CHINA AND TIBET

China is a new area for us, and I think if you look 20 years into the future, it will be a key area of focus.

- Peter de Wit, director Shell Gas & Power, Asia-Pacific May 2002

In May 2002, at Shell’s annual shareholders meeting in London, company chairman Phil Watts was confronted by some unhappy activists over Shell’s planned involvement in a major Chinese pipeline project. The proposed "West-East" natural gas pipeline is a $14 billion, 2,600-mile (4,200 km) project that will bring natural gas from the Tarim Basin in China’s far west to the booming economies of Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta. Trouble is, this pipeline, and the well fields that will feed it, will cross or are found within politically-sensitive lands that were once Tibet.

Meanwhile, at the Shell shareholders meeting in May 2002, Phil Watts was asked by one shareholder from east Turkestan, "What gives Shell the right to profit from the destruction of my homeland?" Watts, not answering that particular question directly, said that he had met personally with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Beijing in March and told him that Shell would only enter the venture "if the environ-mental and social dimensions are properly addressed." Watts also said that Shell was in consultation with non-governmental organizations about the project, and was working under a United Nations Development Program agreement to carry out social and environmental impact assessments.

But Alison Reynolds, director of the London-based Free Tibet Campaign, questioned the legitimacy of such assessments, since they would be undertaken in an occupied country and would not reflect the views of the native population. She also warned that the human rights and Tibetan issues surrounding the project presented "a serious threat to Shell’s reputation." But Shell, apparently, thinks otherwise, and appears to have already factored in these risks. In June 2002, Shell was awarded the lead role in the West-East pipeline contract, though bringing in ExxonMobil and Russia’s Gazprom as partners.

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