BORROW MY BOAT
Everyone knows China spreads its propaganda messaging by relying on its international friends, who lend their credibility and reputation to amplify the work of the CCP United Front. But China has more than one propaganda strategy, including how to use your enemies to boost your voice. It has two pillars.
“China sees the Global South as an important vector for enhancing discourse power and has deployed a number of tactics to disseminate Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-approved narratives there. Two pillars of its strategy include ‘using international friends for international propaganda’ 通过国际友人开展国际传播 and ‘borrowing a boat out to sea 借船出海.’
The first pillar relies on co-opting the voices of foreigners (and foreign leaders) to spread pro-China messaging. The second pillar relies on using international platforms to spread Chinese propaganda in target environments.”[1] Tibetans in exile are frequent contributors to international platforms and influencing social media.
Getting out to sea is what China wants. For decades, setting up a business has been colloquially called “plunging into the sea., 下海xia hai.” Getting to be a global superpower means projecting China’s power out to sea and across the oceans. If you can get out to sea by borrowing someone else’s boat, all the better. No need to rely on international friends; if you know how to do it, you can borrow the boats of your enemies too.
“As China’s military and economic power has grown, so too has its investment in propaganda and influence operations. Following Xi Jinping’s rise to power and China’s adoption of a more confrontational foreign policy, the country saw a need to sway global public opinion in its favour. Beijing refers to this as “discourse power,” a strategy to increase China’s standing on the world stage by promoting pro-China narratives while criticizing geopolitical rivals. The end goal is to shape a world that is more amenable to China’s expressions, and expansion, of power.”
In the 12 years since Xi Jinping took command, a regularly repeated manoeuvre for getting out to sea has been to announce the imminent construction of a massive hydro dam just above India, on the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra. Time after time the prospect of a mega dam upriver from India causes India’s geostrategy elite, the many military think tanks and foreign policy hawks, to hyperventilate. Their mix of fear and anger in turn sparks Indian media, who know nothing of the geography of their immediate neighbour Tibet, to hype it all up further.
This has happened over and over, all very predictable. It achieves China’s objective of sealing the border, remaking the Tibetan Plateau into China’s “great frontier security barrier”, so China can concentrate its force projection out to sea, towards Taiwan and beyond.
Some of the boats China borrows are Tibetan, the boats of the exiled Tibetan influencers, advocacy groups attuned to the never-ending task of stoking the fears of India, where the exiles are permanent guests but precariously without refugee status.
The rewards of fuelling Indian fear are many, as sensationalist media can be relied upon to vividly depict droughts and catastrophic floods in India as a result of dam building and collapse in Tibet. Within days the national government issues statements reaffirming their commitment to defend India’s interests against all threats. Military budgets increase, the militarisation of the Indian Himalaya intensifies.
These are short term wins, reminding India that Tibetans are their friends. In the longer term, reinforcing enmity between India and China is contrary to what the Dalai Lama has for decades worked for: relaxation of India-China tensions resulting in a relaxed China gripping Tibet less compulsively.
INFORMATION WARFARE
Borrowing the boats of Tibetan diaspora to reinforce a closed border is a short term win for China’s propaganda machine. Misinfo/disinfo is amplified. All it takes is a Xinhua media story, only in English, timed for Xmas Day when fact checkers are off duty, starting with “Chinese government has approved………” the megadam. No mention of when the approval was issued, or authorised by whom, or a construction timeline, or financing. Just four words. Everything else is vague, but the boat heads out to sea, powered by Tibetan distress and Indian fear.
This has happened several times in more than a decade of China’s information warfare. It works every time. No-one notices or remembers the previous boat launch was only two or three years back, setting off the same media frenzy.
Borrowing the boats of the Tibetans and Indians is a coup for China’s propaganda machine, since those boats also regularly warn the world to beware China’s info warfare. They remind us to be alert to being gamed by adept manipulators who know how to press our buttons. When the gatekeepers who warn us to be mindful of China’s propaganda themselves fall for it, what to do? Doesn’t Tibet already have enough real problems, without chasing phantoms? Can we recognise when we are being gamed?
