The People's Republic of China today withdrew its request for funds for the embattled "China Western Poverty Reduction Project" from the World Bank, amidst a storm of international criticism linked to China's occupation of Tibet.

The World Bank today dropped plans to fund the China Western Poverty Reduction Project, which would have moved 58,000 Chinese farmers into Tibet's Amdo Province. The move comes after fifteen months of intense campaigning by a broad international coalition of human rights organizations, Tibet support groups, environmental organizations and Bank-watching groups to stop the controversial project.

The project would have facilitated China's continuing population transfer efforts, which have already made Tibetans a minority in much of their own nation and continue to erode Tibetan culture.

Public scrutiny focused on the Bank's Tibet Resettlement Project, along with an Inspection Panel report detailing policy violations associated with the project have raised serious issues of systemic problems at the World Bank. Inadequate environmental assessment, epidemic project miscategorization, insufficient consultation with local peoples, lack of transparency, and overuse of resettlement as a means to alleviate poverty are all issues that the Bank must now address in the wake of what became one of the biggest public relations disasters in the history of the Bank.

The cancellation of the Bank's China Western Poverty Reduction Project is the latest in a series of campaigns that have frustrated China's attempts to generate western capital to fund it's destructive policies in Tibet. Amidst tremendous controversy, China's flagship state-owned oil company, PetroChina, limped onto the New York Stock Exchange in April, raising $7 billion less than initially projected. In May, BP Amoco announced that it was no longer considering any joint ventures with PetroChina related to extraction of gas resources in Tibet's Tsaidam Basin.

"It is getting very expensive and embarrassing for China to maintain their occupation of Tibet," said John Hocevar, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet. "Tibetans, students, and supporters of human rights worldwide are going to keep turning up the pressure until Tibet is free."

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