The Politics of China’s Land Appropriation in Bhutan

In dealing with its neighbors, China “always strives to find fair and reasonable solutions through peaceful and friendly consultations,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the United States told the New York Times in August. Why, then, has China appropriated part of a neighbor’s territory?

That neighbor is Bhutan, a country with which China has said for decades it is keen to have formal diplomatic relations, hoping to balance or reduce Bhutan’s close relations with its southern neighbor, India. Bhutan, for its part, has what it calls “friendly and cooperative relations with the People’s Republic of China” and has supported China consistently at the United Nations and elsewhere.

As China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has put it, in more poetic terms, “China and Bhutan are linked by mountains and rivers and enjoy profound traditional friendship.” And China signed a treaty with Bhutan in 1998 in which both parties proclaimed “mutual respect for each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity” and agreed “not to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border.”

What has since happened is the opposite. Eight years ago, China began building villages within territory that has for decades if not centuries been within Bhutan. Now, as documented in a new report out, there are 22 such villages and settlements built by China within Bhutan’s customary borders. And there is no sign that Bhutan can do anything about it – or that China will face any costs for doing so.

As far as one can tell from satellite images, the Chinese villages and settlements in total contain some 2,200 homes for approximately 7,000 people. To construct these villages, China has annexed 2 percent of Bhutan’s territory.

The villages are being built in two areas of Bhutan. Eight of the Chinese villages are in a western area of Bhutan that the historian Tsering Shakya said was ceded to Bhutan by the then ruler of Tibet, the 13th Dalai Lama in the early 20th century. China has built those eight villages for military reasons: it wants that western area of Bhutan because it includes an 89-square-kilometer area called Doklam, possession of which would give China major strategic advantage in its ongoing confrontations with India.