China is busy planning a treacherous mega project that could emerge as a critical new battlefield among three armed nuclear states and potentially impact the entire planet.
While the West concentrates on responding to increasingly aggressive Chinese naval activity in the South China Sea, Beijing is covertly active elsewhere. Far from prying eyes, high in the Himalayan Mountains on the Tibetan plateau bordering India, China is prepping to create a mega project that, if completed, will likely serve as ground zero for the world’s worst ecological and geopolitical disaster. The area is so pristine and remote that the first, year-round, road into the region was built only eight years ago.
China’s President, Xi Jinping, is vying for the jugular in an attempt to control Asia, and indirectly the rest of the world. His infrastructure plan could impact, without employing much hyperbole, everyone. Ask what is critical to life and also extremely limited in Asia. It’s drinking water and the nutrients carried in river sediment that create the fertile Asian agricultural plains. The headwaters of the Himalayan Mountains serve to moderate monsoonal flooding, too, downstream.
The mountains provide water supporting 47% of the world’s population. The Himalayan ice deposits support major tributaries, including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmanputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. Chinese scientists and politicians are considering building the world’s largest mega dam with more than three times the hydropower output of Three Gorges Dam, the greatest now in existence. When China completed in 2006, Three Gorges was the largest dam ever built and an ecological and historical disaster, wiping out hundreds of thousands of homes and irreplaceable historical sites. It displaced between 1.3-1.9 million Chinese people.
To put it in perspective, Three Gorges is so large that NASA calculated it slowed the rotation of the earth by .06 milliseconds. The new Himalayan Motuo Hydropower Station, as proposed, would bore a tunnel through two of the highest Himalayan Mountains to divert water from the Brahmanputra and Yarlung Tsanpo Rivers, which drop over 1.24 miles in elevation in a short distance. China would use the elevation change to create immense hydropower. The river canyon at the proposed site is three times as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States at 17,388 feet and the world’s longest at over 310 miles in length. It also is identified by ecologists as a biodiversity hotspot.
Contestation over the region dates back to the 18th and 19th century when British soldiers pressed northward and the Qing bureaucrats from China pressed southward into what the dynasty called Zangnan, or southern Tibet. The region was later seized by China in the 1950’s. India has disputed the border since that period with minor skirmishes popping up from time to time. More recently China began sending troops into the area again, remilitarizing what had been a negotiated calm.
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Given Chinese President Xi Jinping’s desire to create a lasting legacy as a world leader who is as powerful as Mao himself, analysts must consider how China could use the proposed Motuo Hydropower Station to cement Xi’s global ambitions. Controlling the water supply supporting 47% of the world’s population certainly lends credence to Xi’s repetitive statements that he intends to “remake the world in China’s image.” India justifiably fears China will weaponize the water and hurt its population and the region’s fragile ecologies. Both countries are nuclear armed states. No one knows how far China will go to dominate the subcontinent or how India will respond if China curtails the flow of water.
Violent fights over water rights are not new: from ownership of Nile Basin water resources to disputed irrigation plans for the Euphrates-Tigris Bain shared by Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Given China’s predilection for aggressive, long-term planning and action, the slow violence of state-building and militarization of water redistribution in the Himalayan Mountains cannot be overlooked simply due to the remoteness of its headwaters or the lack of transparency by the Chinese government planners. On the Chinese side of the border Beijing is building military-grade roads and state-of-the-art railroads that cross permafrost. Its competitive territorialization of the region disregards the transboundary ecological systems and the billions of humans living downstream. If Xi Jinping decides to weaponize water, the whole world will pay a high price, not just those in the lower reaches.
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.
Photo: Tibet Discovery.com