PROPAGANDA’s FREE LUNCH
Fact checking is elementary, a core responsibility of mainstream media. Yet Reuters, Washington Post, BBC, Le Monde are just a few who fell for this vague announcement, and did no fact checking. The furthest any reality checking got was to confirm that the last time such a dam appeared on an official list was in 2021, when the 14th Five-Year Plan was launched, a rollover repeat of successive Five-Year Plans ensuring this dam remains on the eventual to-do list. Nothing since 2021, but for some that was enough, since everyone knows China always does what it says it will do, since that is what makes China a dictatorship.
[1] Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab report 2022, China’s Discourse Power Operations In The Global South
So let’s do some fact checking here. Let’s start by checking China’s business case for the biggest dam in the world, in the remotest location, at the base of the world’s deepest gorge. In further blogs there will be further reality checks, based on a close look at hydro engineering practicalities, local geographies, seismic risks and more. Rukor will post a risk assessment of the wild Yarlung Tsangpo, the precarity of the glaciers that hang far above it, the danger of earthquakes, landslides and subsequent floods in one of the most active seismic zones worldwide.
In this blog we make the surprising discovery of who actually owns the Yarlung Tsangpo, who turns out to be one man you have probably never heard of.
Where to begin assembling evidence as to whether the Yarlung Tsangpo Great Bend hydro dam will be built?
First, the question of who would actually do the construction work, who would finance it, who would build the power grid to connect to far distant electricity users, who would guarantee that electricity generated by the Great Bend dam is actually used, not wasted. All of these are essential to making it happen.
For the dozens of media that amplified China’s information warfare post without checking, river ownership might not seem the obvious place to start, after all, isn’t China a monolithic autocracy? Just who would actually design and construct the Great Bend dam is a secondary detail.
However, Tibetans in Tibet know better. They know China is an assemblage of fiefdoms dominated by boss princelings with exclusive claim over key assets. Ever since China turned the waters of Tibet into an asset class, each river has become a fiefdom, the exclusive property of one of the state-owned hydro dam giant corporations. So if you can discover who owns the Yarlung Tsangpo, it is quite easy to check what they see as priorities and what they are not focused on.
MEET YAJIANG COMPANY
Enter the Yajiang corporation. Jiang is Chinese for river, Ya is China’s reductive collapse of Yarlung Tsangpo, which in Chinese is Yalu Zangbo, 雅鲁藏博 which can get mixed up with the Yalu River of Korea, the river that triggered full scale three year war between China and the US, 1950.
Formally the company is Huaneng Tibet Yarlung Zangbo River Hydropower Development and Investment Co., Ltd.; 华能西藏雅鲁藏布江水电开发投资有限公司, but everyone calls it the Huaneng Yajiang Company. Formally it is a subsidiary of the giant hydro construction company Huaneng, which carries on its website all the latest Yajiang Company news. Huaneng’s splashy splash-page is worth a visit.
What emerges in the Yajiang Company’s publicity self-portrait is that the entire Yarlung Tsangpo is theirs, and prefectural governments all around TAR stage elaborate events to felicitate Yajiang Company in the hope of attracting capital investment to their fiefdom. As the bosses of Yajiang Company travel all over TAR, they are treated with deference, and plenty of local publicity, much like American counties jostling for a Musk or a Bezos to build their next big project on local turf. This makes for lots of media mentions, in addition to the Yajiang Company’s own announcements.
But Yajiang hasn’t entirely forgotten Metok. In 2024 Yajiang renewed its commitment to do poverty alleviation work there.
ENGINEERING R US
What is Yajiang interested in? What is it not interested in?
Its remit is no longer limited to one river, or one technology, of hydro engineering. As Yajiang Company expands into solar and wind power installations, its footprint extends all over central Tibet, far from the Yarlung Tsangpo, as far as Chamdo, Lhasa and Nagchu, none of them near the Yarlung Tsangpo.
