Everything - and I mean everything - Chellaney is saying is a bald-faced lie.
Which is absolutely disgusting: using such a tragedy - which killed hundreds (if not thousands, we don't know yet) of Nepalis and Chinese alike - to manufacture an entirely fake geopolitical narrative is genuinely beyond the pale.
1) The collapse happened on the Nepal side, not the "Tibetan side": as confirmed by Nepal themselves (https://t.co/hVvGlMNzSP) and as obvious from satellite imagery (https://t.co/B6SRZ6dkOr), Langtang Lirung, where the glacier collapsed, is entirely within Nepalese territory - this is not even a borderline case.
2) There is exactly zero "Chinese hydrological modifications and infrastructure footprint" in this area. You just need to check satellite imagery around the collapse side to check it out: https://t.co/TKvdc0PKgO. It's an extremely wild and unpopulated mountainous area.
The only "infrastructure" there is a border checkpoint, a road, and a bridge that have existed in some form since the 8th century (https://t.co/pkZVW8xPZe). There are no dams. No hydrological modifications. Nothing.
3) On the "no warning" claim: this one is probably the most egregious of all because Chellaney is blaming China for not warning Nepal about something that happened **inside Nepal**.
And, in any case, once the mountain collapse, warnings would unfortunately not have changed people's fates: the mudslide reached the border crossing - just 25km away - within just 7 minutes and 40 seconds (https://t.co/eKzfNAzNn7). There is no conceivable warning system that would have enabled a meaningful evacuation in under eight minutes.
4) If anything, one of the lessons of this terrible tragedy is that you actually WANT more infrastructure footprint in that area, Chinese or otherwise, if only to monitor if nearby mountains or glacier are showing signs of instability.
Entire mountains just don't collapse from one day to the next without showing early signs of weakness that the right sensors could pick up days or weeks in advance.
So the right answer to save lives in the region in the future, which I strongly suspect Chellaney doesn't give the slightest damn about, is more Chinese-Nepali cooperation on joint monitoring infrastructure.
This is unfortunately not Chellaney's first rodeo with anti-China narratives designed to sow division and hatred between developing countries.
He is the man, for instance, who infamously coined the "debt-trap diplomacy" narrative (since thoroughly debunked - see https://t.co/y1EaERG0R5 - but still widely believed) to poison developing countries' relationships with China and thereby deprive them of infrastructure investment they badly need.
How many roads, ports, and railways were delayed or canceled across Africa and Asia because governments were scared off by a narrative that turned out to be false?
It's exactly the same pattern here: a catchy lie designed to sow division and hatred between countries at the exact moment they need each other most.
I hate to say this but, behind all this, there is also a wider India angle. Anyone who's followed posts on X about this tragedy know that the overwhelming share of the disinformation about it - all aimed at weaponizing the tragedy to blame China - has come from thousands of Indian accounts like Chellaney's.
And, given how aggressively India censors social media (shutting down up to thousands of X accounts a week: https://t.co/Se02KGlAYX), the tolerance about this anti-China misinformation campaign unfortunately speaks for itself.
All the more, in this instance, since Chellaney is deeply connected in the Indian government and was a member of India's National Security Advisory Board (https://t.co/DbRh142dNx).
At the risk of stating the obvious, it's pretty pathetic and deeply short-sighted.
This is the case for this specific strategy: every glacier that threatens Nepal threatens northern India just as much: the next collapse could just as easily send a wall of mud into Uttarakhand. And if it does, India will need exactly the kind of cross-border China-Nepal monitoring cooperation that narratives like Chellaney's are designed to destroy.
And it is the case more broadly too: when your strategy consists of turning your neighbors against each other based on lies, sooner or later they realize that the one thing they actually have in common is being deceived by you - and that makes you, not China, the common threat.