De-escalation efforts continue over the clash that captured the attention of the globe in June. Resulting in the deaths of over 20 Indian and an unreleased number of PLA combatants, the Galwan Valley melee has by now been well-documented.[1] During a recent closed Hudson Institute briefing under Chatham House Rules, Indian civil society leaders and policy experts noted that its impact on Sino-Indian border relations is severe, effectively eliminating progress made in negotiations and de-escalation since 1993 and raising the prospect of an entirely rethought Indian-China policy based around shifting from nonalignment to a closer strategic partnership with Washington.[2]
It is therefore vital to continue analysis of the driving forces motivating such contestation, in this case primarily (though not exclusively) focussed on the current Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (formerly NEFA, the North East Frontier Area, and to the PRC officially “Southern Tibet”), and the Aksai Chin plateau, a relative desert approximately the size of Switzerland.[3] Rather than offer an exhaustive chronology of this complex Asian stress line, this article will offer a series of propositions, which, each in their own way, act as lenses through which the Sino-Indian border conflict, its origins and its nuances can be observed.
- The Sino-Indian border conflict results from the Sykes-Picot of the Himalayas
Any keen observer of the Sino-Indian border dispute should recognise that its continued existence cannot be decoupled from the legacy of the British Raj.
British India’s expansion continued over the 19th century, during which an intensification of the Anglo-Russian “Great Game” began to play out, as both powers continued contestation over Afghanistan and stretched spheres of influence over the ailing late Qing empire. In response to the effective provincialisation of Mongolia by the Tsar, Britain looked beyond its Raj frontiers to Tibet, vassalizing Himalayan principalities such as Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal to construct its own imperial buffer zone.[4] Interestingly, this focus on expanding frontiers neglected Indian territory within the Raj proper. In 1873, Britain delineated an “Inner and Outer Line” policy in Assam, interdicting travel beyond the Inner Line and through this quarantining a band of primarily tribal territory to all but the most missionary or adventurously capitalistic travellers.[5] In contrast, Britain very seriously eyed the potential of transforming Tibet into an effective trade mart and mountain frontier, forcing open the region during the 1904 Younghusband Expedition and initiating border discussions.[6]
The process of negotiations over what would become the eastern sector of present-day India culminated (at least in Anglo-Indian eyes) at the 1914 Simla Convention. Effectively proclaiming that its recognition of Yuan Shikai’s government was conditional upon attendance, and overturning Chinese complaints to allow Lonchen Shatra’s presence on behalf of a Tibet claiming independence, Britain’s negotiation resulted in the haphazard definition of a “McMahon Line” as suggested by the British plenipotentiary Sir Henry McMahon.
This line is intentionally compared to the Sykes-Picot Agreement in this proposition for good reason. Sykes-Picot, the product of 1916 negotiations between Britain and France, planned a carve-up of the former Ottoman empire devoid of substantial consideration for those Ottoman subjects, notably the Kurds. This ham-fisted exercise has repeatedly been blamed in academia and the press as a root cause of the Middle East’s geopolitical instability ever since.[7] Although perhaps less famous, Sino-Indian border demarcations such as the McMahon Line have also proven to be highly problematic and controversial from the start.
Firstly, the line itself, rather than determined by careful topographical analysis, was decided upon in the absence of Ifan Chen (the Chinese negotiator) in an exchange of maps between Henry McMahon and Lonchen Shatra. Drawn in thick red ink upon a map with scale 8 miles/inch,[8] it is hardly surprising that this one and only source has proved open to interpretation.
Layering on top of this, as noted above, Ifan Chen was hardly involved. Indeed, the Chinese negotiator only initialled the Simla Convention before Yuan Shikai’s government itself repudiated it. In a direct linkage to this, Zhou Enlai officially repudiated McMahon in 1959, stating the PRC’s position was that the border was therefore un-demarcated and imposed without Chinese consent.[9]
Complexifying such a situation further, to coerce China back to the negotiating table, Britain withheld official publication of the Simla Convention. Even in 1930s, as the Guomindang published maps delineating the north-eastern region as part of a future province, Britain hardly reacted to what it saw as paper posturing. Only as the Second World War pushed Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime to Chongqing, much closer to India, did Britain belatedly create the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) in 1943.[10] Independent India was thus gifted a section of disputed territory scarcely four years into even paper administrative control by its imperial ancestor.
