'Exercise of sovereignty', China defends map showing India's territories as its own

Notwithstanding strong protest from New Delhi, Beijing on Wednesday defended its new map showing India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin as part of the territory of China – calling it an “exercise of sovereignty in accordance with law”.

New Delhi had on Tuesday lodged a strong protest with Beijing through diplomatic channels over the 2023 ‘standard map’ of China that laid claim to India's territory. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had dismissed China’s move to reassert its claim on territories of India as ‘absurd’.

“It is a routine practice in China’s exercise of sovereignty in accordance with the law,” Wang Wenbin, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Government, said in Beijing. “We hope relevant sides can stay objective and calm, and refrain from over-interpreting the issue,” he added while replying to a query on India’s protest over the new maps issued by the Ministry of Natural Resources of China.

The “2023 edition of the standard map of China” issued on Tuesday is in sync with China’s expansive territorial claims not only along its disputed boundary with India in the Himalayas but also in the South China Sea as well as on Taiwan.

Beijing claims almost the entire state of – over 80,000 sq km of area – Arunachal Pradesh of India as a part of the territory of China and calls it Zangnan or south Tibet. India claims that China is illegally occupying about 38,000 sq km of its territory in Aksai Chin, which borders eastern Ladakh. China claims nearly 2000 sq km of land in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand of India.

New Delhi also claims that Pakistan illegally ceded about 5,180 sq km of India’s territory to China in 1963.

Apart from showing the territories of India as China’s own or disputed in the official maps, Beijing has been resorting to several other ways to assert its claims on territories of India – be it by assigning Chinese and Tibetan names to areas – particularly in Arunachal Pradesh – it has been eyeing, or by issuing stapled visas to people from Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir and thus avoiding recognizing them as citizens of India.

China’s move to reassert its claims on Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin of India came less than a week after the leaders of the two nations had a conversation on the sideline of the BRICS summit at Johannesburg in South Africa. After the meeting, New Delhi had claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to direct relevant officials to step up efforts for expeditious disengagement of frontline troops from the remaining face-off points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in order to completely end the more than three-year-long military stand-off in eastern Ladakh.

Beijing had also issued a statement, quoting Xi telling Modi that China and India should bear in mind the overall interests of their bilateral relations and handle properly the border issue so as to jointly safeguard peace and tranquillity in the border region. The statement issued by China, however, had refrained from referring to the leaders of the communist country and India agreeing to expedite the complete resolution of the dispute.