Tsewang Dorji Firstpost 21 June 2021
For the past few years, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has upgraded its high-tech weapons and conducted a series of live-fire military exercises along the Himalayan borders and in Tibet. For Instance, Global Times reported on 5 January, 2020 that “China’s latest weapons including the Type 15 tank and the new 155-millimeter vehicle-mounted Howitzer were deployed in Southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began a first round of exercises in 2020…”.
After Xi Jinping came to power, a major reorganisation of the PLA was carried out in 2015 and later in February 2016, the seven military regions were reorganised into five theatre commands. During the official flag-conferring ceremony held in Beijing on 1 February, 2016, Xi, also chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), “urged the theate commands to improve their ability to command and strengthen joint command and action to complete the tasks of routine combat readiness and military actions”.
Since then, there have been different intensive military exercises which also involved joint military exercises between different theatre commands, including the Western Theatre Command, which overlooks the security of East Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Tibet. All this centralisation of the command system indicates that China is planning to create a new front in the Indo-Tibet border.
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