LHASA, TIBET - All along the immaculately-built highway from Lhasa's airport to its city centre, big red billboards dot the vast, uninhabited plains backed by a mighty mountain range draped in the bluest of skies.

About every 200m, slogans in large bold yellow Chinese characters and smaller Tibetan script underneath them shout out for the people of this land to obey the Communist Party of China (CPC) and build a "united, wealthy, civilised and harmonious new socialist and modernised Tibet".