Britain also considered Aksai Chin a potential buffer zone between its client in Kashmir (this state included Ladakh, ceded by Tibetan and Qing officials in 1842[11]), and Russia.[12] Another line was suggested in an 1899 letter to the Qing court by one C.M. Macdonald, including the incorporation of Aksai Chin. This time receiving neither affirmation nor repudiation, but in fact no reply at all, the Raj kept quiet before in 1920s publishing atlases affirming the territory as part of British India, defined by the watershed.[13] In fact, even watershed justifications are highly uncertain in Aksai Chin. As the CIA put it in a 1959 intelligence report, “The Aksai Chin area, however, consists of a series of interior-drainage-basins with circular water-sheds, which are nearly meaningless for boundary marking.”[14] That same report notes that, in essence, the only defined border between China and another state in the area as of 1959 was the mere 110 miles between China and Sikkim.[15]
Post-independence conflicts rest on shaky, pre-independence ground. In many ways, a White House briefing from 7th May 1962 seems to unfortunately hold clear as of June 2020, “New Delhi is convinced that failure to maintain actively Indian claims to any of the disputed areas would endanger the country’s security by calling into question the validity of the entire border inherited from the British.”[16]
2. The Land of Snows and its Five Fingers shadow the entirety of the debate
Criticisms of the “Sykes-Picot doomed the Middle East,” thesis of course apply to the above proposition. It is hardly reasonable to deprive both India, China and the other Himalayan states of their agency by asserting that they remain locked within the territorial contests of European imperialism. Indeed, recent work on the Sino-Indian border has called for an entire re-evaluation of “Westphalian world”; borders should not be conceptualised as a series of disputed lines in the sand (or, mountain watersheds), rather the result of transnational contestation over historically porous spaces.[17]
One example of how transnational connections influence the Sino-Indian border is with regards to Tibet and Pan-Himalayan claims by the PRC.
Without exhaustively detailing the turns of the Sino-Tibetan conflict, suffice it to say that the 1911 Revolution marked, in many Tibetan eyes, the end of a personalised priest-patron relationship of dynastic clientage.[18] Rejecting transformation into regions of a constituent national whole, Tibet alongside Mongolia bid for independence, bids which in both cases blended in with the geostrategic gaming of Britain and Russia. As noted above, this resulted in Britain forcing China to a tripartite conference with what in Chinese eyes remained a recalcitrant province, and indeed until 1930s the primary Chinese complaint regarding the Simla Convention was not the McMahon line at all, but Simla’s additional delineation of an “Inner” and “Outer Tibet”, the latter to be granted “maximal autonomy” amounting to de facto independent status.[19]
Moving forward, border disputes between a free India and a Liberated Peoples’ Republic can in many ways be configured with the Land of Snows in the background. It was the Panchsheel Agreement of 1954 for instance, signed regarding trade with Tibet and India, which nonetheless also blueprinted the Five Principles for Peaceful Coexistence between India and China and thus, the hope was, an alternative model of development to the USSR and US-aligned blocs in the decolonising world.[20] Furthermore, it was also Tibet which poisoned that relationship. The Lhasa Uprising, a culmination of the PRC’s failed hearts-and-minds United Front Work wooing the Tibetan population with the benefits of 1951’s “reunification”, resulted in the flight of several tens of thousands of Tibetans and the Dalai Lama into India, where NEFA administrators settled them at first in that very same belt of territory disputed since the Simla Convention.[21] China’s response included a repudiation of the McMahon line and a reassertion that very region constituted “Southern Tibet”, rightfully under PRC control just as Tibet had, of course, “always been a part of China.”[22]
The Dalai Lama remains a diplomatic foil in India’s proverbial toolbox. Almost immediately following Galwan The Diplomat and other sources penned articles asking if the time was right for India to play the “Tibet card” again, throwing itself wholeheartedly behind Tibetan independence.[23] The impact of such rhetoric cannot be understated. One must remember today that not only is the Dalai in his 80s, but that Tibet itself has served as a laboratory since 2011 for the invasive surveillance techniques now famous from Xinjiang, pioneered by the then-Tibet party secretary Chen Quanguo from 2011-2016.[24] Coincidence is unlikely; the PRC is highly aware that his Holiness’ death could result in a resurgent Tibetan independence movement, or the potential nightmare scenario of a reincarnation being found in supposed “Southern Tibet”, present day Arunachal Pradesh.
