Galen Murton
Chinese infrastructure investment and development in Nepal are critical to the territorial integrity of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and strategically extend the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into sensitive spaces of South Asia. While trade flows and investment patterns across the China-Nepal borderlands reflect asymmetrical power relations between Beijing and Kathmandu, a grounded, geographic review of the region reveals three key observations: a historical linkage between border resolutions and Chinese-facilitated infrastructure development in Nepal, an ongoing “corridorization” of Nepal that is both real and imagined, and a persistent oscillation of border openings and closings that challenges the mobility practices of local populations and yet also escapes the PRC’s enhanced controls. Attention to the Himalayan region, much like borderlands elsewhere in Asia, reinforces the adage to look to the margins to see the state in new and often overlooked ways, as “borders offer unique vantage points to produce decentered accounts of the state and denaturalized narratives of nationalist projects.”
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