China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet

China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet
by Abrahm Lustgarten

China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet
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Book Summary Information

Author: Abrahm Lustgarten
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-13
ISBN: 0805083243
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Times Books

Book Reviews of China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet

Book Review: Too Little About "China's Great Train"
Summary: 2 Stars

Lustgarten, an American journalist, says his "reporting was completed without [China's Ministry of Railways'] sanction and involvement." He also says the story was "inspired by my early introduction to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan culture when I was a young boy." These two comments at the end of the book help explain the failure of the preceding 277 pages. Instead of a story about "China's Great Train" - the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, a stunning engineering achievement by any standard - the book is little more than invective against "Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet," the book's subtitle. Only two of the book's twelve chapters (8 and 9) are truly devoted to the making of the railway, and they fly by in 45 pages. Too much of the rest of the book is polemic, with page after page going by without so much as a reference to the railway.

Take advantage of Amazon's "Search Inside!" feature: the opening tone of the book carries throughout, as does the prose style. (The first sentence on page 6 is a doozy.) Also, "Search Inside This Book" for the word "stringy," go to the page where it appears (179 - actually page 163 of the book) and read the churlish description there of Zhao Shiyun, the man who successfully directed the multibillion-dollar railroad project to completion a year ahead of schedule. Throughout the book, Lustgarten rarely lets an opportunity to be negative toward the Chinese go by.

Readers looking for thoughtful journalistic writing about the development of new technology (like Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine") or level-headed historical writing about a massive railroad project (like David Haward Bain's "Empire Express") will not find it here. As someone who drove alongside the full length of this railway (on the Qinghai-Tibet Highway) a year before its completion, and wondered how in the world its myriad challenges were overcome, I found this book to be a major disappointment.

Summary of China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet

A vivid account of China?s unstoppable quest to build a railway into Tibet, and its obsession to transform its land and its people

In the summer of 2006, the Chinese government fulfilled a fifty-year plan to build a railway into Tibet. Since Mao Zedong first envisioned it, the line had grown into an imperative, a critical component of China?s breakneck expansion and the final maneuver in strengthening China?s grip over this remote and often mystical frontier, which promised rich resources and geographic supremacy over South Asia.

Through the lives of the Chinese and Tibetans swept up in the project, Fortune magazine writer Abrahm Lustgarten explores the ?Wild West? atmosphere of the Chinese economy today. He follows innovative Chinese engineer Zhang Luxin as he makes the train?s route over the treacherous mountains and permafrost possible (for now), and the tenacious Tibetan shopkeeper Rinzen, who struggles to hold on to his business in a boomtown that increasingly favors the Han Chinese. As the railway?the highest and steepest in the world?extends to Lhasa, and China?s ?Go West? campaign delivers waves of rural poor eager to make their fortunes, their lives and communities fundamentally change, sometimes for good, sometimes not.

Lustgarten?s book is a timely, provocative, and absorbing first-hand account of the Chinese boom and the promise and costs of rapid development on the country?s people.

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