China inventing names for places in Arunachal Pradesh

China inventing names for places in Arunachal Pradesh

Subject – IR

Context – China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs announced on Wednesday (December 29) that it had “standardised” the names of 15 places in Arunachal Pradesh

Concept –

• 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.
• This is a second lot of “standardised” names of places in Arunachal Pradesh that China has announced. On April 14, 2017, its Ministry of Civil Affairs had issued “official” Chinese names for six places in the state.

The names –

• The six names on that list then, written in the Roman alphabet, were “Wo’gyainling”, “Mila Ri”, “QoidengarboRi”, “Mainquka”, “Bumo La” and “NamkapubRi”.
• The latitude and longitude listed with the names showed those places as Tawang, KraDaadi, West Siang, Siang (where Mechuka or Menchuka is an emerging tourist destination), Anjaw, and Subansiri respectively.
• These six places spanned the breadth of Arunachal Pradesh — “Wo’gyainling” in the west, “Bumo La” in the east and the other four located in the central part of the state.

What is China’s argument for claiming these areas?

• 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.
• 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 IsuRazi 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.