Deconstructing China’s infrastructure investments in Nepal
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Sambandh Scholars Speak, part of the Sambandh: Regional Connectivity Initiative, is a series of blog posts that feature evidence-based research on South Asia with a focus on regional studies and cross-border connectivity. The series engages with authors of recent books, articles, and reports on India and its neighbouring countries. This series is edited by Saneet Chakradeo, Research Analyst at Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP).
In this edition, Samar SJB Rana interviews Galen Murton, and Austin Lord, on their article, ‘Trans-Himalayan power corridors: Infrastructural politics and China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal’, published in Political Geography in 2019.
The relationship between Nepal and China has traditionally focused more on Chinese security concerns and Nepal’s adherence to the ‘One China policy’ than on cross-border infrastructure and economic ties. But, the economic embargo at the Nepal-India border in 2015 prompted Nepal to seek options other than India, with China already expressing its interest in developing physical infrastructure projects in Nepal. Since then, China and Nepal have engaged on matters related to connectivity. In 2017, Nepal signed the framework for nine projects under the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI gained further salience in 2019 after the 2nd Belt and Road Forum (BRF), which established the ‘Nepal-China trans-Himalayan Multi-Dimensional Connectivity Network’.
In their article, Galen Murton and Austin Lord examine the perceptions of various Nepali and Chinese stakeholders and actors to understand the infrastructural diplomacy of Nepal’s northern frontier. Out of the 15 northern districts of Nepal that border China, the authors use Rasuwa and Gorkha to conceptualise the ‘trans-Himalayan power corridor’, a series of planned Chinese development projects pertaining to hydropower generation, border infrastructure, and road expansion.
Through ethnographic research, the article analyses how locals in the borderland have anticipated and perceived investment from China. The indigenous people of Nepal’s borderlands have been historically neglected and marginalised, but increased Chinese investment in Rasuwa is bringing new development opportunities. On the other hand, the authors also highlight the uncertainty associated with China’s promised investments in Nepal, as illustrated in the cancellation of the much-expected Budhi Gandaki Hydropower Project. Their research traces the rapid transformation of a landlocked Himalayan region, and what used to be one of Asia’s most peripheral and isolated land borders.
Samar SJB Rana: Your article conceptualises ‘power corridors’ in Rasuwa and Gorkha and their ‘process of co-construction’ which outlines the perceptions of myriad Nepali and Chinese actors on Chinese projects. How do these actors and projects challenge simplistic narratives about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China’s politics of leverage?
Galen Murton: Up to this point, there has been no shortage of analyses of the BRI related to grand strategy narratives and the tremendous financial commitments that Beijing has made to its international development agenda. While these kinds of studies are indeed important, part of our effort has been to examine the ways in which BRI programs are experienced and impact local communities at more grounded scales. By looking at the BRI through ethnographically informed and geographically situated lenses, one finds that Belt and Road projects are anything but unilateral enterprises and much more than strategic vectors for China to relocate surplus capital and amass soft power. To be sure, this is indeed going on, but in the case of Nepal – and obviously more places than we can count – BRI investment and development is negotiated, received, and leveraged to accomplish local tasks at a range of scales.
From long-anticipated village electrification schemes to nationalistic priorities to access seaports beyond India, Nepali actors have successfully embraced BRI projects to ‘do development differently’ across the country. While much ink has been spilled attending to great power asymmetries and potential debt entrapments of BRI programs, since 2016 we have tried to point out that in the case of Nepal – like many other places – “it is important to see how a small state like Nepal can in fact use China to support its own state-making agenda, instead of just the other way around.” (Murton, Lord, & Beazley. 2016).
From long-anticipated village electrification schemes to nationalistic priorities to access seaports beyond India, Nepali actors have successfully embraced BRI projects to ‘do development differently’ across the country.
SSJBR: In the article, you explain the difficulties in implementing the Budhi Gandaki Hydropower Project due to Nepal’s internal political struggles and the larger geopolitics at play. Why has this project struggled to gain momentum compared to the Rasuwa-Kyirong power corridor and what larger problems with BRI projects in Nepal does it signify?
