The only place the railway didn't go was Tibet. The Chinese had abandoned this Tibet line at Golmud in Qinghai, faced by the impenetrable Kunlun Mountains.
[1993, John W. Garver, “External Threat and Internal Security”, in Foreign Relations of the People's Republic of China[2], Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 267:
In 1959, a line from Lanzhou to Xining in Qinghai was opened. Plans called for extending this line westward into central Qinghai, then south over the Kun Lun Mountains to the Tibetan plateau and thence to Lhasa. By 1991, this line had reached Geermu in central Qinghai. There were also plans to extend the line further west from Geermu along the south rim of the Tarim basin to Kashgar in western Xinjiang.]
We had left the frosty campsite at Koko Nor after a hearty Sherpa breakfast of hot porridge and fried eggs, the car heater was pumping out warmth, we had slept well, and we were a few minutes into our drive to Golmud, 580 kilometres further towards Tibet.
'Social development' could obliquely mean a new Chinese invasion - a massive influx of Chinese settlers, drawn by financial incentives and tax breaks. There are precedents here: you do not have to look any further than Golmud itself. Fifty years ago, Golmud was open steppe with nomad herders. After the railway reached town, immigrants from eastern China arrived in droves, leading to the present population of several hundred thousand and a sprawling town.
