the capacity and will to keep those profits for themselves, enriching their executives, heightening the inequality which makes China one of the most inegalitarian of nations. The SOEs, confident they are protected as China’s ‘national champions’, have no intention of relinquishing their power or allowing the entry of competitors. China’s new leaders face an entrenched elite, able to resist even a determined push for reform. Tibet is now one of their bastions. The flow of profits from the new mines in Tibet will only strengthen the SOE oligopoly, and override popular voices calling for the preservation of Tibet from despoliation.

  spoiling tibet Shall we, then, say Tibet has been spoiled? Not yet. Despite the widespread damage to land and Tibetan society, of decades of gold rush, it is only now that exploitation of the resource patrimony of Tibet is going ahead in earnest. Tibetan protests are also increasing, despite the terrible cost in beatings, torture and lengthy imprisonment. Fresh voices speak up for Tibet, from within the urban elite, seeking to preserve, in far Tibet, a land unspoiled by the hunger of the world’s factory for mineral resources. After the 2013 landslide disaster at the Gyama copper/gold mine just upstream of Lhasa, Han Chinese popular singers and movie producers spoke up, urging that somewhere in China there must be places set aside for conservation. Well-known singer Zhang Yihe, in a message to her 339,000 fans, said: ‘I don’t understand why we have to dig up gold in areas that are above 4,000 metres. Why don’t we leave something for the next generation?’1 This is the same preservationist ethos that swept western countries, which resulted in national parks, protected areas, wilderness reserves, indigenous homelands and biodiversity protection zones. Tibet is not yet spoiled, for two more reasons. One is that Tibet is not an unspoiled wilderness that was untouched by human hand until very recently. It is a curated land shaped by thousands of years of human use. What is recent is that the plateau’s human population has doubled, as Han migrants and soldiers have moved in,2 and long-term, extensive, mobile, sustainable use has been replaced by intensive, unsustainable, enclave land use, concentrated in mines and cities. The most powerful reason we cannot say Tibet is yet spoiled is that Tibetan culture remains strong. The inner strengths of the Tibetans, cultivated in solitude, in the mountains, remain the backbone of Tibetan civilization. The unbroken Tibetan lineages of mind training survived the decades of denunciation, destruction, starvation and dispersal of practitioners of the inner path. The caves and solitary retreat places of the mountains continue to produce new leaders, willing to face all hardships, in order to protect the land from mining. The protests will continue. Tibet is not spoiled – yet.

conclusion   Tibetan voices I know your stalwart figure Standing firmly in the boundless space between heaven and earth On your venerable forehead that has passed through thousands of years Are the clean snowflakes shining in the sun of the plateau Under your vast, peaceful and smooth feet Is the sound of praises sung to you by the plateau herders. You are one of the nine sacred mountains of Tibet Your fame is firmly established throughout the world. You are the Dharma defender of Amdo Your good name is widely known. However, today, the wheels of greed Are running over the grassland, entering directly under your feet They bring bombs, trucks, and excavators And other bizarre tools that are used by demons To excavate the hidden gems in your body. In 2011 an anonymous Tibetan blogger posted, in Chinese, a poem addressed to Amnye Machen, the name of both a mountain range and a major god protecting the land of Tibet. This extract is translated by High Peaks Pure Earth. http://highpeaks­pureearth. com/2012/poem-to-amnye-machen.

Unbundled modernity ‘Globalization can be thought of as the unbundling of things. Trade liberalization relaxes the need to cluster production near demand whereas the ICT improvement relaxes the need to cluster production altogether.’ So say two Chinese economists in Japan. 3 In an unbundled world, we need no longer assume that production and consumption be physically anywhere near each other, nor that the first stage of production, such as mining, need be anywhere near the next stage, of metals production and manufacturing of consumer goods. This is the genius of contemporary capitalism,

  spoiling tibet liberated from the tyranny of distance by inexhaustible energy supplies that make it cheap and easy to shift producer goods – raw materials such as mineral ores – and consumer goods, such as cars, around the planet. In today’s unbundled world, Tibet is merely a geography, an incidental detail of little interest to investors whose wider concern is whether an enterprise is about to make money. The actual physical location of its source of raw materials is a minor detail, a boring backroom story best left to the nerds in back offices who must figure out the competing merits of sourcing chromium for gleaming cars made in China, from South Africa, Turkey, Kazakhstan or Tibet. That is how the unbundled world works, as if cheap oil, with no effective carbon price included, will continue forever. With the rush into shale oil, coal seam gas, and drilling the Arctic Ocean, the peak and subsequent decline in fossil fuels have again been postponed. That is an argument for the future. Right now, Tibet has proven to be largely irrelevant to China’s mineral and energy needs. The Tibetan Plateau has gone from being a treasure house in the making to being yesterday’s story, without ever peaking as a source of major industrial raw materials. Its promise remains unfulfilled, yet China presses on with centrally planned mining projects big enough to despoil Tibet, yet not big enough, employing enough, enriching owners enough, to achieve China’s nation-building goals of assimilating Tibet into China. In the unbundled world, China is the global factory, now seeking to go upmarket, adding value, reducing its dependence on stuff, such as minerals, to turn into unbranded goods at low prices. The world’s factory has discovered it is far cheaper and easier to obtain its chromium from Kazakhstan, Oman, Turkey or South Africa, than to negotiate with the iron-rice-bowl-era chromite miners based in Tibet on the banks of the upper Brahmaputra. The Kazakhs or South Africans might occasionally express dismay at being relegated to the basic role of diggers of raw chromite, with the value-adding of turning chromite ore into furnace-ready ferrochrome being

conclusion   monopolized by China. But there is little they can do to reverse the shipping or unprocessed ores all the way to China. In an unbundled world, even the biggest of transnationals such as RioTinto or Alcoa must accept that their aluminium smelters will have to close, and soon their role will be only to ship alumina to China where the smelting into aluminium takes place. But an unbundled world is extremely fragile, prone to costly interruptions to the seamless flow of commodities across the planet and back again, as iron ore leaves Brazil and returns as automobiles, or copper concentrate leaves the Congo and returns as Chinese-made mobile phones. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic ash, floods and fires disrupt not only the remote locations of such disasters, but now affect the entire unbundled world production system. China’s leaders are evidently fearful that Tibetan voices demanding agency in their own land could reduce all of China to chaos, weakness, humiliation and ruin. It is this inherent instability of the unbundled world, and especially that of a regime determined that wealth creation be monopolized by a small well-connected elite, that leads to the one irresistible pressure on Tibetan minerals: gold. China can easily do without Tibetan oil, gas, lead, zinc, asbestos, chromite, copper and much more. China’s nation-building agenda of increasing the non-Tibetan population resident in central Tibet is being rapidly accomplished through mass tourism, an industry far better able to employ large numbers of Chinese immigrants than mining. Tourists do not want to see mines and dirty smelter smokestacks. But there is one mineral to be found in many places in Tibet which is essential to the leading Chinese players in an unbundled world. That is gold. The new rich in China feel an urgent need for ways of conserving and growing their wealth that are portable, durable, reliable, readily liquefiable and globally valuable. Money in the bank attracts interest well below inflation. Money invested in shares is in a casino where the odds are against the punters. Money invested in opaque state-owned corporations that ignore

  spoiling tibet minority shareholders is at best a gamble. ‘Mass incidents’ of unrest in response to glaring inequality keep growing, to the point that China’s internal security budget is bigger than its military budget. The renminbi is not yet a globally exchangeable currency. Capital flight – getting wealth out of China to somewhere safer – is not a hypothetical danger, but an everyday necessity for the wealthy. There are many ways to ensure that accumulations of wealth end up in Swiss bank accounts. Best of all is that the wealth in the first instance be generated outside China by, for example, running a Chinese copper mine in Zambia or Peru, a Chinese oilfield in Sudan. In an unbundled world, China’s bundling of politics and economics, state power and corporate investment, strongly encourages state-owned corporations to ‘go out’ and incorporate in Vancouver, list in Hong Kong or Toronto, and buy that mine in central Africa. The old-fashioned developmental state model China follows, bundling together ministries of foreign affairs and commerce with the state-financed foreign investment strategies of its biggest state-owned corporations, is just beginning to succeed in owning mines worldwide. The more mines and oilfields China acquires, the more opportunity grows for senior management to capture the wealth created, channel it through tax havens – exemplary unbundlers – and store value, in gold bars, in safety deposits in the bastions of banking secrecy. Even in the best of times, when footloose capital flows freely and quickly to wherever it has best prospects for making more, gold still has a place. But in the worst of times, when the market economy’s capacity for creative destruction erupts as yet another global financial crisis, gold is in a class of its own. Nothing holds value like gold. It is not bulky, and is readily transportable. China became the biggest gold producer and consumer in the world with astonishing speed. Industrial uses for gold played a minor part. The driver was jewellery, a proxy for investment in the metal itself and its enduring value. This is the one Tibetan commodity China cannot do without.

