World
China’s Great Wall of Villages
Qionglin New Village sits deep in the Himalayas, just three miles from a region where a heavy military buildup and confrontations between Chinese and Indian troops have brought fears of a border war.
The land was once an empty valley, more than 10,000 feet above the sea, traversed only by local hunters. Then Chinese officials built Qionglin, a village of cookie-cutter homes and finely paved roads, and paid people to move there from other settlements.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calls such people “border guardians.” Qionglin’s villagers are essentially sentries on the front line of China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh, India’s easternmost state, which Beijing insists is part of Chinese-ruled Tibet.
Many villages like Qionglin have sprung up. In China’s west, they give its sovereignty a new, undeniable permanence along boundaries contested by India, Bhutan and Nepal. In its north, the settlements bolster security and promote trade with Central Asia. In the south, they guard against the flow of drugs and crime from Southeast Asia.
16 miles to border claimed by India Jiagang Village
Inside territory claimed by Bhutan
Gyalaphug (Jieluobu) Village Fumin Village and Aimin Village
Sources: Jiagang Village – video still from CCTV (state media); Gyalaphug Village – local government of Luozha county, Shannan (Lhoka), Tibet Autonomous Region; Fumin Village and Aimin Village – Tian Shan Wang (state media); Shibanzhai – Hong He Daily (state media)
The buildup is the clearest sign that Mr. Xi is using civilian settlements to quietly solidify China’s control in far-flung frontiers, just as he has with fishing militias and islands in the disputed South China Sea.
The New York Times mapped and analyzed settlements along China’s border to create the first detailed visual representation of how the country has reshaped its frontiers with strategic civilian outposts, in just eight years.
Working with the artificial intelligence company RAIC Labs, which scanned satellite images of China’s entire land border captured by Planet Labs, The Times identified the locations of new villages and checked them against historical images, state media, social media posts and public records.
The mapping reveals that China has put at least one village near every accessible Himalayan pass that borders India, as well as on most of the passes bordering Bhutan and Nepal, according to Matthew Akester, an independent researcher on Tibet, and Robert Barnett, a professor from SOAS University of London. Mr. Akester and Mr. Barnett, who have studied Tibet’s border villages for years, reviewed The Times’s findings.
Inside territory claimed by India
Demchok (Dianjiao) Village
Source: China United Front News Network (state media)
The outposts are civilian in nature, but they also provide China’s military with roads, access to the internet and power, should it want to move troops quickly to the border. Villagers serve as eyes and ears in remote areas, discouraging intruders or runaways.
“China does not want outsiders to be able to walk across the border for any distance without being challenged by its security personnel or citizens,” Mr. Akester said.
The buildup of settlements fuels anxiety in the region about Beijing’s ambitions. The threat of conflict is ever present: Deadly clashes have broken out along the border between troops from India and China since 2020, and tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides remain on a war footing.
The first signs of Mr. Xi’s ambitions emerged in 2017, when state media told the story of a letter he wrote to two Tibetan sisters in the remote village of Yume, in a region near Arunachal Pradesh that is blanketed by deep snow for more than half the year.
He praised their family for having protected the area for China for decades, despite the inhospitable terrain: “I hope you continue your spirit as a patriot and border guardian.”
Over the next few years, workers built dozens of new homes in Yume, and officials moved over 200 people there.
Yume, also known as Yumai in Chinese, is among at least 90 new villages and expanded settlements that have sprung up in Tibet since 2016, when China began outlining its border village plan in the region, The Times found. In neighboring Xinjiang and Yunnan, The Times identified six new and 59 expanded border villages. (China says there are hundreds of villages like them, but few details are available and many appear to be mere upgrades of existing villages.)
Of the new villages The Times identified in Tibet, one is on land claimed by India, though within China’s de facto border; 11 other settlements are in areas contested by Bhutan. Some of those 11 villages are near the Doklam region, the site of a standoff between troops from India and China in 2017 over Chinese attempts to extend a road.
A Times investigation found 12 villages in disputed areas
Source: RAIC Labs and The Times analysis of Planet Labs satellite imagery
China makes clear that the villages are there for security. In 2020, a leader of a Tibetan border county told state media that he was relocating more than 3,000 people to frontier areas that were “weakly controlled, disputed or empty.”
Brahma Chellaney, a strategic affairs analyst based in New Delhi, said that in quietly building militarized villages in disputed borderlands, China is replicating on land an expansionist approach that it has used successfully in the South China Sea.