Critical however, and certainly misunderstood in European circles, is the extent to which the Tibetan situation has also been weaponised by the People’s Republic to extend its border claims. At a recent Hudson briefing, several speakers commented on their irritation that Bhutanese and Ladakhi Buddhism are effectively conceived as Tibetan (usually the Dalai Lama’s Gelugpa) Buddhists, they themselves therefore as Tibetans.[25] This is hardly the case, most Ladakhis are Drukpa, however, this generalization not only serves as testament to poor Euro-American scholarship, but a deliberate elision of the Himalayas and its inhabitants with Tibet and China.
It is worth noting the extent to which the PRC reaches into Qing religiopolitical precedent to suggest a pan-Himalayan Buddhist sphere of control. Mao Zedong conceptualised the “Five Finger Policy” based on this; Tibet is the palm, and the five fingers of Sikkim, Ladakh, Nepal, Arunachal Pradesh and Bhutan the Fingers.[26] This rhetoric was generated by long Tibetan (and occasionally more direct Qing) presence in the region, a presence which in the Tibetan case was directly agglomerated by Tibet-is-China elision to the PRC itself. To take one example, the PRC alongside its recent Indian behaviour is putting pressure on Bhutan, through asserting the entire frontier is un-demarcated. In 2017, China precipitated a 73-day standoff with India over the Doklam Plateau, a China-India-Bhutan connection over which the PLA attempted to build a road in contravention of Clause 3 of the 1998 Treaty to Maintain Peace and Tranquility. On 21st July, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Wang Wenbin noted “The boundary between China and Bhutan is yet to be demarcated, and the middle, eastern and western sections of the border are disputed.” This is a new assertion- for the first time on June 3rd China claimed the Sakteng wildlife reservation in the west.[27] These new claims, justified on historic Tibetan suzerainty and (minority) religious presence, can be paralleled in Nepal, where since 1960s the CIA has been concerned the PRC would use 18th century conflict with the Gurkhas as a pretext to invade and wholesale absorb Kathmandu.[28]
A fascinating revision by Phunchok Stobdan in his recent work would suggest that even Arunachal Pradesh is vulnerable to the shadow of the Land of Snows. By allowing the Dalai Lama’s flight, China’s masterstroke was to saddle India with a perennially unstable independence cause necessitating Indian investment.[29] The great game in the Buddhist Himalayas situated for a time, in a region claimed as southern Tibet, the representative of the Tibetan people, and the Dalai’s current residence is in a Himachal Pradesh that Indian sources recently suggested the PRC may angle to penetrate next.[30] One may wonder whether the nightmare scenario of a 15th Dalai Lama arising in such disputed territory could turn the dispute to PRC’s advantage. Sidestepping real heterodoxy and cultural heterogeneity by asserting an essentialised “Buddhist” whole alongside imperial-era claims, Beijing opens up an additional dimension to border conflict and extends areas under question to the entire Himalayan range.
