Why China Bringing Galwan Valley Clash Back Into Spotlight During Communist Party Meet Is No Surprise

"My pure love is only for China," Xi Jinping said, "has become the most powerful expression of young people in contemporary China."

Xi was speaking at a ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Youth League of China on 10 May this year, and the expression he quoted was written by Chen Xiangrong, an 18-year-old Chinese soldier killed in the clash in the Galwan River Valley in June 2020.

While Xi's comment did not get much attention in India, China's attempt to promote legends about the soldiers it lost in Galwan and create military heroes out of them has been too conspicuous to miss.

"At the battleground where...other soldiers died, soldier Chen Xiangrong was lying next to Chen Hongjun's body, maintaining a posture of protecting his battalion commander," a People's Daily report, which also carried a picture of the soldier's "unfinished letter to his mom", read.

In the two years since the clashes, China has not shied away from highlighting tensions with India and bringing the incident at Galwan back in the spotlight, although mostly for the domestic audience.

An exhibition on the 95 years of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA's) history that Xi visited in July this year had panels on the 1962 war and the Galwan Valley clashes.

Earlier, during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Qi Fabao, a PLA regiment commander who was injured in Galwan, served as one of the torchbearers.

Just months before that, videos of the Galwan Valley clashes had been released in China ahead of a meeting between the PLA and the Indian Army on disengagement, and a series of pictures allegedly showed Indian soldiers in Chinese captivity after the clashes followed.

More recently, as veteran Beijing watcher Jayadeva Ranade wrote, "the number of delegates representing the People's Liberation Army's Western Theatre Command [responsible for the border with India] at the 20th Party Congress is nearly double than that of the other four theatre commands."

Neither of these could have happened without approval from the top echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PLA — Xi and his loyalists.

In 2021, Xi awarded the July 1 Medal to Zhuoga, one of the two sisters from a Tibetan herder family who wrote to him about the border with India ahead of the 19th Party Congress in 2017. The story of the two sisters and their family had served as a model for the launch of the border defence villages programme along the frontier in Tibet.

Seen in this context, the appearance of an image of PLA Commander Qi Fabao fighting Indian soldiers in the Galwan Valley, during the 20th national congress of the CCP, does not come as a surprise.

Qi, who was also injured during the clashes in the Galwan Valley and received the title of "hero regiment commander for defending the border" earlier this year, is one of the delegates from the PLA's Western Theatre Command at the once-in-five-years party congress.

To make up for any ambiguity in the CCP's messaging, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV ran videos showing an emotional Qi Fabao recounting the skirmish with India in the Galwan Valley.

In Taiwan, Xi is constrained by challenges from the US, which has forced him to limit his actions primarily to threats. But Galwan, and the border tensions with India more broadly, where the situation is better concealed or obscured, making perception management easier, offers Xi's image-makers an opportunity to cast him as a strong leader safeguarding China's interests.

Xi's focus on national security in his speech at the opening of the Communist Party congress — he mentioned 'security' about 50 times — and the recounting of achievements related to it underlines the importance this holds in reinforcing his image as a strong leader as he secures an unprecedented third term.

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