Beijing, March 10: China plans to further strengthen its strategic transport network in sensitive border regions with India over the next five years to fortify its remote frontiers during the 15th Five-Year Plan beginning this year.
One project involves building a 394 km highway linking the northern and southern sides of the rugged Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang, Uygur Autonomous Region, reported the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, quoting the draft report of the 15th Five-Year Plan.
The plan has been placed for approval of China’s national legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), currently in session here.
The route will run parallel to a strategic road built through the disputed Aksai Chin area to improve military mobility following the 1962 Sino-Indian border war.
Construction of the Dushanzi-Kuqa Highway in central Xinjiang began in September and is expected to finish by 2032.
The plan also proposes upgrading the three existing highways running into Tibet.
The 15th Five-Year Plan, stated to be the most consequential for China’s future placing more emphasis on AI and new productive forces like E-vehicles and batteries to boost the sagging economy, has already been approved by the ruling Communist Party.
The NPC, regarded as the rubber-stamp parliament, is set to approve it in its current session.
China completed the 14th Five-Year Plan last year, during which it initiated the construction of the world’s largest dam in Tibet over the Brahmaputra near the Indian border.
Last July, China started constructing the USD 170 billion dam, stated to be the world’s biggest infrastructure project. It evoked concerns in riparian countries India and Bangladesh for its ability to hold massive amounts of water, altering its flow.
China has been upgrading border infrastructure with India, building massive roads and high-speed rail networks in Tibet close to the disputed border.
In August, Beijing established the Xinjiang-Tibet-Railway Company to oversee the construction of a strategic 1,980 km artery between Lhasa in Tibet and Hotan in Xinjiang, the Post reported.
Perched on the Karakoram plateau, the Hotan region includes the Galwan Valley region, the hotly contested area at the centre of the bloody war in 1962, and the deadly clashes between the troops in 2020, which resulted in a five-year complete freeze in relations between the two countries.
The relations improved after a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in 2024, followed by the SCO summit in Tianjin last year.
Both countries are currently in a normalisation process involving direct flights, increase in the issuance of visas and government-level interactions.
Commenting on China’s plans for road networks, Liu Zongyi, director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said both economic development and strategic stability were driving China to expand infrastructure in border areas.
Chinese leaders have long embraced the idea that “building roads is the first step to prosperity” and see improved transport links as key to boosting economies in border regions that lag behind the more developed coastal provinces.
“Infrastructure holds significant strategic and economic value,” Liu told the Post.
“In the event of an emergency, personnel and resources could be deployed more quickly to frontier regions, which is crucial for border stability and national defence,” he said.
Under the 15th plan, which outlines China’s policy priorities for the rest of the decade, Beijing aims to complete two highways spanning all nine of its land-border provinces and “advance” construction of the National Coastal Highway along its east coast that links the port city of Dandong, near North Korea, with Dongxing on the border with Vietnam, the Post report said. (PTI)