In 2024 Li Chaoyi, boss (and more importantly Party Secretary) of Yajiang Company was honoured in Chamdo, a city not on the distant Yarlung Tsangpo, but on the Dri Chu/Yangtze. “Zhuang Jinsong, on behalf of the Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government, welcomed Li Chaoyi and his party to Chamdo for inspection, and expressed gratitude to Huaneng Yajiang Company for its long-term strong support to Chamdo. Zhuang Jinsong emphasized that Huaneng Yajiang Company has completed the Huaneng Jiangda [Jomda] Sori Solar Storage Power Station on schedule, carried out the preliminary work of the Gongjue wind power project. It is hoped that Huaneng Yajiang Company will actively help solve the problems of infrastructure construction and employment of college graduates in Chamdo.”
In response, Yajiang Company boss Li Chaoyi was vague: “Chamdo has unique advantages in the development of clean energy. Huaneng Yajiang Company will focus on implementing the new development pattern of “one base, two demonstrations” for clean energy in the autonomous region, give full play to its advantages in talents, technology, etc., strengthen investment in Chamdo, balance economic and social benefits, balance project development and ecological and environmental protection, and fully serve the development and construction of clean energy in Chamdo, promote mutual benefit and win-win cooperation between the two sides, and make positive contributions to the long-term stability and high-quality development of Chamdo.”
Much the same happened in 2024 in Nagchu, far to the north of the Yarlung Tsangpo, much closer to the uppermost ZaChu/Mekong watershed. In Nagchu Yajiang Company bosses also were given an inspection tour, and also solicited for investment capital: “Zhuang Jinsong, secretary of the Nagchu Municipal Party Committee, held a discussion with Liu Feng, member of the Party Committee and deputy general manager of Huaneng Yajiang Company. Municipal leader Pema Norbu attended. Zhuang Jinsong welcomed Liu Feng and his party to Nagchu for the discussion and exchange, and expressed gratitude to Huaneng Yajiang Company for its concern and support for Nagchu’s economic and social development. He said that Nagchu, as a strategic support for border consolidation and stability in Tibet, a polar plateau scientific research centre and base, and an important ecological security barrier in the polar plateau, has always adhered to the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought. Nagchu, as the city with the highest altitude and the largest land area in the great motherland, has unique resource advantages, rich reserves of clean energy such as wind, light, water, and geothermal energy, obvious advantages, and huge development potential. As a large state-owned enterprise serving the national energy strategy, undertaking Tibet’s energy development, and helping the construction of ecological civilization, Huaneng Yajiang Company has unique advantages in the application and development of plateau energy technology and the high-quality promotion of hydropower project construction. It is hoped that Huaneng Yajiang Company will practice the responsibility of state-owned enterprises, closely combine the advantages of both parties, building an integrated base of water, wind, light and storage, and building a clean and smart energy operation centre in northern Tibet.”
As usual the response from Yajiang Company was vague.
Lhasa Municipality -a huge area- is also competing for Yajiang Company patronage. In 2024 it too publicised an event seeking corporate investment. The pitch by top Lhasa cadres: “Lhasa has a unique location advantages, resource advantages, the two sides in the clean energy industry and other areas of co-operation have broad prospects. It is hoped that the two sides will take this seminar as an opportunity to further enhance consensus, deepen cooperation and achieve a higher level of mutual benefit and win-win situation. Lhasa will do a good job of service with heart and soul, make every effort to create a better business environment, so that enterprises in Lhasa have smooth operation and development.”
As usual Li Chaoyi, boss of Yajiang Company, was vague in response: “He said that Huaneng Yajiang will give full play to its own advantages, actively docking, seeking cooperation, and make new and greater contributions to the high-quality economic and social development of Lhasa.”
PATRIOTICALLY PROFITABLE
This symbiosis of patron and client, state owned hydro giant and municipal party secretaries, was succinctly expressed, in 2018 in Lhasa by a boss of SASAC, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission: “The development history of Tibet is also the development history of central enterprises.”
Yajiang Company has been showered with official awards: “Tibet Autonomous Region Science and Technology Progress Award”, “Tibet May 1st Labor Award”, “Tibet Autonomous Region National Security and People’s Defense Line Advanced Collective”.
Huaneng is now pivoting away from hydro and into solar and wind tech, patriotically implementing Xi Jinping Thought. This includes proudly proclaiming solar installations high in the Tibetan mountains.
