(TibetanReview.net, Jul31’25) – China’s $167 billion mega-dam in Tibet is more than anything else a tool to assimilate Tibet through economic integration and infrastructure dominance, reinforced by its potential to revive the country’s ailing economy and as a weapon to be unleashed any time the need arises. The fact that the project lies in a seismically active Himalayas, which makes it a huge gamble, is apparently of only secondary concern.
China’s assurance about the safety and, in fact, claimed usefulness for flood-control and so forth, of the world’s biggest ever hydroelectric power dam project at such a fragile yet potently strategic location does not, and cannot, address these concerns, even with a display of full transparency about it.
Lacking the revolutionary credential of Mao Zedong or the economic reform and opening up renown of Deng Xiaoping, President Xi Jinping apparently hopes to be remembered, at least, by this mega project which seems unlikely to be rivaled by any other foreseeable infrastructure project across the world for a long time to come.
The figures for the project are mind-boggling. “How Chinese scientists fought for 74 years to build most powerful dam on Earth – and won,” read a scmp.com headline Jul 28, referring to Premier Li Qiang’s Jul 19 announcement of the launch of the Yarlung Tsanpo’s downstream hydropower project during its groundbreaking ceremony in the Tibetan city of Nyingtri.
It led to a surge in the value of dam-building companies’ stocks and demand for the building materials.
The Yarlung Tsangpo dam in Tibet’s Metog County, which lies just across the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, dwarfs the $37 billion Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power plant by far, also built by China.
It was quietly approved last December, with little public discourse or transparency. Any environmental reviews or relocation strategies have likely been handled behind closed doors, noted the timesnownews.com Jul 30.
The scale of the project can be gauged from the fact that it would use more steel than 116 Empire State Buildings, as Bloomberg has noted. Besides, the dam is estimated to use concrete enough to build a two-lane highway around the Earth five times.
The project’s material demands are staggering, said the timesnownews.com report, noting that it will consume 50 million tons of cement, 6 million tons of steel, 250 million tons of sand and aggregate, 500,000 tons of copper, and hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives.
The question is, is the seismically active Himalayan Tibet equipped to bear such weight, in addition to the sheer amount of water it will store when completed in the 2030s?
NASA scientists have said the Three Gorges Dam has caused a slight slowdown in the Earth’s rotation. Besides, it is suspected to have caused earthquakes and known to have wreaked flood havoc. The dangers from the Yarlung Tsangpo dam are more than three times over, given its Himalayan location.
China’s hydropower project on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet is a bold, high-stakes bet on an old strategy: building big to reignite economic momentum. With deflation fears, a prolonged property crisis, and rising global tensions weighing down the economy, Beijing is turning once again to massive infrastructure as stimulus. For President Xi, the dam isn’t just about energy — it’s a potent tool for state control and furthering his agenda of assimilating Tibet through economic integration, the report said.
The Yarlung Tsangpo project is expected to generate 3 trillion yuan in investment over 10–15 years, around 2.2% of China’s 2024 GDP, surpassing recent stimulus measures like the 2023 mid-year budget revision.
Analysts from Citigroup, ANZ, and Zheshang Securities have been cited to project that the dam could lift China’s annual GDP growth by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points and create as many as 200,000 jobs per year, nearly 2% China’s yearly employment target.
China’s dangerous gamble would be that these economic benefits will at least begin to be realized before a major earthquake hits the project with cataclysmic consequences.
Construction is expected to be in full swing within this year, and once completed, clean energy from Tibet can be “delivered instantly” to the Greater Bay Area, the scmp.com report cited an NDRC (China’s National Development and Reform Commission) report as saying.
The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is a massive city cluster in southern China, encompassing Hong Kong, Macau, and nine cities in Guangdong province: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, and Zhaoqing. This region is a key strategic initiative for China’s development, aiming to integrate these diverse areas into a globally competitive economic and innovation hub.