South Tibet

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South Tibet is a literal translation of the Chinese term '藏南' (pinyin: Zàng Nán), which may refer to different geographic areas:

The southern part of Tibet, covering the middle reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River Valley between Saga County to the west and Mainling County to the east, as well as neighbouring areas located between the Himalayas to the south and the Transhimalayas range to the north. The region extends around 1,000 km from west to east and 300 km from north to south. By this definition, South Tibet includes most of modern-day Shigatse, Lhasa, Lhoka (Shannan) Prefecture and Nyingchi Prefecture.

South Tibet may also refer to a shorter section of the Yarlung Tsangpo and tributaries covering most of Lhoka and Nyingchi Prefectures from the confluence with the Lhasa River to the west up to the beginning of the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon near Mainling County to the east.

When used in relation to the Sino-Indian border dispute, South Tibet is a term mainly used by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to refer to an area south of the McMahon Line currently administered by India as parts of the states of Arunachal Pradesh. This region was recognised by Tibet as belonging to British India under the McMahon Line Agreement (part of the 1914 Simla Convention). The PRC does not recognise the McMahon Line and claims that the area is a part of the Tibet Autonomous Region instead.^[1] According to Hsiao-ting Lin, a scholar from Taiwan, and other scholars, both the British and the Chinese claim to sovereignty over the area can be deemed "largely imaginary", reflected only in official maps and political propagandas.^[2]^[3]^[4]

References

^ 帝国遗梦：中国印度的三段边境争议 (The Last Dream of an Empire: Three Border Disputes between China and India), BBC News Zhongwen, 27 May 2020.

^ Lin, Hsiao-ting (2004), "Boundary, sovereignty, and imagination: Reconsidering the frontier disputes between British India and Republican China, 1914–47", The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 32 (3): 25–47, doi:10.1080/0308653042000279650, S2CID 159560382: "... the professed sovereignties claimed by both Republican China and British India over the Assam-Tibetan tribal territory were largely imaginary, existing merely on official maps and political propagandas. .... More significantly, the war against Japanese encroachment also made it inevitable that the Kuomintang government would be obliged to [..] face the reality that its claimed sovereignty over the Sino-Indian frontier regions was in fact imaginary. ... China's sovereignty over the Tibet-Assam frontier thus existed only in cartography and imagination."

^ Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice (2016), Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962, Cambridge University Press, pp. 55–57, ISBN 978-1-107-17679-9: "The contrast between Republican China's sensitivity towards its imaginary sovereignty and the British Empire's apparent forgetfulness in this regard are connected with the fact that British and Qing expansion attempts had very different 'sovereignty goals' in the eastern Himalayas. [British India's] vision followed an imperial logic: the eastern Himalayas should be a buffer between India and its neighbourhood. Confronted by Chinese expansionism, their aim was limited to achieving external sovereignty over the region – that is, to ensure that no foreign power would intrude into the eastern Himalayas, and that local people would have 'no relations or intercourse with any Foreign Power other than the British Government'."

^ Caroe, Olaf (April 1963), "The Sino-Indian Frontier Dispute", Asian Review, LIX (218): 72–73 – via archive.org: "[The Times] actually shows the frontier before 1914 down here [at the foothills]; it never was. The Tibetans never penetrated this area, except for one or two monasteries right up in the north of it (Tawang was one of them), where monks levied certain monastic dues. The fact of the matter is that this area was a tribal, sort of semi-autonomous, area on the frontier of Assam..."

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