conclusion   Rules of engagement The Chinese were not the first intruders who believed that medieval nonsense about sacred landscapes, caves, solitude and meditative insight should be swept aside. The British, a century ago, having conquered Tibet, considered it a jolly good idea that some bright young Tibetan chaps be sent to the UK to learn the sciences of modernity, and arranged for them to be schooled at Rugby and then at technical colleges. One of the four, Mondong, was designated to study geology as a step towards geologizing Tibet. Mondong was not a wise choice. As a monk, he had already vowed not to do metalwork, something his British mentors were oblivious to. Further, he came from minor nobility and his uncle was an aidede-camp in the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace, a good reason to heed his vows. The British, however, were fascinated by the upper class of Tibet, and thought them the right people to bring modernity to Tibet. So Mondong (or Mondo as the British called him) was sent off to Rugby school in 1913, on the strength of his aptitude for cricket.4 Mondong was the name of his family manor; his personal name was Khenrab Kunsang. He returned to Tibet four years later, aged 20, with instructions to go prospecting. Caught between worlds, he did as little as he could. The British sent him in 1917 to Mysore to the gold mines at Kolar, to learn more. 5 On his return he again did as little as possible, to the disappointment of his mentors. Eventually he obtained various official posts as magistrate, police official and government representative in remote western Tibet. His net contribution to the science of geology was nil. Only once more did the British demand his geological services, in 1922, as the Tibetan aide to Sir Henry Hubert Hayden, who had just retired as director of the Geological Survey of India and was bent on geologizing Tibet, with a local helper. (Hayden died the following year, 1923. His memoir of this trip, under the innocuous title Sport and Travel in the Highlands of Tibet, was published in London in 1927.) Mondong again did little. Although Hayden

  spoiling tibet was delighted to discover ancient fossil ammonite shells high in the Himalayas, Mondong may well have understood that Hayden’s real interest, as it had been in India, was in scouting for strategic minerals with military uses. China’s official policy is that the world-scale mining of Tibet, by state-owned national champion mining corporations is good for Tibet. Tibetans were horrified by decades of rampant gold rush mining of the surface. They will be more horrified by the new wave of deep mining pits, heavy equipment, smelters and massive tailings waste dams that will disfigure the landscape forever. The deep grief felt by Tibetans unable to defend their land will only intensify, as local communities bear the social environmental costs of mining, while state-owned corporations monopolize the wealth created. Around the world, even in dictatorships, there is dialogue between the communities most impacted by mining and the mining companies. The multinational mining giants of the world, the multilateral development banks, global NGOs and think-tanks have all realized that local communities in remote areas, where minerals are so often located, must be integral to the extraction of the stuff of which modernity is made. Governments worldwide regulate mandatory compensation payments and royalties to be received by local communities rather than the distant state. Governments encourage mining companies to do the right thing by providing vocational education for local communities to maximize participation and employment opportunities in the mining workforce. Corporations have come to realize that they cannot just make an agreement with the state, leaving local education, health, employment, water and environmental protection as state responsibilities. No longer do mining companies, especially the biggest ones, hide behind the assertion that they are good corporate citizens because they obey national laws and contracts, leaving social problems to the state. Generations of protests have made the biggest multinational miners realize that they need a social licence as well as legal licences, and that the goodwill of local communities is essential to their corporate

conclusion   reputation, which in turn affects their share price and the cost of money they borrow. Mining in Tibet has progressed from rapacious gold rush to systematic exploitation without the Tibetans, individually or collectively, having any voice. Tibetan resistance has grown in strength as China’s exploitation of Tibet has intensified. China’s governance of Tibet has been counterproductive and self-defeating, full of perverse outcomes. Gyama and Chulong, among the biggest of the new mines, upriver from Lhasa, are in a district deeply meaningful to Tibetans, for whom history matters greatly. This is the area where the last of the pre-Buddhist kings of Tibet, Songtsen Gampo, was born, and where the great Buddhist tamer of Tibetan minds and the spirits of the Tibetan earth, Padmasambhava, performed so many of his rituals to subdue the wild land and people. These are vivid events in the minds of Tibetans. The ruination of lands at the heart of Tibetan culture and identity will further alienate Tibetans, and not be seen as development. In the tourism industry, there are niches for Tibetans, since some tourists want to connect with the people of Tibet. In mining it is all downside, with no silver lining. Globally, community campaigns have done much to tame the minds of the mining corporations. ICMM, EITI, GOXI, Equator Principles, Kimberley Process, South Africa’s Mining Charter are among the initiatives embraced by the biggest corporate players, which require codes of conduct, backed by independent monitoring, to ensure standards are adhered to in practice and not just on paper.6 None of these applies in Tibet; nor have Tibetans yet learned that such standards exist. They will soon learn that theft is not acceptable elsewhere without compensation. When modern, urban, educated Chinese pilgrims now arrive in Tibet, seeking authentic Buddhist teachings, the ecosublime quality of Tibet’s territorial charisma, in most instances, touches and resonates with pilgrims’ psyches, or

  spoiling tibet their spiritual states of being. Shedding tears, sobbing, feeling goose-bumps, kneeling, and kissing the land of Tibet are common emotional manifestations among many first-timer Han pilgrims. It is as if the Han pilgrim were a child returning to the embrace of his or her mother.7

The contrast with the polluted, manufactured landscapes of industrial China is acute. ‘From the mutilated and psychologically displaced landscape there comes a call to preserve the co-existence of nature and human life, for thinking of an earth that can ache and cry, an immanence that Gilles Deleuze describes as a life.’8 So writes the feminist art critic Zhou Yan, in her contemplation of the brutalist landscapes of the Three Gorges Dam. Tibetans say the gods of the mountains remain potent, and will continue to protect the land. The Tibetan Plateau, the land surrounded by mountains, is too big ever to be irrevocably spoiled. Tibetan culture has shown, through Mao’s great famine and the violence of the Cultural Revolution, that its inner strengths, generated in mountain retreats, can withstand and outlive all compulsive grasping for minerals as the foundation of human satisfaction. The Tibetan alternative to staged authenticity, coming from those caves in the snow, is to live authentically, spontaneously open to all circumstances as they arise. Tibetans need space, both to maintain their extensive mode of nomadic pastoral production and, beyond the plateau productive zone, up in the mountains, for solitude and silence, to enable them to look deep within the mind. The People’s Liberation Army brought with it the impulse to civilize/geologize/modernize Tibet and discover strategic minerals. Two generations on, the time when China most needed the minerals of Tibet has come and gone. China’s resource hunger is now so great that the exploitation of Tibet makes little difference to meeting the demands of the world’s factory. The world that consumes what is made in China has a special responsibility for protecting Tibet, in the absence of China signing up to any of the global codes of conduct now governing multinational corporate mining. You

conclusion   can help the Tibetans by ensuring that your next mobile phone, computer or car is not made in China from Tibetan metals, or made with hydroelectricity from damming Tibetan rivers. 9

Notes

introduction 1. ‘Huge Non-Ferrous Mine Found in Qinghai–Tibet Plateau’, www.hexun. com, SinoCast, Metals & Mining & Chemicals Beat, 21 February 2012. 2. Joseph Needham, ‘The Sciences of the Earth’, in The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, p. 323. 3. Thomson Reuters GFMS Newsletter issue 40, October 2011, www.gfms. co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Gold_Survey_2012_Update2_Presentation. pdf. 4. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, First Quarter 2012, p. 12. 5. Much has been published in Chinese by scientists, especially geologists, about Tibet, and there are Chinese journals of ore deposit geology. In other languages, the only book is Mining Tibet, published by the now defunct Tibet Information Network, London, in 2002. 6. Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2000, p. 182. 7. Xiaomei Chen, ‘“Playing in the Dirt”: Plays about Geologists and Memories of the Cultural Revolution’, China Review, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2005, pp. 65–95. 8. Ibid. 9. ‘Government Work Report – Delivered by Tibet Autonomous Regional Chairman Baima Chilin at the Fourth Session of the Ninth Autonomous Regional People’s Congress on 10 January 2011’, Xizang Ribao Online, Lhasa, 9 February 2011 [Chinese].

