When senior Chinese officer on the ground, Qi Fabao, confronted Indian soldiers high in the Himalayas last June, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a fight with pipes, clubs and stones, according to the People’s Liberation Army of China.
According to the report, a battalion commander identified as Chen Hongjun led a load of reinforcements to rescue him, in what has become the deadliest confrontation in more than four decades along the tense mountain border between China and India.
The senior officer suffered a cut of about ten centimeters in the forehead, but survived. Chen Hongjun died, along with three other soldiers, the People’s Liberation Army Journal reported on Friday, in the most detailed official account of the battle so far. One was sucked into the turbulent current of the Galwan River, which exits a valley at an altitude of almost 14,000 feet.
The report in the army’s official newspaper was China’s first explicit acknowledgment that its soldiers died in the June 15 clash, the most violent of a series of clashes in contested parts of the border in the past eight months.
India lost 20 soldiers in that fight and honored them with public mourning rituals that China has so far not extended to its own troops. The clashes have soured relations between the two countries, which had been improving before last year.
It is not clear why the People’s Liberation Army has reported the four deaths now. In doing so, he announced that he had awarded Qi Fabao, a regimental commander with two decades of service along the mountainous border, the honorary title of Hero of the Border Defense.
The four who died received the same award posthumously. (The report did not provide the patents for officers and soldiers.)
“We are the mark of the homeland’s frontier,” said one of the soldiers who died, Xiao Siyuan, having written in a diary before the fatal shock, “and every inch of our land under our feet is the homeland’s territory.”
The new details came after the two countries reached an agreement to withdraw their forces from another point of conflict along the border where the clashes took place: Pangong Tso, a scenic glacial lake not far from Galwan.
Both sides seem eager to prevent tensions from turning into open conflict – although they do not openly grant any territory along a border that remains undefined in some places.
The Chinese version of the deadly shock could not be independently verified. He blamed India for the fight and wider tensions, although he never used the name of the country. The Chinese simply faced “foreign forces”, the article said.
India, for its part, blamed China for overcoming the Royal Control Line that separates the two sides in disputed areas.
A spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, Ren Guoqiang, said the article was an effort to correct what he called India’s exaggerated and slanderous efforts 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.”
So far, China had referred only indirectly to “losses” during last summer’s confrontation. The article did not present the four deaths as an exhaustive count. Indian officials said Chinese losses were at least as high as the 20 deaths in India. An American intelligence official said last summer that China has deliberately concealed the deaths of its soldiers, suggesting that between 20 and 30 died.
In general terms, the descriptions of the confrontation in the Galwan valley corresponded to those on the Indian side, providing a window into how China sees the stalemate and how it gathers its own forces with calls for honor and sacrifice.
In some places, the Chinese account bordered on hagiography, including cinematographic scenes that seemed somewhat unlikely.
“Take care of my mother if I die!” the drowned soldier, identified as Wang Zhuoran, reportedly shouted at another soldier before “falling forever into the bone-chilling torrent”.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting and Claire Fu contributed research.