China Saved 2. Nepal Saved 12,000: Is the Yarlung Tsangpo Dam the Next Disaster?

The mudslide disaster that struck Nepal and Tibet has shocked the world. But this disaster has also revealed something else that many people did not expect. The very different ways Nepal and the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, handled the disaster, the released information have brought several long-ignored issues to the surface. This includes the CCP's attitude toward human life and nature, how it responds when disaster strikes, and the real command ability and strength of the People's Liberation Army. At the same time, the disaster has raised an even more frightening question. Could a similar disaster happen again in the future, especially in the Yalong-Zangbo region? Today, we are going to talk about these issues. Let's first look at the simplest comparison, the numbers. As of Sept. 2, the CCP said 21 people have died. Another 541 were missing, including 261 foreign nationals. A total of 1,054 people had been rescued or evacuated. The core destruction zone covered 0.7 square kilometers, and the affected area had a permanent population of 6,110. The numbers from Nepal were 1,127 dead, about 4,858 missing, including 590 foreign nationals. More than 11,800 people rescued or evacuated. 84,270 people affected by the disaster. From the very beginning, one of the first things people noticed was the huge difference between the death and missing person numbers announced by China and Nepal. They also noticed the huge difference in rescue forces deployed by the two sides. Of course, the disaster area and affected population on the Chinese side were smaller than those in Nepal. So it is understandable that the number of dead and missing in China would be much lower. But if you look at the number of missing foreign nationals, a question appears. Nepal had about 4,848 people missing. Among them, 590 were foreign nationals. The ratio was 8.2. In China, the same ratio was 2. Why was China's ratio 4 times lower than Nepal's? If we use Nepal's ratio and multiply it by the 261 missing foreign nationals reported by China, the result is 2,144 people. Personally, I believe this number may be closer to the real number of missing people. It may also eventually become the death toll. The reason is that it is much harder for the CCP to hide the number of missing foreign nationals. Foreign governments can release their own numbers. So this is something the CCP cannot easily conceal. Now let's look at the rescue forces that were deployed. The difference between the two countries was enormous. China deployed only a little more than 2,300 personnel and a total of 24 helicopter sorties. Nepal deployed more than 21,000 people, including the military police, armed police and others. It carried out a total of 411 aerial search and rescue sorties. Now look at the overall strength of the two countries. China has more than 2 million active duty military personnel. Nepal has only 98,500. China has about 20 times as many. China has 1,007 military helicopters. Nepal has only 10. So China has 101 times as many. China has a total of over 3,500 military aircraft. Nepal has 17. China has 208 times as many. According to estimates for 2026 military spending, China spends about $303 billion. Nepal spends $430 million. China spends about 700 times as much. Now let us use GDP, something the CCP loves to boast about. China's GDP is 429 times Nepal's. China's GDP per capita is 9 times Nepal's. And yet, in this disaster, China rescued only 2 people. Nepal rescued nearly 12,000. Now let's look at how information was released. From the very beginning, the Nepalese government updated the numbers every day. The entire process was transparent. Many Chinese internet users were amazed to discover that they could follow the situation almost in real time. The well-known journalist Gao Yu is currently in Beijing. She is under round-the-clock surveillance by the CCP. Even the internet service in her home has been cut off. In her post titled, Borrowing Wi-Fi to Post No. 189, she wrote, Since this enormous disaster happened, Nepal, a country with a population of 30 million, has moved the world with constantly updated numbers, rescue videos and photographs. Small and poor Nepal has won praise from the world's media for its openness of information. China was the opposite. At first, the CCP announced that only 3 people had died. Later, the number increased to 6. Then it increased to 16. Only today was it updated again to 21. But anyone who saw the video that came out at the beginning showing the entire Jirong border crossing being flooded, could see that there were already more than 21 people just in that video. Surveillance footage from before the disaster showed roughly 80 people visible at the scene. The real number may have been close to 90. When the mudslide arrived almost instantly, could all of those people have survived? In other words, the number of people who died in that one building alone could have been more than 21. Now let us look at how reporting on the disaster was controlled. On social media, we see all kinds of rescue videos from Nepal every day. They come from every possible angle. But on the Chinese side, we can only see videos and reports released by the authorities. And official reports always focus on how many people were sent to carry out rescue