The largest dam ever conceived symbolizes China’s bid, from oil to water, for 21st-century dominance

Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

China is about to upend the world’s hydrological balance — with consequences as far-reaching as climate change itself.

Its $168 billion Himalayan super-dam represents not merely the world’s costliest infrastructure project but also one of its riskiest. What Beijing portrays as an engineering marvel is in fact an ecological disaster in the making.

The dam is being constructed on the Yarlung Zangbo River (also known as the Brahmaputra), just before it curves into India. The project’s significance was underscored by the fact that Chinese Premier Li Qiang, flanked by senior officials and leaders of major state-owned enterprises, formally announced the groundbreaking in July, although satellite imagery had indicated activity at the site for some time.

The last time a Chinese leader inaugurated a dam project was 1994, when then-Premier Li Peng presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. That symbolic parallel underscores the magnitude of the Brahmaputra mega-dam — an undertaking that will surpass the Three Gorges in scale, ambition and peril.

The Three Gorges Dam was initially celebrated as a modern wonder but is now widely recognized as an environmental and social disaster: It displaced more than a million people, triggered recurrent landslides, degraded water quality and disturbed seismic stability. Its mammoth reservoir has even slightly slowed the Earth’s rotation.

China’s new megaproject is in an even more fragile setting: one of the world’s most seismically active zones, straddling a heavily militarized frontier where Beijing claims India’s sprawling Arunachal Pradesh state as “South Tibet.” Constructing the world’s largest dam atop a geological fault line is more than reckless — it is a calculated gamble with catastrophic potential. Any collapse, whether from structural weakness or reservoir-induced seismicity, would devastate India’s northeast and Bangladesh, placing tens of millions at risk.

The dam, designed to generate nearly three times the electricity of the Three Gorges Dam, was approved by the National People’s Congress in March 2021. Yet the project remained cloaked in secrecy until the recent announcement, true to Beijing’s pattern of concealing work on major dams along international rivers until commercially available satellite imagery makes it impossible to hide.

The Brahmaputra, unlike most rivers, is an ecological lifeline, sustaining one of the world’s most biodiverse regions as it descends sharply from Himalayan heights to form the longest and steepest canyon on Earth — twice as deep as America’s Grand Canyon. It is here that China is constructing the behemoth dam to tap the unparalleled concentration of river energy.

Originating in Tibet’s mountain springs, the world’s highest-altitude major river flows through India and Bangladesh, supporting agriculture, fisheries and dense populations. Its annual floods, while destructive, flush toxins, recharge groundwater and deposit nutrient-rich sediment vital for farming. The super-dam will upend this rhythm, trapping silt, shrinking Bangladesh’s delta already imperiled by rising seas and depriving Indian farmers of natural fertilization cycles. Saltwater intrusion and catastrophic floods would become more frequent.

But Beijing sees water not just as a resource; it sees it as power. By placing a mega-dam just before the river leaves Tibet, China would acquire a hydraulic chokehold over hundreds of millions downstream.

Control over oil once defined global power. And, in the 21st century, control over transboundary rivers may prove just as decisive. With the dam, China would hold the ability to weaponize water without firing a shot.

The dam’s enormous price tag reflects not just ambition to generate enormous amounts of electricity but a determination to cement China’s hydro-hegemony through dominance over Asia’s lifelines. This would give Beijing the same strategic leverage over water as OPEC once enjoyed over oil — but with far greater immediacy for the daily survival of populations.

In fact, since annexing Tibet in 1951, China has become the source of cross-border river flows to more countries than any other upstream power. It has built more large dams than the rest of the world combined, with its spree since the 1990s focused on international rivers. Its 11 giant dams on the Mekong have already wreaked havoc downstream, deepening droughts and undercutting livelihoods in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Yet Beijing continues to reject any form of water sharing. It has signed no water-sharing treaty with any neighbor, nor joined the 1997 U.N. Watercourses Convention — the only global treaty governing shared rivers — preferring instead to assert “indisputable sovereignty” over all waters within its borders.

