14-05-2025
Why China keeps cooking up its own names for places in Arunachal Pradesh
India on Wednesday (May 14) rejected the new Chinese names for places in Arunachal Pradesh as a 'preposterous' attempt to alter the 'undeniable' reality that the state 'was, is, and will' always be an integral part of India.
It is, in fact, an old Chinese habit to periodically issue lists of new names for locations in Arunachal Pradesh. India describes the names as 'inventions' by China, and has consistently and unequivocally dismissed them.
China has issued several such lists since 2017, claiming to 'standardise' names in accordance with regulations issued by the State Council, the equivalent of the Chinese Cabinet.
China keeps doing this from time to time.
China claims some 90,000 sq km of Arunachal Pradesh as its territory. It calls the area 'Zangnan' in the Chinese language and makes repeated references to 'South Tibet'.
Chinese maps show Arunachal Pradesh as part of China, and sometimes parenthetically refer to it as 'so-called Arunachal Pradesh'.
China makes periodic efforts to underline this unilateral claim to Indian territory. Giving Chinese names to places in Arunachal Pradesh is part of that effort.
The People's Republic of China disputes the legal status of the McMahon Line, the boundary between Tibet and British India that was agreed at the Simla Convention — officially the 'Convention Between Great Britain, China, and Tibet' — of 1914.
China was represented at the Simla Convention by a plenipotentiary of the Republic of China, which had been declared in 1912 after the Qing dynasty was overthrown. (The present communist government came to power only in 1949, when the People's Republic was proclaimed.)
The Chinese representative did not consent to the Simla Convention, saying Tibet had no independent authority to enter into international agreements.
The McMohan Line, named after Henry McMahon, the chief British negotiator at Shimla, was drawn from the eastern border of Bhutan to the Isu Razi pass on the China-Myanmar border. China claims territory to the south of the McMahon Line, lying in Arunachal Pradesh.
China also bases its claims on the historical ties that have existed between the monasteries in Tawang and Lhasa.
It sees this as a kind of pressure tactic. It is part of Beijing's larger narrative, as part of which it issues statements of outrage whenever an Indian dignitary visits Arunachal Pradesh.
So the 'first batch' of renaming in 2017 came days after the Dalai Lama visited Arunachal Pradesh, against which Beijing lodged a strong protest. And in 2021, it protested after then Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu went to the state Assembly. China also creates difficulties in issuing visas to Indian athletes from Arunachal Pradesh.
Back in 2017, Wang Dehua, who was then director of the Institute for South and Central Asia Studies in Shanghai, had told The Indian Express that 'changing of names is an ongoing process in China', similar to the way India changed 'Bombay to Mumbai or Madras to Chennai'.
The government in Beijing tries to give its own Chinese names to other places as well, such as islands in the South China Sea that it claims sovereignty over. In fact, laying aggressive claims to territories on the basis of alleged historical injustices done to China is a part of the Chinese foreign policy playbook.
The aggression is at all times backed in overt and covert ways by the use of China's economic and military muscle.
(This explainer draws on some earlier explainers published in The Indian Express.)