“What stands out is the speed and stealth with which China is redrawing facts on the ground, with little regard for the geopolitical fallout,” Mr. Chellaney said. “China has been planting settlers in whole new stretches of the Himalayan frontier with India and making them its first line of defense.”
In a written response to The Times, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said that in dealing with border issues with its neighbors, “China always strives to find fair and reasonable solutions through peaceful and friendly consultations.”
India and Bhutan did not respond to requests for comment about the buildup. Indian officials have previously noted “infrastructure construction activity” by China along the border. Local leaders in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh have complained to The Times that China was slowly cutting away small pieces of Indian territory.
9 miles to border claimed by India
Xingkai Village
Source: Satellite images from Planet Labs
India has responded with what it calls “Vibrant Villages,” a campaign that aims to revive hundreds of villages along the border.
But China is outbuilding India, says Brian Hart, an analyst for the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or C.S.I.S., who recently co-authored a report on border villages in Tibet.
Among other findings, the C.S.I.S. report identified what appeared to be a militarized facility in one such village, known as Migyitun, or Zhari in Chinese, an indication of the settlements’ dual-use nature. The Times studied satellite images of the same village and identified military trucks and tents, as well as what appeared to be a shooting range nearby.
6 miles to border claimed by India
Migyitun (Zhari) Village
C.S.I.S.; Satellite image from Maxar Technologies
Some border villages have military and dual-use infrastructure
The villages also serve as propaganda: a display of Chinese strength and superiority in the region, said Jing Qian, co-founder of the Center for China Analysis at the Asia Society.
“They want the Indians, Central Asians and others to see and think that Chinese villages are so good, that the China model is working very well.”
Uncertain Future, Unforgiving Terrain
The slice of the Himalayas where many Chinese villages have sprung up has been largely uninhabited for good reason. Its rocky, icy terrain is particularly forbidding in winter, with roads buried many months of the year by deep snow. The air is thin and cold. The land is barren, making farming difficult.
To persuade residents to move there, Chinese Communist Party officials promised them their new homes would be cheap. They would receive annual subsidies and get paid extra if they took part in border patrols. Chinese propaganda outlets said the government would provide jobs and help promote local businesses and tourism. The villages would come with paved roads, internet connections, schools and clinics.
16 miles to border claimed by India
Geletang Village
Sources: YiHe Landscape; satellite image from Planet LabsThe villages are planned with schools, clinics and more
A local government document reviewed by The Times indicated that some villagers may be receiving around 20,000 Chinese yuan a year for relocation, less than $3,000. One resident reached by phone said he earned an extra $250 a month by patrolling the border.
But it is unclear whether the villages make economic sense.
The residents become dependent on the subsidies because there are few other ways to make a living, according to Mr. Akester, the independent expert.
China’s relocation policy is also a form of social engineering, designed to assimilate minority groups like the Tibetans into the mainstream. Tibetans, who are largely Buddhist, have historically resisted the Communist Party’s intrusive controls on their religion and way of life.
Images from the villages suggest that religious life is largely absent. Buddhist monasteries and temples are seemingly nowhere to be found. Instead, national flags and portraits of Mr. Xi are everywhere, on light poles, living room walls and balcony railings.
“They want to transform the landscape and the population,” Mr. Akester said.
Inside territory claimed by Bhutan
Pangda Village
Inside territory claimed by Bhutan
Gyalaphug (Jieluobu) village
Sources: Pangda Village – User Turuisite via Xigua; Gyalaphug Village – local government of Luozha county, Shannan (Lhoka), Tibet Autonomous Region
Over the years, the government has pushed many nomadic Tibetans to sell their yaks and sheep, leave the grasslands and move into houses, but often without clear ways for them to survive. Instead of herding, residents have to work for wages.
Interviews suggest that many nomads who have moved to the new villages are reluctant to adapt. Some herd yaks for half the year in the mountains; others return to their old homes to live for months at a time.
Residents are often not told about the challenges that moving can entail, Mr. Barnett said, including having to spend more to travel to towns and on electricity, water, food and other essentials.
“The major problem is they are moving them from one lifestyle to another,” he said. “They end up with no capital, no usable skills, no sellable skills and no cultural familiarity.”
When money isn’t enough, Chinese officials have applied pressure on residents to relocate, an approach that was evident even in state propaganda reports.
A documentary aired by the state broadcaster, CCTV, showed how a Chinese official went to Dokha, a village in Tibet, to persuade residents to move to a new village called Duolonggang, 10 miles from Arunachal Pradesh.
