China has constructed villages inside the territory of Bhutan, according to a report in Foreign Policy by Robert Barnett, a writer and researcher on modern Tibetan history and politics on May 7.
According to the FP, China is building three villages. “66 miles of new roads, a small hydropower station, two Communist Party administrative centres, a communications base, a disaster relief warehouse, five military or police outposts, and what are believed to be a major signals tower, a satellite receiving station, a military base, and up to six security sites and outposts,” the report says.
All the stations are in Gyalaphug and within Bhutan borders.
FP further states, “China’s multilevel construction drive within Bhutan has gone almost completely unnoticed by the outside world.”
China had announced the completion of new village construction at Gyalaphug in Tibetan or Jieluobu in the Southern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in early May.
In October 2015, China had announced that a new village called Gyalaphug in Tibetan or Jieluobu in Chinese had been established in the south of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
The Communist Party Secretary of the TAR, Wu Yinjie, travelled across 14,000 feet high passes to visit this new village. There he told to all residents who are Tibetans to “put down roots like Kalsang flowers in the borderland of land snows” and to “raise the bright five-star red flag high,” in April 2020.
News of the village construction was published in Tibetan newspaper but not outside China. The pictures of new villages built shown on local TV channels seemed no different.
China occupying ‘beyul’, the hidden valleys that the “second Buddha” Padmasambhava designated in the 8th century CE as spiritual refuges in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, the CCP gave a powerful signal of their intentions to keep Tibetan Buddhism under the Party’s control.
Bhutan and China do not have strong diplomatic relations. In April this year, however, the 10th Expert Group Meeting (EGM) on Bhutan-China Boundary was held in Kunming, China.
The delegations discussed several issues, including a roadmap to expedite the Bhutan-China boundary talks. The two sides agreed to continue maintaining peace and tranquillity in the border areas, pending a final settlement of the boundary issue.
Robert Barnett reports Gyalaphug is in Bhutan and Wu and retinue officials, police and journalists had crossed an international border. The 232-square-mile area claimed by China since the early 1980s are internationally understood as part of the Lhuentse district in northern Bhutan. The report states “The Chinese officials were visiting to celebrate their success, unnoticed by the world, in planting settlers, security personnel, and military infrastructure within territory internationally and historically understood to be Bhutanese.”
The new construction is reflected as a part of a major drive by the Chinese President Xi Jinping since 2017 to fortify the Tibetan borderlands, a dramatic escalation in China’s long-run efforts to outmanoeuvre India and its neighbours along their Himalayan frontiers. “In this case, China doesn’t need the land it is settling in Bhutan: Its aim is to force the Bhutanese government to cede territory that China wants elsewhere in Bhutan to give Beijing a military advantage in its struggle with New Delhi,” it stated.
This strategy by the Chinese is understood as provocative in the foreign land and it violates the terms of the Sino-Bhutan treaty. “It also ignores decades of protests to Beijing by the Bhutanese about far smaller infractions elsewhere on the borders. By mirroring in the Himalayas the provocative tactics it has used in the South China Sea, Beijing is risking its relations with its neighbours, whose needs and interests it has always claimed to respect, and jeopardizing its reputation worldwide,” FP stated.