Chinese social media abuzz with 'tank dens' in Tibet chatter: Why India needs to heed seriously

My article Chinese social media abuzz with 'tank dens' in Tibet chatter: Why India needs to heed seriously appeared in Firstpost.

Here is the link...

Whether all details are confirmed in their entirety or not about the presence of 'tank dens' is an altogether different matter, but it should be a serious warning for India 

In the recent times, the Chinese social media has been agog with ‘tank dens’ being built by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Tibet; one article speaks of “fully underground design, to prevent Indian troops from starting artillery sneak attack.”
In December 2022, the site ximalaya.com mentioned: “India always wants to act tougher with China in order to please the United States; it is the root cause of disputes on the Sino-Indian border and in the border areas.”
This is forgetting that the ‘dispute’ started at the end of the 1950s, at a time India was close to the Soviet Union.
The article affirmed: “The PLA is far better prepared for war than the Indians could imagine, and recently, India has even discovered an unexpected situation. This will not only effectively protect against Indian bombardment, but also provide a fairly good environment for the equipment.”
Of course, this can be seen as part of the Information Warfare (IW) waged against India, but it can’t be fully ignored.
The article mentioned some Chinese PLA 96A tanks hidden in 'tank dens' near the Indian border (probably in the Chumbi Valley between Sikkim and Bhutan).

Old Habits Die Hard
There is nothing new in the Chinese mania to ‘dig’, except that the PLA’s technology is today far ahead of what it was decades ago.
Nearly 30 years ago, I had the opportunity to interview several senior Tibetan officials who accompanied the Dalai Lama in exile in 1959.
One of them was Rinchen Sadutshang, who as a young translator accompanied the Tibetan delegation who signed a 17-Point Agreement with China in Beijing in 1951; later he served as the Dalai Lama’s representative in Delhi.
When asked whether the Chinese had massive deployment of troops in Southern Tibet at the end of 1950s (for example in places like Tsona, north of Tawang), Sadutshang replied: “Oh yes, all over the place. Wherever the PLA went, they were very secretive. …They were always stationed in mountains and they dug tunnels and tunnels and tunnels.”
This surprised me greatly.
Later, I asked him again about the tunnels; for example, was the local population involved? Sadutshang recounted: “They did not allow the local population [to come nearby]. All aspects of military operations were top secret. Very few civilians were involved, maybe one or two who were indispensable. It was people that either were completely trusted or some after being used, were eliminated. It was so secret, and all the [PLA] movements were happening at night, never during the day. [Tibetan] people could only report: ‘we heard a lot of vehicles moving, a lot trucks moving, it must be the army’; they had not seen them.”
The Tibetan official continued: “…Even in Yatung, they used to be a lot of Chinese military forces there, all inside tunnels, they dug the mountains, huge tunnels, [they were] like mice living under the ground. Exactly the same as mice, you do not see them from outside and they are so well guarded, they do not allow anybody to go 10 km from the entrance as all roads were blocked.”
I had forgotten about this interview until I recently came across the ‘tank dens’.

The Underground City
Some other historical cases are well-known; during the Cold War, a bomb shelter consisting of a network of tunnels existed beneath Beijing, the Chinese capital. Some observers spoke of the ‘Underground Great Wall’, it was built for military purposes.
The complex was constructed from 1969 to 1979 in anticipation of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union as the Sino-Soviet relations had worsened.
It is Mao Zedong who ordered the construction of the Underground City.
The complex was designed to withstand nuclear, biochemical and conventional attacks. The averred purpose was to protect Beijing's population, and allow government officials to leave in the event of an attack on the capital.
Lying some 18 metres underground, the ‘dark, damp, and genuinely eerie’ tunnels covered an area of 85 square kilometers: “At one time there were about 90 entrances to the complex, all of which were hidden in shops along the main streets of Qianmen,” says the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
The complex had facilities such as restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, factories, a roller skating rink, grain and oil warehouses, and a mushroom cultivation farm. It was built by more than 300,000 local workers, including ‘volunteer’ school students.
There were also almost 70 potential sites where water wells could easily be dug if required. To this add elaborate ventilation systems with 2,300 shafts that could be sealed off to protect the tunnels' inhabitants from poison gases. All contingencies had been taken into consideration.
Many believe that the tunnels linked important governmental buildings such as Zhongnanhai, the Great Hall of the People, and even PLA bases in the outskirts of the city; the rumour was that every senior official’s residence had a secret trapdoor leading to the tunnels.