notes   one 1. Saverio Krätli, ‘Living Off Uncertainty: The Intelligent Animal Production of Dryland Pastoralists, European Journal of Development Research 22, 2010, pp. 605–22. 2. John Vincent Bellezza, ‘The Ancient Amulets of Tibet: Thogchags. A Collection of Miniature Masterpieces’, June 1999, www.asianart.com/ articles/ thogchags. 3. Warriors of the Himalayas Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet, exhibition, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5 April–4 July, 2006. 4. Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1963, p. 254. 5. Paul Pelliot, Histoire ancienne du Tibet (Maisonneuve Librairie d’Amerique et d’Orient, Paris, 1961, pp. 5, 6, 84) cites the Chinese documents Kieou T’ang Chou 196A and Sin Tang Chou 216A for the ewer. 6. Amy Heller, ‘The Silver Jug of the Lhasa Jokhang’, 2002, www.asianart. com/articles/heller, citing as her sources: Charles Backus, The Nan chao Kingdom and Tang China’s Southwestern Frontier, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 171–3; Paul Demiéville, Le Concile de Lhasa, Collège de France, Institute des Hautes Études Chinoises, Paris, 1987, pp. 373–6; Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1987, p. 110; Ulrich von Schroeder, Buddhist Sculptures in Tibet, Visual Dharma Publications, Hong Kong, 2001. 7. John Clarke, Jewellery of Tibet and the Himalayas, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2004: p. 40; Erberto Lo Bue, ‘Statuary Metals in Tibet and the Himalayas: History, Tradition and Modern Use’, in W.A. Oddy and W. Zwalf, Aspects of Tibetan Metallurgy, British Museum Occasional Paper, London, 1981; Jane Singer, Gold Jewelry from Tibet and Nepal, Thames & Hudson, London, 1996, p. 32. 8. William John Gill, River of Golden Sand, J. Murray, London, 1883, p. 136. 9. Tsepon Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa, One Hundred Thousand Moons: An Advanced Political History of Tibet, 2 vols, Brill, Leiden, 2010, vol. 1, pp. 27–8. 10. Dan Smyer Yu, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment, Routledge, Abingdon, 2011, p. 59. 11. Keith Dowman, The Power-places of Central Tibet: The Pilgrim’s Guide, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 1. 12. Victoria Sujata, Songs of Shabkar: The Path of a Tibetan Yogi Inspired by Nature, Dharma Publishing, Berkeley CA, 2011, pp. 163–7. 13. Cyrus Stearns, King of the Empty Plain: The Tibetan Iron-bridge Builder Tangtong Gyalpo, Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca NY, 2007, p. 40. 14. Janet Gyatso, A Literary Transmission of the Traditions of Thang-Stong

  spoiling tibet rGyal-po: A Study of Visionary Buddhism in Tibet, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1981, p. 108. 15. Stearns, King of the Empty Plain, p. 40. 16. Ibid., p. 42. 17. Ibid., pp. 45–6. 18. Ibid., p. 54. 19. David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1994. 20. B. Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 21. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1994; Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2004. 22. Tibetan Review, October 2010. 23. David K. Batker and Jennifer Harrison-Cox, Nature’s Value in Qinghai Province: The Essential Economics of Ecosystem Services, Earth Economics, June 2010, www.eartheconomics.org/Page105.aspx. 24. Yu, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China, p. 111. 25. David Germano, ‘Re-membering the Dismembered Body of Tibet: Contemporary Tibetan Visionary Movements in the People’s Republic of China’, in Melvyn Goldstein, ed., Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998, pp. 53–94. 26. Cyrus Stearns, Hermit of Go Cliffs: Timeless Instructions from a Tibetan Mystic, Wisdom Publications, Somerville MA, 2000, pp. 133–4. 27. Yu, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China, pp. 60–65. 28. Fernanda Pirie, Feuding, Mediation and the Negotiation of Authority among the Nomads of Eastern Tibet, Working Paper no. 72, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. 29. Russell Johnson, Kailash: On Pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Tibet, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989. See also Niels Gutschow et al., eds, Sacred Landscapes of the Himalaya, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press Vienna, 2003; Keith Dowman, The Sacred Life of Tibet, HarperCollins, London, 1997; John Snelling, The Sacred Mountain, East–West Publications, London, 1990; Lena and Werner Herzog, Pilgrims: Becoming the Path Itself, Arcperiplus, London, 2002; Alex McKay, Pilgrimage in Tibet, IIAS/Curzon, Richmond, 1998; Toni Huber, Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places in Tibetan Culture, LTWA, Dharamsala, 1999; Toni Huber, The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999; Geshe Gelek Jinpa, Charles Ramble and Carroll Dunham, Sacred Landscape and Pilgrimage in Tibet, Abbeville Press, New York, 2005; Gabriele Tautscher, Himalayan Mountain Cults, Ev-K2–CNR Publications, Bergamo, 2007; Robert Thurman, Circling the Sacred Mountain: A

notes   Spiritual Adventure through the Himalayas, Bantam, New York, 1999; A. McDonald, Mandala and Landscape, DK Printworld, New Delhi, 1997; Jamyang Wangmo, Dancing in the Clouds, Vajra Publications, Kathmandu, 2008; Richard J. Kohn, Lord of the Dance, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 2001; Helmut Burisch, Kailash: Pilger am heiligsten Berg der Welt, Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 2001. 30. Matthieu Ricard, The Life of Shabkar, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1994, p. 218.

two 1. The Chinese Are Coming, BBC One, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/pro­g rammes/ b00ykxg9. 2. C.G. Brown, ‘Chinese Wool Auctions: Failed Agribusiness Reform or Future Marketing Channel?’, China Economic Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 175–90; C.G. Brown, S.A. Waldron and J.W. Longworth, Modernizing China’s Industries: Lessons from Wool and Wool Textiles, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2005. 3. China’s National Defense White paper 2006, http://english.peopledaily. com.cn/whitepaper/defense2006/defense2006(5).html. 4. Shichang Kang, ‘Atmosphere and Water Quality over the Tibetan Plateau’, powerpoint presentation for Foundation for Nonviolent Alternatives, New Delhi, 2011, www.fnvaworld.org/presentations-a-papers. 5. Qinghai Ribao, 9 February 2002, cited in Mining Tibet: Mineral Exploitation in Tibetan Areas of the PRC, Tibet Information Network, 2002, p. 173. 6. ‘Follow Example Set by Gold Mine Ban’, China Daily, 10 October 2005. 7. Xinhua, 13 June 2007. 8. Multi-metal Mine with World-class Deposits Rises in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Xinhua, 29 June 2012, http://english.sina.com/china/2012/ 0629/481634. html#.T-16kuRZ78M.facebook. 9. http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.ca/2012/04/gold-mining-after-kicking-outtibetan.html. 10. UNEP, Global Mercury Assessment 2013: Sources, Emissions, Releases and Environmental Transport, UNEP Chemicals Branch, Geneva, 2013. 11. www.iisd.ca/mercury/inc5. 12. http://tibet.net/important-issues/tibets-environment-and-developmentissues. 13. Xiaobo Zhang, Li Xin, Shenggen Fan and Xiaopeng Luo, ‘Resource Abundance and Regional Development in China’, Economics of Transition, vol. 16, no. 1, 2008, pp. 7–29. 14. Ibid. 15. Steven Sabol, ‘Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization: The “Touch of Civilisation” on the Sioux and Kazakhs’, Western Historical Quarterly 43, Spring 2012, pp. 29–51.

