Beneath triumphal arches, about 350 Communist trucks roared through Tibet into the Forbidden City of Lhasa last week, along two new main roads from Red China. Thirty thousand Tibetans gathered before the legendary Potala palace to greet the trucks, which symbolized their first main road contact with the outside world. Communist authorities paid tribute to the eternal friendship between Red China and Tibet, which the Communists had conquered in 1951, and decorated the workers who had drawn the new highways across the roof of the world.
The Red China-Tibet highways present new strategic daggers at the mountain passes of India, a fact that India’s top soldiers worry about, but India’s top politicians (Nehru & Co.) prefer not to discuss out loud. The new highways, giving Red China access to the undeveloped mineral resources of Tibet, also present impressive evidence of what a slave economy can do: the roads took 3½ years to build; their combined length (2,722 miles) is almost twice as long as China’s ancient Great Wall and more than three times as long as the Burma Road. The Sikang-Tibet Highway runs 1,410 miles across 14 mountain ranges and 100 rivers, at one point traversing a staggering series of 2,600-ft. precipices. Chinese Nationalist sources acknowledged the achievement, but preferred to stress its human cost—an estimated 50,000 out of 500,000 road workers dead from injuries, exhaustion and freezing.
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