Project 131
Another grandiose scheme was Project 131, located in the town of Gaoqiao of the Xian'an District of the Xianning prefecture-level city in Hubei Province. It was located some 80 km south of Wuhan.
The origin of the Project is also the split with the Soviet Union. On January 31, 1969, the decision was taken to build an underground command headquarters for the PLA (the name derives the date of the decision or 1-31). The Chief of Staff of the PLA’s General Staff Department, Gen Huang Yongsheng was responsible for the construction.
In 1955, Huang had risen through the 1950s and 1960s, and during the Cultural Revolution he became close to Lin Biao, the Defence Minister.
The tunnels, which had meeting rooms, offices for the top commanders, were constructed under the nearby hills; luxurious villas for Mao Zedong and his heir apparent Lin Biao were also built but over the ground.
After the latter’s dramatic escape and his subsequent death, Huang was purged due to his close association with the defence minister; the project was stopped and Mao and his cronies never used the facilities.

The ‘Tank Dens’
Now, it appears that the PLA has built semi-underground as well as fully underground fortifications and military bases along the Tibet-India border.
The article quoted above said: “In recent reports, the PLA's plateau underground fortifications have been revealed and although not many specific [details about the] plateau underground fortifications have become public, there are enough to show the existence of a number of them, including a rare Chinese ‘tank fortress’; it can also be called a staging area for tanks and troops. A hundred tanks as well as other armoured vehicles and a large number of PLA troops are already stationed directly in this semi-underground fortification.”
The site ximalaya.com added: “the PLA plateau bases are now fully underground facilities, and though the amount of work is very important, it has the advantage of good protection for the equipment and it greatly improves the living conditions of the [army] personnel. More importantly, it can provide good protection against sneak attacks by Indian troops using artillery. Due to the very large range of modern weaponry, the problem of facing a surprise attack must be considered even at a distance of several dozen of kilometres from the front line.”
The article further rationales: “It is not possible to rule out the possibility of a surprise attack by the Indians, [for example] a sudden and massive artillery attack. The PLA should then be prepared with a large number of armoured vehicles [tanks] to ensure that our forces are not destroyed by the Indian army, after all, we can't afford to have a defensive [position] only.”
Whether all these details are confirmed in their entirety or not, it should be a serious warning for India.

The Border Situation
In this context, it was interesting to see that Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently stood firm on India’s position when he met his Chinese counterpart General Li Shangfu. Held on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) defence ministers’ meeting in Delhi, the Indian Minister is said to have used plain words to characterize the recent developments in the India-China border. A statement said: “Rajnath Singh categorically conveyed that development of relations between India and China is premised on the prevalence of peace and tranquility at the borders …. He reiterated that violation of existing agreements has eroded the entire basis of bilateral relations and disengagement at the border will logically be followed with de-escalation.”
Undoubtedly, China is getting ready for a long haul; the ‘tank dens’ should be seen in this perspective.

Tibet’s Waters for Xinjiang: Another Diversion of the Brahmaputra?

Picture accompanying the Chinese article

I often mentioned on this blog, the different 'diversion' schemes, whether of the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) or the Indus River.
Now, a new one has come to light.
According to an official Chinese website, during the 'Two Sessions', the China Railway Tunnel Group Co Ltd (CRTG), the largest specialized company in the field of underground works in China, which integrates design, construction, scientific research and manufacture, proposed to divert the Yarlung Tsanpo (Brahmaputra) from Tibet to Xinjiang.
CRTG is itself a subsidiary of the China Railway Group Ltd, with has 14 wholly-owned subsidiaries, 3 holding subsidiaries, 2 share holding subsidiaries and 8 branch companies.
The company likes to think big (money).
Whether it could trigger a conflict with India is not its concern.

The New Scheme
During the Second Session of the Twelfth National People's Congress (NPC), CRTG’s Deputy Chief Engineer Wang Mengshu submitted a project for the first phase of mega ‘a water diversion’ scheme.
Wang Mengshu stated that the water transfer project could not only help the ecological environment in the project area, but also greatly improve the social and economic development of the region, i.e. Xinjiang.
It would also improve the transportation, energy, communications and other infrastructure conditions in Southern Xinjiang, on a desert area covering 80 million square kilometers which could be transformed into an oasis.
It would later help ‘transferring’ of a large number of people to this strategic area of Western China.
In a long-term, it would have a great significance for the development of the region.
The ‘proposal’ has been worked out with the Hydraulics and Mountain River Development Department of the Sichuan University. Key national research laboratories are ready to provide further support.
Wang Mengshu introduced the first phase of the project to divert some 10 billion to 15 billion m3 from the Yarlung Zangbo River (Brahmaputra) to Southern Xinjiang.
The main feature of the project would be that the transfer of flood waters would not require a hydropower station power generation required as the waters would flow downstream and the ecological environment of the basin would not be significantly affected.