The stakes extend beyond Asia. Tibet is warming twice as fast as the global average, accelerating glacier melt and permafrost thaw. With its towering height rising into the troposphere, the Tibetan Plateau shapes the Asian monsoons, stabilizes climate across Eurasia and influences the Northern Hemisphere’s atmospheric general circulation — the vast system of winds that helps define different climate zones by transporting warm air from the equator toward higher latitudes.

Tampering with the plateau’s hydrology is not just a regional gamble; it is a planetary risk. Altered river flows from Tibet will ripple outward into weather systems, food security and even migration patterns far beyond Asia.

If Beijing succeeds in monopolizing transboundary rivers, other states may be tempted to follow, eroding fragile cooperative frameworks elsewhere — from the Nile Basin to the Tigris-Euphrates. The mega-dam is thus not merely Asia’s problem but the world’s. The precedent it sets could destabilize water security worldwide at a moment when droughts and extreme weather are already straining societies.

This gargantuan dam is a geopolitical and ecological catastrophe in waiting, with its dangers already coming into view. Silence is complicity: The international community must press China to respect international water norms.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

China has built more dams than any other country and more large dams than the rest of the world combined. This month, it officially acknowledged construction of the biggest dam ever conceived in human history — although satellite imagery suggests the groundwork began much earlier, following the megaproject’s approval by China’s rubber-stamp parliament in 2021.

Located on the Brahmaputra River just before it curves into India, this super-dam is being developed with little transparency in a seismically active and ecologically fragile region near the heavily militarized Tibetan-Indian frontier. Once completed, the massive structure will dwarf the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, and is expected to generate nearly three times as much hydropower by harnessing the Brahmaputra’s sharp descent from Himalayan peaks into the world’s deepest canyon.

Yet far beyond electricity production, the project portends a looming geopolitical and environmental crisis. It stands to disrupt the hydrological balance for millions of people downstream, destabilize a delicate Himalayan ecosystem and provide Beijing with a potent new lever over India, its strategic rival.

China appears to have learned nothing from its own cautionary tale: the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest. Once hailed as an engineering marvel, the dam has become an environmental nightmare — eroding riverbanks and deltas, degrading water quality, triggering frequent landslides and causing lasting ecological damage.

The new super-dam’s site is on a geologic fault line — a recipe for catastrophe. Scientists warn that large dam reservoirs can trigger seismic activity, a phenomenon known as reservoir-triggered seismicity. In this quake-prone region, the tectonic stresses induced by such a megastructure could lead to devastating earthquakes.

The Brahmaputra — the world’s highest-altitude major river — draws its perennial flow from Himalayan springs, glacial melt, upland wetlands and tributaries. The vast majority of these sources lie within Chinese-occupied Tibet, where the river is known as the Yarlung Zangbo. In contrast, India contributes modestly to the river’s year-round volume, though it plays a greater role in its monsoonal surge. After flowing through India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Assam states, the river enters Bangladesh before draining into the Bay of Bengal.

But a river’s flow is not just about water — it also carries nutrient-rich sediment, serving as the ecological lifeblood of entire regions.

By building a gigantic dam just before the river exits Chinese-controlled territory, Beijing gains the power to manipulate cross-border flows, including during the critical dry season. It can withhold or release water at will, trap sediment and potentially weaponize water in future disputes.

By capturing silt-laden waters before they reach India and Bangladesh, the dam will starve downstream floodplains of nourishing sediment that replenishes farmland and sustains fisheries. Bangladesh’s delta, already threatened by rising seas, will shrink further and become more prone to saltwater intrusion and catastrophic flooding.

Equally alarming is the likely disruption of the Brahmaputra’s natural flooding cycle. Seasonal floods during the summer monsoon serve vital ecological functions. Disrupting this rhythm could spell disaster for northeast India’s agrarian economy and for millions in Bangladesh who depend on the river’s pulse.

