How far will China’s cartographic encroachment go? The Chinese government does not all at once rename all of the places that it claims as its own, does not yet govern in fact, but hopes or expects to one day govern. There are stages.
The example mapped by Marco Respinti and Aaron Rhodes is “China’s ‘virtual invasion’ of India and the cultural genocide of Tibet” (Radio Free Asia, May 18, 2024), in which the authors conclude that “the PRC campaign to rename Arunachal Pradesh aims to justify its 75-year occupation of Tibet.” It seems to me that the purpose would be more to justify an eventual occupation of Arunachal Pradesh. Of course it may be both.
On March 30, the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the PRC committed its latest misappropriation of Indian toponyms, changing 30 placenames in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
Eleven residential areas, 12 mountains, four rivers, one lake, one mountain pass and a piece of land were given new Chinese names in simplified Chinese ideograms, Tibetan script and pinyin rendering as well as in the Roman alphabet….
The sinicization of toponyms in Arunachal Pradesh is only the latest offensive in an ongoing campaign that Beijing has launched in recent years.
The inaugural step of the campaign took place on April 13, 2017, when the ministry officialized the change of six place names. The second move was made official on Dec. 29, 2021, and it included the change of 15 toponyms . The third came on April 2, 2023, when 11 place names were sinicized as well.
At this rate, China will have map-grabbed all of India by 2054 or so.
How is the paper takeover of Arunachal Pradesh warranted in the minds of PRC officals? Well, what the Indians call “Arunachal Pradesh” doesn’t exist as such, in their view; it is, rather, part of Tibet and “has always been an integral part of China.” China is an adherent of the we-want-it-therefore-we-have-it school of international relations.
This assertion has been continuously perpetrated by the PRC since 1950, with the annexation and then military occupation of Tibet, which was in fact a different, independent country.
The cartographic incursions expressing wishes and perhaps prefiguring invasion may be accompanied by further incursions in nearby places that China does currently more or less control.
The authors say that in Arunachal Pradesh, China is playing something like a board game, with none of the movements on the board corresponding to anything happening—yet—in reality. The latest conquest-by-map has not been preceded by “the occupation of sovereign Indian territory that the new toponyms seem to indicate.” But it is accompanied by China’s decades-long and continued efforts to wipe out Tibetan culture and suppress Tibetan identity, the better to integrate the occupied Tibet into China.
It’s a long game. Will China succeed? Respinti and Rhodes say no. “Totalitarian arrogance may pretend to change history and reality. It devastates societies, traditions and individual freedom, but it will ultimately fail.”
