Word: china
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...China claims the region where Tawang sits and the area surrounding it as a southern extension of Tibet, which Beijing rules; India has long maintained that the land, which comprises its northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, is an inalienable part of its territory. Tensions over the border dispute have flared recently, raising the specter of a budding rivalry between the two Asian giants who fought a brief, wintry war in 1962. Reports of troop buildups and border incursions have increased. A visit to the state by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in mid-October to campaign in local elections...
...trip, which his camp insists is simply to deliver teachings to his faithful, is further stoking Chinese ire. On Nov. 3, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman blasted the Tibetan leader-in-exile for his "separatist" activities. "The Dalai Lama often lies and often engages in acts to sabotage China's relations with other countries," said Ma Zhaoxu. New Delhi, sensing trouble, has barred foreign journalists from covering the event. (Read about the rivalry between New Delhi and Beijing...
Ever since he fled the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the Dalai Lama has lived as a guest on Indian soil, free to do as he pleases provided he refrains from directly antagonizing China. This is not the first time he has journeyed to Tawang from his seat in the north Indian town of Dharamsala. But in the wake of riots in Lhasa last year and amid the present frostiness over the Sino-Indian border, the visit has assumed a deeper political dimension...
...ginning up emotions and support in Tawang poses a challenge to its vision of dominion over all of Tibet. The boundary separating Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet - dubbed the McMahon Line - was drawn up by the colonial British and officials from Lhasa in 1914, an act of map-making that China to this day refuses to recognize. According to Beijing, Tawang and its surroundings were under the suzerainty of the Qing dynasty after its armies extended China's frontiers to Tibet and Central Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries. If Tibet is Chinese soil - something that New Delhi has officially...
...facts on the ground, experts say, do not fully support Beijing's claim. "China is trying to impose this idea of a coherent nation-state," says Gray Tuttle, professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York. "But it is basing its claim on a premodern cultural world where there was nothing like a modern state." Not only was Chinese control over Tibet thin until the 1950s, but Tibetan rule over Tawang was nominal as well. Beyond the appointment of certain abbots in monasteries and the occasional payment of taxes to Lhasa, the people living there...