Moreover, by trapping sediment and altering flows, the $168 billion dam could erode riverbeds, degrade habitats and accelerate coastal loss. China would gain not only hydropower but also hydraulic power — the ability to influence political and ecological outcomes in neighboring nations.

China’s dam-building frenzy on rivers originating on the Tibetan Plateau has long alarmed downstream nations, from Vietnam and Thailand to Nepal. What makes this project uniquely concerning is its sheer scale, high-risk location and the strategic signal it sends.

For India, the dam represents more than just a hydrological threat. It is a potential geopolitical stranglehold. If tensions escalate again — as they did following China’s stealth incursions into Indian territory in 2020 — Beijing could exploit its upstream control to exert pressure. This is especially ominous given China’s claim to India’s sprawling Arunachal Pradesh state, which it labels “South Tibet.”

Hydropower generation is only one aspect of the dam’s utility. Its greater value lies in strategic dominance.

Despite the grave implications, international response has been muted. India has voiced concern, but its political response has been measured. The stark reality is that India possesses few diplomatic or legal tools to counter China’s upstream assertiveness. Nevertheless, India could take the lead in advocating international recognition of Tibet’s status as Asia’s “water tower” and push for binding norms on transboundary river development.

China’s unilateralism deepens distrust and reinforces strategic asymmetry in the region. Beijing is not party to any binding water-sharing treaty with its neighbors. Nor has it conducted credible environmental or seismic assessments for a project of this magnitude — despite its location in one of Earth’s most geologically unstable regions.

The Brahmaputra super-dam thus raises profound questions about regional stability. It epitomizes China’s strategy of “hydro-hegemony” — using upstream control of water to exercise geopolitical influence.

This is not just another dam. In an era when control over water is becoming as consequential as control over oil was in the 20th century, China is methodically locking in future geopolitical leverage.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Millions downstream in India and Bangladesh could die if a quake triggers a collapse

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

January 29, 2025

By embarking on building a super-dam, the largest ever conceived, in the seismically active Sino-Indian border region, China is potentially creating a ticking water bomb for millions of people living downstream in India and Bangladesh.

The super-dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river, better known as the Brahmaputra, is located in the eastern Himalayas, which sit on a geological fault line where the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate collide.

In a fresh reminder of the dangers posed by the megaproject, a strong earthquake this month in the eastern Himalayas, near Tibet’s borders with Nepal and India, damaged five dams, forcing the evacuation of people from downstream villages. The magnitude 6.8 quake killed at least 134 people, wounded hundreds and wrecked buildings, including Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries, some centuries old.

The concern that the behemoth dam will be the world’s riskiest project is reinforced by another fact: Two years after the Zipingpu Dam came into service near a seismic fault, a massive earthquake on the Tibetan Plateau’s eastern rim killed 87,000 people in 2008. The quake drew international attention to what scientists call reservoir-triggered seismicity (RTS), when the weight of the water impounded in a large dam reservoir causes severe tectonic stresses, triggering earthquakes usually within a few years of the dam being commissioned.

The reservoir of China’s Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s biggest, is longer than the largest of North America’s Great Lakes, with its construction submerging two cities, 114 towns and 1,680 villages, and displacing 1.4 million residents in the largest peacetime evacuation in history. Beijing has not disclosed how many Tibetans will be displaced by the super-dam, which will generate more than three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam in central China.

As its 11 giant dams on the Mekong River illustrate, Beijing takes a highly secretive approach to its dam projects on international rivers flowing to other countries from the water-rich Tibetan Plateau, whose annexation in the early 1950s helped turn China into an unrivaled hydro-hegemon, with 18 downstream neighbors. Tibet is the source of Asia’s greatest river systems.

China has provided no public updates on the super-dam after its rubber-stamp National People’s Congress in March 2021 approved the project’s construction next to the heavily militarized frontier with India. But shortly after the approval, Beijing formally included the super-dam in its latest five-year development plan and opened a new railroad and highway to transport heavy equipment, materials and workers to the remote project site. All this suggested the start of construction.

