Regarding Brahma Chellaney's July 15 article, "China's false monoculture": Chellaney is entitled to his dislikes and suspicions of China, but he should not distort facts. He says that post-1949 China gobbled up India's 38,000-square-km Aksai China, part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, to provide a route linking Tibet with Xinjiang. There are some problems with this statement:
• Most of Aksai China, the Tibet-Xinjiang route especially, lies north of the Himalayan watershed in this area.
• India did not discover the construction of this route until years after the event — proof positive that India was not in control of the area.
• The only pre-1949 border ever formally suggested for most of this area was the British proposal to China in 1899, to which China never responded. Imperialistic Britain at the time had a forward policy to forestall Russian ambitions in the area.
Even so, the 1899 proposal leaves most of the disputed territory under Chinese control. The Indian claim to this area relies on a highly distorted version of the 1899 proposal, as historian Alastair Lamb has pointed out.
• In exchange for its Aksai China claim, China has effectively conceded India's claim to the much more valuable NEFA (North East Frontier Area), grabbed by the British from a weak Tibet in 1914. The China India frontier war of 1962 occurred only after India pushed troops north even of the Indian-claimed NEFA frontier, as historian Neville Maxwell has pointed out.
Incidentally, Chellaney criticizes China's treatment of the Tibetan and Uighur peoples, but China's behavior pales in comparison with India's dismal record with the Muslim majority in Kashmir.