Chinese government lifting Tibet

Lhasa is a shiny modern city with one of the largest solar energy power plants in China. Because of the excessive sunshine almost all its energy is solar with power generation output of 2.3m watts of energy, a volume that is far in excess of its need. Therefore, it sells energy to some parts of China.

Tibet is one of the areas China has targeted with deliberate and successful poverty alleviation with amazing infrastructure in this impossible landscape. With 70,000km of highways, a GDP that has risen on double digit over 22 years, and success in liberating over 70% of the population from poverty in the past years, Tibet stands on higher ground of progress.

The leaders of the region in a meeting said that 17 major Chinese national agencies devote a certain amount of their earning to the Tibet cause as all other provinces of China donate every year a percentage of their income to the region.

Tibet for instance has a modern skills acquisition centre built by the Jiangsu Province and the sports stadium built by the Beijing Municipality.

It looks impossible, but true that the Chinese government is taking on its bravest and most expensive road construction of the 5,476km 318 Nepal-Tibet-Sichuan-Shanghai Highway that runs through mountains and hundreds of tunnels in that rugged countryside. It is actually the longest highway in China cutting across the entire country from the sea in Shanghai to the mountains at the Nepal border. It is also called the Friendship Highway. The vast Region with sparse population density also has five airports.

Emewu is senior editor of The Sun Newspaper, Nigeria, an intern at People’s Daily and Fellow of the China Public Diplomacy on Media Exchange, Beijing (ikeroyalemewu@yahoo.com)