He encountered some resistance. Tenzin, a lay Buddhist practitioner, insisted that Dokha’s land was fertile, producing oranges and other fruit. “We can feed ourselves without government subsidies,” he said.
The official criticized Tenzin for “using his age and religious status to obstruct relocation,” according to a state media article cited by Human Rights Watch in a report.
In the end, all 143 residents of Dokha moved to the new settlement.
How we identified the villages
The Times first compiled a list of the locations of 10 border villages in China that had been in earlier news reports and shared their coordinates with RAIC Labs. RAIC Labs used artificial intelligence to scan satellite images of China’s land borders, provided by Planet Labs, to look for settlements that had similar features. The area that was scanned extended roughly three miles beyond China’s border and 25 miles within the border.
We manually checked the results from RAIC Labs’ scan to determine whether each site it had detected was a village. Features in satellite images that pointed to civilian settlements included yards, roofs of homes, cars and sports grounds like running tracks and basketball courts. Where possible, using coordinates identified by RAIC Labs, we looked up village names and searched for social media posts and Chinese media reports about the sites. We categorized the sites based on how much had been built around 2016, when China began planning its border village program. We categorized a village as new if no more than 10 structures had existed before 2016. A village was categorized as having expanded if it had more than 10 structures before 2016 but had grown in the years since. We also treated a settlement as a new village if the Chinese government designated it as such, regardless of how many structures it had before 2016.
We found a small number of villages that the algorithm had missed. Our findings still might not be comprehensive. Matthew Akester and Robert Barnett reviewed our analysis and contributed three additional village sites that had not previously been reported.
World
UAE cuts funding for citizens studying at UK universities over campus radicalization fears: report
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The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is removing funding for its citizens to study in the United Kingdom, citing concerns they could be radicalized abroad.
The move means the UAE has removed British universities from a list of higher education institutions eligible for state scholarships amid growing tensions over London’s decision not to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, The Financial Times reported.
“[The UAE] don’t want their kids to be radicalized on campus,” a person directly involved with the decision told the outlet.
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A “Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine” banner at King’s College at the University of Cambridge May 11, 2024, in Cambridge, U.K. (Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Since then, Emirati students who have applied to their government for scholarships to study in the U.K. have been denied.
The move also means that the UAE will not recognize qualifications from academic institutions that are not on its accredited list, rendering degrees from U.K. universities less valuable than others, according to the report.
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The skyline in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where funding for its citizens to study in the United Kingdom has been halted. (Vidhyaa Chandramohan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“All forms of extremism have absolutely no place in our society, and we will stamp them out wherever they are found,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said in a statement. “We offer one of the best education systems in the world and maintain stringent measures on student welfare and on-campus safety.”
The UAE has taken a hardline approach to Islamist movements abroad and at home.
During the 2023-24 school year, 70 students at U.K. universities were reported for possible referral to the government’s deradicalization program, the report states.
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UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan has repeatedly questioned the U.K.’s decision to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
Starmer’s administration last year said the matter was under “close review.”
These are the key developments from day 1,416 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Published On 10 Jan 2026
Here is where things stand on Saturday, January 10:
Fighting:
- The death toll from a massive Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv that began on Thursday night has risen to four, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service wrote in an update shared on Facebook on Friday. At least 25 people were also injured, including five rescuers, the service added.
- The attack left thousands of Kyiv apartments without heat, electricity and water as temperatures fell to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) on Friday, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko and other local officials said.
- Klitschko called on people to temporarily leave the city, saying on Telegram that “half of apartment buildings in Kyiv – nearly 6,000 – are currently without heating because the capital’s critical infrastructure was damaged by the enemy’s massive attack”.
- Russian forces shelled a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Kherson just after midday on Friday, damaging the intensive care unit and injuring three nurses, the regional prosecutor’s office wrote on Telegram.
- “As a result of the attack, three nurses aged 21, 49, and 52 were wounded. At the time of the shelling, the women were inside the medical facility,” the office said in a statement.
- The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, condemned attacks on healthcare in Ukraine in a statement shared on X, saying that there had been nine attacks since the beginning of 2026, killing one patient, one medic and injuring 11 others, including healthcare workers and patients.
- Tedros said that the attacks further “complicated the delivery of health care during the winter period” and called for “the protection of health care facilities, patients and health workers”.
- Russian forces attacked two foreign-flagged civilian vessels with drones in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, killing a Syrian national and injuring another, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba and other officials said on Friday.
