From Ken Cao by way of Monkton comes the suggestion that “China’s infrastructure obsession helped turn a Himalayan hazard into a catastrophe for Nepal.”
Cao writes that the People’s Republic “has spent years carving highways and tunnels through one of Earth’s most fragile mountain systems. That means blasting rock, cutting slopes, removing vegetation and redirecting drainage, all activities known to increase landslide risk when poorly managed” (August 28, 2026).
He also wonders what the heck is the good of the Chinese Communist Party’s minute and continuous surveillance of everything if the apparatus of surveillance can’t be used to effectively warn people of onrushing catastrophe.
The CCP has covered Tibet with surveillance cameras, military installations, highways and massive infrastructure projects. It can monitor a Tibetan carrying the wrong photograph or posting the wrong sentence. Yet when a catastrophic flood threatened tens of thousands of people downstream, where was the effective cross-border warning system?
This was not an unforeseeable event. A similar flood struck the same river system only 14 months ago. Scientists have warned repeatedly that Himalayan glaciers are destabilizing as temperatures rise. China knew the danger, possessed the technology, and controlled extensive upstream territory. What it apparently lacked was the [sense of urgency and commitment to the transparency required] to protect people beyond its border.
China loves calling its projects “friendship bridges,” “development corridors” and [the result of] “win-win cooperation.” But friendship means warning your neighbors before a wall of water reaches them, not dispatching officials and propaganda crews after their towns have disappeared.
The glacial collapse may have been natural. The absence of adequate monitoring, information sharing and emergency coordination was not.
China wants to dam transboundary rivers and reshape the Himalayas while treating downstream countries as spectators. Nepal, India and Bhutan should study this catastrophe carefully.
It’s doubtful how much a better warning system would have helped in this particular case; the reporting suggests that after the glacier crackup, the avalanche and flooding were extremely fast. Nepal does or did have an early warning system, but one observer says that the “surge that happened was so fast that even the monitoring stations were swept away before they were able to send the early warning.”
Under the right circumstances, a warning system can save lives during a flash flood. In July 2025, “Warning sirens helped [a] small Texas community survive flooding,” according to an Associated Press report. But this flooding was preceded by heavy rain that itself served as a kind of early warning system, telling meteorologists and others over the course of hours what might happen.
Whatever improvements may be possible with respect to warning systems in Nepal and Tibet, Cao rightly sees a more fundamental problem in China’s “infrastructure obsession.”
