主题：【原创】看BBC怒发上冲冠 -- Cipher

The Chinese name for Tibet - Xizang Zhizou - means 'western treasure basket'. Approximately 40 per cent of China's mineral resources are in Tibet, including gold, coal and what are estimated to be the world's largest uranium deposits (many under Tibet's most sacred sites such as the Potala hill in Lhasa). Altogether more than 126 industrially useful minerals lie under Tibetan soil; soil that the nomadic people consider as sacred. Many Tibetans have commented on how quickly the West went to the aid of Kuwait in the first Gulf War for its oil reserves while still ignoring Tibet. Huge areas of prime virgin forest have been clear-felled in southeastern Tibet, the former province of Kham. It was estimated in the 1980s that over $54 billion worth of timber had been extracted from Tibet since the early 1950s. Only recently has China forbidden logging in the Upper Yangtse because of the catastrophic results of the massive deforestation. Both the Yangtse and Yellow Rivers carry massive volumes of silt, but in the case of the Yangtse, the topsoil erosion already constitutes a major threat to the hydroelectric machinery of the Three Gorges Dam.

Water is also soon to be one of Tibet's most exploited resources. Much has been heard of the notorious Three Gorges Dam further down the Yangtse, but the Chinese are also undertaking massive damming schemes in Tibet. Approximately ten major dams are planned in the immediate future, with all the devastation and displacement of local Tibetan communities that will entail. They are also talking of diverting the Brahmaputra River northwards to irrigate north China's deserts and of using nuclear explosives to cut through the intervening mountain ranges. At the Great Bend, where it turns south through the Himalayas into Assam, the Brahmaputra falls 3,000 metres in the space of a hundred or so kilometres with huge hydroelectric potential. The Chinese claim it will have twice the output of the Three Gorges Dam. Work is tentatively scheduled to begin in 2009 but has been described as a 'declaration of war' against India and Bangladesh. One of Tibet's most sacred lakes, Yamdrok Tso, has already been mined, tunnelled and used for hydroelectric development.