AROW that started a year ago over a US$40 million (about HK$311 million) World Bank anti-poverty loan to Qinghai province has finally blown up, exposing all involved in the harshest possible light.
A World Bank meeting on Thursday and Friday ended with China refusing to accept further conditions on the controversial loan, which had been opposed by the United States when the bank first offered it last year. The money was intended to fund resettlement of about 58,000 poor farmers from an overpopulated part of Qinghai on to farmland grazed by Tibetan and Mongol nomads.
Premier Zhu Rongji reportedly intervened personally from Europe to end a seven-hour stalemate at the Washington meeting. China says it will now manage the project by itself.
The project became notorious after American Tibetan Daja Meston fell out of a fourth-floor window while being held under guard in a hotel room by Chinese security agents last summer. He and an Australian, Gabriel Lafitte, had been trying to find out what was going on in Dulan county, which covers the site of the resettlement. The county was settled in the 1950s and is surrounded by secrecy as it is dominated by a labour camp and is now being expanded to accommodate a mass transfer of civilians to exploit the region's mineral resources.
Mr Meston returned to America for treatment to his broken spine. After this event, the US and Germany voted against the project and the World Bank's board agreed to send a three-member independent inspection panel, led by chairman Jim MacNeill and including members from Ghana and Canada, to examine not so much the project itself, but whether the World Bank had followed its own regulations in agreeing the loan.
Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, opposed the project, and his supporters mobilised pop stars, US senators and thousands of signatories to publicly condemn the project and, by extension, all the Chinese Government's policies on Tibet.