China’s Great Wall of Villages: China has built over 50 new villages along its western frontiers in recent years, 12 of them in areas claimed by other countries, satellite imagery finds
China’s Great Wall of Villages: China has built over 50 new villages along its western frontiers in recent years, 12 of them in areas claimed by other countries, satellite imagery finds
China has moved thousands of people to new settlements on its frontiers. It calls them “border guardians.”
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In addition to the 50 new villages, China added new homes to 100 other villages, to house even more people.
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These civilian outposts are one way that Beijing is projecting its power abroad and securing its rule at home.
Qionglin New Village sits deep in the Himalayas, just three miles from a region where a heavy military buildup and confrontations between Chinese and Indian troops have brought fears of a border war.
The land was once an empty valley, more than 10,000 feet above the sea, traversed only by local hunters. Then Chinese officials built Qionglin, a village of cookie-cutter homes and finely paved roads, and paid people to move there from other settlements.
**China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calls such people “border guardians.” ** Qionglin’s villagers are essentially sentries on the front line of China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh, India’s easternmost state, which Beijing insists is part of Chinese-ruled Tibet.
Many villages like Qionglin have sprung up. In China’s west, they give its sovereignty a new, undeniable permanence along boundaries contested by India, Bhutan and Nepal. In its north, the settlements bolster security and promote trade with Central Asia. In the south, they guard against the flow of drugs and crime from Southeast Asia.
The buildup is 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.
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The mapping 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, according to Matthew Akester, an independent researcher on Tibet, and Robert Barnett, a professor from SOAS University of London. Mr. Akester and Mr. Barnett, who have studied Tibet’s border villages for years, reviewed The Times’s findings.
The outposts are civilian in nature, but 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.
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The buildup of settlements fuels 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.
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Of the new villages The Times identified in Tibet, one is on land claimed by India, though within China’s de facto border; 11 other settlements are in areas contested by Bhutan. Some of those 11 villages are near the Doklam region, the site of a standoff between troops from India and China in 2017 over Chinese attempts to extend a road.
China makes clear that the villages are there for security. In 2020, a leader of a Tibetan border county told state media that he was relocating more than 3,000 people to frontier areas that were “weakly controlled, disputed or empty.”
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Indian officials have previously noted “infrastructure construction activity” by China along the border. Local leaders in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh have complained to The Times that China was slowly cutting away small pieces of Indian territory.
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Among other findings, the C.S.I.S. [Center for Strategic and International Studies in a] report identified what appeared to be a militarized facility in one such village, known as Migyitun, or Zhari in Chinese, an indication of the settlements’ dual-use nature.
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To persuade residents to move there, Chinese Communist Party officials promised them their new homes would be cheap. They would receive annual subsidies and get paid extra if they took part in border patrols. Chinese propaganda outlets said the government would provide jobs and help promote local businesses and tourism. The villages would come with paved roads, internet connections, schools and clinics.
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Some villagers may be receiving around 20,000 Chinese yuan a year for relocation {according to a government document], less than $3,000. One resident reached by phone said he earned an extra $250 a month by patrolling the border.
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The residents become dependent on the subsidies because there are few other ways to make a living.
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China’s relocation policy is also a form of social engineering, designed to assimilate minority groups like the Tibetans into the mainstream. Tibetans, who are largely Buddhist, have historically resisted the Communist Party’s intrusive controls on their religion and way of life.
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When money isn’t enough, Chinese officials have applied pressure on residents to relocate, an approach that was evident even in state propaganda reports.
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 said.
The official criticized Tenzin for “using his age and religious status to obstruct relocation,” according to 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.
An addition:
Chinese border guards are putting a surveillance app on tourists’ phones (2019)
The spyware: Traders, tourists, and other people crossing the land border from central Asia into Xinjiang are being asked to hand over their phones. Border guards are then loading an app known as Fengcai onto them. This sucks up calendar entries, text messages, phone contacts, and call logs, all of which are then sent to a remote server. It also checks which other apps are on a device. The Fengcai app studied by the reporters was for Android phones, but they also saw guards collect iPhones and plug them into a handheld device.
Content snooping: Security researchers who studied the app found it was also checking phones’ content against a register of over 73,000 items included in a list embedded in the app’s code. Some of the items are things that could be used by terrorists, such as instructions for making weapons and derailing trains.
But the surveillance net is being cast very wide. The list also includes material like books about the Arabic language, audio recordings of the Quran, and even a song by a Japanese band called Unholy Grace, which may have attracted China’s ire when it came out with a track called “Taiwan: Another China.”
The idea of going to native Tibetan people, after you've already successfully stolen their country, and removing them from their fertile homeland by force so they can serve as your border guards while you encroach on surrounding terrotories... so evil in so many ways.
But China has accrued enough power and land in this way already, it doesn't seem like anyone is going to take the risk to stand up to them. Not until they make a move on their target, but as a nation with massive amounts of resources unlike Russia's feeble attempt to take Ukraine.
We've thawed out after the cold war and everyone feels somewhat confident none of us want nukes on the table no matter what happens, so some of the warring nations have poked their heads out and begun slowly ramping up to see how hot they can get without causing a big reaction from the superpower across the sea.
The way China's "communist" authoritarianism allows them to just move people around and command them at will, like a person playing Risk, is super scary to see in action. I feel safe here, but I am massively afraid for my fellow humans in Taiwan.
Well, it worked for Israel, right?