India on Wednesday slammed China’s “vain and preposterous” attempt to rename 27 terrain features in the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh with Chinese-language names.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry defended its effort to “standardize” the names of mountains, lakes, and rivers by insisting the region rightfully “belongs to China.”
Arunachal Pradesh is a mountainous state in northeastern India that borders on Bhutan, Tibet, and Myanmar. Its rough terrain divides the population into dozens of tribal groups, which speak about fifty languages and dialects among them.
The hills and mountains are not conducive to building large cities or massive public works, which is one reason the area remains contested between India and China. While many of the tribal residents of Arunachal Pradesh speak Hindi and have embraced Hinduism due to their long association with India, the Indians have never been able to build the sort of large-scale construction projects that would consolidate their grip on disputed territory, the way China grabs large portions of the contested South China Sea by building artificial islands.
The region that includes Arunachal Pradesh is divided between India and China by a 700-mile border, drawn in 1914 and known as the McMahon Line. Sir Henry McMahon was the chief British negotiator who worked on the treaty with Tibet and China, at a time when India was part of the British Empire, and Tibet had not yet been dragged into the Chinese empire.
McMahon’s border technically separated India from Tibet, leaving China out of the deal, but China insisted Tibet was a Chinese possession that had no right to make its own treaties. China denounced the border as an act of “imperialist aggression” and refused to recognize it.
A few decades later, China showed the world just how much it hated imperialist aggression by invading and conquering Tibet. The Chinese government insisted the territory it gained by conquering Tibet should extend well south of the McMahon Line. India, which was by then independent from the British Empire, strongly disagreed.
India and China have been fighting ever since over the territory that lies between the McMahon Line and where Beijing thinks the border should have been drawn. The Chinese refer to the entire region by the name “Zangnan.” The argument occasionally descends into physical violence, although both sides refrain from using guns or explosives, to avoid escalation. Instead, Indian and Chinese soldiers clobber each other with rocks, sticks, and improvised weapons.
China has made several efforts to pick new names for terrain features in Arunachal Pradesh since 2017, normally choosing about a dozen mountains, valleys, and rivers at a time. On Wednesday, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs published an unusually long list of 27 new names for parts of Arunachal Pradesh. The move came as an unwelcome surprise to India, which thought relations with China had improved since their last clash over the disputed territory.
“We have noticed that China has persisted with its vain and preposterous attempts to name places in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh,” Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement released on Wednesday.
“Consistent with our principled position, we reject such attempts categorically,” Jaiswal said.
“Creative naming will not alter the undeniable reality that Arunachal Pradesh was, is, and will always remain an integral and inalienable part of India,” he asserted.
“Zangnan is part of China’s territory. The Chinese government has standardized the names of some parts of Zangnan. This is within China’s sovereign rights,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian blithely responded.
Indian analysts denounced China’s act of “cartographic aggression” to Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Wednesday. China Studies fellow Kapit Mankikar of the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi said China’s aggression was directed more at Tibetans than Indians, because China wants to erase all traces of Tibetan identity.
“This has been the fifth time that China has renamed places in Arunachal. And this is also part of the larger scheme of things, where it calls Tibet ‘Xizang,’” said Mankikar. “This is a long, long-drawn strategy.”
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