China Strengthens Territorial Claim With Villages Seen From Space

China has strengthened its territorial claims against India in recent years by constructing new settlements along their disputed border, with the dozens of concrete structures likely to be put to use by the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

The two Asian giants fought a bloody border war in 1962 over the disputed 2,100-mile Line of Actual Control. In the past three years, however, fresh clashes have been reported at both ends of the LAC as they tussle over otherwise inhospitable strategic ground in the Himalayas.

In an area known as the Nagdoh bowl, roughly 2.2 miles from the border with India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, China has consolidated its presence by building so-called "xiaokang" villages. The phrase means "moderately prosperous," borrowed directly from Chinese leader Xi Jinping's former development goal for the country.

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Newsweek's analysis of imagery from Sinergise's Sentinel Hub website, captured by the Sentinel-2 satellite of the European Union's Copernicus Earth observation program, showed the sprawling network of villages growing in the border city of Nyingchi, in China's southwestern Tibet region, since late 2020.

The satellite photographs showed one red-roofed settlement in the area existing as far back as 2017, before dozens more buildings, all with dark roofs, emerged alongside a field and running track. The three dual-use settlements of mixed civilian and military infrastructure were said to be occupied by local cattle herders, according to Chinese state media.

China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of southern Tibet. One year ago, PLA troops and members of the Indian Army fought at a placed called Yangtse in the Tawang region of the Indian state. It was another melee with fists and handheld weapons instead of firearms—part of a long-running understanding between the two sides.

Xi has repeatedly called on the PLA to defend the country's border at all costs. The harder line on territorial integrity has become the driving force behind Beijing's regional security calculus as well as its long-term defense planning.

"Border defense work is a major event in the governance of the country," China's president said in June during an inspection of the Inner Mongolia region in the country's north. Holding Chinese territory is key to "the construction of a strong country and the great cause of national rejuvenation," he said.

But Arunachal Pradesh is integral to India, too.

Subject-matter experts in the country say China's xiaokang villages are a "gray-zone" tactic, a quasi-military move that deliberately falls short of the threshold of war. Policymakers in New Delhi have been warned that the new settlements could be used to secretly house garrisons, and to launch offenses into Indian land.

"Chinese efforts to strengthen its claims in the area have led Beijing to adopt new ways and means: building xiaokang 'model' villages in strategic areas, renaming places, and issuing new border laws that India sees as giving more legal cover to its forces," Amrita Jash, an assistant professor at India's Manipal Academy of Higher Education, wrote in an October report for the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Advanced Study of India.

After last year's melee in Yangtse—6.2 miles west of the Nagdoh bowl where Beijing's three xiaokang villages are located—officials in New Delhi accused a Chinese patrol of an incursion into Indian territory.

Rajnath Singh, India's defense minister, told his country's lawmakers that PLA troops had "tried to transgress the LAC" and "unilaterally change the status quo." The Indian Army responded "in a firm and resolute manner," Singh said.

Beijing, however, said it was Indian troops who had crossed into China's southern border instead.

"The patrol was blocked by the Indian Army illegally crossing the line. We dealt with it professionally and effectively and stabilized the situation on the ground," Col. Long Shaohua, a spokesperson for the PLA's Western Theater Command, said at the time.

"We ask the Indian side to strictly control and restrain its front-line troops, and work with China to maintain peace and tranquility on the border," Long said.

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In an op-ed that month, L. Nishikanta Singh, a retired lieutenant general of the Indian Army, identified Tsong Dzong, roughly 10 miles north of the Nagdoh bowl, as a PLA regimental base, from which Chinese soldiers had mobilized for the clash.

It was the second such major incident after the June 2020 clash in the Galwan Valley of India's Ladakh region, on the western end of the LAC, where 20 Indian soldiers and at least four PLA soldiers died.

In Yangtse, the Indian Army commands a strategic advantage thanks to its occupation of the region's high ground. But the PLA wants to change the reality on the ground through permanent presence in the xiaokang villages near the border.

"Yangtse's importance lies in the fact that we can get a very good view of what is going on in the Nagdoh bowl. And…it is the fulcrum of the Chinese activities in the area opposite Tawang," Singh said.

China is attempting to tip the scales in another way—lawfare in the public domain. Chinese users of open-source mapping software like Sentinel Hub are tweaking labels and adding place names in a subtle tactic that some have dubbed "cartographic aggression."

In 2021, mapmaker Nick Doiron noticed that Chinese contributors on the OpenStreetMap platform had extend Beijing's territorial claims by adding Chinese map nomenclature to contested locations, from the border with India to the South China Sea.

On Sentinel Hub, at the site of Nagdoh bowl, a line of Chinese text now refers to the area as part of "the motherland."

The Indian government has not officially acknowledged China's xiaokang villages north of the border, but there is little doubt it is paying attention.

This past April, India's Home Minister Amit Shah defied Beijing's protests to visit Arunachal Pradesh, where a newly built village called Kibithoo—just 7 miles from the LAC—is seen as an effort to counter Beijing's settlement program nearby.

New Delhi has allocated over half a billion dollars in funds to ensure the remote area remains connected to the rest of the country.

The Indian and Chinese defense ministries did not immediately return Newsweek's separate written requests for comment.