As the U.S. government has spent ever more of its time in recent years preparing to respond to any potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Beijing has been busy slicing away parts of the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Over the last few years, China has built massive infrastructure with hundreds of concrete structures, military posts, and administrative centers in the region of Beyul Khenpajong, some 12,000 feet in the northern Himalayan mountains. The so-called “hidden valley” is deemed sacred by Bhutanese, with the country’s royal family tracing its ancestral heritage to the area.
As the U.S. government has spent ever more of its time in recent years preparing to respond to any potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Beijing has been busy slicing away parts of the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Over the last few years, China has built massive infrastructure with hundreds of concrete structures, military posts, and administrative centers in the region of Beyul Khenpajong, some 12,000 feet in the northern Himalayan mountains. The so-called “hidden valley” is deemed sacred by Bhutanese, with the country’s royal family tracing its ancestral heritage to the area.
China’s blatant land grab of Bhutanese territory is just its latest move to control areas of significance in Buddhist culture, exploit a far less resourceful neighbor, and challenge its regional rival India in the Himalayas.
China’s expansion in the Beyul was first reported in Foreign Policy in 2021 by Robert Barnett, an expert on Tibet and the China-Bhutan border. Barnett wrote that while China had announced the settlement of a single village called Gyalaphug in the contested valley back in 2015, tens of miles of road and several key military buildings were in place in the Beyul and the neighboring Menchuma Valley by 2021.
He spoke to Foreign Policy from Paris last week and said that over the last two years, construction in the valley “more than doubled.”
In his 2021 report, Barnett and his team of researchers spotted 66 miles of new roads, a small hydropower plant, a communications base, five military or police outposts, and a major signals tower, among other edifices, in the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley.
According to a report on an Indian news channel, those scattered buildings now lie in fully established strips of townships with hundreds of multistory structures. The cars parked outside the buildings give the impression that the areas are inhabited, even though in 1998 China agreed with Bhutan to stick to the status quo until a final border settlement could be reached.
Bhutan, however, is a nation of just 800,000 inhabitants and a humble $3 billion economy. It has neither the economic nor the military means to respond to Chinese encroachments.
A Chatham House report published last month said that despite the cultural significance of the region, the Bhutanese government has been “powerless to stop Chinese settlement.” Experts worry that Bhutan may have to cede territory to avoid a confrontation between nuclear-armed India and China.
“The new outposts in Bhutan’s remote Jakarlung Valley, part of the Beyul Khenpajong region, may become permanent Chinese territory after an announcement on a border deal between the two countries expected soon,” John Pollock and Damien Symon warned in the Chatham report.
The 25th and latest round of talks between Thimphu and Beijing were held in October, four decades after negotiations to resolve the border dispute started. China claims 495 square kilometers (191 square miles) of territory in north-central Bhutan in the Jakarlung and Pasumlung valleys (Jakarlung is part of the Beyul) and 269 square kilometers (104 square miles) in the Doklam plateau in the west on Bhutan’s border with India. In 2020, China added Sakteng in the east to its list reportedly to seek advantage in negotiations.
The fact that China’s claims in Bhutan are based on the assertion that these regions are a part of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) has left the Tibetans flabbergasted. They are offended that China is pushing forward its imperialist agenda in their name.
Lobsang Sangay, a former Tibetan leader in exile and currently a senior visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s East Asian legal studies program, said that “history is complex and details matter,” dodging Foreign Policy’s question if Tibetans claim this territory and acknowledge a border dispute with Bhutan. But he added that it was “pretty clear Chinese troops have no right to be in the area because Tibet itself was illegally invaded and continues to be under occupation.”
A Bhutanese source who is aware of the thinking in the Bhutanese government and who spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter said Bhutan is desperately trying to “avoid a full-scale war” between New Delhi and Beijing.
The Chinese expanded in the Beyul to coerce Bhutan into ceding control of a more strategic area near India, the Doklam plateau, but it has since expanded in both regions and upped the ante without any repercussions or costs.
