China Could Restrict India's Water Supply With World's Largest Dam

 

[By Neely Haby]

The Tibetan Plateau is the largest source of freshwater in the Indo-Pacific region, supporting a staggering 1.35?billion people, a fifth of the world’s population. Of the five major rivers flowing from the plateau, China has established a system of hydroelectric dams on the two largest: the Mekong River flowing through Southeast Asia, and the Brahmaputra River flowing through India and Bangladesh.

My new ASPI report assesses the geopolitical impact of a possible new dam proposed by China at the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra. In particular, it examines the dam as a potential source of coercive leverage China may gain over India.

In the report I argue a dam at the Great Bend would create four likely strategic effects:

—It would very likely consolidate Beijing’s political control over its distant borderlands;

—It would create the potential for strategic flooding;

—It may affect human settlement and economic patterns on the Indian side of the border, downstream; and

—It would give Beijing water and data that it could withhold from India as bargaining leverage in unrelated negotiations.

The Brahmaputra River, nicknamed the ‘highest river in the world’, exists as a hydropower goldmine because water flow and the steepness of elevation drop determine the amount of available energy in moving water. The greatest point of hydropower potential on the Brahmaputra is the Great Bend, which is a point on the river in China where the water takes a sharp turn, dropping 3,000?meters through a gorge before gushing cross-border into Arunachal Pradesh, India.

The Chinese Government has for years toyed with the idea of a massive dam at the Great Bend, and, in 2020, in the midst of a military crisis on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), it announced its latest plan for a massive hydropower plant on the Brahmaputra. A possible hydropower project would involve a tunnel that cuts through terrain, linking the river at relatively higher altitude before the Great Bend, with the river at relatively lower altitude after it.

Such a project would be able to power a 50-gigawatt hydropower station (that could provide 300?billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year). It would be the largest hydropower project in history—about three times the size of the Three Gorges Dam.

Beijing’s reach for lofty climate initiatives as the biggest energy consumer on the planet has made it the largest hydropower producer in the world, giving it extensive influence and power over lower riparian nations—that is, those downstream on rivers—through water control.

China’s climate pledge is to peak in carbon emissions before 2030. Its ‘14th Five Year Plan for a Modern Energy System’ details its strategy in energy from 2021 to 2025, a timeframe it describes as a critical period for ensuring China’s energy security. Energy shortages experienced by the country over the past three years have encouraged a balanced approach to its low-carbon transition, detailed in the plan as a coordinated, ‘supplies guaranteed’, large-scale expansion of renewables. The plan runs parallel to the building of hundreds of new coal-fired power plants to insure the country against recurring blackouts. China is pushing to match thermal energy expansion with a rapid enlargement of renewables to maintain its eco-friendly façade.

The scale and location of the proposed Great Bend Dam will substantially increase China’s influence in the border region and expand its capacity to store and withhold or release water in India. Hydro-hegemony isn’t a foreign concept to India, which in many cases benefits from holding a favorable position upstream from its neighbors. However, as the lower riparian nation on the Brahmaputra, New Delhi is unable to shape water politics as it has on other parts of its border, most notably with Pakistan on the Indus River.

To mitigate those challenges and risks, the report provides three policy recommendations for the Indian Government and its partners in Australia and the US.

First, it recommends the establishment of an open-source, publicly available data repository, based on satellite sensing, to disseminate information about the physical impacts of the Great Bend Dam.

Second, it recommends that like-minded governments use international legal arguments to pressure Beijing to abide by global norms and conventions. China often succeeds in its use of grey?zone tactics because they’re hidden from public view. Conversely, it’s most effectively challenged when its coercion is exposed and the effects of its actions are explained. In that way, New Delhi and Dhaka, together—and in coordination with partners—can expand the narrative on the realities of Chinese upstream river damming. Bangladesh’s role is essential in this initiative, as it’s expected for India to be critical of any Chinese activity near the border. Partners, including especially the US, can support this narrative by placing pressure on China to enact downstream risk?mitigation efforts required by international law.

Third and finally, my report recommends that the Quad—Australia, India, Japan and the US—use its humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) guidelines to begin to share information and build capacity for dam-related contingencies. In 2022, the Quad established a HADR framework that requires members to meet biannually and conduct regular tabletop exercises to increase interoperability in case of disaster. The Quad could add work specific to water security and dam?related disaster preparation to its HADR toolkit. That work would primarily take the form of information exchanges, capacity building and tabletop exercises among the Quad members for dam?related contingencies such as flooding. Such preparatory work would be inherently useful—it would contribute to the Quad’s avowed mission of providing international public goods to the region, especially to safeguard vulnerable human populations, but it would also send a political signal of international interest in mitigating the risks associated with China’s hydropower construction.

Neely Haby produced this research while she was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. She is currently an analyst at US Indo-Pacific Command. Opinions expressed in this article are her own and do not reflect the positions or policies of the US Department of Defense.

This article appears courtesy of The Strategist and may be found in its original form here.