High in the mist-shrouded Himalayas, a winding mountain road opens to a clearing in the pine forested valley, revealing rows of uniform Tibetan-style houses, each topped with a Chinese flag. Construction is booming in this remote place. Piles of logs and other building materials line the road. On a nearby hillside, cranes tower over rising housing blocks.
“They are building resettlement houses here,” says the Chinese travel vlogger who captured these scenes last year, speaking into his phone on a roadside. “When people live and settle here, it undeniably confirms that this is our country’s territory.” But the village – known as Demalong and formally founded in March last year with a community of 70 families, according to a government notice seen in the footage – is not only located in territory claimed by the world’s ascendent superpower. It is one of a string of Chinese settlements that also fall well within the border shown on official maps of Bhutan – a Buddhist kingdom of fewer than 1 million people that’s never agreed on a formal international border with China.
For centuries, herders looking for summer pastures were the main presence in this harsh and inhospitable region some 14,000 feet (4,200 meters) above sea level in the eastern Himalayas. But now, there is a growing population as the Chinese government incentivizes hundreds of people to settle there from across Tibet, the region of China that borders Bhutan. Those settlements show another, quieter front in China’s expanding efforts to assert its control over disputed, peripheral territories – also playing out in the South and East China Seas – as Chinese leader Xi Jinping seeks to bolster national security and enhance China’s position over its rivals.
Bhutan and China have been holding yet-unresolved border talks for decades. Looming in the backdrop of those discussions is India, China’s biggest regional rival and Bhutan’s close diplomatic ally. The nuclear-armed neighbors have previously gone to war and more recently engaged in a series of skirmishes over their disputed 2,100-mile (3,379-kilometer) border, which straddles Bhutan – and, in Beijing’s eyes, makes the small Himalayan nation all the more critical to its national security.
CNN has reviewed satellite images provided by Earth data company Planet Labs, as well as Chinese government notices, state media reports, and social media footage, which together reveal extensive development in a valley China calls the Jigenong, or Jakarlung in Tibetan. Locations of the construction were provided to CNN by modern Tibet studies expert Robert Barnett of SOAS University of London. CNN has geolocated four officially named villages and a fifth settlement using satellite images and videos in state and social media. A comparison of China’s official map of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Bhutan’s national map published in its 2023 Statistical Yearbook show this development is located in territory claimed by both countries.
Source: CNN
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