  spoiling tibet three 1. Kenneth J, Hsu, ‘Buried-Euxenic-Basin Model Sets Tarim Basin Potential’, Oil & Gas Journal, vol. 92, no. 48, 28 November 1994. 2. Duan Zhijia, History of Tubo, Qinghai Nationalities Publishing House, Xining, 1983; Wang Yao, Selected Dunhuang Tubo Documents, Sichuan Nationalities Publishing House, Chengdu, 1983. 3. Louis M. J. Schram, ‘The Monguors of the Kansu–Tibetan Frontier’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 44, 1954, pp. 1–137. 4. Xinhua, 23 October 1971, reprinted in H.C. Ling, The Petroleum Industry of the People’s Republic of China, Hoover Institution, Stanford CA, 1975, pp. 183–6. 5. Ibid., pp. 83–4. 6. Pedro Carrasco, Land and Polity in Tibet, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1959, p. 156. 7. S. Marshall and S. Cooke, Tibet Outside TAR, CD-ROM, Alliance for Research in Tibet, 1997, 1360, quoting data from Gansu Yearbook 1995. 8. www-nfcis.iaea.org. 9. www-nfcis.iaea.org/NFCFacilityReport.asp?WhichFacility=712; Mark Hibbs, ‘China Moved Centrifuge Complex to Keep Enriching U at Lanzhou, Nuclear Fuel, vol. 24, no. 10, 17 May 1999; World Nuclear Industry Handbook 1999, Reed International, 1999. 10. Problems Concerning the Accumulation of Separated Plutonium, IAEATECDOC-765, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, 1994; John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1988; ‘Daya Bay Spent Fuel to Be Moved to Separation Plant Pool by 2000’, Nuclear Fuel, vol. 23, no. 22, 2 November 1998; ‘China Barred Guangdong Joint Venture from Re-racking Spent Fuel Pond’, Nuclear Fuel, vol. 25, no. 7, 3 April 2000. 11. www-nfcis.iaea.org/NFCFacilityReport.asp?WhichFacility=663. 12. www-nfcis.iaea.org/NFCFacilityReport.asp?WhichFacility=627. 13. www-nfcis.iaea.org/NFCFacilityReport.asp?WhichFacility=182. 14. Song Xinyu and Yao Jianhua, ‘Resources Exploitation and Conservation of Qaidam Basin under the Principle of Sustainable Development’, paper presented to International Symposium on the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, Xining, 24 July 1998. 15. Fan Guangming, ‘Ecology, Scale and Continuity Are Train of Thought Developing Agriculture in Chaidamu’, Studies of Developing Chaidamu 1, 1998 (Chaidamu Kai Fayanjiu). 16. Ma Dechao, ‘Qaidam Basin – China’s Treasure House’, in China’s Majestic and Richly Endowed Qinghai Plateau, ed. Qinghai Science and Technology Weekly, Qinghai People’s Publishing House, Xining, 1987, pp. 56–7. 17. Reuters, 27 January 1994.

notes   18. Jonathan E. Sinton, ed., China Energy Databook, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Berkeley CA, 1996, II-37. 19. Bian Yaowu, ed., The Guide to the Development of Western China: Qinghai Province, Science and Technology Press, Beijing, 1987, p. 35. 20. Radio Beijing, 25 August 1991 [Tibetan]. 21. Sinton, ed., China Energy Databook, II-45, II-51. 22. Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform 1978–1993, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 236–9. 23. The Sixth Five-Year Plan of the People’s Republic of China for Economic and Social Development, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1984, p. 191.

four 1. Zhiming Zhang et al., ‘Geology of the Post-collisional Porphyry CopperMolybdenum Deposit at Qulong, Tibet’, Ore Geology Reviews 36, 2009, pp. 133–59. 2. The Discovery History of Mineral Deposits of China (Zhongguo kuang chuang fa xian shi), vol. 25, Tibet, Di zhi chu ban she (Geology Publishing House), Beijing, 1996. 3. Ibid., p. 21. 4. Tibet Statistical Yearbook 2011, National Statistical Publishing House, Beijing, 2012, Table 9–14. 5. Qingsong Fang et al., ‘Qusongite (WC): A New Mineral’, American Mineralogist 94, 2009, pp. 387–90, deposit map p. 388. 6. The Discovery History of Mineral Deposits of China (Zhongguo kuang chuang fa xian shi) 10, pp. 18–21. 7. William Gumede, ‘China Must Sweat for African Money’, Sunday Independent, 6 May 2012. 8. www.ferroalloynet.com/analysis/buyers_are_looking_at_madagascar_ chrome_ore_with_a_lot_of_interest.html, 17 August 2011. 9. www.ferroalloynet.com/analysis/tibet_chrome_ore_lumpy_seek_more_ shares_in_northwest_china.html, 16 May 2012. 10. Among the chromium using companies closing in 2012 were Qinghai Rongxin Li Smelting Co., Qinghai Jinsheng Smelting Co., Qinghai Zhongxing Smelting Co., Shida Smelting Co., Heshui Yataili Smelting Co. and Lanzhou Hongda Special Alloy Co. 11. www2.adb.org/projects/project.asp?id=35354. 12. ‘Construction of the Lhasa to Nyingtri Railway to Start during the Period of the “12th Five-Year Plan”’, ChinaNewsNet, 12 January 2011. 13. www.szse.cn/main/en/marketdata/quotes/index.shtml?txtcode=000762. 14. www.ferroalloynet.com/news/tibet_mineral_will_invest_12m_yuan_to_ explore_luobusa_chromite_deposit_in_tibet.html. 15. http://english.nudt.edu.cn/ArticleShow_eng.asp?ID=75. 16. www.chinamining.org/Investment/2011–05–20/1305854244d45648.html.

  spoiling tibet 17. www.ferroalloynet.com/analysis/some_chinese_companies_are_changing_their_roles_in_chrome_ore_market.html. 18. ‘Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production’, UNEP International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, Nairobi, 2010, www.unep.org/resourcepanel, Table 5.1. 19. www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4493. 20. http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/chromium/mcs-2012– chrom.pdf. 21. Wenbin Xu, Xiaobin Li, Qiusheng Zhou, Zhihong Peng, Guihua Li and Tiangui Qi, ‘Remediation of Chromite Ore Processing Residue by Hydrothermal Process with Starch’, Process Safety and Environmental Protection 89, 2011, pp. 179–85. 22. Z. Ji, ‘The Mineral Phases Composition of Chromite Ore Processing Residue and Its Influences on Detoxication and Comprehensive Utilization’, Environmental Protection Chemistry 4, 1984, pp. 37–41; Z. Ji, ‘A Summary of the Harmfulness of Chromite Ore Processing Residue and Its Treatment’, Inorganic Chemistry 3, 2003, pp. 1–4. Z. Ji, ‘Two Key Points for the Treatment of Chromium Ore Processing Residue’, Chromium Salts 2, 2004, pp. 1–14; Z. Ji, ‘The Composition Changing of Chromic Residue after Piled in Long Period and Its Effect on the Treatment’, Inorganic Chemistry, vol. 38, no. 9, 2006, pp. 8–12. 23. Allan H. Smith, ‘Hexavalent Chromium, Yellow Water, and Cancer: A Convoluted Saga’, Epidemiology, vol. 19, no. 1, January 2008. 24. James J. Beaumont et al., ‘Cancer Mortality in a Chinese Population Exposed to Hexavalent Chromium in Drinking Water’, Epidemiology, vol. 19, no. 1, January 2008. 25. David Egilman, ‘Corporate Corruption of Science – The Case of Chromium (VI)’, International Journal of Occupational Environmental Health 12, 2006, pp. 169–76. 26. www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/March-April% 202010/made-in-china-full.html. 27. Gong Jing and Cui Zheng, ‘China’s Food Fright’, Caixin, 20 June 2012, http://english.caixin.com/2012–06–20/100402817.html. 28. www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4493. 29. Xu-Hui Zhang et al., ‘Chronic Occupational Exposure to Hexavalent Chromium Causes DNA Damage in Electroplating Workers’, BMC Public Health 11, 2011, p. 224. 30. M. Bruckner et al., ‘Materials Embodied in International Trade: Global Material Extraction and Consumption between 1995 and 2005’, Global Environmental Change, vol. 22, no. 3, 2012, pp. 568–76.

five 1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwVo9cdwbB4.

notes   2. ‘Tibet to Step up Exploitation of Mineral Resources, Vowing to Be “Rational”’, 13 March 2010, http://english.chinatibetnews.com/news/2010–03/13/ content_420502.htm. 3. George Schaller, Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, pp. 44–5, 55–6, 329–32. 4. ‘Multi-metal Mine with World-class Deposits Rises in Qinghai–Tibet Plateau’, Xinhua, 29 June 2012, http://english.sina.com/china/2012/ 0629/ 481634.html#.T-16kuRZ78M.facebook. 5. ‘Tibet Explores Way to Tap into Holy Mountain’, Xinhua news agency, 30 June 2012. 6. ‘China Likely to Launch Gold ETF This Year’, Financial Times, 14 February 2013. 7. www.sedar.com/DisplayCompanyDocuments.do?lang=EN&issuerNo= 00005597. 8. Inter-Citic press release, 27 August 2012. 9. www.inter-citic.com/maps.php. 10. www.inter-citic.com/documents/dachangnorth.pdf. 11. Stanley C. Bartlett, Dibya Kanti Mukhopadhyay and B. Terrence Hennessey, ‘A Technical Report on an Updated Mineral Resource Estimate for the Dachang Gold Project, Qinghai Province, People’s Republic of China’, June 2011, p. 28 Fig. 7.2, www.sedar.com/DisplayCompanyDocuments. do?lang=EN&issuerNo=00005597. 12. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_country.php# china. 13. www.cers.org.hk/index.php/en/expeditions/yellow-river-source. 14. Ibid. 15. http://ramsar.wetlands.org/Database/Searchforsites/tabid/765/Default. aspx. 16. www.westmining.com/ SSE #601168; Taiwan Economic Journal is available to subscribers via LexisNexis. 17. ‘Roof of the World: First Joint Scientific Meeting of GSC and GSA, June 17–19, 2013, Chengdu, China (Second Circular)’, www.geosociety.org/ meetings/2013china.