“It’s not surprising that China is claiming Khenpajong and Doklam areas,” Sangay said. “China is implementing what it said in the 1950s, that Tibet is the palm and Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Arunachal are five fingers. First occupy Tibet, then we occupy five fingers,” he added in reference to Mao Zedong’s imperialist vision for three Indian states and Nepal and Bhutan.
Back in the 1990s, Beijing had offered Thimphu a package deal under which it would give up its claim in the northern parts in exchange for Doklam. But Bhutan refused, owing to deep historic and economic ties with India. (Some 70 percent of Bhutanese imports come from India, the local currency is pegged to the Indian rupee, and India controlled Bhutanese foreign affairs under a treaty signed in 1949 that was replaced with a much lighter version only in 2007.)
Bhutan believes that refusal led to Chinese expansion in its sacred areas. “This is basically a price Bhutan is paying for not budging over the demand on the western sector and because border talks dragged on for too long,” the Bhutanese source said. “That is what China is making us pay for.”
In 2017, India and China nearly went to war as Chinese soldiers tried to extend a road from Chumbi Valley in the TAR to Doklam, all the way to the Jampheri ridge, which offers a direct view to the Siliguri corridor—India’s Achilles’s heel. It connects the rest of India to seven federal states in the northeast and is just 14 miles wide, which makes it militarily easy to sever. If China gets access to the Jampheri ridge, it can better surveil the Siliguri corridor, often dubbed the “chicken’s neck,” and have huge leverage over India.
The tense standoff finally subsided as the Chinese stepped back, but that didn’t stop China from further expanding in Doklam. China built a whole village called Pangda inside the plateau, at a distance of just a few miles from the key ridge.
“There is a stalemate with a large number of Indian troops stationed in the area,” Sangay said. “But the Chinese have built major infrastructure with a permanent helipad and army camp. They are there to stay. Bhutan is under tremendous pressure to compromise, which means to give strategic advantage to Chinese troops.”
Nobody feels more pressure than Bhutan, but a denial in 2020 by the Bhutanese ambassador to India, Vetsop Namgyel, that “there is no Chinese village inside Bhutan” rang alarm bells in New Delhi and caused suspicion that Bhutan, India’s closest ally in South Asia, may have decided to hand over Doklam, or at least parts of it, to China.
There are signs that Indian faith in its firm relations with Bhutan is wavering. Even though New Delhi never directly questioned Bhutan’s intentions, experts feel it deployed the Indian media to insinuate that Bhutan may have shut its eyes to Chinese construction in Doklam.
There are concerns in India that the urge to put an end to Chinese encroachment and to expand its economy may encourage Bhutan to open up to China. S.D. Muni, a former diplomat and professor emeritus at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said that according to his Bhutanese friends, a third of Bhutanese consumer imports already come from China via third nations.
On their part, the Bhutanese say such mistrust is unwarranted. They maintain they will never sell out India’s strategic interests and emphasize the importance of resolving the border dispute with China, even if that comes with establishing diplomatic ties with Beijing, which Thimphu has thus far resisted.
New Delhi finds the prospect of a Chinese embassy in Thimphu unappetizing and fears sharing if not losing influence over Bhutan. Worse, if China entraps Bhutan into taking expensive loans in the future, it could coerce Bhutan into giving up control of Doklam. (Bhutan has remained out of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.)
Bhutan, however, may be able to balance out any future Chinese influence by also opening up ties with other main powers, notably the United States. Bhutan, often described as the last Shangri-La, has deliberately stayed away from establishing diplomatic ties with any of the main powers in its quest to stay equidistant and not irk the Chinese. It may be time to change that, said the Bhutanese source, who felt that opening up to the United States may serve Bhutan’s interests.
“It now seems to be a widespread view in Bhutan that formal relations with its northern neighbor cannot be endlessly delayed,” Barnett added. “But we can be fairly sure that if Bhutan accepts a Chinese embassy in Thimphu, it will invite the U.S. and the other main powers to formalize relations with it, too.”
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