The first hub: four features
The first hub would not used 'water diversion technology’ with a dam.
Gravity through a tunnel would be complemented by smart water management for the distribution system.
In his introduction, Wang Mengshu said that in the first phase of the project, there will four major technical features.
One, the first part will not use a dam for the diversion.
It will conform to natural and sustainable laws.
Second, the traditional Dujiangyan watershed, sand and diversion control technology and water flow control technology will be utilised.
What is a Dujiangyan irrigation system?
According to Wikipedia, it was originally constructed around 256 BC by the State of Qin as a water conservation and flood control scheme. The system's infrastructure is on the Min River (Minjiang) in Sichuan.
The area is situated in the western portion of the Chengdu flat lands at the confluence between the Sichuan basin and the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. Originally the Minjiang rushed down from the Min Mountains, but slowed abruptly after reaching the Chengdu Plains, causing the watercourse to fill up with silt, making the surrounding area extremely prone to flooding. Li Bing, then governor of Shu for the state of Qin, took care of the construction of the Dujiangyan, which harnessed the river using a new method of channeling and dividing the water rather than simply following the old way of dam building. It is still in use today to irrigate over 5,300 square kilometers of land in the same area.
In the 'diversion' scheme, the principles will be to utilize ‘curved circulation’ to achieve secondary water flow and sedimentation, the use of ‘settling sedimentation’, and finally use of a shaft to control the water, according to the principle of using floods waters.
It could work even during the dry season, as well as meet the downstream ecological requirements while helping reduce the downstream floods.
The third feature the water supply will be the use of gravity through flow tunnel technology, it will avoid evaporation along the way.
All other technical issues will make the project safe and reliable.
Fourth and finally, the pressure-flow will be self-regulated by the shaft technology which can be used to divide the whole water delivery system into several relatively independent subunits.
It can reduce the ‘water hammer pressure’ of the whole water supply system and avoid the full range of diffusion and propagation of hydraulic oscillation.
And also it will reduce the 'vibration' of the water flow system and tackle other issues; it will be easy to control and will fully transfer the flood waters.
The structure is also relatively simple, according to Meng, though not easy to understand for the lay man.
Wang Mengshu said that this water transfer technology is feasible, the ecological impact is minimal; it has a low operating and maintenance costs.
With the use of tunnels for the water supply, water evaporation loss is minimal and water security is fully protected. The principle of taking away flood waters, will avoid the outflow of surplus water downstream and even will reduce the pressure on the river flood control.
Wang Mengshu suggested carrying a demonstration of the water diversion project. On this basis, the implementation of the first phase of the project is feasible, he said.
The translation of the article might not be perfect but it gives an idea of the concept of the project.

What about India?
No doubt that the ‘tunnel lobby’ is as powerful as the ‘dam lobby’ in the Middle Kingdom.
Like the other projects reported in this blog earlier, it is a dream of megalomaniac engineers, who forget that the Yarlung Tsangpo (the Siang in Arunachal Pradesh and later the Brahmaputra and the Jamuna in Bangladesh) is not the sole property of the the People's Republic of China.
India and Bangladesh have a say as far as the utilisation of its waters is concerned.
It is probably one of these projects to remind India that China, by controlling Tibet, also control the Tibetan rivers and can create a lot of trouble for the lower riparian States.
Can it go further than the drawing board?
It is doubtful.

Some previous posts

• Water War in South Asia? (2003)

• Again diverting the Brahmaputra (2013)

• The 'feasibility' of diverting the Brahmaputra (2014)

• Diverting the Indus to Xinjiang (2015)

The 'feasibility' of diverting the Brahmaputra

Map prepared according to an article published on a Chinese official website

Let me come back on the 'feasibility' of diverting the Yarlung Tsango/Brahmaputra towards northern China.
Some years ago, I wrote the 'history' of the project which had become public in 1986 for the first time.
I am posting below what I wrote at that time.
At the end of the 1980s, till the 1990s, experts agreed that the project to 'push water up' and cross the mountain ranges was impossible, unless Beijing decided to use some sorts of small nuclear devices (or PNE, Peaceful Nuclear Explosions).
Twenty years down the line, the situation has changed. China has made tremendous progress in digging tunnels. It is perhaps one of the reasons why the project has recently resurfaced.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that "China Considers Longest Underwater Tunnel Under Bohai Sea".
The financial publication explained: "China may invest US $ 36 billion to build the world’s longest tunnel beneath the Bohai Sea to connect the northeastern city of Dalian to Yantai in Shandong province".
It quotes the China Daily: "proposals for the 123-kilometer tunnel, which is targeted for completion in 2026, may be submitted to the central government in April". The Chinese newspaper cites Wang Mengshu, an engineer working on the project: "A feasibility study taking two to three years could begin as early as 2015."
The proposed tunnel would become the longest in the world (twice the length of Japan’s Seikan Tunnel, which is 53.9 kms long). Bloomberg asserted: "The world’s second-largest economy has poured billions in past years to build infrastructure to spur growth, which may be more critical with gross domestic product forecast by economists to expand this year at the slowest pace since 1990."
The project is also important for the ports of Qinhuangdao, Tianjin and Caofeidian all located on the coast of the Bohai Sea.

