BEIJING — China's high-speed, high-altitude railway to Tibet carried troops to the region for the first time, state media has reported, in a development likely to fuel concerns about the railway's impact on the restive Himalayan area.
The brief Xinhua News Agency report late Friday did not say how many soldiers were aboard the train that left a provincial city Friday for the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The report cited unnamed sources in the People's Liberation Army as saying that the "railway will become a main option" for transporting troops to Tibet, replacing the air and road routes used since Chinese troops annexed Tibet 57 years ago.

The $4.2 billion "Sky Train" uses special technology to snake across the Tibetan plateau's permafrost and 16,500-feet mountain passes and has cut travel time to Lhasa from Beijing and other cities to two days, instead of weeks.

In the 17 months since its inauguration, however, the railway has brought a surge of Chinese tourists and ferried minerals out of the region, raising suspicions among critics that its main purpose is to tighten the communist government's hold on Tibet. Tibetan monitoring groups and activists supporting independence for the region have warned that Tibetan Buddhist culture is being further eroded.

The train now carries about 75 percent of all goods between Tibet and other parts of China, the Xinhua report said. Tourism arrivals soared 64 percent the first 10 months of the year, to 3.72 million tourists, compared with the year previous, Xinhua said in a separate report.

AP[Saturday, December 01, 2007 12:16]