From damming powerful rivers to tearing up savanna for mining to expelling Tibetan nomads from their ancestral lands, China is exploiting the natural resources of Tibet on an epic scale, a new book argues.
Tibet has huge reserves of copper, lithium, gold and silver. Most of it has never been touched, because the Tibetans didn't mine the land: it's against their religious practices to disturb the ground. But China has begun mining on an enormous scale.
China's been "gung-ho on dams ever since Mao Zedong came into power," Buckley explains, but not on the Tibetan Plateau — it was always in the East. Now the dam movement in China is expanding westward with no end in sight.
The headwaters of the Yangtze River, the Yellow River, the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Ganges and the Mekong all flow from the high-altitude plateau into Asia, providing life-giving water for drinking, agriculture, fisheries and, more recently, hydropower.
“You've got the hugest hydro-potential ever,” Buckley says, “because you’re starting in the Himalayas and dropping 3,000 or 4,000 meters."
China wants to double its use of hydropower by 2020, as a way generating more “green” energy. The only way to do that is by expanding dam building to the rivers of Tibet, because the rivers of China are already thoroughly dammed, Buckley says. “You can't dam them anymore. China has more dams than the rest of the world put together. So they’re gradually working their way towards the Tibetan Plateau.”
So look at the big scale work of China and Tibetan definitely are in the pipeline for job opportunity and many more.
We see China is progressively moving forward with opportunity but what about CTA?
