By all measures Tibet's economy is booming. In the past 30 years its growth rate has outstripped the rest of China's, 10.4 percent to 9.8 percent year on year. The result is that the vast majority of Tibetans have been pulled out of deep poverty.
Simultaneously a massive investment in soft and hard infrastructure had the central government pick up 93 percent of the bill. Education had expanded from virtually nothing in 1951, when the Communists took over, by 92 percent at the completion of a nine-year-education program. A new university campus for 9,000 students has opened, and Tibet has achieved the per capita national average for doctors and hospital beds.
On the hard side, the Qinghai-Lhasa railway has opened — Tibet was the last province to join the network — and thousands of kilometers of new roads have been built with a new airport planned for western Tibet.
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