The U.S. strongly opposed China's renaming of 30 locations inside India's Arunachal Pradesh, as Beijing's push to further its territorial claims is escalating tensions between the two Asian giants.
"The United States strongly opposes any unilateral attempts to advance territorial claims by incursions or encroachments, military or civilian, across the Line of Actual Control," a U.S. State Department official said on Tuesday, according to Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post.
The U.S. comment on China's renaming policy came as Beijing has recently escalated its claim over Arunachal Pradesh by calling the area part of its territory "since ancient times."
China's Ministry of Civil Affairs on March 30 issued "standardized" names of places in Mandarin and Tibetan for locations inside Arunachal Pradesh. The list of 30 names included places with rivers, mountains, a lake and residential areas.
The renaming effort was China's fourth attempt to use cartographic renaming of locations in Arunachal Pradesh to further its territorial claims.
China claims the area as part of Zangnan, or South Tibet, based on historical rights. In the past, China has released official maps showing the region as part of its territory and issued separate visas to Indian citizens from Arunachal Pradesh to further its sovereignty claim.
The two countries fought a bloody war in the 1960s over the region, and their 2,100-mile-long disputed mutual border remains a thorny issue. Since June 2020, China and India have been locked in a new military stand-off with thousands of soldiers deployed across from each other in the Eastern Ladakh region.
The military officials from the two sides have met 21 times so far as part of a special effort to defuse tensions in the frigid Himalayan region.
Beijing has used a similar approach to extend claims in disputed islands in the South China Sea, giving Mandarin names to maritime features.
A Chinese military spokesperson recently issued a stark statement to solidify the claims on Arunachal Pradesh.
"Zangnan has been China's territory since ancient times. This is an undeniable fact," Col. Wu Qian, China's defense ministry spokesperson, said on March 28.
Newsweek contacted China's embassy in New Delhi and India's Ministry of External Affairs for comment.
India reacted sharply to China's renaming of the locations.
"China has persisted with its senseless attempts to rename places in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. We firmly reject such attempts," a spokesperson from India's External Affairs Ministry said on Tuesday.
"If today I change the name of your house, will it become mine? Arunachal Pradesh was, is and will always be a state of India. Changing names does not have an effect," Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's external affairs minister, said on Monday, according to the Indian newspaper The Hindustan Times.
Observers believe the renaming attempt seeks to strategically further Beijing's territorial claims.
"It does bare China's mala-fide intent, and its larger designs: renaming places in Arunachal, showing Arunachal within China on new maps, putting roadblocks to the entry of sportspersons from Arunachal. This is part of its plan to change the cultural markers of Tibet, which it has begun calling Xizang," Kalpit Mankikar, a China fellow at the New Delhi-based think tank the Observer Research Foundation, told Newsweek in an interview.
"The renaming of Mago (China renamed it as Moguo) in the eastern Tawang sector in Arunachal Pradesh is a signal to India that China is taking note of India's recent announcement to build a frontier highway opposite its border as it will be the starting point of India's new strategic border road." Nature Desai, an open-source analyst and observer of China-India relations, told Newsweek in an interview.
"Then there is the longest freshwater lake in Arunachal Pradesh, which was renamed," Desai told Newsweek.
Update 4/8/24, 02:20 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional context.
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Aadil Brar is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers international security, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian ... Read more
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