China's India war: collision course on the roof of the world
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ia/iiy130
ISSN1468-2346
Autores Tópico(s)Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
ResumoBertil Lintner is a Swedish journalist living in northern Thailand who is well known for his studies of ethnic minorities in south and south-east Asia. In China's India war he has turned would-be historian by challenging a thesis set out by Neville Maxwell in his India's China war (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; reviewed in International Affairs 47: 2, April 1971)—to which Lintner's book is an obvious counter. Maxwell, to summarize Lintner's oversimplification, claimed that the interminable Sino-Indian border dispute was to a great extent caused, to put it mildly, by Indian obstinacy and incompetence. Lintner now argues that, on the contrary, the problem from the outset has been the result of malicious and ruthless Chinese aggression: it is China's, not India's, war. Lintner's case is based on a wide range of secondary sources, many with CIA origins. There are two major sectors of Sino-Indian border involved in this dispute, which has been smouldering since at least the People's Republic of China's (PRC) occupation of Tibet in 1950–51. The eastern sector, in Arunachal Pradesh, oddly enough does not present insoluble problems, albeit being the site of a major Sino-Indian armed clash in 1962. Competent diplomacy on both sides should be able to sort it out easily enough provided an answer can be found for the Aksai Chin conundrum. Aksai Chin is a remote mountainous tract at the extreme western end of the Tibetan plateau adjacent to south-west Xinjiang—both now under effective Chinese control. In 1951 the PRC began building a strategic road across Aksai Chin, now the China National Highway 219 (G219), linking Lhasa with Kashgar (Kashi). The route is clearly of great strategic and economic importance to China. Aksai Chin, desolate and uninhabited, is of no importance whatsoever to India.
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