six 1. Interfax: China Mining and Metals Weekly, 27 April 2012. 2. Yongnian Zheng, Globalisation and State Transformation in China, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 85–99. 3. ‘China to Achieve Leapfrog Development, Lasting Stability in Tibet, Xinhua, 23 January 2010. 4. On the basis of the latest available data from the US Geological Service (http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/asia.html#ch; http:// pubs.usgs.gov/of/2008/1155; http://tin.er.usgs.gov/porcu/find-porcu.php)

  spoiling tibet and also the International Copper Study Group (www.icsg.org/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=16) it is possible to situate China’s Five-Year Plan for Tibetan copper in a global context, since China is simultaneously reducing the diversity of its copper industry, bulking up a few national champions to be big enough to compete on a world scale. 5. ‘China to Consolidate Copper Production, Raise Capacity – Exec’, Dow Jones Chinese Financial Wire, 2 November 2010. 6. http://rhg.com/notes/beijings-2015–industry-consolidation-targets-problem-or-solution. 7. ‘Jiangxi Copper’s Cathode Output to Top 1 Mln Tons in 2011’, China Knowledge Press, 14 February 2011. 8. http://tin.er.usgs.gov/porcu/show.php?labno=389. 9. http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/asia.html#ch; http:// pubs.usgs.gov/of/2008/1155; http://tin.er.usgs.gov/porcu/find-porcu.php. 10. www.icsg.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Item id=16. 11. http://tin.er.usgs.gov/porcu/show.php?labno=229. 12. http://tin.er.usgs.gov/porcu/show.php?labno=231. 13. Ibid. 14. Qinghai Statistical Yearbook 2009, National Bureau of Statistics Publishing House, 2010, Table 12–20. 15. Dadao Lu and Jie Fan, eds, Regional Development Research in China: A Roadmap to 2050, Science Press, Beijing/Springer, 2010, p. 177. 16. Ibid., pp. 164–5. 17. www.chinamining.org/News/2011–05–23/1306113993d45685.html. 18. http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012–07/07/content_1555 6690. htm?bsh_bid=106172996. 19. http://tin.er.usgs.gov/porcu/show-porcu.php?rec_id=242. 20. http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978–952–61–0020–3/urn_ isbn_978–952–61–0020–3.pdf. 21. www.zjky.cn/Portals/1/LTN20111108023.pdf. 22. ‘15 Tibetans Put behind Bars over Anti-mining Protests in Shigatse’, Phayul.com, 14 February 2011. 23. www.tibetanreview.net/news.php?showfooter=1&cp=35&&id=4103. 24. www.dolbear.com/projects/asia. 25. ‘Molybdenum to Join Gold, Silver and Uranium on the Toronto Stock Exchange’, Mining Engineering, vol. 59, no. 4, April 2007, p. 16. 26.  ‘Multi-metal Mine with World-class Deposits Rises in Qinghai–Tibet Plateau’, Xinhua, 29 June 2012, http://english.sina.com/china/2012/0629/481634. html#.T-16kuRZ78M.facebook. 27. Eric Ng, ‘China Gold Panning for Overseas Options’, scmp.com, 9 April 2012.

notes   28. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/03/ministry-of-truth-tibet-mine-landslide. 29. Beijing Review, 24 August 2012, www.bjreview.com.cn/business/txt/ 2012– 08/24/content_478236_2.htm. 30. Zhiming Yang, Zengqian Hou and Noel C. White, Geology of the Postcollisional Porphyry Copper–Molybdenum Deposit at Qulong, Tibet’, Ore Geology Reviews 36, 2009, pp. 133–59. 31. http://tin.er.usgs.gov/porcu/show.php?labno=245. 32. Cao Yugong, ed., The Discovery History of Mineral Deposits in Tibet Autonomous Region, Geological Publishing House, Beijing, 1996, pp. 30–35. 33. Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, Rainbow Body, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley CA, 2012. 34. http://shangshunginstitute.org/index.php/en. 35. Du Juan, ‘Mining to Become Key to Tibet’s Economy’ China Daily, 9 July 2012. 36. www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2011/201102/20110201/article_463004. htm. 37. www.infomine.com/index/pr/PA530181.pdf.

conclusion 1. ‘Chinese Bloggers Criticise Apathy towards Environment’, The Hindu, 31 March 2013, www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/chinesebloggers-criticise-apathy-towards-environment/article4567479.ece. 2. Tabulation on the 2010 Population Census of Tibet Autonomous Region, China Statistics Press, Beijing, 3 vols, 2012. 3. Yiming Zhou and Dao-Zhi Zeng, ‘Offshoring, Globalization and Welfare’, 2012, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2056214. 4. Robert Ford, Wind Between the Worlds, David McKay, New York, 1957, pp. 108–9. 5. ‘Who’s Who in Tibet’, http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk/biography_177.html. 6. www.icmm.com/our-work http://eiti.org/eiti/principles http://goxi.org/ page/vision-1; www.equator-principles.com/resources/equator_principles_chinese.pdf. 7. Dan Smyer Yu, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment, Routledge, London, 2012, p. 74. 8. ‘Zhou Yan Displaced Cultural Landscape and Manufactured Landscapes: The Three Gorges Dam Project in Art’, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 11, no. 6, 2012, p. 13. The reference to Deleuze is to Pure Immanence, Zone Books, Cambridge MA, 2001. 9. Not easily done individually. Hewlett-Packard has taken a lead, promising to identify and publish locations of all smelters from which it buys metals, in response to concerns about corporate use of ‘conflict minerals’ from Africa. Such disclosure should become the norm.

Further reading on Tibet

Baker, Ian, The Heart of the World, Penguin, New York, 2004. Blondeau, Anne-Marie, ed., ‘Tibetan Mountain Deities: Their Cults and Representations’, Proceedings of the VII Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Verlag des Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998. Blondeau, Anne-Marie, and Katia Buffetrille, eds, Authenticating Tibet, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008. Blondeau, Anne-Marie, and Ernst Steinkellner, eds, Reflections of the Mountain: Essays on the History and Social Meaning of the Mountain Cult in Tibet and the Himalayas, Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996. Buffetrille, Katrina, Pelerins, lamas et visionnaires. Sources orales et ecrites sur les pelerinages tibetains. Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde; Arbeitskreis fur Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, 2000. Buffetrille, Katrina, ‘Pilgrimage and Incest: The Case of mChod rten nyi ma’, Bulletin of Tibetology, Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, Sikkim, Spring 2004, pp. 5–38. Caple, Jane, Mining Tibet, Tibet Information Network, London, 2002. Clarke, John, Jewellery of Tibet and the Himalayas, V&A Publications, London, 2004. Dorje, Gyurme, Tibet Handbook, 4th edn, Footprint Books, Bath, 2009. Gelek Jinpa, Geshe, Sacred Landscape and Pilgrimage in Tibet, Abbeville Press, New York, 2005. Huber, Toni, ed., The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain: Popular Pilgrimage and Visionary Landscape in Southeast Tibet, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999. Kapstein, Matthew, The Tibetans, Blackwell, Oxford, 2006.

further reading   LaRocca, Donald J., Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armour of Tibet, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006. Like Gold That Fears No Fire: New Writing from Tibet, International Campaign for Tibet, Washington DC, 2009. Macdonald, A.W., ed., Mandala and Landscape, D.K.Printworld, New Delhi, 1997. McKay, Alex, ed., Pilgrimage in Tibet, IIAS/Curzon, Richmond, 1998. Mingsen, Li, and Yang Yichou, Tibet: Natural Resources and Scenery, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 2005. Rinpoche, Arjia, Surviving the Dragon, Rodale Books, Emmaus PA, 2010. Schaller, George, Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998. Shakabpa, Tsepon, One Hundred Thousand Moons, 2 vols, Brill, Leiden, 2010. Singer, Jane Casey, Gold Jewelry from Tibet and Nepal, Thames & Hudson, London, 1996. Smith, Warren W., Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and SinoTibetan Relations, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1996. Smith, Warren W., China’s Tibet? Autonomy or Assimilation, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2008. van Schaik, Sam, Tibet: A History, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2011. Weldon, David, The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet, Laurence King, London, 1999. Wolff, Diane, Tibet Unconquered, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010. In addition to this reading list, there are many resources online, from fresh translations into English of Tibetan voices inside Tibet to maps of China’s mines and the hydro-dams built to provide power to them. There are many Google Earth images of mines. There is also online access to Chinese propaganda posters praising the work of geologists in bringing civilization to Tibet. The following websites, including the author’s blog, are recommended: www.rukor.org http://home.wmin.ac.uk/china_posters/G3.htm http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/2013–update-dams-on-drichuyangtze.html www.highpeakspureearth.com www.chinadialogue.net http://Tibet-edd.blogspot.com.au www.himalayanvoices.org www.culanth.org/?q=node%2F526 www.plateauculture.org/asian-highlands-perspectives has a series of twenty-two volumes, largely written by Tibetans, all freely downloadable.

