Is China planning Big? Builds 9 new airports in Tibet bordering India

Was the Chinese transgression of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Tawang sector on December 9th part of Beijing’s fairly new strategy to alter the status quo along the border?

All assessments indicate that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China has been asked by the Chinese establishment to adopt an aggressive posturing along the LAC in a bid to alter the accepted or perceived border between the two Asian giants.

In fact, in a recent interview, former Army Chief, MM Naravane called this ‘salami cutting tactic’ whereby Beijing could try to alter the LAC in small incremental steps over a period of time.

Now it is clear that the PLA infantry may have gathered the courage to try and transgress the LAC in Tawang sector because of the massive Chinese air-power build up in the Tibet-Xinxiang region since the last couple of years.

The Centre for Strategy and International Studies, an American think tank has said in a recent report that China has built 9 new airports in the Tibet region which are run by the PLA aviation wing.

Reports accessed by Northeast Live shows that China has built 4 new airports and 5 new heliports in Tibet along the border with India while upgrading 5 airports and 2 heliports.

Reports talk about sighting of fighter aircrafts, re-fuellers, airborne early warning and control aircrafts and the sophisticated WZ-7 drones called Soaring Dragons at some of the airbases within a distance of 150 km from Arunachal Pradesh. These drones launched about a year ago, are said to have a capability to fly non-stop upto 10 hours.

The air-power build up by Chinese indicate that they were engaged in serious air space surveillance along the Sino-indian border.

Significantly, the Chinese are even militarising the civilian airports in the area. For eg: the Nyingchi Mainling airport, not far from the border in Arunachal Pradesh, has seen militarisation since 2020. In some of these airbases, reports talk about sighting of military training and air defence equipment besides camouflage positions.

Obviously, one can safely say that the Indian military establishment is aware of these developments across the border. Whether or not the Indian Air Forces’ exercises over the Arunachal skies and India’s decision to launch combat air patrol in the area are the result of the preparedness across the border is something that should be left to the Indian defence establishment to comment upon.