McMahon line

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The McMahon Line ( Chinese  麦克马洪 线 , Pinyin Màikèmǎhóng Xiàn ) is a border line drawn on the map that belongs to the Shimla Convention , a treaty concluded between Great Britain and Tibet in 1914. It was named after Sir Henry McMahon , Foreign Minister of the Viceroyalty of British India and British chief diplomat, during whose tenure the treaty was signed.

The line runs on the summit ridge of the Himalayas for 550  miles from Bhutan in the west to the arch of Brahmaputra in the east. It corresponds roughly to the Line of Actual Control , which marks the current border between the territory controlled by India and the territory controlled by the People's Republic of China .

From the Indian point of view, the McMahon Line represents a permanent borderline, while China regards it as a provisional borderline. China rejects the Shimla Convention because it has regarded Tibet as part of Chinese territory for centuries and a regional government does not have the authority to conclude an international treaty. China rejects Tibet's 1913 unilateral declaration of independence, claiming 56,000  square miles , located south of the McMahon Line and considered by India as part of Arunachal Pradesh , as southern Tibet. Chinese troops briefly occupied this region during the Indo-Chinese border war from 1962 to 1963.

history

Early British efforts to create a border in this region began in the mid-19th century with the discovery that Tawang , a major trading town, was part of Tibetan territory. In 1873 the British Indian government drew an "Outer Line" intended as an international border. The line followed the end of the Himalayan foothills, which today corresponds to the southern border of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh . Great Britain completed the border treaties on Tibet's borders with Burma and Sikkim with Beijing . Nevertheless, the government of Tibet refused to recognize the boundaries drawn by these treaties. In 1904 British troops under the command of Sir Francis Younghusband moved to Tibet ( British Tibet Campaign ) and forced a treaty directly with the Tibetan government on September 7, 1904. After a change of government in London , Britain returned to its previous policy of allowing China to negotiate on behalf of Tibet. Britain and Russia agreed, in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 , not to negotiate directly with Tibet.

British interests in the border areas were affected when the Qing government installed a direct Chinese government in Tibet (1910–1912). A British military expedition was dispatched to what is now Arunachal Pradesh in 1911, and in 1912 the North East Frontier Tract (NEFT) was created to loosely control this area without integrating it directly into the province of Assam . Between 1912 and 1913, the administration reached agreements with most of the region's tribal leaders. The Outer Line was moved north, but Tawang remained Tibetan territory. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in China, Tibet expelled the Chinese troops and declared itself independent in 1913. In 1914, Britain invited representatives from China and Tibet to the Shimla Conference to clarify Tibet's status. It drafted an agreement that divided Tibet into an "Outer Tibet" under the administration of the Dalai Lama government and an "Inner Tibet" in which Lhasa was to have only religious authority. Both territories were considered to be under Chinese " suzerainty " (German suzerainty). Suzeran is a state that has authority over a dependent state. All three representatives initialed the agreement in April 1914. But Beijing immediately protested against the proposed border between Inner and Outer Tibet and rejected the agreement.

The result of the Shimla conference was rejected by the British Indian government as incompatible with the 1907 British-Russian agreement. This agreement was rejected by Russia and Great Britain in 1921. The Survey of India , the cartographic and geographic office, first published a map in 1937 with the McMahon Line as the official boundary. Most recently, the British published the Shimla Convention as a bilateral agreement in 1938 and required the Tawang monarchy, which was located south of the McMahon Line, to suspend payments to Lhasa. Tibet protested the request but did not object to the British presence along the rest of the McMahon Line.

In an attempt to revise history, the relevant volume of C. U. Aitchison's A Collection of Treaties , which originally contained a note indicating that no binding agreement had been reached at Shimla, was recalled from the libraries . It was replaced by an edition under the incorrect publication date of 1929 in which a note from the editor stated that Tibet and Britain would have reached a binding agreement without China.

In 1944, NEFT established direct administrative control over the entire region, although Tibet immediately claimed authority over Tawang. In 1949 the Communist Party came to power in Beijing and declared its intention to conquer Tibet. India, which became independent in 1947, declared in its reply the McMahon Line to be its border and asserted control of the Tawang region (1950–1951). After a battle between Tibetan and Chinese Communist forces near Chamdo , Tibet and Beijing agreed the 17-point agreement in which Chinese sovereignty over Tibet was claimed in 1951.

