South Tibet

South Tibet is a literal translation of the Chinese term '藏南' (Zàngnán), 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 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 China to refer to a Assam Himalaya region located south of the McMahon Line. This region was recognised by Tibet as belonging to British India under the McMahon Line agreement (part of the 1914 Simla Convention). China does not recognise the McMahon Line and claims that the area belongs to Tibet instead.[1] According to scholar Hsiao-Ting Lin, the Chinese claim to sovereignty over the area is "largely imaginary", generated by official maps and political progagandas.[2]

References
  1. 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 Zhonwen, 27 May 2020.
  2. 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: "As the following discussion reveals, 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. From a broader historical viewpoint, such imagined sovereignty and the ‘cartographically existing’ authority, lacking any actuality and experience with respect to governance and administration, were in fact the origins of a dispute that eventually led to the war between the successor regimes in the 1960s."
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.