work and how difficult the rescue work was. When it comes to the number of deaths, they avoid mentioning it whenever possible. They also do not explain what methods are being used to search for and rescue the missing people. It almost seems that they planned to give up on rescue efforts from the beginning. It was not until 48 hours after the disaster that China Central Television showed footage of a few scattered personnel searching the scene. They were shown tapping the ground with sticks and asking, is anyone in there? On September 1, six days after the disaster, CCTV aired a television report more than 20 minutes long. Most of it was about crews working over time, day and night, to repair the road. Clearly, rescuing people was not the main focus. Whether we are talking about the more than 500 people officially listed as missing, or the more than 2,000 people we estimated ourselves, they seemed to be completely outside the authorities' consideration. By contrast, some videos and photographs released by CCP look fake at first glance. For example, an official video released by Tibet Daily on August 30 carried this caption, quote, At the Giron mudslide rescue scene, firefighters who had fought continuously for days collapsed beside the road from exhaustion. A brief sleep gave them strength to fight again, unquote. But look carefully. Those firefighters who supposedly had been fighting continuously for days had perfectly clean uniforms. Their hands were perfectly clean. Even the bottoms of their boots were clean. There was no mud on them. So where exactly had they been fighting for days? If people cannot even stage propaganda professionally, can you really expect them to rescue people? The fakery is not limited to local authorities. It starts at the central government level. Xinhua released a photograph claiming that Chinese Premier Li Qiang went to the disaster area on August 27 to inspect the disaster situation on the ground. No one knows exactly where this photograph was taken. But it was clearly still far away from the real disaster area. According to the CCP itself, the only road leading to the Giron border crossing has still not been repaired. Besides creating fake images, the CCP has also arrested Internet users who dared to post real information online. More than a dozen people have been arrested so far. Disaster videos that were not officially released have been blocked across the Chinese Internet. Gao Yu also said, quote, China has suffered one serious flood disaster after another this year. The central government has almost completely ignored them. But the Giron mudslide happened in both China and Nepal at the same time. This time they could not simply ignore it. That is why Li Qiang went. In a country without freedom, whenever there is a comparison, it will lose completely, from top to bottom. Independent media commentator Aileen Zheng said, quote, The commander-in-chief of Nepal's disaster rescue operation is the prime minister. The disaster they were trying to rescue people from is the disaster suffered by the victims. The commander-in-chief of disaster rescue in CCP China is the CCP propaganda department. The disaster it is trying to rescue is its own disaster. Look at these two countries and compare them. Which one is a civilized society, and which one is a rogue state? unquote. This disaster has also exposed another problem. The CCP military is either incompetent, or after Xi Jinping's major purge of the military, it is deliberately refusing to act in the face of a major disaster like this. Xinhua's propaganda shouts loud slogans. It says authorities must take every effort to carry out rescue operations. But in reality, either rescue operations do not happen at all, they arrive very late, or people arrive mainly to shoot propaganda videos. So one disaster has once again exposed many problems inside the CCP military to the entire world. An even more frightening issue is the CCP's arrogance in its so-called struggle against heaven and earth. There is an old communist slogan, to struggle against heaven is endless joy, to struggle against the earth is endless joy, to struggle against people is endless joy. Under this arrogant atheist ideology, the CCP has no respect for heaven and earth, it has no respect to nature or the laws of science. In Tibet, where both the ecosystem and the geological structure are extremely fragile, the CCP has carried out massive infrastructure construction. It has built large numbers of reservoirs to open routes for belt and road projects. It has blasted mountains and dark tunnels on a large scale around the China-Nepal border crossings. Could the seismic waves created by this frequent constructing blasting produce large numbers of tiny cracks in brittle rock layers? Hydrology expert Wang Weiluo has also said that besides the collapse of ice and rock, human changes to the terrain were also a factor of this disaster. The terrain where the Donglin Temple enters the Girong Temple was artificially changed. Engineering projects compressed the river channel and made it narrower. This forced the mudslide to rise higher. That means when a huge amount of mud and debris rushed down from upstream at high speed, floodwater and mud that originally could have spread out to both sides were forced into a relatively narrow river channel. That increased the impact on surrounding facilities. In