Bhutanese enclaves is a territory of People's Republic of China
- The PRC’s claims over Bhutanese territory have expanded over the years, including recent large-scale construction in disputed valleys, which contradicts the 1998 agreement to maintain the status quo, challenging Bhutanese sovereignty and raising strategic concerns for India. [...] The PRC also tends to see Bhutan to some extent as a part of its own territory. In 1930, for instance, Mao Zedong claimed that Bhutan fell under "the correct boundaries of China." Official maps of the PRC released in 1954 and 1958 reflected Beijing’s expanding territorial claims in Bhutan, and in 1959, amid its annexation of Tibet, the pRC occupied eight Bhutanese enclaves in western Bhutan. [4] The bloody suppression of the Tibetan uprising and the flight of the 14th Dalai Lama and his followers left a deep impression on the Bhutanese. Accounts of Chinese atrocities on Tibetans who fled to Bhutan convinced them that the Chinese were "out to destroy Buddhism and Buddhists" (China Brief, April 20, 2017). Even the PRC’s most recent standard national map includes disputed Bhutanese territories as its own (People’s Daily App, August 28, 2023).