Why are local governments soliciting investment by Yajiang Company? It has a solid record. It was involved in constructing dams in the Gyatsa gorge in Lhoka, far upriver from the Great Bend. The biggest is Zangmu, with 510 megawatts generating capacity, a tiny fraction of the putative capacity of the 60,000 megawatts a Great Bend dam could generate. Gezhouba was also involved in constructing Zangmu, but has since gone global; whereas Huaneng Yajiang Company is focussed entirely on Tibet, even if its parent has global ambitions.
THE METOK MEGA DAM?
But what about the Great Bend dam site at Metok/Motuo? What does Yajiang Company have to say? Plenty. But it is all in the past, a completed story, closed book.
In two stages, starting over a decade ago, Yajiang Company took on the task of ensuring supply of hydro electricity to Metok town, at the remote far end of the Great Bend, a tropical town not far from the Indian border, so disconnected from Tibet as well as China that motorable road access was built only recently, including a lot of tunnelling to ensure the road stays open year-round, a road with so many zigs and zags it is hard to imagine trucking heavy dam equipment -tunnelling machines and turbines- through its many switchbacks. Of China’s 2000 counties, Metok was the very last to get a road connection. Electrifying the small town of Metok was all Yajiang did. Done.
https://vs.cns.com.cn/video/detailTemp/44683.html?id=44683
Metok (in Chinese Motuo 墨脱 ) is the keyword for searching what plans China has for the Great Bend, as it is where the mega dam would be placed, at the end of the river diversion tunnel, at the mouth of the Great Bend gorge.
However, instead of looking ahead to this Metok mega dam as its greatest glory, Yajiang Company refers to Metok only in past tense, as a hydro electrification done, and completed.
For China and Yajiang Company, Metok is end of the line, a small town in urgent need of modernisation and a substantial Chinese security state presence, all of which requires electricity. Thirty years ago Metok was a backwater despite being on a raging river: “Medok would be a frustrating posting for any petty official. Many villagers still carried guns in the town despite a 1989 directive ordering that firearms be turned in to local authorities in an effort to control illegal hunting. The region was only sparsely settled until two hundred years ago, when Monpas from eastern Bhutan moved into the area, following Padmasambhava’s prophecies. At that time the Monpa settlers had sought isolation, but they now wanted a road connecting them with the outside world so they could market their rice, plantains, and chilies. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Chinese had constructed a road between Powo Dzong and Medok, where they hoped to establish a banana plantation, but continual landslides, tree falls, and year-round snow on the Gawalung pass soon made it impassible, and the road reverted to a jungle track. A more logical route to the outside world would be south to India, but even if this were politically feasible, a road would put great pressure on Medok’s timber resources and create easier access for poachers. It would also deprive many families of the income they receive from transporting goods with pack animals or as porters.”[3]
That old Metok has vanished, and Yajiang claims much credit, firstly for installing a very basic hydro scheme in 2013, then a few years later constructing a local hydro plant which, by any measure, would be considered modest. And there the story ends, so far as Huaneng Yajiang Company is concerned. Metok is done. “The Medog local area network 建设的墨脱局域网全面解决了墨脱县用电问题built has comprehensively solved the electricity problem in Medog County; the Three Gorges Tibet Energy Investment Company has taken the initiative to undertake the construction of the Medog Yadong Demonstration Village.”
This is heralded as a great achievement: “This marks the initial completion of Tibet’s first renewable energy local area network demonstration project, and the people of all ethnic groups in Medog County have ended their history of severe power shortages and entered an era of clean, safe, stable and reliable power supply. Medog County is located on the Sino-Indian border in southwest Tibet, and the level of power infrastructure construction is backward. The total installed capacity is 5,000 kilowatts, which is more than twice the 22 small and micro power stations previously built in the county. After completion, it can meet the basic electricity demand of the county in the middle of the 13th Five-Year Plan. The power station started construction on December 25, 2013. It adopts a runoff water diversion design. The complex geological conditions in Medog County, inconvenient transportation, and lack of local building materials have brought many difficulties to the construction of the project. Huaneng Medog Power Company organized and coordinated all parties involved in the construction to overcome the difficulties of late start and tight investment, and paid close attention to safety, quality, progress, and investment management.”