Index

Alcoa, 179 alluvial gold , 69, 71–2 aluminium, 116 Aluminium Corporation of China (Chinalco), 126, 153 Amdo Golok Machu, 36 Amdo Kanlho Sangchu, 79 Amdo Tsonub Dulan, 71 Ando Tsolho Tsikorthang, 69 animals, Tibet: numbers loss, 70, 120; poisoning, 80–81 anti-mining protesters killed, 104 arsenic, 135, 160 artisanal mining, 53–6, 77–8 asbestos, 92, 101 Asian Development Bank, 113 Asian rivers, Tibetan plateau source, 13, 35, 88 Atacama salt lakes, Andes, 123 Australia, 126 ‘backwardness’, Chinese Tibet narrative, 20, 25; glib assertion of, 38 Baima Chilin, 11 Bangladesh, water arsenic poisoning, 160 Baosteel, Shanghai corporation, 112, 114 barley cropping, 27 bauxite, 139 Behre Dolbear consultants, 163 Beijing Institute of Geology, 9 Beijing Review, 164

Bellezza, John, 21 Bethiong township, protest repression, 99 BHP Billiton, 16, 122, 142, 153 Bhutan, iron ore mined, 33 BP, 16 bridges, iron, traditional Tibetan, 32–4 bridges, ‘theatrical’, 32–3 British steel production, China goal, 3 Brockovich, Erin, 103, 117–18 Buddhism, 20, 34: aristocratic China entry, 45; Tibetan, 32, 45 Buffett, Warren, 124–5 BYD, battery manufacturer, 124–5 California Environment Protection Agency, 117 capital flight, China, 180 caterpillar fungus, traffic in, 59 CCP (Chinese Communist Party), 38, 125, 164; geology priority, 7; monopoly power, 34; official vengeance from, 54; Politburo Standing Committee, 148; resettlement, 93; scientific modernity ideology, 14; Tibet reproduction failure, 149 Centralized Wet Storage facility, Lanzhou, 97 Chaksampa Tulkus, iron-bridge building lamas, 32 chemical fertilizer, China reliance on, 102 Chen Yun, 8

index   Chengdu, 13, 113, 148; Ford production, 158 Chile, 126; copper production price benchmark, 144, 171; Escondida mine, 153 China: Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 82; anxieties, 51; assimilation model, 11; car industry, 156–7; chromite/chromium imports, 112–13; chromium poisoning/ waste dumped, 103, 117; collective purpose era, nostalgia for, 10; command economy period, 4, 95; competing groups, 55; copper smelting capacity, 168; developmentalist gaze, 37; domestic material consumption, 119; economic ‘miracle’, 65; environmental campaigns, 2; ferrochrome producers, 114–16; geologists, 88, 174; gold demand, 4; green credentials promotion, 131; history narratives, 38; import reliance, 139, 170; landscape manufacturing, 26; leadership mistakes unacknowledged, 78; local courts independence lack, 84; mining companies and laws, 16, 82, 153; Ministry of Land and Resources, see below; Ministry of Petroleum Industry, 94–5; ‘modern’ rhetoric, 5; national champions strategy, 16, 141, 155, 173; National Defence White Paper, 66; PLA, see below; resource curse provinces, 83; resource hunger, 119, 184; rivers Tibetan sources, 30; service economy rhetoric, 143; stainless steel production, 112; State Food and Drug Administration, 118; state-owned corporate, 16, 146, 175; steel production, 3; Third Front policy, 94; Tibet copper targets, 144; Tibetan master narratives contradiction, 25, 128; Tibetan statist agenda, 20, 122; traditional medicine market, 59; unrest ‘mass incidents’, 180; water need, 35; wealth-generating contradictions, 13; well-connected elite, 179; ‘world’s factory’, 2, 48, 119, 178; WTO case against, 163 China Gold International, 161, 163, Gyama PR, 129; Huatailong subsidiary, 72, 173 China National Gold Group Corporation, 129, 140, 164, 170 China National Petroleum Corporation, 94 China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association (CNMIA), 151 Chinese Academy of Sciences, 156 Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine, 117

Chinese Muslim warlords, 93 Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, 167–8 Chone, Tibetan kingdom, 96 Chongqing, 13, 148, 156; Chengdu industrial hub, 158; Tibet rail connections, 113 chromite, 4, 56, 141; Tibet mining, 106, 108, 119, 142; unprocessed imports, 110 chromium, 13, 105, 111, 178; environmental impact, 116; poisoning, 103; pollution 118; strategic material, 107; water contamination scandals, 115 Chulong, 165, 183; copper/gold deposit, 164 codes of practice, mining, 183 Cold War, 96 colonization, 90–91, 97–8 commodity price cycles, 15; speculative trading, 2 computer factories, Chongqing–Chengdu area, 158 conflict minerals, 84, 86–7 Congo, 141; Chinese mines, 158; conflict minerals, 86; copper, 10 copper, 1, 4, 10, 13, 116, 139, 142, 150; capital spending need, 141; China consolidation, 153; China import reliance, 145; China smelting capacity, 168; Chinese per capita consumption, 156; Chinese self-sufficiency target, 151; global mines benchmark, 170; high voltage cable use, 146, 157, 166; open pit mining, 140; price realities, 143–4; Serkhok mine, 68; Tibet deposit size, 5, 159; 12th Five Year Plan, 147 ‘Copper-Coloured Mountain’, 47 Cultural Revolution era, 8–9, 34, 49, 93, 106, 120, 126, 167, 184 curse, resource, 82 customary land use, devalued, 90 cyanide and mercury, mining use, 60, 131 Dachang, 131–3, 135; externalities, 133; gold, 130; Yellow River source proximity, 134 Dalai Lama, 50 degrading watersheds, China concern, 127 Deleuze, Gilles, 184 Deng Xiaoping, 56, 61 development, Chinese promise of, 40; Chinese state model, 180 Dhunagng mine, 73 division of labour, Adam Smith variety, 156; global, 2, 37 Dongqiao, chromite deposits, 106

  spoiling tibet Dowman, Keith, 29 Drangyer Tsaka, 124 dredging, environmental impacts of, 60–61 Dringye Ngo Sorma, sacred mountain, 85 Drukmo Dralu, gold mining, 68 Drung mountain, Nyima township, 36 dualism, modernizers–innocents, 5; standard, 38 Duan Shaofu, 151 Dulan, iron ore, 100 Dzogang, protest arrests, 99 earth spirits, Tibetan beliefs, 3 ecological economics, 119 ‘ecological migrants’, forced, 75, 84 EITI, 183 electric cars, 124; business slump, 125 emissions, small gold mining, 78 empires, historians of, 90 enclaves, Chinese mining in Tibet, 37; development, 87; hinterland marginalized, 89 Environment and Development Desk, Kashag staff Dharamsala, 82 environmental NGOs, Tibetan non‑freedom for, 18 environmental services, payment for, 44, 50–51 environmental services, monetized, 44 Equator Principles, 183 Essence Securities, 140 exchange traded funds, 130 exploitation, modes of, 4, 105, 116, 118, 120; see also primitive accumulation; state capitalism ExxonMobil, 16 Fan Guangming, 98, 100 FDI foreign investment, Chinese, in global minerals, 2, 158 fees inventing, local government, 58–9 felting, 63 FerroAlloyNet, 112 Five Year Plans, China, 113, 171; extraction targets, 145; 6th, 102; 10th, 109; 12th, 146–7, 149–52, 154–6 Ford corporation, 113 freight routes, subsidized, 10 Ganden Monastery, 162 Ganhetan Industrial Park, 136 Gansu province, 28; China nuclear industry, 96; Corridor, 156; gold mine,

