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Gyalaphug is now one of three new villages (two already occupied, one under construction), 66 miles of new roads, a small hydropower station, two Communist Party administrative centers, a communications base, a disaster relief warehouse, five military or police outposts, and what are believed to be a major signals tower, a satellite receiving station, a military base, and up to six security sites and outposts that China has constructed in what it says are parts of Lhodrak in the TAR but which in fact are in the far north of Bhutan

The settlement of an entire area within another country goes far beyond the forward patrolling and occasional road-building that led to war with India in 1962, military clashes in 1967 and 1987, and the deaths of 24 Chinese and Indian soldiers in 2020.

By mirroring in the Himalayas the provocative tactics it has used in the South China Sea, Beijing is risking its relations with its neighbors, whose needs and interests it has always claimed to respect, and jeopardizing its reputation worldwide.

China has tried building roads into Bhutan before—but mainly in its western areas and with limited success. In 2017, China’s attempt to build a road across the Doklam plateau in southwestern Bhutan, next to the trijunction with India, triggered a 73-day faceoff between hundreds of Chinese and Indian troops and had to be abandoned. Last November, an Indian media outlet reported that a village called Pangda had been built by the Chinese government in subtropical forest just inside the southwestern border of Bhutan. (China denied the claim.) It’s possible, however, as some analysts have speculated, that Bhutan had quietly ceded that territory to China but not announced it to the outside world.

It is in an area of exceptional religious importance to Bhutan and its people.

Given its incomparable importance for the Bhutanese and for Tibetan Buddhists in general, no Bhutanese official would ever formally relinquish this area to China, any more than Britain would yield Stonehenge or Italy Venice.

In the face of raw Chinese power, Bhutan appears to have chosen to maintain what the Bhutanese political commentator Tenzing Lamsang has previously characterized as a “disciplined silence.” As a “small country stuck between two giants,” he said, Bhutan’s strategy is “to avoid unnecessarily antagonizing either side.”

Bhutan’s border guards are posted in the Beyul each summer, but their task is primarily to defend Bhutanese herders in encounters with their counterparts from Tibet. From the mid-1990s onward, these encounters became more aggressive: The Bhutanese accuse the Tibetans of cattle rustling; collecting timber; constructing shelters; driving huge, consolidated flocks of yaks across traditional Bhutanese grazing lands; and demanding that Bhutanese herders pay taxes to them for grazing there.

Today all of the Menchuma Valley and most of the Beyul are controlled by China. Both are being settled. Together, they constitute 1 percent of Bhutan’s territory; if it were to lose them, it would be comparable to the United States losing Maine or Kentucky. If Bhutanese troops try to reenter these areas, they will have to do so on foot and, given the lack of infrastructure on their side, would be immediately beyond the reach of supplies or reinforcements. The Chinese troops would have a barracks close at hand, would be motorized, and would be only three hours’ drive from the nearest town in China.

reciprocal cross-border grazing was the norm in the Himalayas and in the Beyul before the Chinese invasion and annexation of Tibet in the 1950s

China has long renounced the 19th-century claims by Qing emperors—repeated by Mao Zedong in the 1930s—to sovereignty over Bhutan and other Himalayan states. Relations between China and Bhutan have been amicable since the early 1970s, when Bhutan supported China’s entry into the United Nations. As one Chinese official put it recently, the two countries are “friendly neighbors linked by mountains and rivers.” But as with China’s other Himalayan neighbors, the legacies of colonialism and conflict have left behind uncertain borders

In December 1998, China signed a formal agreement with Bhutan, the first and so far only treaty between the two nations. In that document, China recognized Bhutan’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity and agreed that “no unilateral action will be taken to change the status quo on the border.” The construction of roads, settlements, and buildings within the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley is clearly a contravention of that agreement.

China’s principal aim in the Beyul is clear from its stance in talks with the Bhutanese government: Ever since 1990, China has offered to give up its claim to 495 square kilometers (191 square miles) of the Beyul if Thimphu will give China 269 square kilometers (104 square miles) in western Bhutan. Those areas—Doklam, Charithang, Sinchulungpa, Dramana, and Shakhatoe—lie close to the trijunction with India and are of far greater strategic importance to China than the Beyul, offering China a foothold only 62 miles from India’s geographic weak point, the 14-mile-wide Siliguri Corridor that connects the Indian mainland to its northeastern territories.

In Chinese, the term for so-called salami-slicing tactics—slowly cutting off  piece by piece of other nations’ territory—is can shi, or “nibbling like a silkworm.” It’s serious business: The belief that India was gnawing at fragments of China’s territory drove Mao to launch the 1962 Sino-Indian War. And the converse of the phrase is jing tun, “swallowing like a whale.” The small bites of the silkworm can turn into crushing jaws.

a large red banner says, “Resolutely uphold the core position of General Secretary Xi Jinping! Resolutely uphold the authority of and centralized and unified leadership by the Party Central Committee!”

A special unit from the police agency overseeing borders is based in or near the village. The most important task of this police agency, one officer stationed on the western Tibetan border told a Chinese news agency, is to catch “illegal immigrants”—meaning Tibetans trying to flee to India or Nepal.

So far, Chinese troops cannot reach China’s claimed border with Bhutan at the southern tip of the Beyul except by foot. But work has nearly been completed on a strategic road heading southwest from Gyalaphug across the Ngarab La. A second road from the upper Jakarlung leads southwest across the mountains to what some unofficial Chinese sources say is a military outpost next to the deserted temple of Lhalung Lhakhang, also on the bank of the Pagsamlung, 9 miles south of the Bhutanese border. These roads will provide the Chinese with motorable access to the Pagsamlung, allowing them to get troops and construction crews down to the far south of the Beyul; once that is done, we are likely to see permanent border posts along China’s claim line. None of these roads or military sites existed five years ago. There is little that Bhutan can do, given that the 1998 agreement, in which both sides undertook not to alter the status of disputed areas, has been shredded by Beijing’s actions on the ground.

Oman is desperate to diversify away from its oil and gas dependency. Research by the US Energy Information Administration puts Oman’s known crude oil reserves at 5.6bn barrels. While this is only enough to rank the country 21st in the world, its economy is disproportionately dependent: oil and gas accounts for nearly half of the country’s GDP, 70% of exports and between 68% and 85% of government revenue.

“Several dozen new cities are being constructed in the Middle East, mainly to transition away from the petroleum industry to a variety of other industries, including tourism, manufacturing, education and hi-tech,” says Dr Sarah Moser, a McGill University geography professor and author of an upcoming atlas of new cities.

Duqm sits on the Arabian Sea near the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf – and the world’s most glaring oil supply chokepoint. Nearly a fifth of the world’s oil currently flows through this passage, ever prone to disruption. If the Duqm project succeeds, the shipping industry would be able to dock at the gates of the Middle East without needing to go all the way inside.

attracted the attention of Beijing’s much heralded Maritime Silk Road. More than three-quarters of Oman’s crude oil exports go directly to China.

While Duqm was never very densely populated, around 3,000 Bedouin – mostly fishermen and semi-nomadic herders – called the area home before the bulldozers arrived. These villages have now been demolished and the Oman government has built a new, modern town for them to relocate to. The houses look as if they were copied and pasted from Muscat – bright, white buildings two storeys high with garages and ornate gateways. There is a mosque in the centre. The houses stand empty. The local Bedouin prefer their traditional way of life – and want space to keep camels.