For Huaneng Yajiang Co. that is the end of story. There is no mention at all, on the main Huaneng website, or its Yajiang subsidiary, of any further work to be done, even though a project on the scale of the Great Bend dam would make any dam builder famous, probably world famous.
BORING, BORING
Is the Yajiang Company now too big for the Yarlung Tsangpo river which gives the company its name? or is the river too big for the Yajiang Company?
There is only one hint that this mother of all mega dams is still on the horizon of Yajiang Company’s long term preparedness. One of the causes Yajiang Company has agreed to financially assist is a Sichuan Provincial Research Centre of Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) Intelligent Boring and Disaster Prevention Engineering Technology in Complex Geology. Worldwide, massive tunnel boring machines are replacing the old methods of digging and blasting, whether the tunnels are for metro rail, high speed long haul rail such as the Chengdu to Nyingtri and Lhasa railway, or for hydro tunnels. If there is ever to be a tunnel to bypass the Yarlung Tsangpo Great Bend, diverting the river directly down into turbines, digging and blasting in such a seismically active region, deep underground, would be disastrous. Tunnel boring machines are very big, very expensive, prone to fail and require a lot of maintenance. Elon Musk’s Boring Company is heavily invested in them.
Since Huaneng Yajiang Company does not do railway tunnels, maybe the Great Bend is still on their mind. Huaneng Yajiang Company boss Li Chaoyi attended the 2023 launch of this research centre, at Chengdu University of Technology(CDUT): “The centre, based at CDUT, is a collaborative effort with the Tibet branch of China Huaneng Group Co., Ltd., China Railway Engineering Equipment Group Co., Ltd., and Sinohydro Bureau 10 Co., Ltd., among others. Currently, it is staffed by 41 researchers, all of whom are highly educated and hold senior technical titles. The centre is focused on the crucial period of technological innovation in the underground engineering field, transitioning from traditional drilling and blasting to mechanical rock-breaking methods.”
That is the only indication the Great Bend dam might yet one day happen.
FOLLOWING THE MONEY, GOING SOLAR
Meanwhile, what is actually happening is that Yajiang Company, under the leadership of Li Chaoyi, is moving in a different direction, keeping pace with CCP ideological shifts, investing in what makes money. In 2024 “Southern Finance Network reported on September 4 that Huaneng Plateau Energy Technology (Chengdu) Co., Ltd. 华能高原能源科技was established recently. The legal representative is Li Chaoyi, with a registered capital of 10 million yuan. The business scope includes new material technology research and development, energy storage technology services, and artificial intelligence application software development. The equity penetration chart shows that the company is wholly owned by Huaneng Tibet Yarlung Zangbo River Hydropower Development Investment Co., Ltd.”
Li Chaoyi knows how to be a princeling, perhaps inheriting “red genes” from well-connected parents. It is not clear if he is grandson of Li Peng, son of either Li Xiaopeng or Li Xiaolin, the children of Li Peng. After all, Li is a very common family name. But Li Chaoyi boasts prestigious Tsinghua University as his alma mater, and Tsinghua boasts of him: “When he first arrived in Tibet, the altitude sickness tested Li Chaoyi’s body and heart. The nearly 6 hours of bumpy mountain roads made the altitude sickness more severe. He overcame the altitude sickness and devoted himself to the urgent engineering tasks, vividly interpreting the spirit of Huaneng Tibet: “lack of oxygen but not lack of spirit, hardship but not hardship, dedication but not gains and losses”.
“Huaneng International Power Development Corporation, was headed (1999–2008) by Li Xiaopeng (son of China’s former Premier Li Peng). When in 2012, Li Xiaopeng was appointed as the Vice-Governor of Shanxi Province, his sister, Li Xiaolin (the chief executive of China Power International Development Company from 2004–2015), became a lead figure in Yunnan’s power generation sector. For many years the Li family, rather than the Ministry of Water Resources, or the Yunnan provincial government, decided whether to build a dam on the Lancang.”[4]
Prestigious Tsinghua U seldom gushes so enthusiastically about its alumni: “Since Tibet is located in a high-altitude area with a large temperature difference between day and night, how to achieve high-quality construction of a 100-meter concrete dam has become a prominent problem facing engineering construction. Li Chaoyi, who graduated from the Department of Water Conservancy and Hydropower Engineering and Construction of Tsinghua University, took the initiative to take the lead in carrying out key technology research on key technologies for high concrete dam construction in high-altitude and large temperature difference areas, integrated construction technology for pre-cooling and preheating of concrete aggregates, and concrete durability technology, achieving high-quality continuous pouring of a 100-meter dam throughout the year, providing practical experience for the development and construction of large hydropower in Tibet.”
