China reaffirmed its claim over a north-eastern Indian state bordering Tibet on Tuesday, sparking a diplomatic row between the Asian giants less than a week before Chinese President Hu Jintao visits New Delhi.
Beijing does not recognise the remote and sparsely populated state of Arunachal Pradesh is part of India and claims the state's mountainous Tawang district once belonged to Tibet.
"In our position, the whole of what you call the state, the Arunachal (Pradesh) state, is Chinese territory and Tawang is only one place in it and we are claiming all of that," Chinese ambassador Sun Yuxi said in a television interview late on Monday. Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee rejected China's claim. "Arunachal is an integral part of India, and it is known ... the position of the respective countries with regards to Arunachal," he told reporters on Tuesday.
India and China shared frosty ties for decades after fighting a brief but brutal border war in 1962. But relations have warmed considerably since the early 1990s on the back of booming bilateral trade.
The neighbours have, however, made little progress over resolving the dispute over their 3,500 km (2,220 mile) Himalayan frontier despite several rounds of talks in the past decade.
For its part, India disputes Chinese rule of 38,000 sq km (15,000 sq miles) of barren, icy and uninhabited land on the Tibetan plateau seized in the 1962 war by Chinese troops. Hu's four-day India visit starts on November 20 and Beijing is expected to push for greater two-way trade, which could pass $20 billion this year.
Comments
Comments are closed.