Chinese authorities are pressing ahead with plans to build a series of enormous hydropower dams across a gorge in the Himalayas that is three times as deep as the Grand Canyon, despite concerns raised by Tibetan human rights groups and New Delhi.
The project would be a “major step in the country’s transition to green and low-carbon energy,” Xinhua said, adding that it would “bring a sense of gain, happiness and security to the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet.”
Xinhua did not say where the dam would be built, when construction would start or the scale of the approved project. It also gave little indication of how builders plan to resolve the severe engineering challenges of damming the world’s highest river as it passes through Earth’s largest land canyon, which reaches as deep as 17,000 feet in places.
Beijing has long viewed the rushing water that falls nearly 18,000 feet through 310 miles of steep-sided gorge as an important source of untapped renewable power. The project was included in the Chinese Communist Party’s most recent five-year economic development plan, which was released in 2021.
An estimate from the Chongyi Water Resources bureau put the potential hydropower output at triple that of the Three Gorges Dam. Total costs for the multistage project could be as high as a trillion yuan, or $127 billion, the bureau said last year.
The project is one of dozens across the Tibetan plateau proposed by Chinese policymakers, who are searching for new sources of energy upriver, beyond the already heavily dammed lower reaches of the Yangtze.
The building spree, if it goes ahead, threatens to rekindle a border dispute with India, which was only recently eased. In India, the Yarlung Tsangpo is known as the Brahmaputra and flows through the state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as its territory.
In responses to Indian concerns in 2020, China’s foreign ministry said it has a “legitimate right” to dam the river and has fully considered downstream impacts.
China and India had been locked in a border dispute for four years, and it was only resolved in October, just before a meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with an agreement on patrolling the disputed border regions.
The thaw has yet to reach down to working-level deals on hydrologic data sharing that are crucial for avoiding tensions over new hydropower projects, said Amit Ranjan, a research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.
“There is new bonhomie between India and China, and when there are good ties they can resolve these issue promptly,” Ranjan said. But he added that a previous deal on sharing data about water levels, discharge and rainfall lapsed in 2023 and there has been no announcement of a renewal.
Human rights groups have also raised alarm that these dams will drastically alter the natural landscape of Tibet, damage fragile local ecosystems and displace local communities.
In February this year, Tibetan communities staged rare protests in Kamtok, a remote mountainous region on the border of Tibet and Sichuan province, against a dam that rights groups said would flood six Buddhist monasteries, some of which house wall paintings dating from at least the 16th century.
“For the first time, China’s dam building [is reaching] landscapes that were previously among the least disturbed habitats on earth,” Tibet Watch, a London-based nonprofit, wrote in a report in May.
Chinese researchers have also raised concerns that such extensive excavation and construction in the steep and narrow Yarlung Tsangpo gorge will increase the frequency of landslides in an earthquake prone area.
Even if the dam itself is built to withstand seismic activity, “earthquake-induced landslides and mud-rock flows are often uncontrollable and will also pose a huge threat to the project,” a senior engineer from Sichuan provincial geological bureau warned in 2022.