China Tibet Online
August 10, 2015
5100—This isn’t some secret project code number, it’s the name of a factory located at an altitude of 5100 meters above sea level.
Industry moving onto the plateau
The full name of Factory 5100 is Tibet 5100 Water Resource Holdings Limited , which was built in 2005 in the Nyainqentanglha mountains, with a total investment of 500 million yuan, and all of the factory’s machinery is imported from Germany.
According to some references, the origin of the spring water used by Factory 5100, was found in 1986, however what enabled them to make extensive use of this water source was the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway in 2006.
Before this, due to the inconvenience of transportation in Tibet, enterprises were only able to ship spring water by air or by truck, both of which have relatively expensive shipping costs which eventually increased the price of the spring water.
After the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, spring water became one of the few things Tibet could ship to inland areas of the country, and by using the railway, they also prevented sending empty railcars back down the plateau.
In 2008, the cooperation between Factory 5100 and the China Railway progressed, and the 5100 glacier spring water became a complimentary gift for passengers taking the trains. According to a report by Xinhua news, the amount of money the China Railway put into purchasing spring water has already grown to 1.592 billion yuan, and in 2013, China Railway spent 323 million yuan on spring water alone.
Over the past six years, Factory 5100’s revenues have increased six fold, and net profits have increased 40 fold. In one of their better years, 90 percent of all spring water sales came from the China Railway.
The area that Factory 5100 is located in, Lhasa’s Damxung County, is one of the plateau’s grassland farming county. Previously, the town’s average annual revenue was approximately two million yuan; However, after the cooperation was formed between Factory 5100 and China Railway, Damxung’s annual tax revenue exceeded 100 million yuan.
New ideas of Tibetan workers
A new, modern factory is something that Tibetans living in this area are relatively foreign to.
Losang, a Tibetan girl, is one of the first civilians that started working in Factory 5100, and she stated that before the construction of the factory, young Tibetans had to decide wether they wanted to work in the livestock industry, or become a waiter/waitress in Damxung County, where they would be able to earn a monthly salary of 2,000 yuan.
Comparatively, people who have been working in the factory for a sufficient amount of time and have more experience would be able to earn a monthly salary of about 5,000 yuan, whereas new workers could expect to earn around 3,000 yuan. Additionally, workers can also strive to achieve monthly bonuses of a couple thousand yuan, or even year end bonuses of more than 10,000 yuan. Although living expenses in Tibet are quite pricy, the wages earned by workers is already comparable to workers in the more developed parts of eastern China.
High wages have enticed Tibetans to change their lifestyles around. Information provided by Damxung government has shown that out of the 221 workers employed at Factory 5100, 81.46 percent are Tibetans, and 69.37percent are children of Tibetans who work in the livestock industry.
The person in charge of the logistics department of Factory 5100 stated that making Tibetans who work in the livestock industry change their lifestyles and accustom themselves to the rigid working hours of a factory is not an easy task, even some workers with positive attitudes like Losang have shown up to work two hours late.Losang believes that the reason behind tardiness isn’t only that some Tibetans don’t have a sense of time, but is also due to the fact that the factory is very far away from the homes of workers, and if a worker encounters even the slightest problem during their commute to work, it is difficult to guarantee that they will be able to show up for work on time.
Language is also one of the major barriers that many Tibetans face in the workplace. When Tibetans entered the workplace about 10 years ago, there were very few workers who were educated in Mandarin, so they had difficulties comprehending manuals on how to operate factory machinery, and they also ran into difficulties communicating with their superior.
As of today, these problems no longer hinder Tibetans in the workplace. Losang stated that most of the workers live in the dormitories provided by the factory, and the factory also provides Tibetan workers with Mandarin and other vocational classes.
Factory 5100 will also occasionally organize groups of workers to enter inland China and experience social and conceptual differences and gaps. These so called “differences and gaps” these workers may encounter while in the inland are actually decreasing and becoming less prominent.
In Factory 5100, many workers like to gather around the billiards tables for entertainment. There are television sets in the dormitories, so workers have the opportunity to see what the world is like outside of Tibet. Recently,Losang’s favorite thing to watch on TV are Korean dramas.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and Losang’s life is the epitome of what freedom and autonomy can provide Tibet with. The meaning behind “ethnic autonomy ” is not only to preserve ethnic minority culture, but also to provide minorities with the freedom to create new culture. Development is truly the ultimate freedom.
