India-China border: China's great wall of villages

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

China has put at least one village near every accessible Himalayan pass that borders India, as well as on most of the passes bordering Bhutan and Nepal, the New York Times has reported. China has moved thousands of people to new settlements on its frontiers. It calls them “border guardians.”

The New York Times mapped and analyzed settlements along China’s border to create the first detailed visual representatio n of how the country has reshaped its frontiers with strategic civilian outposts, in just eight years.

Working with the artificial intelligence company RAIC Labs, which scanned satellite images of China’s entire land border captured by Planet Labs, The Times identified the locations of new villages and checked them against historical images, state media, social media posts and public records.

The mapping reveals that China has put at least one village near every accessible Himalayan pass that borders India, as well as on most of the passes bordering Bhutan and Nepal, according to Matthew Akester, an independent researcher on Tibet, and Robert Barnett, a professor from SOAS University of London. Mr. Akester and Mr. Barnett, who have studied Tibet’s border villages for years, reviewed The Times’s findings.

Of the new villages The Times identified in Tibet, one is on land claimed by India, though within China’s de facto border; 11 other settlements are in areas contested by Bhutan. Some of those 11 villages are near the Doklam region, the site of a standoff between troops from India and China in 2017 over Chinese attempts to extend a road.

On May 16, 2024, Chinapower.csis.org reported that China is upgrading dual-use villages along its disputed Indian border.

The Chinapower wrote that in the desolate and inhospitable Himalayas, China is constructing and expanding hundreds of “xiaokang”  villages along its hotly disputed border with India.1These villages, often accompanied by military and dual-use infrastructure, are an important “gray zone” tool enabling China to assert and defend its claims near disputed areas. Commercial satellite images provide a glimpse into China’s activities and show that China is making rapid and significant progress on these border villages despite the harsh environment.

In July 2017, the government of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region announced plans to construct hundreds of border villages and accompanying infrastructure as part of a major push to develop China’s remote border regions. Between 2018 and 2022, the region reportedly built 624 villages, and work has continued on additional villages. Many of these are clustered along the eastern sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the de facto border separating China and India. The eastern sector borders Arunachal Pradesh, a state administered by India but largely claimed by China as “South Tibet.”

China is not alone in developing infrastructure along the border. Alarmed by China’s border buildup, India also  launched its own program to build villages in Arunachal Pradesh and other border states. However, China has demonstrated an enormous capacity to develop these regions, and India will find it challenging to keep pace with China.

Earlier in November 2021, India Today reported that Beijing’s explosive growth of military infrastructure—airfields and military bases on the Tibetan plateau—is now only matched by a simultaneous push to settle civilian populations in newly-constructed settlements like the one on the Tsari Chu river. Over the past three years, China has built over 600 ‘Xiaokang’ (well-off) border villages along its nearly 4,000-km-long boundary with India. The new villages dot a swathe of the Tibet Autonomous Region, from Rutok in Ngari Prefecture opposite Ladakh to Rima opposite Kibithu in Arunachal’s Lohit Valley. All of these villages are built in Tibet, which China occupied in 1949. (China does not recognise Arunachal Pradesh as part of India and calls it South Tibet.)

‘Some of these villages were built despite ongoing diplomatic and military dialogues to reduce border tensions with India’, noted the Pentagon’s annual report on China’s military development to the Congress, released on November 4. The report said the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ‘has continued taking incremental and tactical actions to press its claims at the LAC (Line of Actual Control)’. It highlighted the ‘large 100-home civilian village’ (on the Tsari Chu) located ‘inside disputed territory between the PRC’s Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern sector of LAC’.
 

HEADLINES

 The Journal of America Team:

 Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott

Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab