Southwest part of Tibet Autonomous Region of China | file photo
China will soon begin construction on an ambitious new railway line connecting Xinjiang and Tibet, close to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and through the disputed Aksai Chin region, according to a new railway plan released by the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Will do ) Government.
The “medium-to-long-term railway plan” for Tibet, which was made public last week, envisages expanding the TAR rail network from the current 1,400 km to 4,000 km by 2025, including new routes that will connect India And will walk till the borders of China with Nepal. ,
The most ambitious of the new plans is the Xinjiang-Tibet Railway, which will roughly follow the route of the G219 national highway. The construction of the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway through Aksai Chin created tensions between India and China in the lead-up to the 1962 war.
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The proposed railway would start at Shigatse in Tibet, and run northwest along the Nepal border, before cutting north through Aksai Chin and terminating at Hotan in Xinjiang. The planned route will pass through Rutog and around Pangong Lake on the Chinese side of the LAC. The first section, from Shigatse to Pakhuktso, will be completed by 2025, with the rest of the line, to Hotan, expected to be finished by 2035.
“By 2025, construction of a number of railway projects, including the Yan-Nyingchi section of the Sichuan-Tibet Railway, the Shigatse-Pakhuktso section of the Xinjiang-Tibet Railway, and the Bomi-Roc section of Yunnan – quoting the plan released by the TAR Development and Reform Commission Tibet Railways will see all major progress, said a state media report.
“The improvement of the regional railway network will be of great importance for promoting socioeconomic development and safeguarding national security,” the report said.
There are only three rail lines currently operating in Tibet: the Qinghai–Tibet link which opened in 2006, the Lhasa–Shigatse rail started in 2014, and the Lhasa–Nyingchi line which started operations in 2021.
The Lhasa–Nyingchi line runs southeast of Tibet and near the border with India’s Arunachal Pradesh. The line is being extended further east to the provincial capital of Sichuan and Chengdu, a major economic and military center in western China, reducing travel time between the two regional capitals from 36 hours to 12 hours.
Under the plan, border railway lines will be built to Gyrong, a land port on the Nepal-Tibet border, and Yadong County in the Chumbi Valley, which borders India’s Sikkim and Bhutan.
The railway construction is seen as serving two purposes: boosting border security by enabling China to more closely integrate border regions as well as enable rapid border mobilization when needed; and second, to accelerate the economic integration of Tibet with the hinterland. While Qinghai province has rail links to Tibet, the plan will now extend railway links to three other neighboring provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu for the first time.