China inaugurated the Medog Hydro power Station on July 19 on Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo River, called the Brahmaputra in India. While the plan for the dam was under discussion for a few years and the official approval came in December last year, its July inauguration is highly linked with India withdrawing its participation from the Indus Water Treaty after April’s Pahalgam terror attack. After all, dams are akin to yesterday’s forts and are contemporary bastions of geopolitics.
Indus Water Treaty is a river water-distribution treaty signed between India and Pakistan in 1960 and after the terror attack in Pahalgam valley of Kashmir that killed 26 tourists, India suspended its participation in the treaty as a punitive measure against Pakistan. India alleged that Pakistan sponsored terrorism was behind the attack.
The Medog dam–Medog means the flower in Tibetan langauge–but the Chinese call it the Motou Hydropower Project, once constructed will be three times the scale of the Three Gorges Dams which is currently the world’s largest in terms of installed capacity and power generation. Its inauguration was done in Linzhi City by China’s premier, Li Qiang. Li’s presence at the inauguration was a geo-political message in itself to India.
High-Altitude Glacial Ecosystems
So how is the timing of the inauguration of the $167 billion Medog project which actually consists of five hydro power stations linked to India’s abeyance from the Indus Water Treaty? The Medog project is in the Brahmaputra basin on the border in the Eastern Himalayas while the Indus Water Treaty is about sharing waters of the Indus and its river system in the Western Himalayas and the adjoining plains.
The clue to this geopolitical puzzle lies in Pakistan; where China is investing over $60 billion in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which also includes investments in multiple hydro power stations on the rivers of the Indus, particularly in the upper basin. This entire context can actually be better defined as China-Pakistan cooperation in high-altitude glacier ecosystems.
The latter is complex because a substantial chunk of this collaboration comes in regions which were a part of the erstwhile Princely state of Jammu and Kashmir which wholly acceded to India in 1947 but after several wars in the last several decades is administered today by three countries–India (45 percent), Pakistan (35 percent) and China (20 percent).
Incidentally China and Pakistan who call themselves “iron-clad friends”, control several of these high altitude glacial ecosystems because of their control over the territory and due to CPEC’s presence in the Gilgit-Baltistan region which again is a high-altitude glacial ecosystem. India objects to CPEC because it claims Gilgit-Baltistan as its territory.
In this matrix of disputed territories and water wars, another important point of contention between India, Pakistan and China is the trans-Karakoram tract (Shaksgam valley) that was a part of the same disputed territory but was transferred by Pakistan to China in 1963 under the Sino-Pakistan Agreement. The trans-Karakoram tract, an important connecting geography, is again a high-altitude glacier ecosystem meaning it consists of multiple glaciers that feed many rivers in the regions.
However its rivers come under the Tarim River Basin. Nonetheless, the two river systems are connected.
Origin of Rivers in Tibet
Though the Indus and the Brahmaputra flow in opposite directions in the western and eastern Himalayan regions respectively–they both originate from the same region of the Kailash range and the Mansarovar lake inside Tibet that China controls today. Controlling rivers at their origin in high altitude glacier ecosystems is a massive source of power in river conflicts.
China-Pakistan cooperation in these regions not only helps China strengthen its control over the region but it also keeps India, a lower riparian state, threatened. Pakistan is a lower riparian state for rivers originating and flowing through India, across the western Himalayas in the same way that India is downstream for rivers coming from across the border with China in eastern Himalayas.
In this geopolitical chess board spread across the massive Himalayan stretch, when India puts before Pakistan a challenge, the answer can likely come from China.
And in this century of Asian rise characterized by the economic rise of India and China and the ensuing competition–the Himalayan chess board is a single stretch spread between two most populated countries. They are hungry for power and resources but are ideologically antagonistic.
(The Author is a senior journalist and a MOFA 2025 Taiwan Fellow)
