From The Hindu:
A month after India and China held the fifteenth round of border talks, a commentary in a Chinese newspaper has questioned India's claims on Kashmir and asserted that the only dispute was over the status of Arunachal Pradesh.
An article in the Communist Party-run Jiefang Daily, or Liberation Daily newspaper said the disputed western section of the border — including the Aksai Chin region which is now under China's control — was not part of the dispute, underscoring how far apart both countries' positions remained even after 15 rounds of negotiations.
The commentary said: “The Indian side believes that the border dispute between China and India covers not only the eastern region of 90,000 sq km but also the western region of 30,000 sq km and the western region is India's too. This wrong argument, which totally disregards the history, still has supporters in India.”
The article, written by an India scholar in the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, Wu Yongnian, was the first Chinese reaction to last month's border talks, and it underscored a hardening in China's position over the western section over recent years, analysts and officials said.
In New Delhi last month, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo, the two Special Representatives, discussed a framework for the settlement of disputes in all three sectors — western, middle and eastern. This was in keeping with the 2005 agreement on Political Parameters and Guiding Principles, which marked the ending of the first of three stages of negotiations.
China appears to want to split up the various border disputes, and the talks are not going well, despite public shows of optimism.According to Article III of the agreement, the boundary settlement would be “final, covering all sectors of the India-China boundary.”
The Times of India quotes China Daily:
"The first issue is the China-India border negotiation. China and India have held 15 meetings of special representatives for the border issue.
"Although the meetings have made many positive achievements, it is still far away from reaching a fair, just and reasonable agreement," the write up in the opinion page said.
The main barrier still comes from the Indian side as Indian media insist that the border line between China and India should be based on the " McMahon Line" left by British colonists, it said also India believes that the border dispute between the two countries covers not only the eastern region of 90,000 square km but also 30,000 sq km in the western region.
"This wrong argument, which totally disregards the history, still has supporters in India," it said.
Yet another reason that delaying the agreement was India's multi-party political system as well its society which is extremely complicated, it said.
"Various Indian political parties have different understandings on the China-India border issue, and therefore, it is hard for them to reach an agreement on the issue," it said.
It seems obvious that, in a democracy such as India, you are not going to have the consensus of opinion that you find in China.
China has made 'concessions' with Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in border talks previously. But there seems to be a pattern of China making huge (and unreasonable) demands, while settling for far less:
In the 1990s, China began negotiating settlements with these countries. Border agreements with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan were reached in 1996 and 1998 respectively. Border talks with Tajikistan were delayed by the civil war there. However, talks gathered momentum in the late 1990s and an agreement was reached in 2002. It was this agreement that was ratified recently.
Analysts have drawn attention to the territorial concessions that China extended to resolve its many disputes. Of its 23 territorial disputes active since 1949, China offered "substantial compromises" in 17, usually agreeing "to accept less than half of the territory being disputed," M Taylor Fravel, associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out in the article "Regime Insecurity and International Cooperation: Explaining China's Compromises in Territorial Disputes," published in the journal International Security.
However, there is more to it than meets the eye. The territorial concessions that China is believed to have made are not quite as substantial as they appear to be. Srikanth Kondapalli, a China expert at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi pointed out that China's strategy of stepping up territorial claims and then settling for less has enabled it to appear to be making a major territorial concession to reach a border resolution agreement. In several disputes, "whether China actually gave up territory or made a substantial concession is a debatable question," he told Asia Times Online.
Chinese media has built up an anti-Indian sentiment, and the media is completely State-controlled. I outlined some of this in a previous post. Much of it is jingoistic, inclined toward "teaching India a lesson".
India, for its part, has also stirred up resentments in the media over the border conflict.
From Asia Times Online:
The shame of a lost border war left a long tradition of anti-Chinese slant in Indian newspapers, to the point where it doesn’t even seem like an aberration. But for some years now, the tone of a large section of the media has turned decidedly strident, a condition the country’s leading Outlook magazine once diagnosed as "Sinositis". Where once the China reportage gave the impression that for some in the media the war never quite ended, now one gets the sense that the infected are, in fact, itching for another round. Brace yourself for more malignant stuff this year, which marks the 50th anniversary of the war.
Many of the China-bashing stories doing the rounds in Indian papers are a mixture of reflexive phobia, envy, anxiety and great-game bluster, with headlines such as Wary of China moves, India, US & Japan plan talks; As China looms, US tells India to lead Asia; etc. Some are products of the occasional public spats on issues such as territorial rights, and are appropriately combative (Manmohan to Wen: Back off on South China Sea). And, when they are not openly hawkish and baying for blood (With China in mind, India tests new-generation Agni missile with high 'kill efficiency', screams a November headline), they are passive aggressive at the minimum, often betraying a degree of inferiority complex. The subheading to another November story headlined East Asia meet to have China tilt read INDIA STAND: Can't check them, will wait and watch. And that's not even an editorial!
Then there are the Chinese "incursions" stories - the most potent, and the fountainhead, of all Sinoscare media motifs in India. These stories, liberally peppered with alarmist words like "aggression", "transgression", "encroachment", and the like, follow a familiar pattern. "Sources", mostly unnamed, tell a paper or a TV channel how Chinese forces have been intruding into Indian territory; a comparison with similar intrusions in previous years establish how the Chinese menace is rising; followed by accounts of Chinese military build-up.
The "McMahon line" is the only recognised border, and China has acceded to it in the case of Myanmar (its ally). In the cases of India and Bhutan, however, it is considered unreasonable:
The Sino-Indian border dispute arose out of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. China's refusal to grant internal autonomy to Tibet has kept the pot boiling in Tibet and the Chinese view Indian asylum to the Dalai Lama with suspicion. This, despite the fact that India has accepted Tibet as part of China.
The Chinese have kept the border 'unsettled' so as to keep it as a ready excuse to intervene in the affairs of the Indian subcontinent. But there is a larger Chinese design at work here.
It showed this intent in 1965 though not during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan conflict due to the erstwhile Soviet Union checkmating it on the Amur-Ussuri border.
Initially, the dispute was over the Aksai Chin area and the Chinese strategic road passing through it connecting Sinkiang with Tibet, a military necessity. Its claims over Arunachal Pradesh, initially at least, were seen as a bargaining chip.
When China talks about "securing Tibet", it means something very different than what the rest of the world considers to be "Tibet". They define Arunachal Pradesh as "South Tibet", and even include Bhutan as part of "Tibet".
It is noteworthy that the McMahon Line -- that China refuses to accept in Arunachal Pradesh -- has been accepted as the boundary with Myanmar. This clearly shows Chinese duplicity.
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