编辑推荐ReviewA careful account of the Chinese expansion into the Tibetan Plateau, accelerated by the completion of the world's highest railroad.Fortune contributing writer Lustgarten notes that China has been working to incorporate Tibet wholly into its sphere since the invasion of 1959, when the Dalai Lama was forced into exile. To the chagrin of Communist technocrats, however, China could never quite figure out how to fund highways and other corridors of transport into the high country until recently, with the result that "Tibet's infrastructure in the decades since [1959] had remained more tied to India and Nepal than to Beijing - something Chinese nationalists found excruciatingly untenable." Thanks to President Jiang Zemin's "Go West" development initiative, though, Chinese settlers have pushed ever westward, resettling millions of ethnic Chinese into the remote interior. An important vehicle was the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, begun in 2001, which picked up on a failed effort begun and abandoned in 1979. The mountainous region, "shockingly inhospitable to the lowlander Chinese," has since been sprouting factories, shopping centers, housing developments - and prisons, of course, for China has been striving to break the back of the Tibetan freedom movement. This train would, its builders hoped, "finally provide a permanent, intractable link between Tibet and China," if only by introducing enough ethnic Chinese into the region to outnumber the Tibetan population, and thus converting a backward place full of supposedly docile people into another industrial powerhouse. Reporters remarking on such developments, such as the Swiss journalist Jean-Marie Jolidon, have been summarily expelled from China. Lustgarten had better luck, but it is clear that he asked hard questions along the way, including ones to establish how expensive the whole railway project has turned out to be: about $4.5 billion, perhaps much more.Lustgarten's account, both journalistic and historical, is a welcome addition to the literature of Tibetan enslavement. (Kirkus Reviews) Review "I can't think of any story that better captures the exhilaration and the agony of our pell-mell globalization. China’s Great Train is a powerful piece of reporting and of reflection, and it never edges away from the tough questions."—Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy "Lustgarten has pulled off something quite extraordinary: by shining a finely-pointed and intimate light on a handful of people directly affected by one of the modern era's greatest engineering feats—or follies—he has rendered a far broader portrait of what happens when two great cultures come into collision. In the process, he not only explores the age-old question of what price progress, but the far more essential question of just how progress might be defined. A must read for anyone who seeks to understand the colossal changes taking place in today's China."—Scott Anderson, author of Moonlight Hotel and The Man Who Tried to Save the World "China’s Great Train is a wonderful account of a project that combined technological ambition, nationalistic and ethnic hubris, and individual determination, cunning, and vision. It is a saga in the spirit of David McCullough’s accounts of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal —but about a project happening right now. Its implications aren’t all positive—about China, Tibet, or the process of modernization—but Abrahm Lustgarten does an admirable job of leading the reader to surprising understandings of all those topics."—James Fallows, author of Blind Into Baghdad and Looking at the Sun "Lustgarten lifts the rug off the grand national project of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. His compelling descriptions of bureaucratic struggles and bitter human costs are contrasted with the great Chinese national pride and the heroism of those who tried to solve the problems to make the train work. This is an insider’s view and an important contribution to understanding the enigmas of China."—James R. Lilley, author of China Hands and former U.S. ambassador to the People’s Republic of China |
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