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

Over the Past Three Decades, China Has Emerged as an economic superpower while Tibet has struggled to exert its autonomy. In China's Great Train, Abrahm Lustgarten, an investigative reporter with ProPublica, uncovers the audacious project to build a railway into this rich frontier-as a means to fuel China's breakneck expansion and to strengthen the country's grip over the land and its people. Lustgarten follows Chinese engineer Zhang Luxin as he makes the train's route over the treacherous mountains and permafrost possible (for now) and Tibetan shopkeeper Renzin, who is caught in a boomtown that favors the Han Chinese. As the "sky train"-the highest and steepest railway in the world and the culmination of a plan first envisioned by Mao Zedong-extends to Lhasa, the lives of both the Chinese and the Tibetans fundamentally change, sometimes for good, sometimes not.