{"id":63041,"date":"2021-03-10T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2021-03-10T00:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=63041"},"modified":"2021-03-10T11:00:12","modified_gmt":"2021-03-10T00:00:12","slug":"beijing-replicates-its-south-china-sea-tactics-in-the-himalayas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/beijing-replicates-its-south-china-sea-tactics-in-the-himalayas\/","title":{"rendered":"Beijing replicates its South China Sea tactics in the Himalayas"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Emboldened by its cost-free expansion<\/a> in the South China Sea, Chinese President Xi Jinping\u2019s regime has stepped up efforts to replicate that model in the Himalayas. In particular, China is aggressively building many new villages in disputed borderlands to extend or consolidate its control over strategically important areas that India, Bhutan and Nepal maintain fall within their national boundaries.<\/p>\n

Underscoring the strategic implications of China\u2019s drive to populate these desolate, uninhabited border areas is its major build-up<\/a> of new military facilities there. The new installations range from electronic-warfare stations and air-defence sites to underground ammunition depots.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s militarised village-building spree has renewed the regional spotlight on Xi\u2019s expansionist strategy at a time when, despite a recent disengagement<\/a> in one area, tens of thousands of its troops remain locked in multiple standoffs with Indian forces. Recurrent skirmishing began last May after India discovered to its alarm that Chinese forces had stealthily occupied<\/a> mountaintops and other strategic vantage points in its northernmost Ladakh borderlands.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s newly built border villages in the Himalayas are the equivalent of its artificially created islands in the South China Sea, whose geopolitical map Xi\u2019s regime has redrawn without firing a shot. Xi\u2019s regime advanced its South China Sea expansionism through asymmetrical or hybrid warfare<\/a>, waged below the threshold of overt armed conflict. This approach blends conventional and irregular tactics with small incremental territorial encroachments (or \u2018salami slicing\u2019), psychological manipulation, disinformation, lawfare, and coercive diplomacy.<\/p>\n

Now China is applying that playbook<\/a> in the Himalayan borderlands. The Hong Kong\u2013based South China Morning Post<\/em>, citing<\/a> a Chinese government document, recently reported that China intends to build 624 border villages in disputed Himalayan areas. In the name of \u2018poverty alleviation\u2019, the Chinese Communist Party is callously uprooting Tibetan nomads and forcing them to settle in artificial new border villages in isolated, high-altitude areas. The CCP has also sent ethnic Han Chinese party members to such villages to serve as resident overseers.<\/p>\n

Creating a dispute where none previously existed is usually China\u2019s first step toward asserting a territorial claim, before it furtively tries to seize the coveted area. Xi\u2019s regime frequently uses civilian militias in the vanguard of such a strategy.<\/p>\n

So, just as China has employed flotillas of coastguard-backed civilian fishing boats for expansionist forays in the South and East China Seas, it has been sending herders and graziers ahead of regular army troops into desolate Himalayan border areas to foment disputes and then assert control. Such an approach has enabled it to nibble away<\/a> at Himalayan territories, one pasture at a time.<\/p>\n

In international law, a territorial claim must be based on continuous and peaceful<\/a> exercise of sovereignty over the territory concerned. Until now, China\u2019s Himalayan claims have been anchored in a \u2018might makes right\u2019 approach that seeks to extend<\/a> its annexation of Tibet to neighbouring countries\u2019 borderlands. By building new border villages and relocating people there, China can now invoke international law in support of its claims. Effective control is an essential condition of a strong territorial claim<\/a> in international law. Armed patrols don\u2019t prove effective control, but settlements do.<\/p>\n

The speed and stealth with which China has been changing the facts on the ground in the Himalayas, with little regard for the geopolitical fallout, also reflects other considerations. Border villages, for example, will constrain the opposing military\u2019s use of force while aiding Chinese intelligence gathering and cross-frontier operations.<\/p>\n

Satellite images<\/a> show how rapidly such villages have sprouted up, along with extensive new roads and military facilities. The Chinese government recently justified constructing a new village inside the sprawling Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh by saying<\/a> it \u2018never recognised\u2019 Indian sovereignty over that region. And China\u2019s territorial encroachments have not spared one of the world\u2019s smallest countries, Bhutan, or even Nepal, which has a pro-China communist government.<\/p>\n

China conceived its border-village program after Xi called on<\/a> Tibetan herdsmen in 2017 to settle in frontier areas and \u2018become guardians of Chinese territory.\u2019 Xi said in his appeal that, \u2018without peace in the territory, there will be no peaceful lives for millions of families.\u2019 But Xi\u2019s \u2018poverty alleviation\u2019 program in Tibet, which has steadily gained momentum since 2019, has centred on cynically relocating the poor to neighbouring countries\u2019 territories.<\/p>\n

The echoes of China\u2019s maritime expansionism extend to the Himalayan environment. Xi\u2019s island building in the South China Sea has \u2018caused severe harm to the coral reef environment,\u2019 according to an international arbitral tribunal<\/a>. Likewise, China\u2019s construction of villages and military facilities in the borderlands threatens to wreak havoc on the ecologically fragile Himalayas, which are the source of Asia\u2019s great rivers. Environmental damage is already apparent on the once-pristine Doklam Plateau, claimed by Bhutan, which China has transformed into a heavily militarised zone since seizing it in 2017.<\/p>\n

Indian army chief Manoj Naravane recently claimed<\/a> that China\u2019s salami-slicing tactics \u2018will not work.\u2019 Yet even an important military power like India is struggling to find effective ways to counter China\u2019s territorial aggrandisement along one of the world\u2019s most inhospitable and treacherous borders.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s bulletless aggression\u2014based on using military-backed civilians to create new facts on the ground\u2014makes defence challenging, because it must be countered without resorting to open combat. Although India has responded with heavy military deployments, Chinese forces remain in control of most of the areas they seized nearly a year ago. So far, China\u2019s strategy is proving just as effective on land as it has been at sea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emboldened by its cost-free expansion in the South China Sea, Chinese President Xi Jinping\u2019s regime has stepped up efforts to replicate that model in the Himalayas. In particular, China is aggressively building many new villages …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":482,"featured_media":63043,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1163,52,69,471],"class_list":["post-63041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-borders","tag-china","tag-india","tag-south-china-sea"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBeijing replicates its South China Sea tactics in the Himalayas | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/beijing-replicates-its-south-china-sea-tactics-in-the-himalayas\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Beijing replicates its South China Sea tactics in the Himalayas | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Emboldened by its cost-free expansion in the South China Sea, Chinese President Xi Jinping\u2019s regime has stepped up efforts to replicate that model in the Himalayas. 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