In 1853, Karl Marx argued in the New York Daily Tribune that the introduction of railways to India would speed the “annihilation of old Asiatic society and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.” This is an apposite thought to consider in the month that sees the opening of the world’s highest railway, linking eastern China, for the first time, to Lhasa in Tibet.

One undisputed effect of the railroad will be to confirm tourism as a “pillar industry” for the Tibet Autonomous Region. According to government figures, 1.8 million tourists visited the Region last year and the railway will boost daily arrivals to 5,000. It is easy to foresee the day when tourists will outnumber the 2 million or so Tibetans in the TAR.

Anticipating the business opportunities, entrepreneurs from eastern China have already opened stores in Lhasa’s Barkhor area to supply visitors with hiking boots, ethnic knick-knacks and a boutique shopping experience within spitting distance of pilgrims prostrating themselves around the Jokhang Temple.

Some people see this as part of a social engineering policy to settle Tibet with Han Chinese. But in fact the traders from the east, like the Han labourers toiling on the city’s building sites and the Sichuan girls who populate the karaoke bars and brothels, are simply hardworking people doing the best they can for themselves. It is not the Communist Party of China that summoned them—any more than it summoned the tourists—but the call of free trade and the force of markets.

Nevertheless, this leaves the great majority of Tibetans on the margins of a development narrative written by others. It is not just that they are ill-equipped to compete with educated, energetic and populous Han, but that in many cases they don’t want to, preferring an “old Asiatic society” that valued sustenance and continuity above sustained growth and an endless quest for modernisation and progress.

Beijing pumps a small fortune into the TAR each year and takes out almost nothing in tax. Although a large slice of the subsidy is spent on maintaining an administrative elite, some of it is also devoted to improving the “quality” of local people. Current promotion of “scientific development” includes, for example, a drive to get more children into school. Yet all too often this in fact boils down to local officials threatening and bullying parents to enrol their kids in order to meet Beijing’s targets. This is hardly the best advertisement for modernisation, and it is hardly conducive to the social stability that Beijing, rightly, sees as a prerequisite for development. Moreover, ethnic resentments may well rise, alongside the receipts from tourism, if the latter are enjoyed mainly by incoming businesses and entrepreneurs.

So what is to be done? Common sense suggests that social stability and “harmony” are likely to be served best by increasing local ownership over development choices—which will increase in some ways as tourism revenues grow.

The prevailing version of regional “autonomy” was created under the command economy and it has become ever less meaningful as the “reform era” has unfolded.

It is now time to renegotiate and reshape that autonomy—not just for the TAR but for all the autonomous regions, prefectures and counties, where the majority of China’s 100 million ethnic minority people are concentrated. For, as our special report on migration among ethnic minorities showed last month, Tibetans are by no means the only minority in China to be left on the margins of mainstream development processes.

Probably there is nothing that can be done to prevent inequality in China getting worse before it becomes better; and there is almost certainly nothing that can be done to maintain ancient cultures intact and unchanged. But the creation of representative political institutions that exercise a meaningful range of powers would likely prove far more effective in combating economic marginalisation than state hand-outs and relief programmes; and greater autonomy might also provide a framework for cultural regeneration rather than annihilation.

Marx was, of course, wrong about India. The British colonialists he so admired did not eradicate the subcontinent’s Indian-ness, and the locomotive did not turn out to be the engine of historical inevitability he perceived it to be. The railroad to Lhasa—a remarkable feat of engineering, completed ahead of schedule with characteristic Chinese state efficiency—need not presage the end of Tibetan-ness either. For China still has a real opportunity to avoid the gross failures of North American and Australian policies towards their own native—and eventually “minority”—populations; and seizing that opportunity would do much allay Asian and global fears of China’s rise.