Tibet's resources behind U.S./China tug of war?

[Dover]

China thinks the U.S. is undermining it's ownership of Tibet in order to gain access to its vast resources:


...Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ¡®Tibet Roulette¡¯ with China (2)

Part 2:

The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organization today is the International Campaign for Tibet, founded in Washington in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT has been receiving funds from the NED. The ICT awarded their annual Light of Truth award in 2005 to Carl Gershman, founder of the NED. Other ICT award winners have included the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Czech leader, Vaclav Havel. The ICT Board of Directors is peopled with former US State Department officials including Gare Smith and Julia Taft. 8

Another especially active anti-Beijing organization is the US-based Students for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450 foot banner atop the Great Wall in China; calling for a free Tibet, and accusing Beijing of wholly unsubstantiated claims of genocide against Tibet. Apparently it makes good drama to rally naïve students.

The SFT was among five organizations which this past January that proclaimed start of a "Tibetan people's uprising" on Jan 4 this year and co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and financing.

Harry Wu is another prominent Dalai Lama supporter against Beijing. He became notorious for claiming falsely in a 1996 Playboy interview that he had ¡°videotaped a prisoner whose kidneys were surgically removed while he was alive, and then the prisoner was taken out and shot. The tape was broadcast by BBC." The BBC film showed nothing of the sort, but the damage was done. How many people check old BBC archives? Wu, a retired Berkeley professor who left China after imprisonment as a dissident, is head of the Laogai Research Foundation, a tax-exempt organization whose main funding is from the NED.9

Among related projects, the US Government-financed NED also supports the Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama¡¯s exile base at Dharamsala, India. The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Center for ¡°information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet,¡± also based in Dharamsala. And NED finances the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

In short, US State Department and US intelligence community finger prints are all over the upsurge around the Free Tibet movement and the anti-Han Chinese attacks of March. The question to be asked is why, and especially why now?

Tibet¡¯s raw minerals treasure

Tibet is of strategic import to China not only for its geographical location astride the border with India, Washington¡¯s newest anti-China ally in Asia. Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet contains some of the world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world's lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet's forests are the largest timber reserve at China's disposal; as of 1980, an estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled and taken by China. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the region.10

On the Tibet Autonomous Region¡¯s border along the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam Basin, known as a "treasure basin." The Basin has 57 different types of mineral resources with proven reserves including petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and gold. These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China.

And situated as it is, on the ¡°roof of the world,¡± Tibet is perhaps the world¡¯s most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven of Asia's greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people.¡± He who controls Tibet¡¯s water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever over all Asia.

But the prime interest of Tibet for Washington today is its potential to act as a lever to destabilize and blackmail the Beijing Government...cont'd

http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=600876

[Hekate]

1. A friend took me to hear a very informative lecture by the Tibetan foreign minister in exile

I believe that was his title -- regrettably I was not able to pick up a flyer so I could memorize this elderly monk's name and title. Apologies: "Rinpoche" is all I remember.

Some of the audience may have been expecting a dharma-talk. If so, they were disappointed. Instead, we had a very detailed and erudite lecture on the political history of China and Tibet, and their prospects for resolution in the near term, which are dim. In his estimation, the Chinese are simply stalling until the Dalai Lama and others of his generation die off.

During the question and answer period, he proved to be able to track very complicated questions and answer each part in turn without hesitation. This was despite how heavy his own accent was--he clearly was able to understand English to an exquisite degree.

Two things struck me about his explanation for the Chinese interest in maintaining hegemony over the area and wiping out the culture of the Tibetan people. One is that the high plateau is ideal for aiming missiles in all directions. The other is that the Brahmaputra River (and one other, whose name I missed) supply water to a huge proportion of the peoples to the south of Tibet. The Chinese are in process of damming these rivers.

Think about it. China is damming the Brahmaputra River at its source, which will have appalling consequences for the environment of untold millions of people. And China is accusing the US government of wanting to do what China is already doing, namely coveting and taking the mineral resources of Tibet.

Hekate