Infrastructure nationalism and sovereignty by settlement in Tibet: The case of xiaokang border villages

This article critically examines China’s Xiaokang Border Village Programme (2017–20) in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), situating it within Xi Jinping’s broader strategy of ‘governing the borders to govern the country’. Ostensibly framed as a poverty alleviation and rural revitalization initiative, the programme mobilized billions in state funding to construct or rebuild more than 600 model villages in Tibet’s border counties. Drawing on a range of new sources, the article argues that these villages are less developmental tools than instruments of territorial consolidation, securitization, and ideological transformation. By reconfiguring spatial relations, relocating border populations, and embedding Han-led Chinese Communist Party (CCP) institutions, these xiaokang villages function as micro-sites of infrastructure nationalism and colonial-style governance, inscribing Han norms into Indigenous landscapes and subjectivities to further CCP control over once autonomous communities in the farthest reaches of the People’s Republic of China.