Trump’s Iran War Is Backfiring — China Is Ready | Silk and Steel

**Jamarl Thomas** (0:00)
He is a damn good friend of the show, and I appreciate him for joining me. Carl Zha, what's happening, my man? I'm digging that mic.

**Carl Zha** (0:08)
Thank you. Thank you.
I always have this mic for a while. It's out of sight as a view.

**Jamarl Thomas** (0:17)
Because I got to be honest, I hate my Column mic.
It's like I even got to the point and say, okay, I'm going to get another one of these. But there's nothing wrong with this one, but I'm writing a book. But Carl Zha, man, thank you for joining me. Just for the audience, I always like to give a heads up on who a person is, even though I imagine at this point the audience knows you. Carl Zha, he's host of Silk and Steel Podcasts, focused on China, the surrounding regions, their history, culture, and politics. You can follow Carl on Twitter, at Carl Zha. You can follow his podcast on Twitter, at Steel, Silk, and Letter In. You can subscribe and support the podcast on patreon.com/silk and Steel. Carl, I'm glad that you can join me. I suppose we should start with tragedy, more than anything else. That is the big disaster that took place on the border of Nepal and China.
What do we know of this? I mean, I saw the footage of it and it's terrifying. Basically, this mudslide that took out everything that was in front of it.

**Carl Zha** (1:23)
It's actually a glacial rung off, an entire glacier on the Nepal side just dropped off the sheer face of the mountain. And because that entire glacier melted and suddenly the water level rose very fast. It's basically a glacier rung off slash landslide slash flash flood. Because the border between China and Nepal, it sits on a river valley in the Himalayas. Like you could see basically the whole border post was on the side of the river. China is on one side of the river, Nepal is on the other side of the river. What happened is one of a big chunk of glacier just melted off and slide off the mountainside and fell into the upstream of the river. And it added huge volume of water, mud, and with very high speed just rushed down and you just wipe out everything in its path. And so far we know at least several hundred people are missing or dead. Because the video was hard to watch because you can tell most of the people in there probably didn't make it. Yeah.
Because the whole border, it consists of a huge gate and there was a massive parking area. But as you can see on the video, all the entire structure got completely demolished when the glacial slide just wiped the whole area clean.
It actually triggered a 5 earthquake when that glacier fell down the mountain. Yeah, yeah. And now it's likely gonna block the river flow with all the mud and debris. They're gonna probably form a barrier lake, which is gonna have to clear out, because otherwise that's gonna cost even more problems.
And this is one reason, you know, there's actually the planned China-Nepal Railway was supposed to go through that exact region. The Jairong was one of the major border crossing between China and Nepal. The proposed China-Nepal Highway that would cross the Himalayas would have gone through there. But I expect, this is why I expect that, that railway will probably be a more long-term project, just giving the kind of the tremendous difficulty to build through a geologically active area. You know, one of the proposal for the railroad I saw was just basically tunneled through the mountains. They're going to build the almost 90% of the rail under the mountains. So, to avoid the kind of those surface conditions like landslide, earthquake and all that kind of stuff. But it's going to take time. It's going to take time and a lot of money.

**Jamarl Thomas** (4:33)
I can imagine. I'm curious on something now that you brought this up.
When I was in Nepal, there was political upheaval in Nepal when I was in Nepal last year.
There was a lot of talk about what the political upheaval was about. Now, when I was on the ground, they were very specific that police shot our kids and so we burned down their buildings. It was very specific. They made the point of saying, we have agency, we're not being pushed by anybody else, etc. But as I was having a conversation with some of the people on the ground, I pointed out to them that outside of Nepal, there was this belief that this was, let's say, they were being maneuvered. They were being maneuvered from the standpoint of trying to get a government that is more favorable to the United States and less favorable to China. I'm curious, did anything fundamentally change in the government, in the governments, meaning did the relationship between Nepal and China change after the government change?