Bohai Sea (map SCMP)

Can you imagine that the tunnel (if constructed) would cut the travel time between Dalian and Yantai to 40 minutes (from about eight hours by ferry currently and 1,400 km by road).
In the Bohai tunnel, trains may be able to run at 220 kilometers an hour and passenger vehicles would cross the sea on rail carriages.
During the last meeting of the National People’s Congress in March 2013, Chen Zhenggao, the provincial governor of Liaoning province requested the central government to take up the project as soon as possible to boost the regional economy.
My point is that if China has the technology to dig such a tunnel under the Bohai Sea, it might be able to perform a similar feat around the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo, in which case the new avatar of the Great Western Water Diversion may not be an utopia as thought earlier.
One issue has however not been mentioned, it is the fate of the Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve (SNNR), also known as the Three Rivers Nature Reserve.
Located on the Tibetan Plateau (in today's Qinghai province), the 'Reserve' monitors the headwaters of the Yellow River, the Yangtze, and the Mekong. The SNNR has been established to protect the sources and headwaters of these rivers. The reserve is divided in 18 subareas, each containing three zones.

Map Wikipedia

Wikipedia says: "Along with wetland and waters protection, other ecological values, such as grassland, forest, and wildlife enhancement, have also been presented as goals. To advance the goals of the SNNR uncontrolled or poorly managed mining, logging, hunting, and grazing have been curtailed. Foreign and other mining firms have replaced the uncontrolled miners, trees have been planted, and measures have been taken to protect endangered species. To protect the grasslands, pastoralists are not permitted to graze their animals in designated ‘core zones’, and grazing is supervised elsewhere in the SNNR. In addition, residents have been resettled from core zones and other grassland areas of the SNNR, and rangeland has been fenced and is in the process of being privatized throughout the Sanjiangyuan Area."
There are, of course, many controversial aspects in this project, but its objective would be the first causality if the mega diversion was allowed to happen.

