https://www.theepochtimes.com/severe-floods-hit-chongqing-as-flooding-across-southern-china-leaves-106-people-dead-or-missing_3410702.html
Watching Chongqing
https://tibet.net/severe-floods-in-china-leave-over-106-dead-or-missing/
About 15 million residents in southern China have been affected by the worst flooding in decades in parts of the region as abnormally intense rainfall has swept away buildings and ruined homes.
Residents in a flooded area were evacuated this week after heavy rain in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Raymond Zhong | New York Times | July 3, 2020 | Read original news here
Weeks of abnormally intense rains have swept away buildings and ruined homes across southern China, leaving at least 106 people dead or missing and affecting 15 million residents in the worst flooding that parts of the region have seen in decades.
Heavy rains this time of year often swell China’s rivers and cause its reservoirs to overflow. This year, however, the battle against the coronavirus pandemic has strained flood preparations, according to People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper.
With the bad weather showing no sign of letting up after more than 31 consecutive days of alerts about torrential rain from the government weather agency, experts have warned of potential landslides and bursts at reservoirs and dams.
A photo released last month by Xinhua, a state-run news agency, showing floodwaters surrounding a village in the Guangxi region of southern China. Credit…Lu Boan/Xinhua, via Associated Press
In China, “most small reservoirs were built in the 1960s and ’70s” and did not follow high construction standards, said Brandon Meng, a hydraulic engineer in the southern city of Shenzhen. “Once there is extreme weather, it’s very easy for them to be in danger.”
One of the hardest-hit provinces so far has been Hubei, whose capital, Wuhan, saw the first emergence of the coronavirus. Waist-deep muddy water inundated streets and stranded people in their cars late last month in Yichang, a city in Hubei down the Yangtze River from the Three Gorges Dam, one of the world’s largest.
Distributing food to people affected by floods at a temporary shelter in Mianning County, in Sichuan Province, this week.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In Yangshuo, a tourist town known for its stunning mountain vistas, an official told the newsmagazine Southern Weekly that the area had experienced a once-in-two-centuries burst of heavy rain on June 7. More than 1,000 hotels and guesthouses and 5,000 shops were damaged, the authorities told Southern Weekly.
In the central metropolis of Chongqing, the city authorities said last month that the flooding along the local section of the Qijiang River, upstream from the Yangtze, had been the worst since monitoring began in 1940. About 40,000 residents were evacuated, according to official news outlets.
China’s National Meteorological Center warned on Friday that the country’s southwest was due for another round of downpours beginning on Saturday.
https://tibet.net/a-geo-strategic-importance-of-tibet-chinas-palm-and-five-fingers-strategy/
By Tsewang Dorji for Tibet Policy Institute, 2 July 2020, Read the original article published on tibetpolicy.net
China warned India that it will open new fronts in the Himalayas soon after the violent face-off took place between Chinese and Indian soldiers in Ladakh along the Indo-Tibetan border, which will cost heavy load for both India and China.
At the height of coronavirus crisis in the world, all the media have focused on China’s military aggressions in Ladakh and Sikkim. But the root cause of China’s military incursions across the Indian Himalayan borders is barely known by the Indian public.
This article aims to explore the geo-strategic importance of Tibet is a fundamental strategic blueprint for the protracted India-China dispute over the Indo-Tibetan border.
China’s military aggressions in India, Bhutan and Nepal is strategically designed by the Chinese communist leaders’ perception that Tibet is the palm and Himalayan regions are the five-fingers. China considered Tibet as the palm and Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh as the five-finger.
In the early 20th century, British India adopted its forward policy towards Tibet for expanding her market and at the same time, British desired to establish Tibet a buffer against the Czarist Russia’s threat to India.
British successfully made Tibet a buffer state between Russia, China and British India after British India’s short invasion of Tibet in 1903. Subsequently, Chinese nationalists viewed British invasion of Tibet as a security threat to China from its backyard. British left India in 1947.
The Communist Party of China established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949. After that, China invaded Tibet in 1950. Subsequently, centuries old a zone of peace between India and China disappeared.
After China’s occupation of Tibet, the first ever Sino-Indian military face-off was seen in the world’s highest border – the Himalayas. Since then, more than thousands of Chinese military incursions took place across the Indian Himalayan borders.
By invading Tibet, China asserted Tibet as a treasure of its strategic asset to speed up China’s expansionist policy towards the Himalayan nations and beyond. And also, China’s militarization of the Tibetan plateau triggered the geopolitical tensions in South Asia.
China sees Tibet as a strategic passage to extend China’s geopolitical ambition in South Asia. Mao Zedong, the founding father of PRC and firm believer of Tsun Tzu’s strategic doctrine – “the Art of War”, strategized Tibet as the palm of China to expand its sphere of influence in South Asia.
China invaded and occupied Tibet in order to bring the ”five-fingers” Himalayan regions under its supremacy.
The 2017 Doklam stand-off and recent China’s occupation of a Nepali village Rui Gaun of Gorkh district are just tip of the iceberg of China’s military aggressions in the five-fingers Himalayan regions.
Today, China is actively encroaching in the Himalayan borders of Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh for further encircling India to boost “China’s Strategy of Encirclement India”, which aim to an encircle India through different fronts.
Professor Ashok Kapur rightly illustrated “China’s Strategy of Encirclement India” in his book entitled “India and the South Asian Strategic Triangle”, where he writes “The China’s India war of 1962 created a military front in the Himalayan regions. The PRC-Pakistan strategic partnership has created a diplomatic with security and defence fronts against India. The encirclement of the Chinese port facilities in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan has created commercial and trade fronts against India”. All these geostrategic tensions are strategic ramifications of China’s aggressive policy towards India.
Strategically, the Tibetans were the first line of the defence for India. They ultimately safeguarded the 3,488 kilometres long border from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh.
Since the disappearance of Tibet as a traditional buffer state between India and China in 1950, the two Asian giants faced military escalations in along the Indo-Tibetan border. The shifting of Indo-Tibetan border into Sino-Indian border itself has created unprecedented geopolitical enigma in the Himalayas
The centrality of Tibet issue in the Sino-Indian geostrategic relations is an ultimate resolution for resolving the Sino-Indian dispute over the Indo-Tibetan border. The renowned international scholars on China study such as Mohan Malik, Professor Dawa Norbu and Brahma Chellaney argues that Tibet lies at the heart of the Sino-Indian relations.
Professor Dawa Norbu explicitly stated that “The crux of the Sino-Indian strategic rivalry is this: if the Chinese power elite consider Tibet to be strategically important to China, the Indian counterparts think it is equally vital to Indian national security”.
The present Chinese leadership has recognized the Tibet issue as a core issue of China’s national security and strategic engagement in South Asia. Thus, this is the right time for India to craft India’s new Tibet policy, because China’s strategizing Tibet as the China’s palm and Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh as the five-fingers of Tibet is not a rhetoric. It is happening in the Himalayas.
*Tsewang Dorji is a visiting fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute. He is a Ph.D scholar from Madras University with the research interest on India-China Relations. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Tibet Policy Institute.