INHERITING RED GENES
Li Peng was a hydro engineer by training as a student in Moscow. His daughter Li Xiaolin trained to be a hydro engineer, graduating from Tsinghua. Likewise Li Chaoyi. Coincidence? Not sure.
What is known is that Li Xiaolin was adept at getting her wealth out of China, and hiding it; and that Li Xiaopeng, following his father making the Three Gorges Dam his personal project, made Huaneng his personal empire. Li Xiaolin was exposed by the Paradise Papers leak of Caribbean tax haven law firm records as having several shell companies, and according to Hurun Report‘s China Rich List 2013, she had an estimated personal fortune of US$550 million.
Whether or not Li Chaoyi was born a princeling, he now behaves like one, courted wherever he goes, treated as a hero in official media and by his alma mater for heroically choosing to breathe the thin air of Tibet. In a massive party-state that operates on networked, franchised corruption, he staked his claim, and now owns the Yarlung Tsangpo.[5]
DANCE TO THE BEAT OF HUANENG STYLE
From his base as exclusive owner-operator of the Yarlung Tsangpo, Li Chaoyi’s empire now includes all of Tibet Autonomous Region, and he sets up new subsidiaries focussed on new tech, new opportunities to make money quickly. That’s the China Model.
From the start of construction to actual operation as a hydro dam, Three Gorges took 23 years. Making the Great Bend dam would take as long, maybe longer given the far longer logistic supply chain and distance from electricity demand centres, plus the high risk of natural disasters. Why wait 23 years for a return on your investment, when there is money to be made in new industries in Tibet such as the massive data centres and surveillance tech? What the Great Bend dam lacks is a business case, including calculating the opportunity cost of foregoing alternative investments.
This blog exercise in fact checking responds to China’s 2024 Christmas day announcement, on Xinhua, in English only, that “Chinese government has approved……..” the Great Bend mega dam, which triggered a wave of alarm, with no fact checking.
Did it not occur to media that if China was actually announcing this dam was going to happen, it would be a huge event? By far the biggest dam the world has seen, a triumph of China’s conquest of nature, something Xi Jinping would personally take credit for, comparable in scale and ambition to landing on Mars? That is where the frontiers of China’s patriotic ambitions have gone, out into the solar system.
Doing a fact check through assessing the business case for this dam might seem odd; but in today’s China not odd at all. As China struggles with the systemic problems of a sluggish economy, and Xi Jinping’s drive to focus on “high quality” development, the case for massive infrastructure builds weakens. The need is for stimulating the shift to a consumption-based economy; not for a project that would take decades to build, in an extremely remote corner. When Li Peng was in power, in the 1980s and 1990s, mega projects were top priority. Most of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee were engineers. Those days are past.
The other oddity of a business case analysis is that nowhere have we mentioned the cost of the build. That is because no-one knows, for years no-one has tried to price the ticket. The one number sometimes cited is RMB one trillion, suspiciously rounded, almost certainly out of date, could be way more. Media reporting in 2025 simply converted that, on the standard exchange rate, to a seemingly precise $137 billion.
Does this mean there will be no Great Bend dam? The absence of any interest by the Yarlung Tsangpo’s owner is hardly proof. Yet as we journey with Li Chaoyi up and down the river, we have learned a lot about how the real world -with Chinese characteristics-actually works.
For a developmentalist state where regime legitimacy rests on the capacity of the state to decisively master all obstacles, conquer nature, build ecological civilisation, this project would seem a must; more so now than ever since China insists it must remain the power hungry manufacturing powerhouse of the planet.
