cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/58410030
The devastated Gyirong border post stands at the heart of China's strategy for south Asia. A railway line, set to become a key link in the Belt and Road Initiative, is planned to pass through here.
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Rescue teams are now widely deployed in Gyirong County in southwestern Tibet, where a major border post was overwhelmed by an avalanche of ice and rock on Wednesday, August 26, resulting so far in 16 deaths, with around 546 people missing on the Chinese side. State television cameras broadcast, hour by hour, the perilous work of firefighters and military personnel, supported by heavy equipment such as excavators, 3D scanners and drones. On Saturday, these devices detected a new lake forming nearby, created by a landslide and at risk of bursting at any moment.
Gyirong is a funnel, with 30% of trade between China and Nepal passing through this location. It serves mainly as an entry point for Chinese goods into Nepal. In 2024, 95% of goods traded were Chinese, including 4,200 electric cars. Its extreme vulnerability has already been demonstrated. In July 2025, floods completely swept away the bridge linking the Gyirong border post to Rasuwa, in Nepal, cutting off all movement of goods and people. Activities resumed on January 1, 2026.
This was again due to a glacial lake outburst, this time in the Tibetan basin of Donglin Zangbo, 15 kilometers upstream from Gyirong. The barrier had formed over just a few days before suddenly bursting. In total, 11 people died and 29 remain missing on both sides of the border. A month after the flooding, according to the International Conferences on Flood Management portal, Nepali and Chinese officials finally met to set up an information-sharing mechanism on flood risks.
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However perilous, this Chinese-Nepali border remains of strategic importance for China under President Xi Jinping. In 2015, an earthquake destroyed the Zhangmu border post, 300 kilometers further east. At the time, that post handled 90% of goods moving between China and Nepal. But the site was built on the mountainside, laid out like a vast terrace and thus vulnerable to landslides. After the earthquake, flows of Chinese goods were redirected to the sea – a 45-day journey through India from the ports of Tianjin or Shenzhen – and by road to Gyirong, at the bottom of a deep canyon, at the confluence of a Tibetan river (Lende Khola) and a Nepali river (Bhote Koshi).
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Urbanization
Gyirong thus became the main logistical hub in Tibet: "Valley floor settlement was allowed to happen organically," said Robbie Barnett, a British Tibetologist and associate scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. According to Barnett, to understand this determination to transform Gyirong, one must look back to Xi's rise to power in November 2012.
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Before Xi, following the riots of March 2008, Chinese policy in Tibet mainly aimed to contain discontent among the Tibetan ethnic population, prioritizing stability. Under Xi, tighter border control was integrated when he declared: "To govern the country well we must first govern the frontiers well, and to govern the frontiers well, we must first ensure stability in Tibet."
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Yet, at the time, China was relatively at peace with its neighbors: "Xi was not facing a serious military threat from India or any other country that borders Tibet," Barnett emphasized. And there were few potential Tibetan asylum seekers, as surveillance was stepped up earlier, in their home villages. "But Xi's dictum nevertheless revolutionized China's Tibet policy, leading from 2017 onwards to the creation of at least 628 'border villages,' with a quarter of a million mostly relocated inhabitants, along the southern borders of Tibet. Each of those villages is officially required to fortify itself in some way as a 'fortress' securing China from the south," he explained. Buildings have been planned in these villages to house military personnel in the event of a mobilization.
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Extreme constraints
Chinese strategists concentrate all flows, and thus Chinese influence, on what they call "corridors" – routes where Chinese-built infrastructure is designed to facilitate trade and movement toward the south. As Barnett explained, "those corridors, perhaps surprisingly, are not aimed primarily at India, but at the largely or partly Buddhist countries with coastal ports to the south and east of India, such as Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar. And also at Singapore, because China's leaders think Tibetan Buddhism, although barely tolerated inside Tibet, can be a powerful force for soft power in relations with those nations. And the corridor leading to southeast Asia and the Buddhist world was defined by China in or after 2015 as going through the Himalayan gorge at Gyirong."
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China plans to open 13 other Himalayan crossings for future trade with Nepal, but Gyirong will remain by far the most important. In 2016, Beijing put forward a plan for a railway linking China to Kathmandu, the Nepali capital, via Gyirong. At the end of 2024, the two countries confirmed it as a "priority project of the Belt and Road Initiative."
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The Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post now questions its feasibility, beyond the technical studies completed in June and the issue of its cost: $4.5 billion for the 72 kilometers of the Nepali section alone, which Kathmandu has no intention of funding. Presented by the Chinese authorities as engineering feats, the Qinghai-Tibet railway, completed in 2006, and the megadam project on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo – work on which began in July 2025 – have also faced the extreme constraints of the Himalayas: earthquakes, floods and permafrost thaw. As Barnett concluded, "in all these projects, and many others, the drive to extract power from the landscape or to project power to one's neighbors involves, as we now see, terrifyingly high-risk gambles with the limitations of nature."