Austin Lord: For the past several years, the Budhi Gandaki HPP has remained in a suspended state – largely due to COVID-19 and ongoing political contestation within Nepal, but also due to communication breakdown with the Chinese contractor, China Gezhouba Group Company Ltd. (CGGC). As one spokesperson for Nepal’s Ministry of Water Resources, Energy, and Irrigation recently told journalist Ramesh Bhushal: “We have tried to communicate with the company in the past few months, but it hasn’t responded clearly. We can neither say the company is out, nor it’s in. It is between somewhere and nowhere.” As the project remains stalled, neither plans for the resettlement of project-affected communities nor follow-on development dreams can be guaranteed. This mega project was intended to be completed in 2022, and yet it has hardly even begun.
There are several material and technical differences between the two “power corridors”, which we describe in the paper. Firstly, the Budhi Gandaki megaproject is the keystone of an imagined corridor, whereas construction in the Rasuwa corridor emerged from a constellation of interrelated and mid-sized projects, which provided momentum and infrastructure for one another. One should also note that CGGC, in particular, has an uneven track record in Nepal, as it has already failed to complete several other hydropower projects on time – most notably the Chameliya HPP but also the Trishuli 3A. Right now, the relative scale of the Budhi Gandaki HPP and the fact that the contract was awarded to a single entity, in this case CGGC, means that it is all or nothing.
It is hard to say if the liminal status of the Budhi Gandaki HPP might foretell of any challenges with the BRI portfolio in Nepal. As we argued in our article, it’s important to look beyond geopolitical headlines and instead evaluate and analyse each proposed project individually in the context of national politics, sub-national questions of political economy, and situated development struggles. However, one key takeaway here is that BRI projects, like many other infrastructure and development programs, can also be shaken by unexpected disasters like the 2015 earthquake and COVID-19. This is particularly important in the Himalayan region, where seismicity, geohazards, and climate change are ever present risks.
It’s important to look beyond geopolitical headlines and instead evaluate and analyse each proposed project individually in the context of national politics, sub-national questions of political economy, and situated development struggles.
SSJBR: During PM Oli’s visit to China in 2018, both countries vowed to expedite projects through the Karnali, Gandaki, and Koshi corridor. With the idea of trilateral connectivity between Nepal, China, and India being proposed previously, can Nepal ever become a ‘land-bridge’ between India and China?
Galen Murton: The prospect of Nepal becoming a land bridge between China and India is a compelling infrastructural imaginary. That is not to say that such an imaginary is a fantasy or a far-off dream, but rather that the infrastructural basis to realize such a plan is incredibly ambitious and complex. On the one hand, third-country transit makes perfect sense: you have Nepal, the proverbial yam between two boulders, as a landlocked country sandwiched between the two largest populations on earth with rapidly expanding economies and growing consumer appetites. Sea routes from the manufacturing centres of eastern China to the ports of eastern India take weeks of passage via the Malacca Straits; alternatively, overland travel from Guangzhou to Calcutta by way of railroads through central Tibet and down through Nepal presents an expedient, if questionably viable, second option.
To be clear, it is that passage down or up through Nepal which is so complicated and uncertain. Not only does the infrastructure development to move massive quantities of goods at scale through the Himalaya range demand unprecedented feats of engineering innovation, but the objective hazards of seismically active geological landscapes makes this kind of transit route particularly problematic. As journalist Anil Giri explained in The Kathmandu Post, a couple years ago, early projections for just a 120-km stretch of railroad through Nepal may well require 90-95% of the track to run through tunnels and over bridges. For anyone who has travelled by road in Nepal, or paid attention to the frenetic construction of more highways and feeder roads throughout the country, the prospect of a railroad through this region appears remote. But that is not to say it is impossible!
