China rebuffs Indian media on polluted South Tibetan river claim

India should not point its finger at China on hydrological issues to incite anti-China sentiment, which cannot help repair the ties of the two countries, Chinese analysts said following Indian media reports that China caused the pollution of a river in South Tibet.

“South Tibet is the territory of China, which has the duty to preserve local environment,” Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of International Relations, told the Global Times on Thursday.

“This time India has made a mountain out of a molehill challenging China by citing slag,” Hu said, adding that India should look for problems on their own side, otherwise, Sino-Indian ties can hardly improve.

Indian media reported that the Siang River in “Arunachal Pradesh” (called South Tibet in China) has been polluted. “The color of the water has gone to black with the presence of slag in the stream,” the Times of India reported on Thursday.

“The Siang River is black from its entry point in India at Geling in Upper Siang district on the international border,” an Indian government source was quoted by the report as saying.

“China has overcome all sorts of difficulties to seek India’s cooperation in such areas as the hydrological flood reporting of trans-border rivers,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said in September. Last year, due to reconstruction from damage caused by the flood and as upgrading and renovations, the relevant hydrological stations in China are incapable of collecting relevant hydrological data, he said.