Yet there is no sign that dam will be built, or even signs of preparatory design work, or backroom engineering modelling, or costing, or feasibility, or business case. Instead, in recent years, we do find a torrent of scientific research reports on the difficulties of wanting to tame the pivot of Asia, where continents both collide and tear away, contradictory energies deep in the earth, at precisely where this dam would be.
An abiding subtext is China’s fear and loathing of the frigid land and thin air of Tibet. If we look into China’s First Scientific Expedition to Tibet, which ended in the 19080s and the Second in 2017, a gap of 20 years in which China, compared to today, was more open about the difficulties China faced when trying to rule Tibet, to make Tibet China’s, to transform this unknown land into a modern economy with a substantial Han Chinese population.
In 1997 a reporting team from China’s Financial Times, 金融时报, Jinrong Shibao, went to Lhasa, interviewing People’s Bank officials stationed in Lhasa, who spoke of “solidifying the frontier defence of the motherland, and safeguarding the unity of the motherland”, slogans as common in 2025 as in 1997. Yet “it is as if people living and working in Tibet are always each carrying a load of 20 to 50 kilograms under conditions of the hinterland regions, whether they are walking or resting. Those who have newly arrived would pant from little exertion. Over the decades, thousands of cadres and workers of the financial system have been silently making their sacrifices in such a living environment. Comrades of the People’s Bank Tibet branch have to spend days and weeks travelling thousands of kilometres, when they visit grassroots-level locations. In some places, automobiles are not usable, and they have to ride horses and yaks; in places where yaks and horses cannot reach, they have to walk with their own legs. Many comrades have to overcome all kinds of physical discomforts caused by altitude reaction, and, on the other hand, silently endure the hardship of homesickness caused by being far away from their hometowns and their wives and children. There is a saying in Tibet: getting ruined physically, making the wife suffer, ruining the child’s future.”[6]
Today, close to three decades later there are expressways and high speed rail, yet Han sent to Tibet continue to see is as a hardship posting, to be ended as soon as possible. Tibet remains alien, with every breath.
Put simply, in traditional Chinese medicine, Tibet is unnaturally cold, its air unnaturally thin, an inherent danger in itself, of itself. China’s attitude has not changed much, so Tibet is still very sparsely populated by emigrant settlers anywhere above 3500 m altitude, which is 90% of the plateau.
Installing solar power for export to industry in Kandze Tibetan Prefecture in 2024 still requires Han pioneer heroism, just as in 1997: “At the project construction site, the majestic and precipitous Hengduan [Chushi Gangdruk]Mountains, wild boars, and lone wolves are the “standard configuration” here, and the high altitude caused, ultraviolet rays and fierce “blade wind” are even more inseparable. A team of 15 builders, invested in the construction of new energy at the first time while trying to adapt to the harsh environment at high altitude. “I expected the hardship here, but I didn’t expect it to be so hard!” said Zhang Kehu, head of the General Affairs Department. “One day in November 2023, it was snowing heavily in Yari Village [Tawu dzong], the temperature was more than 20 degrees below zero, and the visibility of the project site was extremely low. My colleagues and I climbed to the highest point of the site at 4,217 meters to conduct on-site inspections, but soon we had altitude sickness, our whole bodies were shivering, our voices were all trembling, and we felt like we were going to faint at any time. We gritted our teeth and persisted for two hours. When the fog gradually dissipated, we could see the situation of the site clearly and successfully completed the inspection task.”
So making Tibet China’s remains elusive, hence the campaign to make the Tibetans Chinese, by coercive assimilation.
LOST HORIZON?
Our key question remains: can the Great Bend dam be built?
On the evidence presented here, it is a long way off, over the horizon. Any business case for such a truly massive capital expenditure, with no return on investment for decades, would have to be strong. It would have to ensure a deal is first done with the power grid builders and the electricity customers thousands of kilometres away, otherwise the electricity generated is abandoned, a common occurrence not cured by Xi Jinping’s many commands to abandon abandonment, or as it is often called, curtailment of high voltage electricity provisioning that is going nowhere. For decades, this has been intractably problematic. Yajiang Company’s monopoly on the Yarlung Tsangpo is no guarantee a hydro dam will have customers, despite China’s green energy rhetoric.