SSJBR: The study uses the case of Chinese infrastructure projects in Nepal to highlight the need for greater nuance and specificity when interpreting bilateral BRI negotiations. How different or similar is Nepal’s case from other South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka?
Galen Murton: Nepal’s experiences with BRI development are very different from those of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and distinct to anywhere else in South Asia for that matter. Let’s start with attention to Nepal’s geography in both political and physical terms. Kathmandu’s relationship with Beijing is decidedly different from that of Dhaka or Colombo; Maoist and Communist leadership matters, as does longstanding frustration with the heavy-handed influence of Delhi in Nepal’s internal affairs. While leadership in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka certainly have their own highly complex relations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as BJP and Indian Congress parties, the power geometries are very different. Relations between Beijing and Islamabad and Thimphu, respectively, are also at such different scales to Kathmandu (as well as to one another), that we don’t need to get into it here. Physically, Nepal also presents a different kind of proximity to China that is not the same in the case of Bangladesh or Sri Lanka; indeed, China shares no land border with either of those countries. Finally, BRI investment projects in Sri Lanka (if not Bangladesh) are conspicuously stained with the negativity of debt and accusations of Chinese land grabbing and entrapment; no such precedent or dynamic exists in Nepal, or at least not at the same scale as the Hambantota port debacle.
BRI investment projects in Sri Lanka (if not Bangladesh) are conspicuously stained with the negativity of debt and accusations of Chinese land grabbing and entrapment; no such precedent or dynamic exists in Nepal, or at least not at the same scale as the Hambantota port debacle.
This is not to say that Chinese loans and investments to Nepal have not yet or will not eventually transform into debt relations; of course, what happens down the road remains to be seen. But with that being said, the current nine BRI projects in Nepal are, first and foremost, shaped by very different configurations of geopolitical relations, and, second, operate at a different scale compared to many neighbouring countries across South Asia. This is what I have elsewhere called the ‘infrastructural relations’ that increasingly characterise Nepal-China politics today (Murton, 2020).
About the experts
Galen Murton is an Assistant Professor of Geographic Science in the School of Integrated Sciences at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A human geographer with broad research and teaching interests in the politics of international development. In 2018-19, he completed the project Road Diplomacy: International Infrastructure and Ethnography of Geopolitics in 21st Century Asia as a Marie S. Curie Fellow in the Institute for Ethnology at Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. He has co-authored multiple journal special issues and edited volumes related to infrastructure development and the Belt and Road Initiative, including ‘China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the Ground’ (Political Geography, 2020) and Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Galen received his PhD (Geography) from the University of Colorado Boulder, his MA (Law and Diplomacy) from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and his BA (Religion) from Middlebury College. In addition to teaching courses on globalization, development, and critical cartography, Galen likes to conduct fieldwork with his students in the mountain ranges of Highland Asia as well as North America. Contact info: murtongb@jmu.edu | Google Scholar
Austin Lord is a PhD Candidate and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. His research focuses on disasters and aftermaths, political ecologies of water and energy, questions of time and temporality, lived experiences of environmental uncertainty and climate change, and the construction of environmental knowledge in the Himalayan region. Austin’s dissertation focuses on the afterlives of disaster in the Langtang Valley of Nepal, where a massive co-seismic avalanche occurred during the 2015 Gorkha earthquake. Drawing from over five years of research and volunteer work, his work carefully examines the ways that the Langtang pass conceptualise recovery, resilience, and uncertainty as they seek to rebuild their lives in the wake of an unthinkable disaster. His scholarship has been published in Economic Anthropology; Cultural Anthropology; Political Geography; WIREs Water; Modern Asian Studies; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies; Eurasian Geography and Economics; Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), and Limn. Austin also holds a Master of Environmental Science (MESc) from Yale University and a B.A. in Economics and Studio Art from Dartmouth College. Contact info: al947@cornell.edu |GoogleScholar
Featured Photo: Galen Murton, February 2016.
Samar SJB Rana was a Research Intern with Foreign Policy and Security Studies, CSEP.
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