An interesting discovery

[unixronin]

meglimir relayed this interesting Register article about a large-scale model in Huangyangtan, China, of an extensive area of mountainous terrain.  The model is 900 by 700 meters and is extremely detailed, complete with snow.

Now to me, with my nasty, suspicious mind, there are three very pressing questions about this model:

• Does it match any existing terrain elsewhere on the Earth?
• If not ... then what's it for?
• More importantly, if it does ... then where is that terrain?

The answers to these questions could be important with regard to insight into China's possible future plans for further, ah, "liberations" of "former Chinese territories".

Of course, since surely the Chinese would be aware of how short a time a construction of this size could possibly go unnoticed by satellite observation, it could also be intentional misdirection.  China has already declared that it considers Taiwan (aka the Republic of China) to still be part of the People's Republic of China¹, and strongly hinted that it is willing to employ any necessary military force to regain control of Taiwan, up to and including using nuclear weapons against US forces supporting Taiwan.

Update:

The word seems to be that the modelled terrain is an area along China's border with India, and that it is modelled in awesomely exacting detail.  One wonders what China may have in mind....

[1]  The Taiwanese people, for the most part, disagree strenuously on this point.  They have an independent, largely free-market society with multi-party democratic politics, not subject to the totalitarian dictates of the PRC, and they like it that way.  In fact, up until 1991, the official position of the ROC government on Taiwan was that it was the legitimate government of all of China.

Comments

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Did you read the second page of the article? It seems that you didn't.
It's a model of a spot on the Indian/Chinese border.

The letters followup point to it being an interesting project in hydrological researching, similar to what was done for the Hoover Dam.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I missed that there was a second page. I must have overlooked the link.