3. A Raj Redux faces the Red Qing Dynasty
“The Asian century” has almost reached the point of cliché, but in reality claims to articulate a new Asian order have been contested between China and India from the 1940s. Both PRC and the Republic of India entered a postcolonial world where they articulated claims to ideational or ideological leadership of Asia. The Nehruvian nonalignment model, including lobbying for PRC’s UN seat and the 1955 Bandung Conference, was welcomed by China, which nonetheless also considered itself the standard-bearer of third world liberation via violent proletarian revolution.[31] As relations between the powers soured, so too did the claims. PRC media routinely accused India of reproducing the imperialism of its colonial rulers,[32] while after the Sino-Soviet Split the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between USSR and India in 1971 was taken as nothing short of an alignment with revisionism leaving China the leader of the unregenerate revolutionary and anti-colonial world.[33]
History may be history and the age of Mao Zedong long over, but in his absence PRC and India’s development, building nations out of imperial projects, increasingly constitutes a competitive clash of empires. The thaw in diplomatic relations from 1976 has resulted in steadily increasing margins of trade- from 1990-2008, a 771-fold increase in fact,[34] but both powers’ engagement has remained limited, in Stobdan’s assertion a stalemate of sorts, as geopolitical competition has repeatedly overridden economic integration.[35] In 2009 China vetoed Asian Development Bank funding for India, partly earmarked for Arunachal Pradesh,[36] while a key mistake Mao Jikang and Li Mingjiang suggest China has made regarding India is failing to appreciate the BRI’s deep unattractiveness considering the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor runs directly past Ladakh.[37] China’s aims, suggested by 1990s academics as fostering global multipolarity, are increasingly being interpreted as pointing to Asian unipolarity. When this rubs up against South Asia’s largest power, one which directly inherited an imperial regime of its own on par with the derelict Qing, conflict becomes increasingly likely.
Indeed, an imperial clash is perhaps likelier as the Nehruvian vision of anti-imperial development has crumbled with the electoral fortunes of India’s Congress or the Mao Zedong Thought concept of global revolution was laid to rest in China’s reform era. It has become increasingly clear that an imperial-lite civilisational discourse has re-entered Chinese policymaking. In Tibet and Xinjiang itself, Ma Rong’s mooted “second generation ethnic policies”[38], avowedly rejected by the party-state and Xi in 2014,[39] nonetheless appear to have been implemented, as minority-nationalities are strongly pressured to assimilate to a model of “Chinese” identity more “Han” than a coalition of 55 ethnic minorities. Inheriting long-term projects of identity generation to benefit the state during the Qing,[40] this imperial process has direct impact on the Sino-Indian border as that very Sino-Indian border runs past Tibet and Xinjiang, two of China’s most restive provinces. Terms such as “Aksai Chin” and “Galwan Valley” are in fact Turkic after all, and substantial migrations of Uyghur and Kazakh refugees entered India through the Karakorum Pass in Ladakh during the Mao era.[41]
Today, this meets an increasingly muscular assertion of India’s geopolitical place. Drawing on seeds sown by Nehru himself, as in 1957 he declared not a single inch of India’s borders would be surrendered to any foreign power, or in his 1930s work The Unity of India,[42] the muscular Hindutva-driven conception of an Indian superpower espoused by Narendra Modi et al hardening India’s frontiers, scarcely batting an eye as it turned Ladakh into a Union territory in 2019 and prompted a furious Chinese protest to the United Nations Security Council.[43] In many ways, a Raj Redux, without the Raj’s preference for buffer zones such as NEFA or Aksai Chin, confronts a revitalised China on a reconstituted Dragon Throne.
4. Zomia has experienced a strange death and even stranger afterlife in between a clash of empires
The propositions above have all been taken from the level of states, unsurprisingly perhaps considering a border conflict is at its most basic level a battle between lines drawn on maps of territorialised entities. However, Sino-India has always been more complex than that, a reality illustrated when one turns to its people.
To do so, it requires a look at the idea of Zomia. Zomia was an intellectual concept popularised by Willem van Schendel and taken up by Sulmaan Wasif Khan, James C. Scott and others, to refer to a massif stretching from Southeast Asia to Eastern India, and the ethos of the “people of the hills” who inhabit it. Scott’s work on Southeast Asia sketches an intellectual case for this region’s peoples as adapted to avoid state-making strategies. This might involve slash and burn nomadism to avoid being tied down and taxed, smaller mobile social groups, and most importantly, habitation in upland or inaccessible geo-cultural “shatter zones” difficult for the agents of centralising polities to reach.[44]
The relevance of Zomia to the modern world is that it is dead, or at the very least, dying. Postcolonial India and Post-Liberation China, for their parts, both evince a territorialised, unified conception of the state, thus absorbing “Westphalia World’s” international borders. As a result, upland borderlands such as Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin and much of Tibet cannot function as borderlands anymore, indeed their status collapses. The 1962 Tibet famine was not, as in most of China, a result of the Great Leap Forward, but due to the ending of Indio-Tibetan trade across the Himalayas, an activity which had never been disrupted by the agents of the Indian or Chinese state, or in fact any state at all.[45] In a new era, development and modernisation were the watchwords for the borderlands which now constituted the Sino-Indian frontier.