59; Jinchuan Noneferrous, 152; Provincial Geological Bureau, 9 Gar sTongtsan, 22 Gates, Bill, 124–5 Gazprom, 16 Geological Society of America, ‘Roof of the World’, 138 Geological Survey of India, 181 geology/geologists, 107, 167: guerrilla hero image, 7–9; history of investigation, 27; Tibetan Plateau, 35 Glencore, 16; Xstrata merger, 16, 122 global mineral commodity boom, 125 Godrakpa, 47 gold, 1, 13, 64, 92, 141, 147, 150, 157, 180; alluvial extraction bans, 72, 75; alluvial rushes, 14, 54–5, 58, 60, 71, 82; artisanal mining, 78; booming Chinese demand for, 4, 137, 157; digging ants story, 6; fetish of, 3; miners’ official protection, 82; 1980s ‘rush’, 53; official rent-seekers, 56; private entrepreneur interest, 123; Tibetan, 5, 11, 66, 69; water contamination, 65 Google, 105 Gorchakov, Alexander, 91 GOXI, 183 grassland turf, erosion, 75, 78 grazing, China bans on, 43 Guangzhou and Shanghai, electricity to, 166 Gumede, William, 111 Gur songs, 30 Guri, mining sites, 70 Gyalwa Karmapa, 46 Gyama, 129, 154, 159, 163–4, 169, 171–2, 183; copper and gold mine, 72, 128, 162, 176; deposit size, 170; mineral processing factory, 73; processing plant, 74; water purity threat, 161 Gyupang hill, mine, 62 Han Chinese, Tibetan Buddhism attraction, 45 Hanlong, 126 Hayden, Henry Hubert, 181–2 Heller, Amy, 23 Henderson Property, 132 Herodotus, 6 Ho family, Macau, 132 Hoh Xil wildlife sanctuary, 128 holy mountain, Terlung Chuksum, 42 Hong Kong: Buddhism, 46; Hong Kong

index   Stock Exchange, 125 Hu Jintao, 66 Huatailong mining, CGI Subsidiary, 72, 169, 173 human rights, monitors, 54 Huntington, Ellsworth, 91 hydropower, China from Tibet, 13; damming, 97, 146–8, mining link, 166 ICMM, 183 ideology, productivist, 37 India, 46, 110; China war, 95; gold demand, 4 indigenous rights movements, 2 inequality, China growing, 83 Inner Mongolia, 63; rare earths, 123 Inter-Citic, Canada-based, 77, 130–34 International Copper Study Group, 155 International Council on Mining and Minerals, 173 International Food Policy Research Institute, 83 iron ore, 74, 139 Jamyang Thinley, arrest of, 100 Japan, 163 Jews, Tsarist Russia, 39 Jiangxi Copper, 152, 155 Jinchuan, 160 Karmapas, lineage of, 46 Kashmir, 33 Kazakhstan, 91: Chinese mines, 111, 158; chromium supplies, 112; copper mines, 154; Russian colonization, 90 Kekexili/Mountain Patrol, 128 Kham Chamdo Markham, 76 Kimberley Process, 183; ‘blood diamonds’ traffic limiting, 87 King Gesar of Ling, 68 King Songtsen Gampo, 22 Korean War, China role, 95 Kumbum monastery, geology of, 136–7 Kun Lun Mountains, 134 Kunchok Tsewang, 76 Kuomintang (KMT), 7; scientific modernity ideology, 14; unfinished, 15 La Caridad, Mexico, copper mine, 154 lamas, 25, 39, 99, 167; high, 26; modern audiences, 46 land: foregrounded Tibetan relations, 48; ‘landscapes of solitude’, 47; mobile use,

26; respect for, 25; tenure rights cancelling, 18, 75; Tibetan cold degradation, 75; yogic services to, 50 Lanzhou, 96; nuclear complex, 97 Laos, Chinese mines, 158 lead, mining and smelting, 67, 69 Lee family, Hong Kong, 132 Levshin, Aleksei, 91 Lhamo mountain, 136 Lhasa, 26; Gyama rail link, 150, 155; Tibetan Environment Change Laboratory, 67; tourist destination, 39 Lhasa Jokhang, chapels of, 23 Liaoning, hexchrome poisoning, 117 lithium, 4, 13, 92, 125; boom, 124; private entrepreneur interest, 123 Liu Shao Qi, 7 Lobsang Palden, 104 local government(s): alluvial gold mining protected, 72; downshifting to, 56, 58; power of, 83; predatory, 57; TVE failing, 61 London Metals Exchange, 125 Madagascar, 112 magnesium, 92 man–nature dyad/non-dualistic, 29–30 Mao Zedong era, 7–8, 121, 142; great famine, 184; master narrative, 2; residential restrictions, 63 Markham county, mining protests, 86 Marx, Karl, 43 mechanized dredges, impact of, 60–61 Meldro Gungkar, 74 Meng Si, 115 mercury and arsenic mining, 72, 77, 135, 160; proposed global ban, 78 metalworking, long Tibetan history, 21–4 metaphors, Tibetan landscape use, 29 Microsoft, 105 Milarepa, 30, 49 mind, nature of, 50 mind training, 45–7 minerals: consumption, 119; cycle speed, 126; development rights auction, 83; extraction laws, 98; global boom, 125; world hunger for, 2 miners: Chinese, 76; private with permission, 70; security rhetoric, 86; without official protection, 86 mining, Tibet, 5, 11, 39–40; artisanal, 77; central Tibet, 12; companies, 41; corporations community relations

  spoiling tibet rhetoric, 86; cost–benefit analysis lack, 67, 142; enclaves, 18; enclaves hinterland marginalized, 88; government subsidized, 143; hi-tech, 6; naturalized, 89; plunder connotations, 1; pollution, 2; protest repression, 10, 160–61; protest deaths, 86; TVE unregulated, 63; zones of exclusion, 43 Ministry of Industry, 152 Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) (ex-Ministry of Geology and Resources) 139–40, 145–6 modernity, 31; operating procedures of, 35 molybdenum, 4, 141, 159, 162, 165–7; Gyama deposit, 163; price, 125; private entrepreneur interest, 123; speculation, 126 Mondong (Khenrab Kunsang), 181–2 Mongolia: Chinese mines, 158; herders oasis displaced, 98; Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, 154 Mount Xitieshan, lead and zinc reserves, 101 mountains, sacred, 41, 52, 80, 85 Namling county, Shigatse, 42 national champions strategy, 16, 141, 155, 160, 175, 182 National University of Defence Technology, Changsha, 114 Natural Resource Law, China, 84 New York, Chrysler Building, 105 Ngoring and Gyaring lakes, 135 nodes of accumulation, 37 nomads, 19 nomenklatura system, 150 Norbusa chromite deposit, 106–7, 113–14; Chinese pre-reform style, 108 Nuclear Fuel Cycle Information System, 97 ‘Number One Water Tower’, Tibet for China, 11, 20, 44, 127, 131

Mongolian, 92; pasture loss/ruination, 68, 70, 169; sedenterized, 18 Pelliot, Paul, 23 Pema Choling, 158 People’s Armed Police (PAP), 66 People’s Liberation Army, China (PLA), 95, 184 Peru, 141; Chinese mines, 2, 158; copper, 10; raw materials, 170 pilgrimage, 27, 51, 54 Pliny the Elder, 6 pollution, 63, 78 Potala Palace, 181 potash salts, 92, 101; Israeli investment, 102 primitive accumulation, China, 173; elite, 41 protected area, rivers sources, 77, 128, 134, 137 protests: arrests Dhunag mine, 73; local cadre repression, 58; violent repression, 40, 66, 79, 82, 182 Qaidam Basin, 100; radioactive strontium, 101; see also Tsaidam Qing dynasty, 45; unfinished agenda, 15 Qinghai, 7–8, 12, 44, 127; copper potential, 155; Geological Survey, 133; Lake, 96; Ribao, 71; Tibet Plateau, 1

oil: and gas, 92; China boom years, 94; China security concern, 95 Olympic Dam, Australia, 142 Oman, 112