Yet, a few weeks ago, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency ran a story as if the super-dam project had just been approved. Xinhua reported nothing about the project’s construction status, other than to quote an official statement to claim the gargantuan dam was part of the country’s effort to pursue “high-quality development.” Subsequently, China’s foreign ministry and its charge d’affaires in New Delhi separately contended that the project would not negatively affect downstream India or Bangladesh — but again without disclosing any information about the super-dam’s current status.

The Brahmaputra, the world’s highest-altitude river, curves sharply around the Himalayas, forming the world’s longest and steepest canyon — twice as deep as America’s Grand Canyon — and holds Asia’s largest untapped water resources. By building the super-dam there, China is seeking to harness the power of a 2,800-meter drop just before the river crosses into India.

The project is not only compounding China’s already-fraught relationship with India but also threatening to affect rainfall patterns in Asia by wreaking severe ecological damage in Tibet, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Tibet’s fragile ecosystems play a central role in triggering Asia’s monsoonal rains.

The super-dam will also defile what is sacred territory for Tibetans: The canyon region’s major mountains, cliffs and caves represent the body of their guardian deity, the goddess Dorje Phagmo, and the Brahmaputra represents her spine. Tibetan culture, with its deeply rooted reverence for nature, acted as an environmental guardian until China avariciously began exploiting Tibet’s vast mineral and water resources.

China’s dam frenzy has already inflicted ecological damage at home and in downstream countries. China’s over-damming of internal rivers has harmed ecosystems, with many rivers disappearing and some drying up, including the Yellow River, the cradle of Chinese civilization. And with its dam builders turning their attention to international rivers flowing out of the Tibetan Plateau, adverse ecological impacts are becoming apparent, for example, in the lower Mekong Basin, including recurrent droughts and saltwater intrusion into the delta.

Today, Tibet’s glaciers and other ecosystems are threatened by climate and environmental change, and if China’s environmentally devastating activities accelerate glacial attrition on the Tibetan Plateau, the resulting significant changes in river flows would not spare even mainland China.

Yet, an undaunted China is pressing ahead with the controversial super-dam, whose construction is tantamount to waging a stealthy water war against India. But, in the long run, the country that could suffer the most is densely populated and China-friendly Bangladesh, located farthest downstream.

Once ready, the super-dam would raise the haunting specter of a quake-triggered collapse. There have been hundreds of dam breaches and collapses in China over the years, including the world’s deadliest dam failures: The 1975 typhoon-triggered collapses of the giant Banqiao and Shimantan dams in central China unleashed a cascade effect that wrecked 62 smaller dams, killing more than 85,000 people and displacing 11 million.

More recently, record flooding endangered even the Three Gorges Dam in 2020, putting some 400 million Chinese at risk.

If a powerful earthquake centered in the canyon region caused the super-dam to collapse, millions downstream could die, largely in the Brahmaputra Valley of India’s Assam state, where the river’s immense width makes it look like an ocean in the monsoon season.

Yet there is little prospect of China halting work on the super-dam. As long as the Chinese Communist Party remains in power, it will ignore the environmental and humanitarian consequences of its actions.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press), which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

The Chinese Communist Party has long thrived on secrecy, and 2024 was no different. As the year was ending, it became clear that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime is pressing ahead with a controversial plan that will likely wreak environmental havoc by damming the world’s highest-altitude river as it passes through Earth’s largest canyon.

The dam, the biggest ever conceived, also holds geopolitical risks given its location next to the disputed and heavily militarized China-India border. Indeed, the mammoth dam is being built just before the Himalayan river Yarlung Tsangpo (known downstream as the Brahmaputra) enters India.

Sketchy reports in Chinese state media last month about China’s “approval” of the super-dam’s construction suggest that work is already well underway, given that the project received the go-ahead from the country’s rubber-stamp parliament in March 2021. In fact, Xi’s regime included this dam project in its 2021 five-year economic development plan.

