Paromita Das
GG News Bureau
At first, China’s claims were limited to Tawang, an area in Arunachal Pradesh. China has, however, been claiming full sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh since the 2000s. This is a strange claim considering that autonomous Bharat has had authority over the region since 1955; Arunachal Pradesh became a union territory in 1972 and a state in 1987. It is important to note that China’s position is directly driven by its aim to suppress Tibetan nationalism, which it perceives to be supported by Bharat. Arunachal Pradesh has additional strategic significance due to its location at the meeting point of the international boundaries of Bhutan, Myanmar, and the People’s Republic of China.
In an attempt to ultimately seize its neighbours’ resources and territory, China has been making irrational claims to them on various pretexts.
China’s authorities have adopted the maxim “do not let your neighbor sleep normally,” which was first uttered by Mao Zedong, the founder of the communist party. This precept has therefore been followed by China, which has been making irrational claims and upsetting the majority of its neighbors under various pretexts in an attempt to unilaterally take territory and resources.
This has been the situation with the islands in the East and South China Seas that are under dispute. The border regions between China and Bharat are another place where China’s haughtiness is more pronounced.
During his visit to Delhi in 1960, then-Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was inclined to concede that Arunachal Pradesh, which is located south of the McMahon Line, is a part of Bharat rather than the Aksai Chin region, despite the country’s poor economic growth rates at the time.
The dragon is now loudly swinging its tail, having risen to the position of the world’s second-largest economy. Its perceptive scope is limitless. China used to view the border areas between Bharat and China as “disputed,” requiring negotiation to be resolved rather than military force. But now, Beijing is trying to settle the disagreement by adopting more forceful diplomatic stances or even preparing for war.
China’s clever decision over Arunachal Pradesh
Prior to this, China unveiled the official 2023 edition of its “standard map,” which includes the Aksai Chin region and the state of Arunachal Pradesh, often known as Southern Tibet or Zangnan in Chinese. This in a string of tense exchanges between the two Asian neighbors was the strong protest that Bharat had registered with China over the new map.
Tens of thousands of soldiers are engaged in military standoffs along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the western Himalayas, and the release of China’s version of a new map that claims Bharatiya areas had made the matter worse.
Conflicts with Bharatiya troops resulted after this, and the Indian army said that scores of people had “minor injuries.” Prior to its attempts to alter the Yangtse area’s status quo unilaterally, China had deployed airborne assets, including drones, throughout the region.
Beijing has been pursuing sovereignty more aggressively lately, even to the point of preparing to station thousands of troops along Bharat’s borders. Arunachal Pradesh has been China’s focus since 1986, when an article by Jing Hui in the think tank of the Foreign Ministry declared the region to be “more important” for his nation.
Beijing has categorized Arunachal Pradesh as “southern Tibet” (Zangnan) at least since 2003. Since Tibet was designated as China’s “core interest” by State Councilor Dai Bingguo in the past, China’s military is now required to defend what is known as “southern Tibet.”
The “entire area” south of the McMahon line was originally declared to be “disputed” territory by the then-envoy Sun Yuxi in November 2006, only one day before President Hu Jintao’s visit to New Delhi. China started claiming ownership of the entire region after that. The propaganda apparatus in Beijing fired up to spread the new “line” and inflame nationalism.
However, as China has found the costs of any military escalation to be significant since the Samdurong Chu incident in 1987 and since Bharat had cemented its power and developed the region since 1951, China launched an extensive campaign of “three warfares” against Bharat, utilizing legal, psychological, and media warfare tactics.
China’s strategy for renaming regions in Arunachal Pradesh
First, Arunachal Pradesh place names were renamed by China. Four times, their Ministry of Civil Affairs changed the names of more than fifty locations in Arunachal Pradesh: six on April 18, 2017, fifteen on December 29, 2021, eleven on April 2, 2023, and thirty on March 30, 2024.
Since February 2010, Hao Xiaoguang, a Chinese researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Surveying and Geophysics, has been publishing articles based on his research on the geographical features of Arunachal Pradesh. His goal is to change the place names because there are barely six Chinese names for the entire region on the 2002 map of China.
Place names in Arunachal Pradesh are allegedly to be changed by a thorough approach developed following Hao’s fifteen years of fieldwork, research, cartography, toponymy, geography, surveying, ethnography, and history. The original plan was to give the locations alternate names because there were none on the Chinese maps that were currently in use.
China renamed eleven locations in Arunachal Pradesh on April 2, 2023. Beijing aimed to “upgrade” the administrative structure for “easier control” in this cycle. Consequently, two administrative entities at the national level in Bharat were “upgraded” to the city level.
On April 23, 2023, a commentator on “Tibet Online” predicted that the Indian government would eventually find itself “stealing the chicken but losing the rice” if it keeps going in the wrong direction. Thirty locations were slated for renaming on March 30, 2024, which included roughly eleven locations where residents have been living and casting ballots in Bharatiya elections.
Needless to say, popular and competitive elections have never taken place in places under Chinese control. A commentator going by the handle “Korolev” claimed that China’s renaming efforts are “a direct declaration of sovereignty.”
Furthermore, as a long-term solution, “Beijing is already making more adequate preparations to regain what was lost” by renaming locations.
Regarding the four renamings of locations in Arunachal Pradesh that have occurred in conjunction with the border incidents, Galwan in 2020, the Dokhlam crisis in 2017, and other events, Sun Xuwen contended that this is a “planned and step-by-step approach to the issue of recovering the southern Tibetan region, rather than a one-on-one approach like Bharat.”
Furthermore, Sun says that Beijing needs to address the US as the “primary contradiction” right now and adds, “The heat must not be too great, causing secondary conflicts to escalate into major conflicts.” Thus, it is more appropriate to respond with additional naming on this topic. In other words, the US is still applying pressure in the Asia-Pacific area despite the fact that the result of the game between China and the US is still up in the air. China’s position will become increasingly passive if the geopolitical landscape in South Asia continues to deteriorate.
Regarding the reason Beijing chose not to use military force to settle the dispute instead of pursuing a “soft approach,” a pundit stated that “the territorial disputes between the two neighboring countries will inevitably lead to a conflict of force between the two sides.”
First, concentrating on the southeast to finish the great cause of reunification; second, there are two centennial goals to finish the great regeneration of the country. These are the medium- and long-term national plans.
Therefore, we can only take the moral high ground worldwide and undertake serious early preparations, including discussions, rather than endorsing this extreme southwest strategy. The front stage is negotiations; the backstage depends on the strength of the country, particularly its military, to wait for the right circumstances. Timing, one or more deft maneuvers to make a comeback!”
It is so evident that China intends to rename locations that are currently effectively under Indian authority. India should investigate international legal regimes, arrange bilateral and multilateral meetings with China’s neighbors in distress, share border management practices and data related to border transgressions, and develop countermeasures to effectively address any impending border skirmishes in order to counter China’s antics and harassment while bolstering conventional and strategic deterrence capabilities.
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