US ‘strongly opposes’ China’s renaming of areas along disputed Indian border

Washington has criticised Beijing’s list of 30 new names for places along the 1,865-mile (3,000km) disputed Himalayan border between China and India, formally known as the Line of Actual Control, as yet another “unilateral attempt” to reassert its territorial claims.

“The United States strongly opposes any unilateral attempts to advance territorial claims by incursions or encroachments, military or civilian, across the Line of Actual Control,” a US State Department representative said on Tuesday.

After the report was picked up by several Indian news outlets, New Delhi’s foreign affairs ministry rejected Beijing’s “senseless attempt” at “inventing” names and “altering reality”.

01:36

US joins high-altitude military exercise with India near its Himalayan border with China

“If today I change the name of your house, will it become mine? Arunachal Pradesh was, is and will always be a state of India. Changing names does not have an effect,” the Indian external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said on Monday.

“Our army is deployed at the Line of Actual Control,” he was quoted as saying by India’s news agency ANI.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have held 21 rounds of military-level talks since 2020, when at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed in a fight along the border.

No breakthrough was achieved during the latest meeting in February as both sides agreed to keep communicating while also positioning extra troops and equipment.

Disagreements over the poorly demarcated border led to a war between the countries in 1962.

Last month, a tunnel inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Arunachal Pradesh became the latest flashpoint. As India and China traded warnings and made overlapping claims of national