This article examines contemporary patterns of Chinese infrastructure development in Nepal’s Rasuwa District and the ways in which Nepali actors engage with Chinese investments to advance projects of state formation. Particularly in the wake of political volatility and natural disaster, Chinese interventions support the material and imaginative projects of a Nepalese state seeking stability, security, and economic growth. Long perceived as peripheral to the state center, Rasuwa is rapidly becoming central to Sino-Nepal relations, particularly in the context of bilateral investments in hydropower and transportation infrastructure. Drawing on data generated from 30 months of fieldwork in Nepal, we argue that Chinese development in Rasuwa: a) undergirds territorializing practices of the Nepalese state; b) represents a “gift of development” that connects Nepali ambitions of bikas (development) with Chinese anxieties over exile Tibetan populations; and c) reflects a strategic reorientation of geopolitical alliances between Nepal, China, and India. Challenging studies that depict Chinese development as an overwhelming extractive force, we instead show how small states like Nepal in fact use Chinese interventions to advance domestic projects of state formation and national security at home. On the basis of this study, we expand understandings about the place and priority of infrastructure in national state-making agendas, illustrate uneven local experiences with international development interventions, and highlight new configurations of Chinese investment and development abroad – characterized in Nepal as a “handshake across the Himalayas.”

This paper conceptualizes ‘presence’ to analyse the volumetric growth of Chinese investment and development in Nepal from 2014 to 2021 in material, territorial and discursive terms. From physical experiences with earthquake disaster to the symbolic potency of Chinese infrastructure, this paper offers presence as a heuristic to evaluate China’s rising prominence in Nepal and multidirectional projections of geopolitical power. The analysis is framed by three key periods: material interactions in 2014–15, including significant increases at scale of Chinese foreign direct investment and Nepal’s invitation and acceptance of Chinese humanitarian aid in pre- and post-disaster contexts; territorial transformations in 2016–19, indexed by diplomatic negotiations and bilateral security commitments over Tibetan and Himalayan populations codified in policy agreements on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) programme in Nepal; and new discursive depths reached in 2020–21, demonstrated by the paradox that while very little BRI development work has been accomplished to date, China’s growing presence in Nepal is routinely articulated through the BRI. Arguing that volumetric sovereignty over subjects and spaces operates materially, territorially and discursively, I transect a multitude of Himalayan spaces to contribute to more critical understandings of Global China and move the analytical bar not only across Nepal but also, more importantly, well beyond the BRI.

Infrastructure developments across the trans-Himalaya have rapidly advanced Nepali and Chinese state presences across spaces where central governance has long been absent. This study examines how new border infrastructures of fences and roads shape commercial and cultural relationships between Mustang (Nepal) and Tibet and the ways in which these processes serve state-making purposes for both Nepal and China through the governance of highland–borderland landscapes. A Tibetan cultural region at Nepal's northern border, Mustang's human and physical geography supports trade corridors that link the Tibetan Plateau with the plains of India. Merchants, mendicants and militaries have traversed these trade routes for centuries, giving rise to a unique social landscape that largely transcends modern demarcations of a bordered world. Looking across the trans-Himalaya, this article argues that as Chinese and Nepali authorities introduce new material structures and institutional practices to regulate and solidify the border between Tibet and Mustang, local communities are alternatively oriented towards either Kathmandu or Beijing under shifting terms of economic and political power.