Here is my 'History of the project' written 10 years ago
The gigantic project was first mentioned at a conference in Alaska in July 1986. Projects under the Global Infrastructure Fund (GIF) were discussed and the ‘Himalayan Hydropower project’ was short-listed. At that time, it was envisaged to have a series of 11 dams around the ‘Brahmaputra loop’ (Great Bend). It included a tunnel through the mountains bringing water to a powerhouse projected to have a capacity of 48,000 Megawatts. The overall capacity of the ‘loop’ was speculated to be 70,000 Megawatts.
Later, the GIF stopped mentioning the project, engineers in Beijing had not shelved it. On the contrary, its new avatar appeared a few years later, as a single mega power station with an installed capacity of around 40,000 Megawatts.
The project was reported in The Scientific American in June 1996. This article giving credence to the Chinese plans. The journal wrote: “Recently some Chinese engineers proposed diverting water into this arid area [Gobi Desert] from the mighty Brahmaputra River, which skirts China’s southern border before dipping into India and Bangladesh. Such a feat would be ‘impossible’ with conventional methods, engineers stated at a meeting held last December at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics in Beijing. But they added that “we can certainly accomplish this project” with nuclear explosives.”
The Journal continued: “This statement is just one of the many lately in which Chinese technologists and officials have touted the potential of nuclear blasts for carrying out non-military goals.”
It is said that one of the reasons for China’s refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was because their desire to keep the possibility of experimenting with what is called PNE (Peaceful Nuclear Explosion). The Chinese argument was “why should promising and potentially useful technology be abandoned.”
The first (and almost only time) that the matter was reported in the Indian Press was in June 1997 when Outlook magazine wrote a piece entitled: “A river runs through it -- China proposes to divert the Brahmaputra at source to green the arid Gobi desert.” The magazine wrote: “The initial report -- that the Chinese were planning to raise their food output in the decades ahead -- was hardly stop-press material. But as details leaked out, policymakers in India and Bangladesh felt a shiver of apprehension: the Chinese proposed to divert the Brahmaputra river at source, in Tibet, even set off a peaceful nuclear explosion, to serve their purpose.”
At that time, the only thing that a former director, Asian Development Bank said was that under international law, no one could stop China and that “The Chinese government has equal rights to the use of the river."
However, Outlook revealed that “the concern in Assam and Bangladesh is understandable. The Luit - as the river [Brahmaputra] is locally called - figures prominently in the folklore and culture of Assam and the Northeast; has been the theme of countless Bhupen Hazarika songs. The river is crucial to the economy of the entire region, where the concept of irrigation through groundwater sources has not really taken off.”
In the coming months, more publicity was given to the dam as well as the diversion proposals. In September 1997, Agence France Press in Beijing reported: "Three experts propose construction of giant dam in Tibet". It stated: "After a long experience of exploration on the site, we believe that the project could begin to be included in the agenda of the concerned department”. Electricity produced was claimed to be: “available for export to Bangladesh, Burma and India, [a feature of the GIF plans] and the diverted water could irrigate the northwestern deserts of the country".
The project was also mentioned in news briefs in the China Daily Business Weekly (21 September 1997) and the International Water Power & Dam Construction Monthly (November 1997).
In January 1998, , the German TV channel ZDF presented a feature on the Yarlung Tsangpo project, in a program entitled "Die Welt" [The World]. The Chief Planner, Professor Chen Chuanyu was interviewed. He described the plan to drill a 15 km (9.3 miles) tunnel through the Himalayas to divert the water before the U turn and direct it to the other end of the bend. This would shorten the distance of the approximately 3,000 meters altitude drop from 200 km to just 15 km. He explained that the hydropower potential of 40,000 Megawatt could be used to pump water to Northwest China over 800 km away.
An interesting aspect that we have briefly mentioned is that this area known to the Tibetans as Pemakö was considered to be a sacred area, rarely visited by outsiders. The difficulty of access to this unexplored region must have created one of the greatest obstacles for the engineers in Beijing. At the end of the 90’s, the Chinese government decided to permit foreigners to explore the Grand Canyon. The well-known National Geographic expedition, with ultra sophisticated materials and highly professional rafters made the first discoveries. Though it resulted in the death of an American kayaker, Doug Gordou in October 1998, it permitted a far greater knowledge in several previously unexplored parts of the gorges. Books and video footage of this expedition (as well as subsequent ones) certainly helped the Chinese planners to get a more accurate picture of the difficulty of the terrain (as well as the potentialities).
The opening of the area to adventure tourism was certainly the step of the preparatory work to find an approach way for dam site.
It should be remembered here that the U turn of the Tsangpo is very close to the Indian border of Arunachal Pradesh (no more 10-15 km as the crow flies) and that China claims the Indian state as its own
In the recent years, the Chinese have been more discreet on the project, although a few reports have continued to come in. The correspondent of The Telegraph in Beijing wrote in October 2000: “Chinese leaders are drawing up plans to use nuclear explosions, in breach of the international test-ban treaty, to blast a tunnel through the Himalayas for the world's biggest hydroelectric plant.”
The Telegraph justly warned: “China will have to overcome fierce opposition from neighbouring countries who fear that the scheme could endanger the lives and livelihoods of millions of their people. Critics say that those living downstream would be at the mercy of Chinese dam officials who would be able to flood them or withhold their water supply.”
According to the London paper, the cost of drilling the tunnel through Mt Namcha Barwa appears likely to surpass £10 billion. The article gives further details: “At the bottom of the tunnel, the water will flow into a new reservoir and then be diverted along more than 500 miles of the Tibetan plateau to the vast, arid areas of Xinjiang region and Gansu province. Beijing wants to use large quantities of the plentiful waters of the south-west to top up the Yellow River basin and assuage mounting discontent over water shortages in 600 cities in northern China.”
However, it seems that the proposal has drawn flak from several Chinese scientists. Yang Yong, a geologist who had explored the river, stated that the dam could become an embarrassing white elephant amid growing signs that the volume of water flowing in the Yarlung Zangpo could shrink over the years.
But in 2000, before becoming Premier Wen Jiabao had declared: "In the 21st century, the construction of large dams will play a key role in exploiting China's water resources, controlling floods and droughts, and pushing the national economy and the country's modernization forward."
In China, the only pertinent question is perhaps: does a Chinese emperor have any choice other than to take up pharaonic works if he wants to remain emperor?

What the Great Underground Wall of China means for India

My article on tunnels in China "What the Great Underground Wall of China means for India" appeared yesterday in The DNA.
Click here to read.

