Analysis: China Building New Villages Along Its Borders
An investigation by the New York Times reveals that China is building scores of new villages along its border with India, Nepal, Vietnam and Myanmar. TaiwanPlus spoke to Robert Barnett, a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, to learn more about these developments.
Transcript
00:00Why is China building new villages along its border?
00:03In about 2010-2012, Chinese scholars who were working on China's northeastern border,
00:10Vietnam in the south and Korea in the northeast,
00:12began to get nervous about the security implications of what they called the hollow village syndrome,
00:21which meant that villagers from border areas were leaving their homes to go and work in town,
00:26something that China has been very much encouraging.
00:30And these scholars said this is a security risk.
00:33This could let people from across the border come into China,
00:36it could spread anti-Chinese ideas and so on.
00:40And by about 2016, Xi Jinping himself had picked up this idea
00:45and started making border security a major issue, particularly for China's Tibet policy.
00:52And so in 2017, the Chinese began this policy of building new villages along the borders of Tibet
01:00and also Xinjiang, Yunnan and other areas as a security measure to strengthen their borders.
01:06Do these villages help China solidify its territorial claim along its border with India?
01:12The villages have some benefit for the military in their dealings with India,
01:18in their operations against India.
01:20They provide some logistical support, some bases for operation,
01:24but actually it's roads that are most important for the military.
01:28And the villages are along roads, but you could have the roads without villages.
01:33So this is why some observers are saying that the villages in terms of India are really a kind of provocation.
01:43They're a kind of psychological, I don't want to say warfare,
01:46but they're a psychological tool.
01:50Is there a parallel between China's border villages and Beijing's islands
01:54constructed in the disputed South China Sea?
01:57They refer to this as salami slicing, which is what happens in the South China Seas.
02:03You progress by a very small move at a time so that the other side can't justify a military response.
02:10It's not quite the same on the India border
02:13because they're not really so much about grabbing territory with these villages.