The Chinese government has kick-started a large-scale effort to upgrade air and rail infrastructure, as well as surveillance capabilities, in its Tibet and Xinjiang regions.

In the coming months, the government will pour billions of dollars into the two autonomous regions with a dual focus of speeding up development in restive areas and enhancing the Army’s mobilisational capacities to bring troops to remote border regions from military commands in other parts of the country.

Once completed, the additional infrastructure, which includes 8,000 km of railway lines and seven new airports, will further widen the asymmetry in border infrastructure between China and India.

China’s National Committee on Border and Coastal Defence (NCBD) in January 2010 pressed the government to speed up infrastructure development in border areas in Tibet and Xinjiang. Following work conferences in May and July on development in Tibet and Xinjiang, local governments in both regions have begun allocating funds for the new projects.

The NCBD also told China’s top leaders that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was close to finishing work on its plan to build a “digital great wall” along the borders in Tibet and Xinjiang. The digital wall is a network of fibre optics which will improve the PLA’s command control structure and communication.

Last year, with the setting up of a new sentry post in Medog County of the Nyingri Prefecture in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the infrastructure for the nationwide surveillance system had been put in place. The meeting was also told that the PLA was on its way to adding 7,000 km of fences, 3,000 border demarcations, watchtowers, coastal defence installations and 25,000 km of maritime border patrol tunnels in other areas.

The new infrastructure includes an additional 8,000 km of railway lines and six new airports in Xinjiang, which lies in China’s far west, bordering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

The Ministry of Railways announced in June it would spend $45.6 billion in the next 10 years to add 8,000 km of railways in Xinjiang, covering 90 per cent of its counties. The government will build six new airports in Xinjiang in the next five-year plan (2011-2015), taking the number of airports in the remote region to 22. The railway network will serve the dual purpose of enhancing troop mobility both to border areas and also within Xinjiang, to increase response times to any unrest. In July 2009, the region saw the worst ethnic violence in China’s recent history, which claimed at least 197 lives and left 1,700 injured.

Reduced travel time

A new 1,776-km line will be built from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, to Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. The $21-billion line will reduce a 20-hour journey by half. The government has also begun work on adding new lines to improve connectivity between Urumqi and Beijing. The new lines will reduce travelling time between the two cities from 40 hours to just 12.

This month, the government has also opened a new airport in Tibet, in the northwest Ngari prefecture. The $249-million airport is Tibet’s fourth, after Lhasa, Bamda in Qamdo prefecture and Nyingchi. A fifth airport, in Xigaze, will open in October.

Much of the PLA’s focus in recent years has been on increasing coordination and mobility between the country’s seven military regions, which was found to be lacking both during the 2008 unrest in Tibet and also in responding to the earthquake in Sichuan the same year.