China''s Great Train PART I A FIFTY-YEAR AMBITION Far above the earth, into the blue, You, wild Kunlun, have seen All that was fairest in the world of men. Your three million white jade dragons in flight Freeze the sky with piercing cold. In summer days your melting torrents Flood the streams and rivers, Turning men into fish and turtles . To Kunlun now I say . Could I but draw my sword o''ertopping heaven, I''d cleave you in three: One piece for Europe, One for America, One to keep in the East. Peace would then reign over the world, The same warmth and cold throughout the globe. --Mao Zedong, "Kunlun," 1935 1 NOW IS THE TIME DIMLY LIT CORRIDORS SNAKE THROUGH IMPERSONAL AND inconspicuous government buildings in downtown Beijing. These are China''s true halls of power, remnants of a twentieth-century China that is increasingly becoming outdated--an architecture of communism, of pale, outsized bureaucracies.

Inside, voices and cigarette smoke ricochet off the cold polished granite. Fluorescent lights accentuate the faded lichen-colored paint. Behind the doors, endless and unceremoniously numbered, the big decisions about China''s future are made. Outside, the city of Beijing has moved on. It buzzes with the optimistic temperament of 15 million people and its pole position in China''s breakneck race for economic greatness. In just one short decade, its streets have been transformed into broad avenues packed not with bicycles and rickshaws but with hundreds of thousands of cars driven by newly affluent and unabashedly proud middle-class workers. There is little of the developing-world chaos of Delhi or Kathmandu. Audis and Ferraris zip past the Cartier store on Beijing''smain shopping avenue.

Overpasses and exit ramps are lined with green and purple neon strips of light, lending a tacky but futuristic feel. Across downtown, mammoth plates of polished glass encase brightly lit storefronts--designer leather handbags (real ones), flat-screen TVs. The lines outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks franchises swamp the occasional corner noodle shops. This is the new China. Old hutongs, the quaint thin alleyways full of traditional courtyard homes, have mostly been torn down to make way for the new. Those that haven''t are being restored with a vigor grown from a newfound sense of tourist-market potential rather than of valued heritage. This urban, and for the most part eastern, China has already made the leap into the twenty-first century global economy and is joyously consuming the goods its factories once only exported for the rest of the world. The booming middle class, with its cars and skyscrapers, is self-perpetuating, a ravenous appetite that energizes the breakneck Chinese economy.

This cycle demands fuel on a level unprecedented in world history--more land as well as grander cities, a politically willing citizenry, ever more consumer hunger, and a still larger middle class. It also, of course, demands the natural resources to construct it all. Fortunately for those piloting the vast experiment, China today is nouveau riche. Mao Zedong''s iron-fisted Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution drained Beijing''s government accounts, but Deng Xiaoping''s "capitalist road" has brought China back to solid financial footing and economic growth through a paradoxical jumble of expansion and Communist-era ideals and social policies. While most of China''s 1.3 billion people still struggle in poverty, the nation''s coffers are finally overflowing--much at the expense of western regions that provided the labor and resources for the east. It''s that cash that has emboldened China''s leaders to think theycan extend prosperity by simply manufacturing more growth on a massive scale, and financing it all from their hive of offices in Beijing. Across the country, whole cities are being rebuilt with seeming disregard for dem∧ dozens of sky-rises are erected almost overnight with no clear indication of who will inhabit them.

The western outposts are linked by an expanding transportation infrastructure--roads, power transmission lines, pipelines, and railways--built at a rate that makes Dwight Eisenhower look lazy. China is in the throes of an industrial revolution that can only be compared to America''s great expansion in the late nineteenth century. By the year 2000, the construction of the unprecedented Three Gorges Dam was well under way, the country had launched spacecraft and planned to send astronauts into orbit, the World Trade Organization was preparing to open its door, and Beijing was on track to win the equivalent of international knighthood, an Olympic bid. It looked clear that China could do almost anything it wanted. Its momentum appeared unstoppable. Social unrest and environmental catastrophes, the makings of what China expert Bruce Gilley fears will be a "metastatic crisis," lurked in the remote and destitute agricultural provinces, but these were far from the eastern megalopolises that were driving the country''s emergence in the global economy. China''s leaders were taking full advantage of a historic opportunity to reinvent itself as an economic wonder and bring its full society into the fold of success. Its continuing growth simply depended on making smart strategic decisions that would bring business and investment while maintaining stability and control.

So it was especially curious in the fall of 2000 when a seemingly obscure development puzzle emerged from inside Beijing''s halls of power to become a paramount national priority: how could a train be built to Tibet? WINTER WAS DESCENDING UNDETECTABLY THROUGH THE THICK ATMOSPHERIC haze of soot and sand that obscures Beijing''s seasons on the day in October 2000 when the conversation again turned to Tibet, the far-flung and controversy-riddled region in China''s westernmost frontier. Behind one of the anonymous doorways inside the Ministry of Railways compound, thirty or so scientists, engineers, and politicians were assembled around a stately wooden conference table to talk about the possibility of laying rails to the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China, the fabled city of Lhasa. Among them was a fifty-four-year-old junior career engineer, Zhang Luxin. Soft-spoken and slightly built, and with his dark wispy hair combed over a thinning top, he physically embodied the lack of authority he possessed in a room full of more senior technocrats. Zhang had spent a career on China''s railways, much of it in Tibet. But he had not yet made a mark in the railway bureaus'' vast hierarchies. His involvement in the meeting was owed to his solid engineering skills rather than any sort of political agility. In fact, he was among the lowest-ranking men in attendance, and therefore the least likely to speak up.

Ministerial-level officials and regional leaders who had traveled cross-country from Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu provinces crowded the room with a heady mixture of power, ego, and scientific knowledge. They had been bandying around ideas about a railway to Tibet over the previous year, but with little headway. A senior scientist present at many of the ministry''s meetings on Tibet could not recall Zhang being present at any of the previous conventions; he mostly sat quietly off to the side and listened. Yet by the end of the day, Zhang would speak out boldly, even inappropriately given China''s strict etiquette for respecting authority, giving shapeto what would become the distinctive first project of China''s new century. Tibet accounts for more than an eighth of the land mapped today within China''s borders, yet in 2000, it was the only region in the country without a rail link to connect it to the east. Almost as soon as the Chinese army entered Lhasa in 1951, building a railway became a top goal. But at the time there was no money to pursue the project, which required the invention of new engineering tactics for crossing the lofty mountains and unstable frozen tundra. In many ways, Tibet''s infrastructure in the decades since had remained more tied to India and Nepal than to Beijing--something Chinese nationalists found excruciatingly untenable.

For many people in the boardroom that day, this in itself was the motivation to finally get the railway done. The vast 1-million-square-mile plateau that makes up most of the TAR is an ecological wonderland, but it held little obvious value for China as a nation. Tibetans did not have much industry or trade to offer--they dealt in yak tails, fur, and salt--and were mostly engrossed in their own cultural values. China had made scant investment in elevating Tibetan society--through education, health care, or an improved standard of living--never reaching a point where the people there were interested in or able to engage fully in China''s economic machine. Yet China was suddenly willing to invest years and billions to lay railroad tracks into what many eastern Chinese view as a wasteland of formidable desert and mountains. Of course, there was the strategic military importance of Tibet, which borders China''s economic and political rival, India, and had been used as a base for Allied air operations during World War II. But modern defense technology seemed to make Tibet less essential as a staging ground than as an old-fashioned natural buffer. The Chinese hoped there were mineral resources to be discovered under the Tibetan Plateau, the highest region on Earth, but the number-crunching bureaucrats had determined that the cost of bringing anything over the rough land to China''s east.