POWER PLAY: Beijing is pursuing a complex strategy to corner natural resources.

By building cascades of large dams on international rivers just before they leave its territory, China is re-engineering cross-border natural flows. Among the rivers it has targeted are the Mekong, the lifeline of South East Asia, and the Brahmaputra, the lifeblood for Bangladesh and north-eastern India.

With the world’s most resource-hungry economy, China has gone into overdrive to corner natural resources. On the most essential resource, freshwater, it is seeking to become the upstream controller by manipulating trans-boundary flows through dams and other structures.

China now controls vast transnational water resources. By forcibly absorbing Asia’s “water tower”, the Tibetan plateau, in 1951, it gained a throttlehold over the headwaters of Asia’s major river systems. Its actions in more recent years have sought to build water leverage over its downstream neighbours.

Such an approach has fostered increasing water-related tensions with India, most of whose northern rivers originate in Tibet. In 2017, in violation of two legally binding bilateral accords, China refused to supply hydrological data to India.

The most disturbing part of this report might be that China already feels it can act with such impunity — which is exactly how rising world powers stumble into regrettable (and major) wars.