Last week, on March 30, China’s ministry of civil affairs released a list of 30 places along the Arunachal border with new “standardised geographical names.” This is the fourth such list that Beijing has issued since it unilaterally renamed the first batch of six places in 2017. India “firmly rejected” the latest renaming attempt, calling it “senseless”.

China’s latest move may look far-reaching. But, it falls squarely into a longstanding Chinese territorial claim over Arunachal Pradesh, which gained full Indian statehood in 1987. With India-China relations facing fresh crosswinds, Beijing only seems to be doubling down.

Claiming territory – Chinese style

In 2011, two Indian weightlifters from Arunachal Pradesh were all ready to fly off to Beijing to participate in the China Weightlifting Grand Prix. But, they were in for a rude surprise. The immigration officials at the New Delhi airport refused to let them pass because their Chinese visas were stapled paper, not printed, versions. When they probed further, the two weightlifters realised that something awkward had happened – the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi had used them to send a message to the Indian government.

By issuing paper visas, Beijing was telling India that Arunachalis didn’t need actual Chinese visas because they were Chinese citizens. The baseline Chinese claim was simple – Arunachal Pradesh was Chinese, not Indian, territory. Beijing began this political practice of issuing alternate visas in 2009. The game of tit-for-tat has continued ever since.

In 2012, China published a map showing Arunachal as its own territory. In response, New Delhi started issuing Indian visas to Chinese travellers with counter-maps. One year later, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) trespassed some 20 km into Indian territory in the Chaglagam area of Arunachal, triggering a military standoff. Then in 2015, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Xi’an, the hometown of Chinese President Xi Jinping, the state broadcaster, CCTV, displayed a map of India without Arunachal Pradesh (and J&K).

Basis of China’s claims

Beijing sees Arunachal as an extension of Tibet, an irredentist thesis that was formally put forward by then Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, in the late 1950s using certain pieces of historical “evidence”. Among them was a history of cultural congruity between Buddhist sects in both regions. However, the claim was inherently problematic simply because China’s claim over Tibet was itself heavily resisted by the Tibetans themselves. Then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru too pushed back against sweeping Chinese claims over large swathes of Eastern Himalayas. This sowed the seeds of irreconcilable differences and in turn, contesting claims over what China deemed as “southern Tibet.” India’s defeat in the 1962 war further strengthened Enlai’s claims.

Eventually, the Chinese started using the lack of clarity over the status of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) to fortify its claims over Arunachal, especially along the Tawang sector. It deployed one of its textbook diplomatic tactics – delaying a settlement of a boundary issue to convince the other side that it was a non-issue, while stealthily deepening unilateral territorial claims. The 2005 India-China bilateral agreement to settle territorial issues too left the Arunachal issue aside, further permitting Beijing to retain its claims. Less than half a decade later, China had started issuing paper visas to Indian travellers from the state.

A new context

Since 2017, when Indian and Chinese forces stared down each other in a 73-day military standoff at the India-Bhutan-China trijunction near the Doklam plateau, both countries have seen bilateral tensions over territorial disputes surge rapidly. The 2020 Galwan clashes revealed that China, under Xi, was willing to push the LAC deeper into India using force, even if that meant destabilising the delicate status quo.

This has given a whole new shade of red to Beijing’s claims over Arunachal. China has used the resurgent friction to expand its physical presence along the state’s disputed borders – such as by building at least two new settlement clusters in Indian territory in the Upper Subansiri district. While the Indian Army claims that these new villages are north of the LAC, these show Beijing’s belligerent approach to the territorial dispute and willingness to cement its claims over Arunachal through infrastructure-building.

New Delhi, on its end, has been mounting a response by expanding its own infrastructure-building endeavours in Arunachal. In February, the Modi government allocated ₹6000 crore in building a 1748 km-long “strategic frontier highway” that runs close to the LAC in Arunachal. This is part of India’s broader strategic response to Chinese de facto claims over and infrastructure-building in Indian territory in not just the Northeastern state, but also along the northern Himalayas in Ladakh.

For Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Senior Lecturer at King’s College London and author of Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962, the India-China spat over Arunachal is a story of “two post-colonial and imperial polities seeking to deepen their rule over Himalayan regions where they encounter people starkly different from their ‘core’ citizenry.” As China asserts itself in a way it has not done before and becomes a dominant force in global politics, this competition will become fiercer. Recent developments over Arunachal show that India will need a new playbook to deal with this new Chinese doctrine.

Angshuman Choudhury is an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Policy Research, and focuses on Northeast India and Myanmar. The views expressed are personal.