“Comprehensive planning and environmental impact assessments for the project should be approved as soon as possible,” he said on Saturday, according to a press release published on Monday on an official regional government website.

Che said also that the exploration of natural gas in northern Tibet should be one of the focuses of the country’s energy development goals over the next five years.

Beijing is keen to boost its energy capacity and resource-rich Tibet is seen as ripe for development. But the hydropower project on the Yarlung Tsangpo is likely to stoke tensions with India, with which China has been locked in a bloody border dispute since May last year.

“It is a national security project, ensuring China’s water resources security and homeland security,” he said.

In what was widely seen as a response to Beijing’s plans, T.S. Mehra, a senior official with India’s water ministry, was quoted by Reuters as saying in December that the government in New Delhi was considering building a 10GW hydropower project on the Brahmaputra to “mitigate the adverse impact of the Chinese dam projects”.

Brahma Chellaney, a strategic studies professor at the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based think tank, said Beijing’s hydropower plans had major significance.

“China’s decision to build dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo just before the river enters Indian territory will arm Beijing with considerable leverage over India,” he said.

“Just before flowing into India, the river makes a U-turn around the Himalayas to form a huge canyon that holds bounteous water resources.”

The Chinese embassy in Delhi said late last year the power project was still in the preliminary planning stage and that there was “no need to over-interpret it”.

In 2018, China and India renewed an agreement to share data on the flow of the Yarlung Tsangpo, after Delhi complained the previous year that Beijing had stopped doing so. China said at the time that the monitoring sites had been washed away by the monsoon floods, though the interruption coincided with a weeks-long military stand-off between the two neighbours.

Over the past decade China has proposed and/or built 11 hydroelectric projects along the Yarlung Tsangpo. While Beijing defends their environmental credentials, critics have accused it of disregarding the developments’ impact on India and Bangladesh, where the river enters the sea.

“It is difficult to say whether the dam building will grow into a bigger dispute,” he said. “But any sort of problem should be solved through dialogue.”