China's Territorial Disputes by Chien-Peng Chung

Author:Chien-Peng Chung [Chung, Chien-Peng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415333665
Publisher: Routledge

5 The McMahon Line/ Aksai Chin dispute

Introduction

At the heart of relations between China and India for the last four decades lies the boundary dispute that brought forth tension and hostility and ultimately led both countries to war in 1962. The Sino-Indian boundary question has historical roots involving aspects of international law as part of British imperial frontier policy in India in the last century, which is an interesting field of inquiry in itself. However, we will make reference to history and law only if they enlighten our quest to explain why the negotiating process to fix the boundary between the two countries failed, but curiously led to fruitful confidence-building security measures and the near-dissipation of border tension in the last decade. Compared to the previous two cases, then, the territorial dispute between China and India may be regarded neither as a complete failure or a resounding success; it is somewhere in between, which like the other cases, makes it an excellent study of the goals and constraints of China’s policy, strategy, and behavior toward the resolution of territorial disputes.

Sino-Indian relations before March 1959

The government that took power in India in 1947 quickly realized that among its inheritance was the problem, unresolved since the last century, of its mountainous borders with Tibet, which soon became China’s problem as well when the PLA entered Tibet in 1950 to establish its authority there. Stretching to almost 2,000 kilometers, the international border between China and India lies for the most part along the towering ranges of the Karakoram in the western sector, and the Himalayas in the eastern sector, interspersed with a few valleys and passes, and almost year-round covered with snow. Adding to the difficulties of locating or defining the frontier is the fact that the demarcation lines drawn on the maps of British India were the results of agreements between the colonial British authorities of India and the Tibetan government, which China had always considered an unacceptable colonial imposition.1

A major part of what would become the disputed Sino-Indian boundary took shape at a conference in Simla from October 1913 to July 1914, with the foreign

secretary of British India Henry McMahon as host and mediator. Throughout the nineteenth century, as British power was expanding from Assam northwards up the foothills of the Himalayas, the Tibetan authorities still insisted on collecting their customary taxes and dues from the tribes and monasteries in that area. When a Chinese warlord from Sichuan entered Tibet in 1910 and sent probes into the foothills, the British authorities in India were alarmed that the unsettled borders with Tibet might constitute cause for future Chinese intervention in the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), as the foothills were known administratively. Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the British sought to organize a conference with the participation of the self-proclaimed independent Lamaist State of Tibet and the republican Chinese government to determine Tibet’s boundaries with both British India and the rest of China. The conference at Simla resulted in a tripartite

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