India must rethink strategy against China’s expansion

In 2015, China announced that a new village, called Gyalaphug in Tibetan or Jieluobu in Chinese, had been constructed in the southern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). A recently published investigative Foreign Policy report by Robert Barnett explains, however, that Gyalaphug is within Bhutanese territory.

China has been quietly expanding its territorial reach throughout South Asia to maximize power and to constrain India’s role as the status quo power in the region.

Moreover, as India continues to be ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, its preoccupation with containing that disease has provided China with a golden opportunity to alter the region’s geopolitical architecture discreetly but effectively. Thus New Delhi must recalibrate its national and regional policies to address the deepening fault lines in South Asia.

In April 2020, the Communist Party secretary of the TAR, Wu Yingjie, visited the new village. He told the Tibetan residents to “raise the bright five-star red flag high.” Unreported outside China, the visit was filmed and broadcast on local television channels, making it seem that the construction of the village was just a normal activity within the recognized borders of China.

However, the fact is China was placing settlers, security personnel, and military infrastructure in territory internationally recognized as inside Bhutan.