Dharamshala, 18th June: According to a Chinese journalist on Twitter, China is conducting final trials on its new high-speed train line connecting Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, with Nyingchi, a town adjacent to India’s Tuting sector in the Upper Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh. The Beijing-based journalist revealed that China spent $4.8 billion on the 435-kilometer rail route by posting a video of the trials on the microblogging site.
🚄Here we go!
Final trials of China’s 4.8 billion US dollars worth of Lhasa-Nyingchi high-altitude high-speed railway in Tibet Autonomous Region. pic.twitter.com/OTJRUEcxpq— Shen Shiwei沈诗伟 (@shen_shiwei) June 12, 2021
Nyingchi, in Arunachal Pradesh, is 40 kilometers from the border, while the rail line itself travels considerably closer to the border than that at times. The Lhasa-Nyingchi train line is part of the 1,600-kilometer Sichuan-Tibet route, which would connect Lhasa with Chengdu, Arunachal Pradesh’s capital. Chengdu is the headquarters of China’s Western Theatre Command, which is responsible for the Indian border from Arunachal Pradesh to Ladakh. A 250-kilometer highway between Nyingchi and Lhasa has also been developed by China, which, like the Lhasa-Nyingchi rail line, travels close to Arunachal.
The Lhasa-Nyingchi train line, which is roughly 75% across bridges or beneath tunnels, began construction in 2015, and track laying was completed five years later, in December 2020. In the midst of tensions with India near the Himalayan border, China wants to open the train line to traffic by the end of June. The final 1,100-kilometer segment of the line (the Chengdu-Ya’an section) is currently complete and is scheduled to be completed by 2030.
The Lhasa-Nyingchi rail line project has gotten a lot of attention from the Chinese Communist Party’s upper echelons, including President Xi Jinping, who connected it to “border stability” in November 2020, during the stalemate with India in Ladakh. Even though the dominant narrative in Chinese state media about the Lhasa-Nyingchi rail line is linked to economic development on the Tibetan Plateau, the CCP apparatus has stated that it will serve as a “fast track” for “delivery of strategic materials” to Tibet “if a scenario of a border crisis occurs.”
The rail line will not only facilitate troop movement within China’s Western Theatre Command but will also allow the PLA to quickly transport trainloads of troops and equipment from other theatres, a scenario that cannot be ruled out following China’s massive mobilization along the LAC in Ladakh in 2020.
Image Courtesy: swarajyamag