Radio Free Asia, 104; Tibetan service, 59 radioactive strontium, Qaidam, 101 Ramsar global wetlands treaty, 137 rare earths, 125, 163; China–Japan denial, 123 regulations, gold mining regulation bypassed, 72 rent-seeking, 41, 56, 58–9 resistance, 41–3 resource nationalism, 6, 143; China–USA–Japan contestation, 165 resource wealth, curse of, 54, 78, 81–2, 84, 87 Rio Tinto, 122, 126, 179; Chinese stake in, 153 royalties, 181–2

Pacific Gas and Electric plant, 103, 117 Padmasambhava, 183 Panchen Lama, 121, 149, 159 pastoral nomadism, 18–19, 27, 35; communities depicted, 91; derogatory view of, 30; flexible life, 20; livelihoods destruction, 11; mining undermined, 88;

Sabol, Steven, 90 Saishitang mine, 155 Salar nomadic people, 92 salts, 101–2 Sanjiangyuan Three River Source Protected Area, 77, 128, 134 science, Western ambivalence, 5

index   security, relentless emphasis on, 43 self-immolation, 54, 59, 87 senior party cadres, rent-seeking, 41 ‘separatism’, Chinese repression rationale, 63, 81, 86 Ser Ngol Lo, gold mining resistance, 104 Serchu river, pollution, 69 Sershung Lungkhok, miners, 64 Sertang monastery, Gelupka school, 80 Sertang Trang, factory, 81 Sgarchu Gyashoe, protester killings, 41 Shabkar, 31, 51 Shakabpa, Tsepon, 24–5 Shanghai Stock Exchange, 137 Shangri-La, romance of, 28 Shell, 16 Shenzhen Stock Exchange, 113, 165 Shigatse, 159; rail line to, 160; Shetongmon mine, 150, 152, 154–5, 159–60, 172 Siberia, 27 Sichuan Basin, 156 Siemens, 157 silk road, the, 6 Singapore, Buddhism, 46 Sino–Soviet split, 1950s, 96 Sioux, American colonization, 90–91 Slezkine, Yuri, 39 Smyer Yu dan, 29 ‘Song of the Geologists’, 10 Song Xin, 164 Song Xinyu, 98 Songsten Gampo, 169, 170, 183 South Africa, 112; chromium processing undermined, 111; ferrochrome industry, 110; Mining Charter, 183 South China Sea, national disputes, 146 Sri Sinmo, 28; Tibet as body, 26 stainless steel, 108–10, 125 state capitalism, Chinese, 4, 113; developmental model, 106; exploitation mode, 5; mining corporations, 10, 168; national champions, 16, 141, 155, 175; stainless steel success, 109; state-owned enterprises, 83 steel, 109–10 stomach cancer rates, 117 streambeds, poisoning of, 53 Sustainable Europe Research Institute, Vienna, 119 Suwa village, coal mine, 57 T’ang dynasty, records of, 23 Taiwan, Buddhism, 46

Takchen Dronggye Chakar, sacred mountain, 80–81 Takmolingka monastery, 160 Tangtong Gyalpo, 31–3, metalwork of, 34 Tangtong Ri mountain, 76 Tantric path, methods of, 47 Tashi Dhondup, 79 Tashi Namgyal, arrest of, 100 tax havens, 180 terroir, concept of, 48 Tethyan Sea, upheaval of, 27 Thewo, 96; county uranium mine, 96–7 Three Gorges Dam, 109, 158, 184 Three Rivers Source Protected Area, boundaries amended, 134 Tibet: ‘Asia’s water tower’, 88; authentic Buddhism for Chinese, 46, 183; Autonomous Region (TAR), 11, 56, 72, 119, 166; ‘backward’ Chinese narrative, 10, 25; beliefs, 3; British conquered, 181; CCP career move, 149–50; Chinese agriculture failures, 37; Chinese nuclear testing ground, 96; chromite minor source, 112, 119; copper mine ownership changes, 154; customary production trivialized, 87; dirigiste command economy, 105–6, 118, 120; ever-present sacredness, 29; economic take-off past failure, 12; ecosystem valuation, 44; environmentalists, 82; expanse of, 26; extreme climate, 87; geologists to, 7, 167; herders oases displaced, 98; historical goldsmiths, 22; hydrodamming–mining link, 166; hydropower dams, 146–8; immigrant farmers, 11; infrastructure, 147, 172; landholding fees, 60; lead from, 67, 69; local government fee invention, 58; long-term assimilation plans, 115; mass tourism, 179; mineral extraction failures, 2, 14–15; mining indigenous involvement lack, 173; mining protests, 11, 84; mining subsidies, 171; molybdenum, 126; monasteries, 50; new energy PR, 125; 1987 protests, 63; ‘Number One Water Tower’ Chinese narrative, 11, 44, 127, 131; oil fields IPO listed, 94; packaged product, 39; protest repression, 40, 66, 79, 82, 182; resistance, 183; rivers’ bridging, 32; state capital spending, 41; state-driven development failure, 113; state-owned enterprises, 175; sustainable grazing, 30; urban non-Tibetans, 15; value-adding

  spoiling tibet industry lack, 38; Western romanticization, 21 Tibet Mineral Development Co., 113–14 Tibet Work, fifth annual Forum, 146–7 Tibetan Empire, 92 Tibetan government in exile, Environment Desk, 23 Tibetan Plateau (QTP); administration conjured away, 28; Chinese control of, 4; distinctiveness of, 27; mining enclaves, 38; spaciousness of, 20, 25 Tibetan Review, 161 Tibetan Tsaidam Basin, see below Tibetans: Chinese language fluency, 86; disempowerment, 43; mobility, 39; Western romanticizing of, 5–6 TISCO, Taiyuan corporation, 112, 114 Togden Ugyen Tenzin, 167–8 Tongling Nonferrous, 152 Toronto Stock Exchange, 130 tourism, 39, 147; Han Chinese, 40; infrastructure spending, 12; Tibet industry, 11, 179, 183 transvaluation, norm created, 90 Tsaidam Basin, 13, 77, 92, 94–5, 123, 134; deforestation, 98; desertification, 100; extractable resources, 102; oil wells, 101; prison camps, 97; state-sponsored settlement, 93 ; see also Qaidam Tsering Dondrub, 59 Turkey, 110, 112 TVE, township and village enterprises, 58, 61; wool-cleaning plants failing, 63 UN (United Nations): Environment Program (UNEP), 77, 115; International Atomic Energy Agency, 97 uncertainty, nomad accommodation of, 19 uranium, 96, 116 USA (United States of America), 163; Geological Service/Survey, 113, 155; resource consumption, 119 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), 95 Vale corporation, 16, 122 Volvo (Geely-owned), 113 Wang Lixiong, 120 waste piles, chromium-laden, 116 water, Tibetan sources, 11, 20, 37, 44, 127, 131; hydropower, see above; protected watersheds, 75

watersheds, protected, 75 Wen Jiabao, 9 Western China, global brands, 166 Western Mining, 114, 132, 137, 172 wildlife conservation reserve, 128 Witwatersrand University, 111 Woeser, Tibetan blogger, 120, 170 wool, 1980s ‘wars’, 61; China cloth global dominance, 63 World Bank, 65 World Gold Council, 130, 157 WTO, China membership, 109; case against China Wuhan steelworks, 106 Xi Jinping, 145, 148 Xianggashan mine, chromite, 107 Xiaobo Zhang, 83 Xiaomei Chen, 10 Xinhua news agency, 101, 129 Xining city, 26, 132 Xining Special Steel, 114 Xinjiang, 8, 63 Xizang, Chinese for Tibet, 15 Xizang (Tibet) Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, 165 Xizang Zhingsheng Mineral Resources Company, 165 Xu Shaoshi, 139 Yangtze river, 128; headwaters, 77, 132 Yao Jianhua, 98 Yarlung Tsangpo River, chromite, 105 yartsa gumbu, 60 Ye Xin, 140 Yellow River, 127, 128, 148; headwaters, 132, hydrodamming, 97, source purity concern, 135, source stream, 77, 130, water diversion, 160 yogis, 26, 32, 39, 48–51 The Young Generation, play, 7–9 Yulong, 126, 152, 154, 159, 165, 171–2; mines cluster, 167 Yunnan Copper Industry, 126 Zambia, 44, 141, 164; Chinese mines, 2, 158; copper from, 10 Zhang Jiandong, 117 Zhang Yie, 176 Zhou Yan, 184 Zijin, 160, 173; Inter-Citic stake, 133; toxic spill record, 172 zinc, 1, 92, 116������

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