Riddled like Gruyère: underground tunnels in China

In November, 2001, Craig’s Smith wrote an article in The New Times entitled Mao's Buried Past: A Strange, Subterranean City. Smith described `a network of 10-to-15-feet wide tunnels in Beijing. While Communist China was getting closer to Washington in the early 1970’s, Mao ordered the construction of a 500-bed underground hospital, a 1,000-seat movie theater, classrooms, granaries, a barbershop and even public baths under the Chinese capital.
Smith affirmed that “Beijing's total honeycomb, which took 400,000 people to complete, could reputedly hold a million people and stretched to the Western Hills, behind whose distant outline the city's sun sets each night.”
There was even a four-lane underground roadway between Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party's leadership compound and the Great Hall of the People.
This underground work was meant to counter a supposed Soviet threat. It was in fact sheer paranoia from the Great Helmsman who called the masses to “deeply dig caves, extensively store rice”.
Smith said: “Strategic mountains were riddled like Gruyère.”
A recent article in The Washington Post, based on a new research by Phillip A. Karber, a professor at Georgetown University and his students mentions "thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads."
The Post says: “The Chinese have called it their ‘Underground Great Wall’ — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.”
Karber, a former top Pentagon official, with a few ‘obsessively dedicated’ students worked for three years to translate hundreds of documents, scrutinize commercial satellite imagery and browse gigabytes of online data; they even managed to obtain restricted Chinese military documents
Their research was triggered by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake which killed 87,000 persons: "The chairman of Karber’s committee noticed Chinese news accounts reporting that thousands of radiation technicians were rushing to the region. Then came pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons."
Though not yet released, the study has already prompted a congressional hearing and has been circulated in the Pentagon.
One of the conclusions of the 363-page research paper is that China’s nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than earlier believed. The State-owned CCTV itself reported that China had more than 3,000 miles of tunnels, including underground bases able to withstand nuclear attacks.
What created a controversy is the conclusions of Karber’s team: China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000.
Hans M. Kristensen, a nuclear expert at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reacted immediately on the FAS Strategic Blog. He objected to this figure: “Although we don’t know exactly how many nuclear weapons China has, we are pretty sure that it doesn’t have 3,000. In fact, the Georgetown University estimate appears to be off by an order of magnitude”.
The main problem according to him is that there is no evidence that China has produced enough fissile material to build so many warheads. He pointed to another issue: China does not have delivery vehicles to dispatch such number of warheads on their targets. Kristensen asserted that the number of delivery vehicles gives a more accurate idea of the size of a nuclear arsenal.
For India, the point is not only the size of the Chinese arsenal or the number of nuclear warheads that Beijing possesses, but the fact that thousands of miles of tunnels have been dug, sometimes close to the Indian border, which can also be used to store ‘conventional’ weapons and ammunition.
Analysts often speak of roads, airports and other ‘dual-use’ infrastructure being built in Tibet, with India lagging far behind, but tunnels are rarely taken into consideration.
The digging mania has existed for decades in Tibet. Several years ago, a former senior Tibetan official told me: “When the Chinese dig, they do not allow the local population to come close. All the aspects of military operations are top secret. Very few Tibetan are involved, maybe one or two, when really indispensable. The digging was so secret! All the movements are done at night; never during the day. Large troop movements occurred at night. People could only say: ‘We have heard vehicles moving, it must be the army’, but nobody has not seen them.”
This was already happening in the 1960’s near the Indian border where the intelligence gathering was comparatively easier; one can imagine the difficulty to get a precise idea of what is happening in remote places such as Delingha (Qinghai) where most of the Chinese arsenal is kept.
One wishes that some bright and energetic professors of IIT or other top technology schools in India would take up such a study with their students.

China's Tunnels

This article of The Washington Post speaks of "thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads."
Whether the  conclusions of Phillip A. Karber, the professor of Georgetown University is correct or not, the fact remains that these tunnels exist.
Three years back I wrote an article in the Indian Defence Review about Missiles in Tibet where I had mentioned the underground missile storage in Tibet. Here is an extract:

"Underground missile storage site in Tibet

The same digging mania happened in Tibet [in the 1950's]. A few years ago, I had interviewed a former senior Tibetan official who recounted : “[When they dug], they did not allow the local population [to come close]. All the aspects of military operations were top secret. Very few [Tibetan] civilians were involved, maybe when one or two were indispensable, the Chinese had [no choice, but] to get their collaboration. Either they trusted these people completely or [in other cases] they used them and later eliminate them. [The digging] was so secret! All the movements were moved at night, never during the day. Large troop movements occurred at night. People could only say: “We [have] heard vehicles moving, trucks moving, it must be the army”, but they had not seen it.”

“Even in Yatung [in Chumbi Valley, near the Sikkim border], they were a lot of Chinese military forces there, inside tunnels, they dug the mountains, huge tunnels, like mice living under the ground. Exactly as mice, you could not see them from outside, it was so well guarded, they did not allow anybody to go 10 km from the place, the roads were all blocked. Nobody was allowed to go there.”

If this was happening near the Indian border where the intelligence gathering was comparatively easier, one can imagine that it is much more difficult to get a precise idea of what was or is happening in remote place such as Delingha (Qinghai).

