Beijing, March 10 China plans to further strengthen its strategic transport network in sensitive border regions with India over the next five years to fortify its remote frontiers during the 15th Five-Year Plan, which begins this year.
One project involves building a 394 km highway linking the northern and southern sides of the rugged Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang, the Uygur Autonomous Region, as reported by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, quoting the draft report of the 15th Five-Year Plan.
The plan is now pending approval from China’s national legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), which is currently in session here.
The route will run parallel to a strategic road built through the disputed Aksai Chin area to improve military mobility following the 1962 Sino-Indian border war.
Construction of the Dushanzi-Kuqa Highway in central Xinjiang began in September and is expected to be completed by 2032.
The plan also proposes upgrading the three existing highways running into Tibet.
The 15th Five-Year Plan, which is considered the most consequential for China's future, placing greater emphasis on AI and new productive forces like electric vehicles and batteries to boost the economy, has already been approved by the ruling Communist Party.
The NPC, regarded as a rubber-stamp parliament, is expected to approve it in its current session.
China completed the 14th Five-Year Plan last year, during which it initiated the construction of the world's largest dam in Tibet over the Brahmaputra near the Indian border.
Last July, China started constructing the USD 170 billion dam, which is stated to be the world’s biggest infrastructure project. This has raised concerns in riparian countries India and Bangladesh regarding its ability to hold massive amounts of water and alter its flow.
China has been upgrading border infrastructure with India, building massive roads and high-speed rail networks in Tibet close to the disputed border.
In August, Beijing established the Xinjiang-Tibet-Railway Company to oversee the construction of a strategic 1,980 km artery between Lhasa in Tibet and Hotan in Xinjiang, as reported by the Post.
The Hotan region, located on the Karakoram plateau, includes the Galwan Valley region, the hotly contested area at the centre of the bloody war in 1962, and the deadly clashes between the troops in 2020, which resulted in a five-year complete freeze in relations between the two countries.
Relations improved after a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in 2024, followed by the SCO summit in Tianjin last year.
Both countries are currently in a normalization process involving direct flights, an increase in visa issuance, and government-level interactions.
Commenting on China's plans for road networks, Liu Zongyi, director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said that both economic development and strategic stability are driving China to expand infrastructure in border areas.
Chinese leaders have long embraced the idea that “building roads is the first step to prosperity” and see improved transport links as key to boosting economies in border regions that lag behind the more developed coastal provinces.
“Infrastructure holds significant strategic and economic value,” Liu told the Post.
“In the event of an emergency, personnel and resources could be deployed more quickly to frontier regions, which is crucial for border stability and national defence,” he said.
Under the 15th plan, which outlines China’s policy priorities for the rest of the decade, Beijing aims to complete two highways spanning all nine of its land-border provinces and “advance” the construction of the National Coastal Highway along its east coast that links the port city of Dandong, near North Korea, with Dongxing on the border with Vietnam, as reported by the Post.