[It
was the first explicit admission by the People’s Liberation Army that it had
lost soldiers in the June brawl. India says 20 of its troops were killed.]
It
said a battalion commander identified as Chen Hongjun led a charge of
reinforcements to rescue him, in what became the deadliest clash in more than
four decades along the tense
mountainous border between China and India.
The
senior officer suffered a roughly four-inch gash across his forehead but
survived. Chen Hongjun died, along with three other soldiers, the People’s
Liberation Army’s Daily reported on Friday, in the most detailed official account of the battle so far.
One of them was sucked under the churning current of the Galwan River, which
rushes out of a valley at an elevation of nearly 14,000 feet.
The
account in the army’s official newspaper was China’s first explicit
acknowledgment that its soldiers had died in the clash on June 15, the fiercest
of a series of confrontations along contested parts of the border over the last
eight months.
India
lost 20 soldiers in that
brawl and honored them with public rituals of mourning that, until
now, China had not extended to its own troops. The clashes have badly soured
relations between the two countries, which had been improving before last year.
It
is not clear why the People’s Liberation Army disclosed the four deaths now. In
doing so, it announced that it had awarded Qi Fabao, a regimental commander
with two decades of service along the mountainous border, the honorary title of
Hero of Defending the Border.
The
four who died received the same award posthumously. The account 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, was said to have written in a diary before the fatal clash, “and every
inch of our land under our feet is the motherland’s territory.”
The
new details came after the two countries reached an agreement to withdraw their
forces from another flash point along the border where clashes occurred:
Pangong Tso, a scenic glacial lake not far from Galwan.
Both
sides have appeared eager to keep the tensions from turning into open conflict
— while not openly conceding any territory along a border that remains
undefined in places.
China’s
version of the deadly clash could not be independently verified. It blamed
India for the brawl and the broader tensions, while never using the country’s
name. The Chinese simply confronted “foreign forces,” the article read.
India,
in turn, has blamed China for encroaching past the Line
of Actual Control that separates the two sides in the disputed areas.
A
spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, Ren Guoqiang, said the
article was an effort to correct what he called exaggerated and slanderous
efforts by India and others to distort the facts. “History cannot be tampered
with,” he said in a statement on the ministry’s website. “Heroes cannot be
forgotten.”
Until
now, China had only obliquely referred to “losses” during
the clash last summer. The article did not present the four deaths as an
exhaustive count. Indian officials have claimed that Chinese losses were at
least as high as India’s 20 fatalities. An American intelligence official said
last summer that China had deliberately concealed its soldiers’ deaths,
suggesting that between 20 and 30 had perished.
In
broad strokes, the descriptions of the clash in the Galwan Valley corresponded
with those from the Indian side, providing a window into how China views the
standoff and how it rallies its own forces with appeals to honor and sacrifice.
In
places, the Chinese account verged on hagiography, including cinematic scenes
that seemed somewhat improbable.
“Take
care of my mom if I die!” the soldier who drowned, identified as Wang Zhuoran,
was said to have shouted to another soldier before he “toppled into the
bone-chilling torrent forever.”