Both India and China therefore had to come to terms with Zomia, with broad ramifications for the Sino-Indian dispute ever since. The Chinese model aimed at conquering Zomia’s geography with infrastructure and socially transforming its peoples. PRC development resulted in Tibet’s first motorable roads in 1950s, with feeders extending to the edge of Chinese control.[46] Aksai Chin was made legible and relevant to the state due to a 1957 road project connecting Tibet to Xinjiang, reducing the difficulties in supplying a military occupation.[47] Despite the PRC’s brief occupation of parts of NEFA during 1962/3, the PLA nonetheless managed to construct new roads where NEFA officialdom had been struggling to do so for over a decade, all without recourse to coerced porterage which had proved so damaging to relations between Indian interlocutors and the locals.[48] When one looks at the rapid build-up of Chinese structures in Galwan,[49] and continued digging in at Pangong-Tso,[50] one could easily spot the fixation over rapid development as a means of securing control.
The Indian method was a little different, to a surprising extent keeping some of Zomia alive if it could benefit the state itself. NEFA was carefully controlled in 1950s, and development was relatively slow. A separation between Assam and NEFA, the “NEFA Philosophy” aimed to acclimate the local tribals, dismissed by Britain as unregenerate savages, to the Indian state without collapsing their cultures, effectively creating a semi-statelessness. Interestingly, this continued after the Sino-Indian war of 1962. As the Chinese pushed their roads to the edge of the Line of Actual Control, road-building was discouraged in future Arunachal Pradesh by the Indian state, to the extent that even in 1987 US intelligence would lament that, “there is nothing connecting Tawang to Wangdung, while PLA has a road-served garrison 3 miles from Wangdung.”[51]This is also true of contemporary Ladakh- commenting on Chinese construction efforts, The Guardian quoted a 60-year old Indian ex-officer who noted, “There were no roads at that time and we would trek for three weeks on horses from Pratappur Nubra north-east to Chumgtas. On the way, we would rest in the Galwan Valley.”[52] Retention of aspects of Zomia’s inaccessibility was utilised by India as defence-in-depth.
Such an attitude has often brought Zomia’s peoples closer to the Indian state, and further from China. In an analysis of the lead-up to the 1962 war, Guyot-Réchard, has noted that post-1963, few Indians hoped for a Chinese return anytime soon. The intimidating efficiency of the Chinese state turned people towards the democratic fragility of the Indian, a model which at the very least consulted locals on development plans (returning NEFA officers were inundated with requests for new schools, hospitals and preferred road links).[53] Moving beyond great power politics, one might re-evaluate the Sino-Indian border contest not as one marked by an Indian defeat in 1962, a victory in 1967 and inconclusive bloodshed in 2020, but a performative exercise attempting to bind local populations to the sway of the state. If so, 1962 may have been won by India, and perhaps 2020 will be too.
Bio: Ben Hales is a MPhil Modern Chinese Studies postgraduate at the University of Oxford. His undergraduate dissertation, on the Tibetan experience during the early People’s Republic of China, has recently been selected for publication by Oxford University History Society.
