(TibetanReview.net, Nov01, 2017) – China has on Oct 31 denied as “false and untrue” a media report suggesting that it may be planning to build a 1,000- km long tunnel to divert waters from the transnational Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet to Xinjiang, insisting that it attached great importance to cross-border river cooperation.
“This is untrue. This is a false report,” India’s PTI news agency Oct 31 quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying as telling a media briefing when asked about the report.
China will continue to attach great importance to cross- border river cooperation, she was cited as saying.
Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post had on Oct 30 reported that Chinese engineers were testing techniques that could be used to build the tunnel, the world’s longest, in an ongoing project in Yunnan Province and that a proposal had been submitted to Beijing in March.
It cited one expert as saying he was expecting approval for the Tibet-Xinjiang project in five to 10 years.
Beijing has for long been assuring downstream countries India and Bangladesh that the dams it was building in Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo river were not designed to store water.
Chinese state experts who had submitted the Tibet-Xinjiang water tunnel proposal have been cited as saying the project would turn the desert wasteland of Xinjiang into something resembling the sprawling agricultural region of California.