China’s Great Wall of Villages
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
