Wall Street Journal
June 18, 1999

World Bank staff have rejected accusations by Western advocacy groups that a proposed poverty-alleviation project in a remote and barren area of China is detrimental to Tibetans living there, and will push for the plan’s approval at a meeting of the bank’s board of directors Tuesday. If implemented, the project would move 58,000 people, some of the poorest people in the world, most of them ethnic Chinese, from a denuded area high on the Tibetan plateau into a sparsely populated, lower-lying region more suited to farming and herding. Both areas lie in Qinghai province, which many Tibetans still consider part of the greater Tibet. The World Bank has earmarked $40 million in soft loans for the project. China has been the World Banks largest borrower for the past seven years, and critics have accused the bank of lending too much to an authoritarian government. In this case, overseas groups have said the project would dilute Tibetan culture by moving too many ethnic Chinese into the area.