- A Ukrainian drone attack on a bus in Russia’s Belgorod region injured four people, the regional task force reported, according to Russia’s TASS state news agency.
- Russian forces seized five settlements in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, including Zelenoye, the Russian Ministry of Defence said, according to TASS.
- Ukrainian battlefield monitoring site DeepState said on Friday that Russian forces advanced in Huliaipole and Prymorske in the Zaporizhia region, but did not report any further changes.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that Russia’s Oreshnik missile strike late on Thursday was “demonstratively” close to Ukraine’s border with the European Union.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency has begun consultations to establish a temporary ceasefire zone near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant after military activity damaged one of two high-voltage power lines, Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a statement on Friday.
Sanctions
- US forces seized the Olina oil tanker and forced it to return to Venezuela so its oil could be sold “through the GREAT Energy Deal”, United States President Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Friday. According to The Associated Press news agency, US government records showed that the Olina had been sanctioned for moving Russian oil under its prior name, Minerva M.
- Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, Olha Stefanishyna, said that Ukrainian nationals were among members of the crew of the Russian-flagged tanker Marinera seized earlier this week by US forces over its links to Venezuela, according to Interfax Ukraine news agency.
- The Russian Foreign Ministry separately said on Friday that the US had released two Russian crewmembers from the Marinera, expressing gratitude to Washington for the decision and pledging to ensure the return home of crewmembers.
Politics and diplomacy
- Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “deep regret” over damage to its embassy in Kyiv, confirming that no diplomats or staff were hurt, in a statement on Friday. The ministry underscored the importance of protecting diplomatic buildings and reiterated its call for a “resolution to the Russian-Ukrainian crisis through dialogue and peaceful means”.
- British Defence Secretary John Healey said that the United Kingdom was allocating 200 million pounds ($270m) to fund preparations for the possible deployment of troops to Ukraine, during a visit to Kyiv on Friday.
- The leaders of Britain, France and Germany described Russia’s use of an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile in western Ukraine as “escalatory and unacceptable”, according to a readout of their call released by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office on Friday.
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. flu infections showed signs of a slight decline last week, but health officials say it is not clear that this severe flu season has peaked.
New government data posted Friday — for flu activity through last week — showed declines in medical office visits due to flu-like illness and in the number of states reporting high flu activity.
However, some measures show this season is already surpassing the flu epidemic of last winter, one of the harshest in recent history. And experts believe there is more suffering ahead.
“This is going to be a long, hard flu season,” New York State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald said, in a statement Friday.
One type of flu virus, called A H3N2, historically has caused the most hospitalizations and deaths in older people. So far this season, that is the type most frequently reported. Even more concerning, more than 91% of the H3N2 infections analyzed were a new version — known as the subclade K variant — that differs from the strain in this year’s flu shots.
The last flu season saw the highest overall flu hospitalization rate since the H1N1 flu pandemic 15 years ago. And child flu deaths reached 289, the worst recorded for any U.S. flu season this century — including that H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009-2010.
So far this season, there have been at least 15 million flu illnesses and 180,000 hospitalizations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. It also estimates there have been 7,400 deaths, including the deaths of at least 17 children.
Last week, 44 states reported high flu activity, down slightly from the week before. However, flu deaths and hospitalizations rose.
Determining exactly how flu season is going can be particularly tricky around the holidays. Schools are closed, and many people are traveling. Some people may be less likely to see a doctor, deciding to just suffer at home. Others may be more likely to go.
Also, some seasons see a surge in cases, then a decline, and then a second surge.
For years, federal health officials joined doctors’ groups in recommending that everyone 6 months and older get an annual influenza vaccine. The shots may not prevent all symptoms but can prevent many infections from becoming severe, experts say.
But federal health officials on Monday announced they will no longer recommend flu vaccinations for U.S. children, saying it is a decision parents and patients should make in consultation with their doctors.
“I can’t begin to express how concerned we are about the future health of the children in this country, who already have been unnecessarily dying from the flu — a vaccine preventable disease,” said Michele Slafkosky, executive director of an advocacy organization called Families Fighting Flu.
“Now, with added confusion for parents and health care providers about childhood vaccines, I fear that flu seasons to come could be even more deadly for our youngest and most vulnerable,” she said in a statement.
Flu is just one of a group of viruses that tend to strike more often in the winter. Hospitalizations from COVID-19 and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, also have been rising in recent weeks — though were not diagnosed nearly as often as flu infections, according to other federal data.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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