McMahon Line
Boundary between the Tibetan region of China and India / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The McMahon Line is the boundary[1] between Tibet and British India as agreed in the maps and notes exchanged by the respective plenipotentiaries on 24–25 March 1914 at Delhi,[2] as part of the 1914 Simla Convention. The line delimited the respective spheres of influence of the two countries in the eastern Himalayan region along northeast India and northern Burma (Myanmar), which were earlier undefined.[3][4][lower-alpha 1] The Republic of China was not a party to the McMahon Line agreement,[6] but the line was part of the overall boundary of Tibet defined in the Simla Convention, initialled by all three parties and later repudiated by the government of China.[7][lower-alpha 2] The Indian part of the Line currently serves as the de facto boundary between China and India, although its legal status is disputed by the People's Republic of China.[12][13] The Burmese part of the Line was renegotiated by the People's Republic of China and Myanmar.
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The line is named after Henry McMahon, foreign secretary of British India and the chief British negotiator of the conference at Simla. The bilateral agreement between Tibet and Britain was signed by McMahon on behalf of the British government and Lonchen Shatra on behalf of the Tibetan government.[14] It spans 890 kilometres (550 miles) from the corner of Bhutan to the Isu Razi Pass on the Burma border, largely along the crest of the Himalayas.[15][16]
The outcomes of the Simla Conference remained ambiguous for several decades because China did not sign the overall Convention but the British were hopeful of persuading the Chinese. The Convention and the McMahon's agreement were omitted in the 1928 edition of Aitchison's Treaties.[17] It was revived in 1935 by Olaf Caroe, then deputy foreign secretary of British India, who obtained London's permission to implement it as well as to publish a revised version of Aitchison's 1928 Treaties.[lower-alpha 3] Since then the McMahon Line has been part of the legal national border of India.
China rejects the Simla Convention and the McMahon Line, contending that Tibet was not a sovereign state and therefore did not have the power to conclude treaties.[20] However China recognizes the line as part of the Line of Actual Control between the two countries, according to a 1959 diplomatic note by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.[21] Chinese maps show some 65,000 km2 (25,000 sq mi) of the territory south of the line as part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, known as South Tibet in China.[22] Chinese forces briefly occupied a part of this area during the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and later withdrew.
The 14th Dalai Lama did not originally recognise India's sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh. As late as 2003, he said that "Arunachal Pradesh was actually part of Tibet".[23] In January 2007, however, he said that both the Tibetan government and Britain recognized the McMahon Line in 1914. In June 2008, he explicitly recognized for the first time that "Arunachal Pradesh was a part of India under the agreement signed by Tibetan and British representatives".[23]