(TibetanReview.net, Dec18’24) – Yet another report confirms that China has made significant encroachments into Bhutanese territory over the past eight years, building more than 20 villages and posing strategic threats to India as well. The development is seen as aimed at building pressure on Bhutan to draw it away from India’s sphere of influence and towards China.
China has built at least 22 villages and settlements over the past eight years within territory that has traditionally been part of Bhutan, with eight villages coming up in areas in proximity to the strategic Doklam plateau since 2020, reported the hindustantimes.com Dec 18, citing satellite imagery.
The report said the eight villages in Bhutan’s western sector, close to Doklam, are all strategically located in a valley or a ridge overlooking a valley that China claims, and several are close to Chinese military outposts or bases.
Observers and researchers have noted that Jiwu, the largest of these villages, is built on a traditional Bhutanese pastureland known as Tshethangkha, also located in the western sector.
The location of these villages is said to have alarmed China watchers in New Delhi, especially since the strengthening of the Chinese position in this strategic region could increase the vulnerability of the Siliguri Corridor, or the so-called “chicken’s neck”, a narrow stretch of land connecting India’s mainland to its northeastern states.
In 2017, New Delhi intervened to prevent the construction of a road and other facilities at Doklam that would have given China access to the southern-most part of the plateau. It resulted in a 73-day standoff between Indian and Chinese troops.
It ended with frontline forces of both sides pulling back from the region without any incident. However, satellite images from recent years have shown stepped-up Chinese construction activity around Doklam, the report said.
China’s building of so-called moderately well-off villages or otherwise border security villages have continued to be reported, including by the New York Times, after Bhutanese authorities have denied the presence of Chinese settlements on Bhutan’s territory. The then prime minister Lotay Tshering created a flutter when he told a Belgian newspaper in 2023 that the Chinese facilities “are not in Bhutan”, the report noted.
The report cited Robert Barnett, research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), as saying that since 2016, when China first built a village in territory understood to be part of Bhutan, Chinese authorities had completed 22 villages and settlements consisting of an estimated 2,284 residential units and relocated almost 7,000 people to previously unpopulated areas of Bhutan.
Barnett’s report, “Forceful Diplomacy: China’s cross-border villages in Bhutan”, was cited a saying China had annexed about 825 sq km “that was formerly within Bhutan”, constituting little more than 2% of the country’s territory.
China was also stated to have moved an unknown number of officials, construction workers, border police and military personnel into these villages. All the villages are reportedly linked by roads to Chinese towns.
The building of seven settlements since early 2023 was stated to signal “a marked increase in the speed and extent of construction in the annexed areas”, with three villages being set to be upgraded to towns.
According to Barnett, China’s objectives in Bhutan’s western sector “have been focused on acquiring and securing the Doklam plateau and adjoining areas”.
Ashok Kantha, India’s envoy to Beijing during 2014-16 and an honorary fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, has said China’s construction of villages within Bhutanese territory amounted to a violation of the agreement signed by the two countries in Dec 1998 on peace and tranquillity in border areas.
The villages, he has said, are part of a pattern of China “changing facts on the ground incrementally and systematically”. This is similar to the pattern in the South China Sea, where China created artificial features and militarised them.
“The Bhutanese are not in a position to challenge them because of the power asymmetry,” he has said.
“This is all part of China’s characteristic of pursuing its claims while disregarding past commitments and the position of other countries, and getting away with it,” Kantha has said. “For us, it matters because it is in a sensitive area close to the Siliguri Corridor.”
“In the long term, the larger issue is whether China’s use of extreme pressure – or more precisely, force – will succeed in pushing Bhutan away from India’s sphere of influence and into that of Beijing. It now seems Bhutan has already had to give up significant territory to China, and that India was unable to help prevent that,” Barnett has said.