North East Frontier Agency in 1961

In 1951, the regional administration was renamed the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) ("Northeast Frontier Agency"). She accepted Chinese sovereignty over Tibet at that time in the Indo-Chinese Panchshil Treaty and, as the legal successor to British India, raised no claims under the Shimla Convention in Tibet.

Until the Sino-Soviet split in 1959/1960, Sino- India relations were cordial, and the border dispute was silent. India became a Soviet ally . Mao Zedong , the head of the Communist Party of China, wanted a successful war to increase the prestige of his Defense Minister Lin Biao , whom he preferred to succeed him. Chinese troops advanced into the disputed region on August 26, 1959 and captured an Indian outpost in Longju, a few kilometers south of the border. On September 8, 1962, a Chinese unit launched a surprise attack on one of the Indian posts in Dhola on the Thagla Ridge , three kilometers north of the McMahon Line, which initiated the Sino-Indian border war. In October, Chinese troops advanced south across the front. Although Indian voices repeatedly stated that they would not give way to Chinese pressure, India was completely unprepared for a military confrontation in the region. Until November 20, 1962, there was no organized Indian power in NEFA or in the western sector claimed by China. The Soviet Union , the United States, and Great Britain all pledged military aid to India. China then withdrew to the McMahon Line and let the Indian prisoners of war return in 1963. New Delhi attributed the Chinese withdrawal to the superiority of its air force and China's logistical problems. Whether China other military targets as a show of force had, can not be proved today. Indian Defense Minister VK Krishna Menon has been dismissed for national humiliation.

NEFA was renamed Arunachal Pradesh in 1972 and became an Indian state in 1987. In 1985 the Indian Army established a post in the Sumdorong Chu Valley , near Tawang and a little north of the McMahon Line. (McMahon had intended to make his boundary line follow the main Himalayan ridge, but in this section it had been mistakenly drawn south of it.) As a result, in October 1986, Deng Xiaoping , then China's strongman, threatened to "teach India a lesson" and both sides gathered troops in the valley. The confrontation was defused in May 1987 and the troops have since withdrawn.

literature

  • Neville Maxwell: India's China War . Cape, London 1971 (Good explanation of how the conflict over the McMahon Line came about).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b James Barnard Calvin: The China-India Border War (1962) . Marine Corps Command and Staff College, April 1984. Abstract on GlobalSecurity.org, 1984, accessed July 2, 2017.
  2. ^ Convention Relating to Burmah and Thibet (1886) . Tibet Justice Center, accessed July 2, 2017.
  3. ^ Convention Between Great Britain and China Relating to Sikkim and Tibet (1890) . Tibet Justice Center, accessed July 2, 2017.
  4. ^ Convention Between Great Britain and Thibet (1904) . Tibet Justice Center, accessed July 2, 2017.
  5. ^ Convention Between Great Britain and Russia (1907) . Tibet Justice Center, accessed July 2, 2017.
  6. ^ Proclamation Issued by His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIII (1913) .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Tibet Justice Center, accessed July 2, 2017.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.tibetjustice.org  
  7. ^ A b c d Neville Maxwell: India's China War. Pantheon, New York, 1970, archived from the original on April 19, 2001 ; accessed on July 2, 2017 .
  8. ^ Convention Between Great Britain, China, and Tibet, Simla (1914) . Tibet Justice Center, accessed July 2, 2017.
  9. ↑ Goldstein, 1989, p. 75
  10. ↑ Mohan Guruswamy: The Battle for the Border . Rediff.com , June 23, 2003, accessed July 2, 2017.
  11. ^ Hsiao-Ting Lin: Boundary, sovereignty, and imagination: Reconsidering the frontier disputes between British India and Republican China, 1914-47 . In: The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History . tape 32 , no. 3 , 2004, p. 25-47 , doi : 10.1080 / 0308653042000279650 (English).
  12. ↑ Goldstein, 1989, pp. 812-813
  13. ↑ a b c Fischer Weltgeschichte Volume 33: Das Moderne Asia , 1979, ISBN 3-436-01219-X , pp. 203f.
  14. ↑ V. Natarajan: The Sumdorong Chu incident. Bharat Rakshak Monitor Nov. – Dec. 2000, 3 (3), archived from the original on January 18, 2013 ; accessed on July 2, 2017 .