The unparalleled dam, which will cost a staggering $127 billion, highlights the government’s continuing fixation on building the world’s tallest, largest, deepest, longest and highest projects. The new dam will dwarf the biggest dam in the world today, China’s own Three Gorges Dam, whose reservoir is longer than the largest of North America’s Great Lakes.

When completed, the super-dam in southeastern Tibet will generate up to 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity yearly — more than triple the 88.2 billion installed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam. Located in central China, the Three Gorges Dam officially uprooted 1.4 million residents to make way for its mammoth reservoir, which submerged two cities, 114 towns and 1,680 villages.

In keeping with its record of secrecy, China has disclosed few details of the super-dam or the number of local Tibetans likely to be displaced, other than to claim that the project would produce “clean” energy. China’s foreign ministry, without saying anything about the dam’s current status, flatly asserted on Dec. 27, “The project will not negatively affect the lower reaches” of the river basin.

In truth, the dam will likely have far-reaching downstream impacts in India and Bangladesh, including altering the cross-border flow and course of the river, which empties into the Bay of Bengal. It will also trap the river’s nutrient-rich silt that helps to naturally fertilize farmlands during the annual monsoonal flooding, as well as sustains marine life.

The dam, in fact, is being built in one of the world’s most species-rich mountainous regions that is known as a biodiversity hotspot. Tibet’s fragile ecosystems are already threatened by climate change and China’s reckless exploitation of the plateau’s vast mineral and water resources. And the super-dam threatens to cause lasting damage to these ecosystems, which play a central role in triggering Asia’s annual monsoons.

To make matters worse, the behemoth dam is in a seismically active area, which raises the specter of a geological disaster. Tibet’s southeastern region is earthquake-prone because it sits on the geological fault line where the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate collide. Building the huge dam close to this fault line makes the project potentially a ticking water bomb for downstream communities.

Geopolitically, the megaproject is likely to sharpen the Sino-Indian territorial and border disputes, which date back to China’s 1951 annexation of the then-autonomous Tibet. By occupying the water-rich Tibetan Plateau, where most of Asia’s great river systems originate, China gained significant upstream leverage over multiple neighboring countries to which rivers flow.

Now, the new dam project will give China control over cross-border river flows, thus allowing it to leverage its territorial claim to India’s sprawling, Tibet-bordering Arunachal Pradesh state, which is almost three times the area of Taiwan.

Since 2006, Beijing has been calling Arunachal Pradesh “South Tibet” to assert that it should be part of China. The purported basis of China’s claim to that Indian state, however, has only served to highlight that Tibet remains the core issue in China-India relations.

While maintaining a veil of secrecy over its super-dam project since it was conceived, Beijing has asserted a “legitimate right” to dam the river in a border area. This is in keeping with its longstanding claim that it has “indisputable sovereignty” over waters on its side of the international boundary, including the right to divert as much shared water as it wishes for its legitimate needs.

China is now the world’s most dammed country, with more large dams in operation than the rest of the world combined. China’s dam building has increasingly moved from dam-saturated internal rivers (a number of which are dying) to international rivers.

Over the years, Beijing has kept every major project on an international river under wraps until construction is far enough along that the dam can no longer be hidden from commercially available satellite imagery and the project becomes a fait accompli. In this fashion, China has built 11 giant dams on the Mekong River (and is constructing or planning at least eight more), thereby gaining geopolitical leverage over its Southeast Asian neighbors, but also wreaking serious environmental harms, including recurrent droughts, in the downriver basin.

Against this backdrop, there is growing concern among downstream countries that China is seeking to weaponize the water resources of the Tibetan Plateau, most of whose river systems are transnational in nature. Not content with the 87,000 dams it has, China remains engaged in dam-building frenzy.

Its colossal dam project will not only compel India to prepare for contingencies but also ensure that, despite recent conciliatory moves, mistrust and strategic rivalry continue to define the Sino-Indian relationship. More fundamentally, the project will impose incalculable environmental costs extending from the Himalayas to the delta in Bangladesh.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

The Brahmaputra super-dam project poses risks for India and Bangladesh

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

China is unmatched as the world’s hydro hegemon, with more large dams in service than every other country combined. Now it is building the world’s first super dam, close to its heavily militarized frontier with India.

