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Source: The post is based on the article “China announces ‘renaming’ of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, including one close to Itanagar” published in The Hindu on 4th April 2023
What is the News?
China has announced new names of another 11 locations in Arunachal Pradesh. This is the third set of names announced by China.
What is China’s so-called claim on Arunachal Pradesh?
China claims some 90,000 sq km of Arunachal Pradesh — the entire state — 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. As part of this strategy, it has tried to give Chinese names to places in Arunachal Pradesh — it published a list of six such names in 2017, and another 15 names in 2021.
How India responded to these Chinese inventions?
India has dismissed the Chinese “invention” of these names. The Ministry of External Affairs had said in a statement: “Arunachal Pradesh has always been, and will always be, an integral part of India. Assigning invented names to places in Arunachal Pradesh does not alter this fact”.
