Defence
Arunachal: China Builds Second Border Village In Indian Territory Under Its Illegal Occupation
- While India claims the territory on which China has built the new village, it has remained under Chinese occupation for years.
- The new Chinese village is the second such settlement in Indian-claimed territory under China's illegal occupation.
Qionglin Village (Xinhua News).
China has built a new settlement in Indian territory under its occupation in the Shi-Yomi district of Arunachal Pradesh, NDTV has reported.
The latest satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs shows that the settlement has around 60 buildings and allied infrastructure. On one rooftop, a Chinese flag has been painted.
Commenting on the issue, the Indian Army has said that the new settlement is located north of the Line of Actual Control.
''The location corresponding to the coordinates mentioned in your query lies to the North of LAC (Line of Actual Control) in Chinese territory," the Indian Army said in response to NDTV's query.
''The area indicated is North of LAC," an Indian Army official told the channel after it asked for clarification.
While India claims the territory on which China has built the new village, it has remained under Chinese occupation for years.
The new Chinese village is the second such settlement in Indian-claimed territory under China's illegal occupation.
Earlier, China had built a village in the Upper Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh in an area under its control since the late 1950s. China had taken over the area after a clash in 1959, called the Longju incident. The Longju clash took place in August 1959, only months after the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa fearing a communist crackdown and reached India.
The Chinese settlement in Arunachal's Upper Subansiri district has been built under China's border defence villages programme.
Since at least 2017, the Chinese Communist Party has been building over 600 border villages under the programme and moving thousands of people to border areas to populate the settlements.
As Swarajya reported earlier, China's border consolidation project will not conclude with the completion of this programme.
China's 14th Five Year Plan promises to "speed up the construction of border villages" and build "about 200 new villages" along the frontiers. Large infrastructure projects for Tibet, such as "hydropower development on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river" (the Brahmaputra in India) and highway from "Medog to the Yunnan-Tibet boundary" (just north of Arunachal) underline continued focus on border areas.
By the time China completes the current phase of the border villages programme, it would have moved over 240,000 people to the frontier.
The population of Tibet's border areas has grown by 10.5 per cent, Wu Yingjie, the Communist Party secretary for Tibet, revealed in August at an event marking the 70th anniversary of the "peaceful liberation of Tibet".
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