[1] Safi, Michael , Ellis-Petersen, Hannah, Davidson, Helen, 2020, “Soldiers fell to their deaths as India and China’s troops fought with rocks”, The Guardian, June 17 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/17/shock-and-anger-in-india-after-worst-attack-on-china-border-in-decades
[2] “Video discussion on Sino-Indian tensions in Ladakh and the PRC’s activities across the Himalayan region,” Video Discussion, The Hudson Institute, Washington D.C. July 22 2020
[3] Huttenback, R. A. “A Historical Note on the Sino-Indian Dispute over the Aksai Chin.” The China Quarterly 18 (1964): 203
[4] Smith, Warren W. Tibetan Nation : A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations. Boulder, Colo ; Oxford: Westview, 1996: 137-142
[5] Noorani, A.G., and Noorani, A. India–China Boundary Problem 1846–1947. Oxford University Press, 2011: 172
[6] Ibid, 174, Lin, Hsiao-Ting. “Boundary, Sovereignty, and Imagination: Reconsidering the Frontier Disputes between British India and Republican China, 1914-47.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32, no. 3 (2004): 26-28
[7] Wright, Robin, 2016, “How the Curse of Sykes-Picto Still Haunts the Middle East”, New Yorker, April 30 https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-curse-of-sykes-picot-still-haunts-the-middle-east Rogan, Eugene L. The Arabs : A History. 2nd Updated ed. London: Penguin, 2011., 191-194
[8] Noorani, A.G., and Noorani, A. India–China Boundary Problem, 190
[9] “THE SINO-INDIAN BORDER”, 17th Dec 1959, Current Intelligence Weekly Summary CIA-RDP62-00680R000200010001-5 (27 July 2020) https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp62-00680r000200010001-5, 17
[10] Lin, Hsiao-Ting. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32, no. 3 (2004): 30-34
[11] “THE SINO-INDIAN BORDER”, 17th Dec 1959, Current Intelligence Weekly Summary CIA-RDP62-00680R000200010001-5 (27 July 2020) https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp62-00680r000200010001-5, 14
[12] Huttenback, R. A. “A Historical Note on the Sino-Indian Dispute over the Aksai Chin.” The China Quarterly 18 (1964): 201
[13] Ibid., 204
[14] “THE SINO-INDIAN BORDER”, 17th Dec 1959, Current Intelligence Weekly Summary CIA-RDP62-00680R000200010001-5 (27 July 2020) https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp62-00680r000200010001-5 , 12
[15] Ibid., 12
[16] “LIKELY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SINO-INDIAN BORDER DISPUTE”, Central Intelligence Agency, Office of National Estimates, 7 May 1962, CIA-RDP79R00904A000800020012-1 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp79r00904a000800020012-1 4
[17] Ling, L. H. M., “Introduction, What’s What There: India-China”, L.H.M Ling India China : Rethinking Borders and Security. Configurations (Ann Arbor, Mich.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016: 3-6
[18] Smith, Tibetan Nation, 188-194
[19] Lin, Hsiao-Ting. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32, no. 3 (2004): 27-29
[20] Khan, Sulmaan Wasif. Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy : China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands. The New Cold War History. Chapel Hill, 2015. 26-28
[21] Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice. Shadow States : India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962. Cambridge Core. Cambridge, 2017, 181, 190-191
[22] Khan, Muslim, 124
[23] Rajagopalan, Rajeswari Pillai, 2020, “Is India Ready to Play the ‘Tibet Card’ in Its Battle With China?”, The Diplomat, July 16 https://thediplomat.com/2020/07/is-india-ready-to-play-the-tibet-card-in-its-battle-with-china/
[24] Mai, Jun, 2019, “From Tibet to Xinjiang, Beijing’s man for restive regions Chen Quanguo is the prime target of US sanctions”, South China Morning Post, December 13 https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3041810/tibet-xinjiang-beijings-man-restive-regions-chen-quanguo-prime
[25] “Video discussion on Sino-Indian tensions in Ladakh and the PRC’s activities across the Himalayan region,” Video Discussion, The Hudson Institute, Washington D.C. July 22 2020
[26] Das, Gurudas. Security and Development in India’s Northeast. Oxford Scholarship Online. New Delhi ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012: 6
[27] Ramachandran, Sudra, 2020, “China’s Bhutan Gambit”, The Diplomat, July 23 (Accessed July 27 2020) https://thediplomat.com/2020/07/chinas-bhutan-gambit/
[28] “CHINESE COMMUNIST GROUND THREAT AGAINST INDIA FROM TIBET AND SINKIANG” , April 11 1963, revised May 28 1963, (July 27 2020) CIA-RDP80S01499R000100010003-6 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80s01499r000100010003-6