Though no serious researches has been recently done on the subject, a few years ago, a Tibetan website associated with the Dalai Lama’s Administration reported the existence of a base at Dhoti Phu, located 3.5 km to the north west of Drapchi Prison and one km to the west of Sera monastery, outside Lhasa. It apparently was established in the 1970s. Trucks loaded with long shaped objects were spotted entering the sophisticated underground storage complex at night. In 1998, on the occasion of the Chinese Army Day (1 August), a number of missiles of these types were displayed on vehicles."

It is interesting to note that the research was triggered by the Sichuan earthquake: "The chairman of Karber’s committee noticed Chinese news accounts reporting that thousands of radiation technicians were rushing to the region. Then came pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons."
One should congratulate the students of Georgetown University who have gone deeper into the issue. Let us hope that their study will soon be published.

Georgetown students shed light on China’s tunnel system for nuclear weapons
Washington Post
By William Wan,
November 30

The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.
For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.
Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.
The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.
The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.
Most of the attention has focused on the 363-page study’s provocative conclusion — that China’s nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts.
“It’s not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information,” said a Defense Department strategist who would discuss the study only on the condition of anonymity.
The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.
Beyond its impact in the policy world, the project has made a profound mark on the students — including some who have since graduated and taken research jobs with the Defense Department and Congress.
“I don’t even want to know how many hours I spent on it,” said Nick Yarosh, 22, an international politics senior at Georgetown. “But you ask people what they did in college, most just say I took this class, I was in this club. I can say I spent it reading Chinese nuclear strategy and Second Artillery manuals. For a nerd like me, that really means something.”

For students, an obsession
The students’ professor, Phillip A. Karber, 65, had spent the Cold War as a top strategist reporting directly to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it was his early work in defense that cemented his reputation, when he led an elite research team created by Henry Kissinger, who was then the national security adviser, to probe the weaknesses of Soviet forces.
Karber prided himself on recruiting the best intelligence analysts in the government. “You didn’t just want the highest-ranking or brightest guys, you wanted the ones who were hungry,” he said.
In 2008, Karber was volunteering on a committee for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon agency charged with countering weapons of mass destruction.
After a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province, the chairman of Karber’s committee noticed Chinese news accounts reporting that thousands of radiation technicians were rushing to the region. Then came pictures of strangely collapsed hills and speculation that the caved-in tunnels in the area had held nuclear weapons.
Find out what’s going on, the chairman asked Karber, who began looking for analysts again — this time among his students at Georgetown.
The first inductees came from his arms-control classes. Each semester, he set aside a day to show them tantalizing videos and documents he had begun gathering on the tunnels. Then he concluded with a simple question: What do you think it means?
“The fact that there were no answers to that really got to me,” said former student Dustin Walker, 22. “It started out like any other class, tests on this day or that, but people kept coming back, even after graduation. . . . We spent hours on our own outside of class on this stuff.”
The students worked in their dorms translating military texts. They skipped movie nights for marathon sessions reviewing TV clips of missiles being moved from one tunnel structure to another. While their friends read Shakespeare, they gathered in the library to war-game worst-case scenarios of a Chinese nuclear strike on the United States.
Over time, the team grew from a handful of contributors to roughly two dozen. Most spent their time studying the subterranean activities of the Second Artillery Corps.
While the tunnels’ existence was something of an open secret among the handful of experts studying China’s nuclear arms, almost no papers or public reports on the structures existed.
So the students turned to publicly available Chinese sources — military journals, local news reports and online photos posted by Chinese citizens. It helped that China’s famously secretive military was beginning to release more information, driven by its leaders’ eagerness to show off China’s growing power to its citizens.
The Internet also generated a raft of leads: new military forums, blogs and once-obscure local TV reports now posted on the Chinese equivalents of YouTube. Strategic string searches even allowed the students to get behind some military Web sites and download documents such as syllabuses taught at China’s military academies.

