Letter from Qinghai Mark GodfreyRats run rampant in some parts of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. Their holes and tunnels pepper these vast grasslands which run from the wildly scenic province of Qinghai in western China into Tibet.
The rodents are multiplying because birds of prey have been hunted and pushed out of traditional breeding grounds by the thousands of humans settling these vast, cold plains in a move westwards that echoes the frontier days of the United States.
Settlers from more densely populated regions of China are pouring into Qinghai and Tibet since the opening of new airports and air routes into the two territories, which are neighbours on China's western flank.
However, the flood-gates will open when the Qinghai-Tibet railway and highway, both chiseled through thousands of kilometres of rocky, icy terrain, are completed shortly.
The Tibet Autonomous Region, as it's known officially in China, makes up nearly one-fifth of China's total area, yet even in their own land native Tibetans have been made a minority after a half-century of incentives to the Han, China's largest race, to move to the region. There are seven-and-a-half million Han Chinese and Hui Muslims, and only six million Tibetans living in Tibet today.
Beijing has poured millions of businessmen, engineers and officials into Tibet, greasing the wheels with billions of yuan in transfers from the Chinese capital.
And now the tourists are coming. The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is a natural tourist draw, with its majestic snow mountains, crisscrossing rivers, vast grasslands and plateau wetlands. Great rivers flow downwards from the plateau.
The Yellow river and four others originate here, their tributaries knitting together a sprawling patchwork of river wetlands.
A huge patchwork of lakes, marshes, grasslands and river wetlands stretch accross the territories of Tibet and Qinghai.
Large forest wetlands are sprinkled accross the Hengduan mountain range in south-east Tibet. Spruces and firs thrive in this cool, wet climate, and shrubs and mosses here host dozens of rare species. Porous, jet-black peat below the grass sponges up heavy rains and melting snow that could otherwise flood the region's cities.
With the arrival of the railways and new air routes cities are expanding rapidly in this outpost. Tibet's old cities don't look unlike other modern Chinese cities, however, boringly familiar in their clutter of box-shaped housing complexes, karaoke bars and motorcycle shops.
Competition for jobs makes knowledge of Chinese essential for Tibetans. Most of the programming on Lhasa television is in Chinese. Meanwhile traditional handicraft industries have been shattered by cheaper imitations of Tibetan pennants and silver jewellery coming in from China and India.
Cheaper food and household goods flood in from Chinese provinces, too, hampering the development of indigenous enterprise. Tibetans sell mass-produced rings and bracelets on the streets of Lhasa and Beijing today, most of them shipped in from factories in Shenzhen and Bangalore.
Beijing intensified Han population transfer to Tibet in 1995 by offering attractive salaries and holiday benefits to willing Han migrants. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, reports that 1,000 officials and technicians were relocated to Tibet in February 1995.
But Chinese communism hasn't released the Tibetans from the "depths of enslavement and suffering", the official pretext of communist China's 1949 invasion. The majority of Tibetans live below the poverty line as calculated by Beijing, despite financial subsidies poured into Tibet from the central government since 1952. Over 1.4 million Tibetans are still illiterate according, to UN figures printed in 2003.
Prosperity and opened borders are bringing millions of tourists to the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. Trains from Beijing will pass through here en route to Tibet in early in 2005. Air China has purchased new Airbus jets for its high-alitude route into Lhasa. No longer so distant, Tibet is about to be tamed and settled.
Worryingly, the swelling population is shrinking the Himalayan plateau wetlands, which irrigate and cool nine countries.
Overgrazing and drought have taken their toll. A recent research paper by Dr Li Laixing, a research fellow with the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, showed that the number of species has remained roughly the same.
But the number of birds, especially the rare species, has decreased sharply. The black-neck crane has been disappearing at an alarming rate. The area is home to more than 70 species of rare wild animals, including fast-dwindling species like the Tibetan gazelle, the snow leopard and the white-lipped deer.
The only species prospering in Qinghai today is the rat.