an interview with the Epoch Times, Wang Weiluo also said that when the CCP provides hydrological and meteorological data to neighboring countries, political considerations sometimes play an obvious role. When bilateral relations become tense, data sharing may also be affected. On August 29, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke by phone with Nepalese Foreign Minister Xi Jinping. Wang said China had shared important information with Nepal, including images of the disaster area, satellite data, and hydrological data. This includes warning information about an upstream landslide-dammed lake. Based on this statement, Wang Weiluo speculated that the CCP had not provided Nepal with the data before the disaster. Wang said that as far as he knows, China possesses information about all the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau. China's current technological capabilities are fully sufficient to monitor glaciers across the Tibetan Plateau. In other words, China should have detected the changes in the glacier shares. But it did not share that information with Nepal. There is another problem. Tibet has as many as over 150 reservoirs. And the massive Yarong Zangpo hydropower project, described as bigger than the Three Gorges, is now under construction. Could this project face the same kind of problem in the future? Events with mechanisms very similar to this disaster in Nepal have already appeared in the Yarong Zangpo Grand Canyon. For example, on October 16, a massive ice and rock collapse occurred at the Sedongpo Glacier and Valley in Mani, Nichi. Research data showed that about 130 million cubic meters of glacier ice and debris suddenly collapsed. The ice and debris rushed into the Yarong Zangpo River. They directly blocked the river for about 60 hours. The result was that upstream water level rose by about 75 meters. 6,000 people were evacuated. Roads, bridges and electrical facilities were damaged. The landslide dam eventually overtopped and felled. The resulting flood peak reached about 32,000 cubic meters per second. Hydropower stations downstream were damaged. This happened in the lower Yarong Zangpo Grand Canyon region, that is the same general geographic environment where major hydropower projects are now being developed. In March 2021, Sedongpo experienced another massive ice and rock collapse of about 50 million cubic meters. It once again created a high-speed debris flow, and once again, it temporarily blocked the Yarong Zangpo River. So in this region, if a massive ice and rock landslide does not fall into an ordinary river section, but instead falls directly into a reservoir, something called overtopping could happen. That means the water level or a giant wave rises above the top of a dam and flows over it toward downstream areas. In other words, even when the dam itself doesn't suffer complete structural damage, a massive overtopping event could also occur. The most famous example in history was the 1963 Vajont Reservoir disaster in Italy. About 270 million cubic meters of mountain rock slid into the reservoir. It created a giant wave that went over the dam. The dam itself basically did not collapse, but about 2,000 people downstream died. The Yarong Zangpo Grand Canyon is exactly the kind of place where several dangerous conditions exist at the same time. First, the two mountain peaks surrounding it are both more than 7,000 meters high. The lowest parts of the river valley are only several hundred to a little more than 2,000 meters above sea level. That means some mountains have thousands of meters of potential energy height. An ice and rock collapse can trigger a debris flow. The debris flow can block the river that can create a landslide-dammed lake. And the failure of that lake can then produce a catastrophic flood. This can create an extremely dangerous chain of disasters. In 2025, a systematic study of the entire Yarong Zangpo River basin published on the Science Direct platform identified at least 2,390 landslides larger than 10,000 square meters. Their total landslide area was about 1,087 square kilometers. Their estimated total volume was about 48 cubic kilometers. This tells us that this is not simply an area where the mountains are steep. It is an area where large active landslides are extremely widespread. Second, the glaciers here are also changing. Glacier activity, climate warming, heavy rainfall, enormous differences in avalanching and seismic activities can all work together to trigger glacier collapse and river-blocking events. And this chain of disasters may continue in the future. It may even become more severe. Third, this is also a region with strong earthquakes. Fourth, compared with the area hit by the current Nepal-Tibet disaster, there is one additional variable here, that is the enormous Yarong Zangpo hydropower project now under construction. This adds another risk factor. And if something goes wrong here, the scale of the disaster could be enormous. It would not affect Tibet alone. India and Bangladesh would also be affected. So, after this disaster, if there is no serious reflection and no serious examination of the causes and conditions that produced it, what happens in the future could be far more frightening. OK, that's all for today. Please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Thank you for watching, and see you next time.