Drudgery and discoveries
The main problem was the sheer amount of translation required.
Each semester, Karber managed to recruit only one or two Chinese-speaking students. So the team assembled a makeshift system to scan images of the books and documents they found. Using text-capture software, they converted those pictures into Chinese characters, which were fed into translation software to produce crude English versions. From those, they highlighted key passages for finer translation by the Chinese speakers.
The downside was the drudgery — hours feeding pages into the scanner. The upside was that after three years, the students had compiled a searchable database of more than 1.4 million words on the Second Artillery and its tunnels.
By combining everything they found in the journals, video clips, satellite imagery and photos, they were able to triangulate the location of several tunnel structures, with a rough idea of what types of missiles were stored in each.
Their work also yielded smaller revelations: how the missiles were kept mobile and transported from structure to structure, as well as tantalizing images and accounts of a “missile train” and disguised passenger rail cars to move China’s long-range missiles.
To facilitate the work, Karber set up research rooms for the students at his home in Great Falls. He bought Apple computers and large flat-screen monitors for their video work and obtained small research grants for those who wanted to work through the summer. When work ran late, many crashed in his basement’s spare room.
“I got fat working on this thing because I didn’t go to the gym anymore. It was that intense,” said Yarosh, who has continued on the project this year not for credit but purely as a hobby. “It’s not the typical college course. Dr. Karber just tells you the objective and gives you total freedom to figure out how to get there. That level of trust can be liberating.”
Some of the biggest breakthroughs came after members of Karber’s team used personal connections in China to obtain a 400-page manual produced by the Second Artillery and usually available only to China’s military personnel.
Another source of insight was a pair of semi-fictionalized TV series chronicling the lives of Second Artillery soldiers.
The plots were often overwrought with melodrama — one series centers on a brigade commander who struggles to whip his slipshod unit into shape while juggling relationship problems with his glamorous Olympic-swim-coach girlfriend. But they also included surprisingly accurate depictions of artillery units’ procedures that lined up perfectly with the military manual and other documents.
“Until someone showed us on screen how exactly these missile deployments were done from the tunnels, we only had disparate pieces. The TV shows gave us the big picture of how it all worked together,” Karber said.

A bigger Chinese arsenal?
In December 2009, just as the students began making progress, the Chinese military admitted for the first time that the Second Artillery had indeed been building a network of tunnels. According to a report by state-run CCTV, China had more than 3,000 miles of tunnels — roughly the distance between Boston and San Francisco — including deep underground bases that could withstand multiple nuclear attacks.
The news shocked Karber and his team. It confirmed the direction of their research, but it also highlighted how little attention the tunnels were garnering outside East Asia.
The lack of interest, particularly in the U.S. media, demonstrated China’s unique position in the world of nuclear arms.
For decades, the focus has been on the two powers with the largest nuclear stockpiles by far — the United States, with 5,000 warheads available for deployment, and Russia, which has 8,000.
But of the five nuclear weapons states recognized by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, China has been the most secretive. While the United States and Russia are bound by bilateral treaties that require on-site inspections, disclosure of forces and bans on certain missiles, China is not.
The assumption for years has been that the Chinese arsenal is relatively small — anywhere from 80 to 400 warheads.
China has encouraged that perception. As the only one of the five original nuclear states with a no-first-use policy, it insists that it keeps a small stockpile only for “minimum deterrence.”
Given China’s lack of transparency, Karber argues, all the experts have to work with are assumptions, which can often be dead wrong. As an example, Karber often recounts to his students his experience of going to Russia with former defense secretary Frank C. Carlucci to discuss U.S. help in securing the Russian nuclear arsenal.
The United States had offered Russia about 20,000 canisters designed to safeguard warheads — a number based on U.S. estimates at the time.
The generals told Karber they needed 40,000.

Skepticism among analysts
At the end of the tunnel study, Karber cautions that the same could happen with China. Based on the number of tunnels the Second Artillery is digging and its increasing deployment of missiles, he argues, China’s nuclear warheads could number as many as 3,000.
It is an assertion that has provoked heated responses from the arms-control community.
Gregory Kulacki, a China nuclear analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, publicly condemned Karber’s report at a recent lecture in Washington. In an interview afterward, he called the 3,000 figure “ridiculous” and said the study’s methodology — especially its inclusion of posts from Chinese bloggers — was “incompetent and lazy.”
“The fact that they’re building tunnels could actually reinforce the exact opposite point,” he argued. “With more tunnels and a better chance of survivability, they may think they don’t need as many warheads to strike back.”
Reaction from others has been more moderate.
“Their research has value, but it also shows the danger of the Internet,” said Hans M. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. Kristensen faulted some of the students’ interpretation of the satellite images.
“One thing his report accomplishes, I think, is it highlights the uncertainty about what China has,” said Mark Stokes, executive director of the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank. “There’s no question China’s been investing in tunnels, and to look at those efforts and pose this question is worthwhile.”
This year, the Defense Department’s annual report on China’s military highlighted for the first time the Second Artillery’s work on new tunnels, partly a result of Karber’s report, according to some Pentagon officials. And in the spring, shortly before a visit to China, some in the office of then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates were briefed on the study.
“I think it’s fair to say senior officials here have keyed upon the importance of this work,” said one Pentagon officer who was not authorized to speak on the record.
For Karber, provoking such debate means that he and his small army of undergrads have succeeded.
“I don’t have the slightest idea how many nuclear weapons China really has, but neither does anyone else in the arms-control community,” he said. “That’s the problem with China — no one really knows except them.”