[29] Stobden, Phunchok, 2020, “China’s face-off with India: How is Beijing planning to change the Himalayan configuration?” Scroll.in, June 22, https://scroll.in/article/965247/chinas-face-off-with-india-how-is-beijing-planning-to-change-the-himalayan-configuration
[30] Chaudhary, Smriti, 2020,” After Aksai Chin, China Dangerously Intruding Into Himachal Pradesh – India”, Eurasian Times, July 28th, https://eurasiantimes.com/after-aksai-chin-china-dangerously-intruding-into-himachal-pradesh-india/
[31] Goswami, Namrata. “China’s ‘Aggressive’ Territorial Claim on India’s Arunachal Pradesh: A Response to Changing Power Dynamics in Asia.” Strategic Analysis 35, no. 5 (2011): 785-787
[32] Khan, Muslim, 90-93
[33] Liu, Xuecheng, and Hardgrave, Robert L. The Sino-Indian Border Dispute and Sino-Indian Relations, 1993, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. 8-12
[34] Das, Gurudas. Security and Development, 17
[35] Stobden, Phunchok, 2020, “China’s face-off with India: How is Beijing planning to change the Himalayan configuration?” Scroll.in, June 22, https://scroll.in/article/965247/chinas-face-off-with-india-how-is-beijing-planning-to-change-the-himalayan-configuration
[36] Goswami, Namrata. “China’s ‘Aggressive’ Territorial Claim on India’s Arunachal Pradesh: A Response to Changing Power Dynamics in Asia.” Strategic Analysis 35, no. 5 (2011): 782
[37] Jikang, Mao, and Li Mingjiang. “Between Engagement and Counter-hedging: China’s India Strategy.” Maritime Affairs: Journal of the National Maritime Foundation of India 15, no. 2 (2019): 42-43
[38] Godbole, Avinash. “Stability in the Xi Era: Trends in Ethnic Policy in Xinjiang and Tibet Since 2012.” India Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2019): 228ff
[39] Hao, Shiyuan. “A Review on Xi Jinping’s Ideas of Ethnic Minority Work.” International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology 2, no. 1 (2018): 6-10.
[40] See Crossley, Pamela Kyle. A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. ACLS Humanities E-Book (Series). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
[41] “Video discussion on Sino-Indian tensions in Ladakh and the PRC’s activities across the Himalayan region,” Video Discussion, The Hudson Institute, Washington D.C. July 22 2020
[42] Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. London ; New York, 2013. 124
[43] “Video discussion on Sino-Indian tensions in Ladakh and the PRC’s activities across the Himalayan region,” Video Discussion, The Hudson Institute, Washington D.C. July 22 2020
[44] Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed : An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven, Conn. ; London: Yale University Press, 2009. xiv-37
[45] Khan, Muslim, 89
[46] Hales, Ben, 2020 “Between the Pagoda and the Politburo: Exploring the intersection between imperialism and socialism in the early People’s Republic of China through its Tibetan periphery, 1951-9, OUHS, no. XII, Trinity 2020 https://50587f0a-adb4-4c2c-bd2d-d71e42f9640a.filesusr.com/ugd/a8b8e6_6b4bf71dc1654c9eae25bf5dbd728874.pdf , 11-16,
[47] Anderson, Perry, The Indian Ideology, 124
[48] Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice. Shadow States, 237
[49]Hassan, Aakash, Ellis-Petersen, Hannah, 2020, “’Our pastures have been taken’: Indians rue China’s Himalayan land grab”, The Guardian, July 3 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/03/our-pastures-have-been-taken-india-china-himalayan-land-grab
[50] Kaushik, Krishn, Roy, Shubhajit, 2020, “Chinese dig in at Pangong Tso and Gogra, India says more talks soon,” Indian Express, July 24 2020 (Accessed July 27 2020) https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-china-ladakh-pangong-tso-army-6520875/#:~:text=In%20May%2C%20Chinese%20troops%20came,the%20ridgeline%20at%20Finger%204.
[51] “CHINA-INDIA BORDER TENSIONS; ORIGINS AND PROSPECTS”, January 29 1987, CIA-RDP04T00907R000200530001-3 (Accessed July 27 2020) https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp04t00907r000200530001-3, 6
[52] Hassan, Aakash, Ellis-Petersen, Hannah, 2020, “’Our pastures have been taken’: Indians rue China’s Himalayan land grab”, The Guardian, July 3 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/03/our-pastures-have-been-taken-india-china-himalayan-land-grab
[53] Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice. Shadow States, 249-250
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