The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) insistence that countries do not interfere in the affairs of another’s domestic policy, and that they respect other nations’ territorial integrity, is sound — in principle. It quickly falls apart when the CCP redefines what constitutes its own, and therefore other nations’, territory, or takes measures against ethnic minorities within its borders in the name of social and cultural unity.
The party’s approach to resolving the issues arising from its methods is based on power relations, not fairness, justice, international law, established norms or appeals to historical veracity. Taiwanese are all too aware of how the CCP is prepared to resort to historical revisionism to legitimize its territorial claims, with or without the explicit assistance of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). Indians, too, have cause to be outraged by Beijing’s behavior.
On Sunday, the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs released an updated list of 11 Chinese “standardized geographical names” in Chinese characters, Tibetan and pinyin for areas, mountains and rivers in the northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, or what China refers to as Zangnan (藏南) and regards as the southern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs pushed back, saying that the region “is, has been and will always be an integral and inalienable part of India.”
Beijing seems to base its claims on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army temporarily occupying part of the area during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. It says that Zangnan has actually been a part of China “since ancient times,” implying that it is India that has “illegally occupied” the area and given it “illegal names.”
“Since ancient times” is a phrase the CCP has rolled out with regard to its claims over Taiwan, too. It apparently believes that any historical claim, however tenuous and irrespective of how much time has passed since the claim has been invalidated by historical circumstance, is ripe for the picking, with the “facts” always falling in its favor. As with Taiwan, as with the land on its border with India, and so with the South China Sea. The same ministry, together with the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources, released a list of Chinese place names for islands, reefs and ridges in the South China Sea almost exactly three years ago.
Naming a location does not give a country territorial claim over it, but it is a powerful device with which to influence perceptions. The CCP uses similarly underhanded methods domestically, too, to alter cultural reality through propaganda and historical revisionism. The international community has failed to exert sufficient pressure against Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to push him to stop the widely acknowledged human rights abuses against Uighurs in East Turkestan, known in China as Xinjiang. Beyond the detention of Uighurs and the demolition or repurposing of mosques in the region, the CCP also engages in propaganda campaigns promoting the assimilation of this religiously and culturally distinct ethnic group into mainstream Han culture.
A report published on Tuesday in the online religious liberty and human rights magazine Bitter Winter describes how a Chinese state-sponsored propaganda video seeks to whitewash centuries of history and culture. It shows a Uighur woman, dressed in Buddhist clothing, dancing to soft Chinese music in the Grand Kuqa Mosque, the second-largest mosque in Xinjiang, while a Han Chinese narrator, walking through the mosque, her head uncovered and still wearing shoes, flouting Muslim convention for entering a mosque, speaks of how centuries of multicultural integration culminated in the “Kuqa Temple,” and how the area is “inextricably part of China.”
The two methods are cut from the same cloth: assert unilateral change, deny debate or recourse, reject compromise.
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