China asserts claim to Indian-held Arunachal Pradesh in latest list of place names
- Beijing has never accepted India’s control of the border region, which it calls Zangnan
- New Delhi dismissed China’s claims to the area as ‘absurd’ after Beijing protested about a recent visit by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi
China has renamed 30 more places in a disputed border region with India in an attempt to assert its claims in a bitter territorial dispute.
On Saturday the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs published the country’s latest set of “standardised” names for places in Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls Zangnan, and says is part of the Tibetan autonomous region.
The renaming covered 11 residential areas, 12 mountains, four rivers, one lake, one mountain pass and a piece of land, all given in Chinese characters, Tibetan and pinyin, the Roman alphabet version of Mandarin Chinese.
The ministry, which is responsible for the establishment and naming of administrative divisions, also included detailed latitude and longitude and a high-resolution map.
“In accordance with the relevant provisions of the State Council [China’s cabinet] on the management of geographical names, we in conjunction with the relevant departments have standardised some of the geographical names in Zangnan of China,” said the ministry.
The new list includes more parts of the disputed area than the three previous renamings over the past seven years.
China and India have never agreed on their border demarcation and since a short but bloody war over the issue in 1962 they have been divided by the 3,200km (1,990-mile) Line of Actual Control – although they have not even been able to agree on where that lies.
