(TibetanReview.net, Mar10’26) – In order to speed up economic development and strengthen border stability and national defence, China is to build a new, 394-km (245-mile) highway in Xinjiang running parallel to the 1962 Sino-India border war and upgrade the three existing highways running into Tibet over the next five years, reported scmp.com Mar 10, citing China’s new Five-Year Plan.
The highway will link the northern and southern sides of the rugged Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang (East Turkestan), the report said, citing the draft 15th five-year plan China released last week. Ir said the route will run parallel to a strategic road built in the 1970s to improve military mobility following the 1962 Sino-India border war.
Construction of the Dushanzi-Kuqa Highway in central Xinjiang was stated to have begun in September, to be finished in 2032. Once completed, it will allow year-round travel and cut journeys across the Tianshan Mountains to half or a third of the current duration, the report said.
Under the plan, China aims to complete two highways spanning all nine of its land-border provinces, apart from undertaking other constructions along its east coast bordering North Korea and Vietnam.
In Aug 2025, Beijing established the Xinjiang-Tibet Railway Company to oversee the construction of a strategic 1,980-km (1,230 miles) artery between Lhasa in Tibet and Hotan in Xinjiang. Hotan administers the Galwan Valley, the hotly contested area at the centre of the bloody war in 1962 and a deadly clash in 2020 that resulted in months of military stand-off with India and a diplomatic chill between the two Asian powers that only began to thaw last year, the report noted.
Liu Zongyi, director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, has said both economic development and strategic stability were driving China to expand infrastructure in border areas.
“Infrastructure holds significant strategic and economic value,” Liu has said. “In the event of an emergency, personnel and resources could be deployed more quickly to frontier regions, which is crucial for border stability and national defence.”
The report noted that following the mid-2020 Galwan clashes, both Beijing and Delhi significantly ramped up infrastructure construction near border regions.
For example, in 2022, China unveiled plans for a new highway between Tibet’s Lhunze and Xinjiang’s Mazha that will run near disputed areas, such as the Depsang Plains, the Galwan Valley and Hot Springs on the Sino-Tibet border Line of Actual Control (LAC).
And then, in 2024, the Indian government approved a plan to build the 1,637km Arunachal Frontier Highway, which is expected to connect 12 districts and 1,683 villages along the LAC, the report said, citing The Times of India.
The construction pushes themselves have sparked diplomatic tension. In January, India’s external affairs ministry lodged a protest over China’s road construction in Shaksgam Valley, which is administered by China as part of the Kashgar prefecture in Xinjiang but claimed by India.
India called the Chinese construction an “illegal occupation”, while the Chinese foreign ministry responded that the area “belongs to China”, adding that it was “fully justified” in conducting infrastructure construction “on its own territory”. The Shaksgam Valley, historically part of India’s Union Territory of Ladakh, was transferred by Pakistan to China in 1963 under a provisional border agreement.