In reality, China’s embrace of other green tech, solar and wind and in future also hydrogen, is actually what undermines the business case for 1990s style megadam. Not only are solar and wind power much cheaper and quicker to build, their positioning is much more flexible, making it far easier to locate an installation in Kham Kandze, close by mineral extraction zones that need electricity to crush rock to powder, so miners then can, at the mine site, chemically make a concentrate sufficiently concentrated to truck out economically, to a lowland factory that makes pure metals.
On the basis of this business case assessment alone we cannot say for sure the Metok Great Bend Dam will never happen. The Chengdu tunnelling tech research partly funded by Yajiang Company is a sign the megaproject could one day yet happen: “It is committed to the intelligent manufacturing technology of underground engineering, endowing the TBM, a major mechanized drilling apparatus used in construction, with the capability of geological discernment, thereby contributing to the construction of a strong national infrastructure. The underground engineering research team, after decades of development, is nationally renowned in areas such as advanced geological forecasting, TBM technology, and disaster prevention in underground engineering.”
So in a forthcoming blog, a careful dive into the hydro engineering practicalities, and the seismic constraints identified by geologists. We now need to look at the hundreds of scientific findings of recent years, and their risk assessments. Will that be proof enough we have, yet again, fallen for the disinfo/misinfo of China’s information warfare?
THROUGH OTHER EYES
While China researches drilling machines capable of “geological discernment”, Tibetans have discerned, in the same lands, evocative reminders of the nature of the mind, the nature of reality.
Focussing on the Great Bend dam as a Chinese project assessed within China’s princeling oligarch system, Tibetans appear only as peripheral, disempowered onlookers. Give Tibetans the last word.
Switching gaze, we see this Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo through the eyes of Kyabje Garje Khamtrul Rinpoche Jamyang Dhondup སྒ་རྗེ་ཁམས་སྤྲུལ་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་འཇམ་དབྱངས་དོན་གྲུབ་.[7]
“If you think to go to Pemako in the south of Tibet,
Travel for nine days through Gyala Badong
Following the Tsangpo downriver
Until you behold the immutable landmark Drangtsi Drak or ‘Honey Rock’,
And after three yojanas you will arrive at the great Pema Dzong,
Where the upper reaches lie in snow and lower down forests prevail.
On the slopes sits a white rocky outcrop like the throne of a king
Surrounded by smaller hills reminiscent of predators on the hunt.
Above and below are Guru Drubphuk, the Guru’s cave
And innumerable signs of virtue including
Footprints left by the Guru, images of the deity and seed syllables.
Nearby in the Pillared Cave and its Dakini Assembly Hall,
Amidst a host of awe-inspiring rock formations
Naturally arisen to resemble plates of ganachakra yogic food offerings and more
is the key to the hidden land as a whole
entrusted as terma treasures under an immutable seal.”[8]
[1] Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab report 2022, China’s Discourse Power Operations In The Global South
[2] Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab report 2022, China’s Discourse Power Operations In The Global South
[3] Ian Baker, The Heart of the World: A journey to Tibet’s lost paradise, Penguin, 2004,302
[4] Suzanne Ogden (2022): The Impact of China’s Dams on the Mekong River Basin: Governance, Sustainable Development, and the Energy-Water Nexus, Journal of Contemporary China
[5] Yuen Yuen Ang, How Exceptional Is China’s Crony-Capitalist Boom? May 10, 2024
Xiaobo Li, Cadres And Corruption: The Organizational Involution Of The Chinese Communist Party, Stanford University Press
Thomas Gold University of California, Doug Guthrie New York University, David Wank Sophia University eds, Social Connections in China Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi, Cambridge U Press
Bálint MAGYAR and Bálint MADLOVICS, The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes, Central European University Press
[6] Song Fuliang, Xu Zhiping, Ma Chenming, Report on Tibet’s Financial System Development, 13 August 1997, Jinrong Shibao, translated by FBIS.
[7] https://meridian-trust.org/video/buddhist-film-club-1-memories-of-lost-and-hidden-lands/ @ 16’35”
[8] Garje Khamtrul Rinpoche, Memorie of Lost and Hidden Lands., Chima Gatsaling, 2009, 327-8