This megaproject, with a planned capacity of 60 gigawatts, would generate three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam, now the world’s largest hydropower plant. China, though, has given few updates about the project’s status since the National People’s Congress approved it in March 2021.

Opacity about the development of past projects has often served as cover for quiet action. Beijing has a record of keeping work on major dam projects on international rivers under wraps until the activity can no longer be hidden in commercially available satellite imagery.

The super dam is located in some of the world’s most treacherous terrain, in an area long thought impassable.

Here, the Brahmaputra, known to Tibetans as the Yarlung Tsangpo, drops almost 3,000 meters as it takes a sharp southerly turn from the Himalayas into India, with the world’s highest-altitude major river descending through the globe’s longest and steepest canyon.

Twice as deep as the U.S. Grand Canyon, the Brahmaputra gorge holds Asia’s greatest untapped water reserves while the river’s precipitous fall creates one of the greatest concentrations of river energy on Earth. The combination has acted as a powerful magnet for Chinese dam builders.

The behemoth dam, however, is the world’s riskiest project as it is being built in a seismically active area. This makes it potentially a ticking water bomb for downstream communities in India and Bangladesh.

The southeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau is earthquake prone because it sits on the geological fault line where the Indian and Eurasian plates collide.

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake, along the Tibetan Plateau’s eastern rim, killed 87,000 people and drew international attention to the phenomenon of reservoir-triggered seismicity (RTS).

Some Chinese and American scientists drew a link between the quake and Sichuan’s Zipingpu Dam, which came into service two years earlier near a seismic fault. They suggested that the weight of the several hundred million cubic meters of water impounded in the dam’s reservoir could have triggered RTS or severe tectonic stresses.

But even without a quake, the new super dam could be a threat to downriver communities if torrential monsoon rains trigger flash floods in the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra. Barely two years ago, some 400 million Chinese were put at risk after record flooding endangered the Three Gorges Dam.

Meanwhile, the 11 large dams China has built on the upper reaches of the Mekong have had many negative ecological impacts, including recurrent drought, for downriver nations. But not only is China constructing more big dams on the Mekong, it is now also turning its attention to tapping the bounteous water resources in the Brahmaputra Basin.

In pursuing its controversial megaproject on the Brahmaputra, China is cloaking its construction activity to mute international reaction.

China presented the super dam project for the approval of the National People’s Congress only after it had built sufficient infrastructure to start transporting heavy equipment, materials and workers to the remote site.

Barely two months after parliament’s approval two years ago, Beijing announced that it had accomplished the feat of completing a “highway through the world’s deepest canyon.” That highway ends very close to the Indian border.

The following month, Beijing announced the launch of a new rail line from Lhasa to Nyangtri, a frontier military base less than 16 kilometers from the India border. In fact, President Xi Jinping began a surprise tour of Tibet in July 2021 from Nyangtri, taking the new train from there to the regional capital.

The new infrastructure indicates that work on the dam’s foundation likely began quietly after the opening of the railroad and highway.

The Brahmaputra was one of the world’s last undammed rivers until China began constructing a series of midsized dams on sections upstream from the famous canyon. With its dam building now moving close to border areas, China will in due course be able to leverage transboundary flows in its relations with rival India.

But the brunt of the environmental havoc that the megaproject is likely to wreak will be borne by Bangladesh, in the last stretch of the river. The environmental damage, however, is likely to extend up through Tibet, one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. In fact, with its super dam, China will be desecrating the canyon region which is a crucial Tibetan holy place.

A cardinal principle of water peace is transparency. The far-reaching strategic, environmental and inter-riparian implications of the largest dam ever conceived make it imperative that China be transparent. Only sustained international pressure can force Beijing to drop the veil of secrecy surrounding its project.

Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”