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Why India’s Ladakh Region Is Crucial For China’s Rise As An Economic Super-Power?

China’s sudden and unceremonious incursions into India’s eastern Ladakh region since April 2020 have piqued the curiosity of many strategic experts, and various theories are thrown around to explain the Chinese aggression against India.

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While some experts blamed the Indian government’s actions such as the unilateral abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, others said the jingoist speeches by politicians over reclaiming Aksai Chin had not gone down well with China.

Several other possible explanations were given to explain unprecedented actions by India’s giant neighbor.

However, according to a prominent Indian politician, China’s actions can be explained if we consider the resources that it will have access to in the region. He says access to freshwater resources could have been the driving factor behind China’s unmitigated advances in Ladakh since early 2020.

Freshwater and sand are the two basic raw materials for the manufacture of semiconductors that form the basis of all modern industry and economic progress.

Semiconductors are at the heart of microprocessor chips, which are a basic component of almost all modern equipment from computers, mobile phones to cars, helicopters and fighter jets.

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Although China is already a global manufacturing hub when it comes to electronics, it depends on its supply chain of chips from other countries, and its own semiconductor manufacturing industry is at a nascent stage.

As such, it aspires to build its own chip manufacturing capacity to cater to a burgeoning demand for this basic building block to support its vast industry base.

The chips are made of silicon which is extracted from sand. Cleaning the silicon wafers also requires immense quantities of freshwater. The wafers must be thoroughly cleaned before the integration of electric circuits takes place over them.

China is said to be hugely deficient in freshwater availability. Some prominent water systems in China such as the Yangtze, Huang Ho and Mekong rivers are all polluted and unfit for the semiconductor industry to operate.

Access to Aksai Chin, Ladakh and even Kashmir can fulfill that requirement since these regions are sources of major freshwater bodies.

Aksai Chin is also home to the Taklamakan desert that could provide an abundance of sand and access to Himalayan rivers and glaciers.

“The Shaksgam valley alone is home to 242 glaciers that can serve as the grand reservoir of fresh water for Chinese chip manufacturing. It, therefore, becomes imperative to view the Sino-Indian standoff through this technological lens also,” writes Manish Tewari, former Indian union minister.

Experts believe the 21st century will be all about the race for domination of chip-making, a strategic resource that will shape the geopolitical outcomes of our time.

China is giving a heavy push to the indigenization of chip-making having operationalized 5,000 semiconductor chip test production lines last year, which have an investment of 10 $1.42 billion in Horgos, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

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