A young Tibetan refugee living in Quebec travels back to her homeland carrying a recorded message from the Dalai Lama, and the film watches Tibetan families gather around a screen, transfixed, to see him. He has been trying to get permission to return home since 1950 and still cannot. Alongside her journey, the film lays out what China has built in Tibet in the meantime: a railway connecting Lhasa to Beijing, the highest such track in the world, plus a network of new highways across the region. Chinese officials describe this as a costly civilizing mission, citing annual subsidies to the Tibetan Autonomous Region that ran around 1 billion yuan, or $270 million, by the late 1980s. The film's argument is that none of this infrastructure has improved daily life for native Tibetans; it has mainly extended the reach of the government building it. The video message and the railway line sit side by side as two versions of what connection to China actually means.