When the senior Chinese officer on the ground, Qi Fabao, confronted the Indian soldiers high in the Himalayas in June last year, he was suddenly overwhelmed, according to the People’s Liberation Army of China, in a fight fought with pipes, batons and stones.
It said a battalion commander identified as Chen Hongjun led to a charge of reinforcements to save him, in the deadliest clash in more than four decades along the tense mountainous border between China and India.
The senior officer found an approximately four inches in his forehead but survived. The People’s Liberation Army’s Daily reported on Friday in the most detailed official report of the fight so far that Chen Hongjun had died along with three other soldiers. One of them was sucked under the stream of the Galwan River, which rushed out of a valley at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet.
The report in the army’s official newspaper was China’s first explicit acknowledgment that its soldiers had been killed in the June 15 clash, the fiercest of a series of confrontations along the contested parts of the border over the past eight months.
India lost 20 soldiers in the battle and honored them with public rituals of mourning that China has so far not extended to its own troops. The clashes have severely soured relations between the two countries, which improved before last year.
It is not clear why the People’s Liberation Army has now announced the four deaths. In doing so, he announced that he had awarded Qi Fabao, a regimental commander with two decades of service along the mountainous border, the honorary title of hero of the defense of the border.
The four who died received the same award posthumously. The report did not provide the ranks of the officers and soldiers.
“We are the boundary marker of the motherland,” one of the soldiers who died, Xiao Siyuan, wrote in a diary before the fatal collision, “and every inch of our land under our feet is the territory of the motherland. ‘
The new details came after the two countries reached an agreement to withdraw their forces from another flashpoint along the border where clashes took place: Pangong Tso, a picturesque glacial lake not far from Galwan.
Both sides seem eager to prevent the tension from turning into an open conflict – while not openly conceding any area along a boundary that is undefined in places.
China’s version of the deadly clash could not be independently confirmed. It blamed India for the fighting and the broader tensions, while never using the country’s name. The Chinese were simply confronting ‘foreign powers’, the article reads.
India, in turn, blamed China for going beyond the line of real control that separates the two parties in the disputed territories.
A spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, Ren Guoqiang, said the article was an attempt to correct the exaggerated and defamatory efforts of India and others to distort the facts. “History cannot be tampered with,” he said in a statement on the ministry’s website. “Heroes can not be forgotten.”
So far, during the clash last summer, China has only obliquely referred to ‘losses’. The article did not present the four deaths as a complete score. Indian officials claimed that Chinese losses were at least as high as the 20 deaths in India. A U.S. intelligence official said last summer that China had deliberately concealed its soldiers’ deaths, suggesting that between 20 and 30 people had died.
Broadly speaking, the descriptions of the clash in the Galwan Valley correspond to the descriptions of the Indian side, which provides a window into how China views the absence and how it gathers its own forces in a call for honor and sacrifice.
In some places, the Chinese report mentioned hagiography, including film scenes that seemed somewhat unlikely.
“Take care of my mother when I die!” it is said that the soldier who drowned, identified as Wang Zhuoran, shouted at another soldier before ‘falling forever into the bone-chilling torrent’.
Hari Kumar reported and Claire Fu contributed research.