China's New Wall: Border Villages

Beijing is setting up border villages to shore up its territorial claims on India along the world’s longest disputed frontier

- Sandeep Unnithan

Until 2019, the area just north of Arunachal Pradesh’s Upper Subansiri district had been verdant forest. Last year, a concrete village of 100-odd houses appeared along the sliver of the Tsari Chu river—the neat grey-roofed structures were arranged like rows of white and grey terracotta warriors. Satellite images released this January by US-based private imaging firm Planet Labs showed the new village. The land the village stood on had once been part of India’s North East Frontier Agency (later renamed Arunachal Pradesh) until it was occupied by China in the late 1950s.

Beijing’s explosive growth of military infrastructure—airfields and military bases on the Tibetan plateau—is now only matched by a simultaneous push to settle civilian populations in newly-constructed settlements like the one on the Tsari Chu river. Over the past three years, China has built over 600 ‘Xiaokang’ (well-off) border villages along its nearly 4,000-km-long boundary with India. The new villages dot a swathe of the Tibet Autonomous Region, from Rutok in Ngari Prefecture opposite Ladakh to Rima opposite Kibithu in Arunachal’s Lohit Valley. All of these villages are built in Tibet, which China occupied in 1949. (China does not recognise Arunachal Pradesh as part of India and calls it South Tibet.)