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China Building World's Tallest Airport In Tibet

January 13, 2010 at 5:20 PM | by | Comments (0)

Tibet already has the world's highest airport, the Bamda Airport in Qamdo. Now China is planning to build an even higher structure, the 14,553-foot Nagqu Dagring Airport. The record-setting airport will be built in Nagqu Prefecture and is set to go live some time around 2014. Construction won't even begin until 2011, and the project is just one of 97 airports that the Chinese hope to build by 2020.

Of course since it's China there's no news that doesn't have some political upshot (just ask Google). The catch here is that Nagqu Dagring is part and parcel of a broader Chinese project to integrate Tibet into the rest of the country. They want to bring Chinese Han into Tibet and wouldn't mind seeing more Tibetans moving into the rest of China, and so they're developing the region's travel infrastructure accordingly. That's happening whether native Tibetans want it or not.

Having finally linked the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to Beijing via rail in 2006, the Chinese now have another six regional railways in the pipeline. The new transportation routes were explicitly designed to create a smoother back-and-forth flow of people, raising concerns about de facto colonization.

As for the question "who wouldn't want a shiny new airport," the answer might well be "ethnic Tibetans who are more interested in preserving their environment than in building new airports and railways." Again they might not have a choice, but the response from the other side is that it's paternalistic to insist that locales wouldn't want to improve their regional economies.

As always with these kinds of questions there are no easy answers. We'll just have to wait and see how the development proceeds, and what toll it takes on the local people and environment.

[Photo: Luo Shaoyang / Wiki Commons]

Related Stories:
· China to build world's highest airport in Tibet by 2011 [USA Today]
· Airport News [Jaunted]
· <Tibet [Jaunted]

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