(TibetanReview.net, Aug14’24) – China has moved thousands of people to new settlements on its frontiers, including in Tibet near the borders with India, Nepal and Bhutan, and elsewhere, calling them “border guardians.” But their economic viability is highly questionable with the residents being dependent mostly on government subsidies and welfare, while some get paid a bit for border security-related jobs, according to a nytimes.com report Aug 10.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calls such people “border guardians” and the villagers are essentially sentries on the country’s front line. And the villages set up along Tibet’s border give China’s sovereignty a new, undeniable permanence along boundaries contested by India, Bhutan and Nepal, the report noted.
The build-up is seen as the clearest sign that Mr Xi is using civilian settlements to quietly solidify China’s control in far-flung frontiers, just as he has with fishing militias and islands in the disputed South China Sea. The report has worked with the artificial intelligence company RAIC Labs, which scanned satellite images of China’s entire land border captured by Planet Labs, to arrive at its findings.
Mapping through use of satellite images and comparing them with historical records 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, the report said, citing Matthew Akester, an independent researcher on Tibet, and Robert Barnett, a professor from SOAS University of London. Both have studied Tibet’s border villages for years.
While the outposts are civilian in nature, they also provide China’s military with roads, access to the internet and power, should it want to move troops quickly to the border. Villagers serve as eyes and ears in remote areas, discouraging intruders or runaways, the report noted.
The build-up of settlements has fuelled anxiety in the region about Beijing’s ambitions. The threat of conflict is ever present: Deadly clashes have broken out along the border between troops from India and China since 2020, and tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides remain on a war footing, the report noted

Of the new villages the report has identified in Tibet, one is stated to be on land claimed by India, though within China’s de facto border, and 11 other settlements are in areas contested by Bhutan. Some of those 11 villages are stated to be near the Doklam region, the site of a prolonged standoff between troops from India and China in 2017 over Chinese attempts to extend a road.
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A local government document reviewed by the report was stated to indicate that some villagers may be receiving around 20,000 Chinese yuan a year for relocation, less than $3,000. Besides, one resident reached by phone has said he earned an extra $250 a month by patrolling the border.
Still, it remains unclear whether the villages make economic sense. The residents become dependent on the subsidies because there are few other ways to make a living, Mr Akester, the independent expert, has said.
Over the years, the government has pushed many nomadic Tibetans to sell their yaks and sheep, leave the grasslands and move into houses, but often without clear ways for them to survive. Instead of herding, residents have to work for wages, the report noted.
“The major problem is they are moving them from one lifestyle to another,” Barnett has said. “They end up with no capital, no usable skills, no sellable skills and no cultural familiarity.”
Residents were thus seen to have been forced to relocate, to be reduced to living in poverty. A documentary aired by the state broadcaster, CCTV, showed how a Chinese official went to Dokha, a village in Tibet, to persuade residents to move to a new village called Duolonggang, 10 miles from Arunachal Pradesh.
He encountered some resistance. Tenzin, a lay Buddhist practitioner, insisted that Dokha’s land was fertile, producing oranges and other fruit. “We can feed ourselves without government subsidies,” he has said.
The official criticized Tenzin for “using his age and religious status to obstruct relocation,” the report said, citing a state media article cited by Human Rights Watch in a report.
In the end, all 143 residents of Dokha moved to the new settlement, the report added.
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Brahma Chellaney, a strategic affairs analyst based in New Delhi, has said that in quietly building militarized villages in disputed borderlands, China is replicating on land an expansionist approach that it has used successfully in the South China Sea.
“What stands out is the speed and stealth with which China is redrawing facts on the ground, with little regard for the geopolitical fallout,” Chellaney has said. “China has been planting settlers in whole new stretches of the Himalayan frontier with India and making them its first line of defence.”
Also, the villages serve as propaganda: a display of Chinese strength and superiority in the region, Jing Qian, co-founder of the Center for China Analysis at the Asia Society, has said.
The relocation policy is also a form of social engineering, designed to assimilate minority groups like the Tibetans into the mainstream. Images from the villages suggest that religious life is largely absent. Buddhist monasteries and temples are seemingly nowhere to be found. Instead, national flags and portraits of Mr. Xi are everywhere, on light poles, living room walls and balcony railings, the report noted.