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Two new Tibet tomes ask important questions about its future, writes Victoria Burrows

Tibet, and its status, is a subject that arouses fierce passion and strongly divided opinion. With the Beijing Olympics rapidly approaching, the issue has been thrust back into the international spotlight – protests calling for Tibetan independence from China have been picked up by media around the world, and Chinese blogging sites have been buzzing with patriotic fervour.

Probably the first book to bring Tibet into the popular consciousness in the West was James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Hilton describes a mystical Himalayan paradise called Shangri-La, which is cut off from the rest of the world and where the people are almost immortal and guided by a lamasry of gentle monks. Twenty years later, books such as Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer dispelled the myth to a certain extent, but still portrayed Tibet as a land of great spiritual depth and charm. By the ’90s, after a decade of Tibet being open to foreign tourists, studies such as Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West by Donald S. Lopez began to address the West’s romanticising of Tibet.

Now, in 2008, writers are showing the need to look beyond common preconceptions to assess the state of Tibet in a balanced manner. Two non-fiction books published this year offer balanced and thought-provoking insight into the effect Beijing and its policies are having on ordinary Tibetans and Han Chinese alike: China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Remaking of Tibet, by Abrahm Lustgarten, and A Year in Tibet by Chinese filmmaker and writer Sun Shuyun.

Lustgarten, an award-winning journalist for Fortune and The New York Times, provides a highly readable account of the building of the railway line to Lhasa – a potent symbol of the Chinese government’s attitude to Tibet. His book centres on Chinese engineer Zhang Luxin as he plans the train’s track, and Tibetan shopkeeper Renzin, who struggles to keep his business going in a town increasingly catering to Han Chinese immigrants.

The quagmire that Zhang has to navigate is not only symbolic, in that the demands of the government for the track’s completion are close to impossible when balanced against the scientific realities of the project of this scale, but also literal, as the permafrost upon which the highest train track in the world is to be built is worryingly unstable – it melts and freezes with the change of seasons, and is largely unstudied. Despite the railway being completed in 2006, Lustgarten warns that no one knows what effect global warming will have on the icy bedrock.

So what really motivated one of the world’s most impressive and expensive feats of engineering? Contrary to Beijing’s upbeat rhetoric, Lustgarten finds that most Tibetans have benefitted little from development of their land, with most marginalised from the Han Chinese driven business boom through language difficulties and a lack of skills. Instead, he learns that Tibet harbours a third of China’s total copper reserves and it is rich in lead, zinc, iron and other minerals worth an estimated US$128 billion.

He also quotes a senior PLA official in Lhasa who said defence accounts for more than half of the strategic purpose behind the railway, with the tracks making the quick shipment of arms to the disputed 2,250-mile border with India finally possible.

In Sun Shuyun’s A Year in Tibet, although the town of Gyantse has no train track, the townsfolk are still under pressure from a rapidly changing world. The book, which stems from a BBC television series Sun was filming, follows a shaman and his family, a village doctor, a Party worker, a hotel manager, a rickshaw driver, and the temple’s monks for a year as they go about their lives.

Gyantse is famous for its magnificent temple complex set in staggeringly beautiful mountain scenery, but the world Sun finds is far from the mystical Himalayan paradise of Shangri-La Instead of a glowing city where people are almost immortal, hepatitis and alcoholism are rife, Tibetan children attend classes taught entirely in Putonghua, even though they cannot understand a word, and an average of 400-500 mothers per 100,000, compared to about 45 per 100,000 in the rest of China, die in childbirth.

Sun, who grew up in mainland China and was educated at both Beijing and Oxford Universities, challenges readers to reassess their perceptions of Tibet as her year in Gyantse forced her to confront hers – it is not the haven of wisdom, purity and tranquillity many Westerners think it is, and probably never was. Nor is it a desolate backwater stuck in a feudal past, the reason oft-given by Chinese authorities for the 1949 Communist invasion. But it is a place of hope, warmth and humility.

While the two books have a different focus – the monumental train that speeds into Lhasa versus life in Gyantse which proceeds very much on foot – neither shies away from big questions, and both suggest that while change is inevitable, rampant development is leaving Tibetans powerless to define their own economic and cultural future.