1. India did not recognize China’s sovereignty over Tibet until 2003.
2. China didn’t seize Aksai Chin (AC) in 1962 war. China always had AC & had military presence at least since 1959 when India began Forward Policy to invade AC.
3. China was also generous to India by supporting annexation of Portuguese Goa which western countries disapproved and tried to prevent.
4. India already doubled its military from 248k to 570k between 1947 and 1962…..
5. Nonlignment has nothing to do with China. It was neither a nonaligned country nor a NATO nor Warsaw Pact country.
6. Whatever Nehru said was rhetoric. US Presidents repeatedly claimed betrayed by likes of Noriega and Sadam Hussein.
I had the impression that your podcast was popular, so I'm surprised to see only one other comment.
This was a good episode: I like the format of lecture -> intense Q&A. Your greatest strength is your ability to ask direct, serious questions, and you did a great job here.
I thought that in some places the responses to your questions were less direct, but I suppose that's a cultural difference between academic and rationalist styles of conversation.
Sarah Paine is spouting a bunch of nonsense. Let me address some of these one by one.
1) India recognized the PRC in 1950 out of generosity.
India is one of the first countries to recognize the PRC. The reason has nothing to do with generosity. The reason is that the Nationalist Party of the Republic of China (ROC), PRC's predecessor, has been sending repeated diplomatic protests to the British Raj and later India over its territorial incursion into China. By recognizing PRC, and therefore the derecognition of the ROC because of the One China Principle upheld on both sides, India cut off the diplomatic channel the ROC used to deliver those diplomatic protests.
2) Tibetan culture is of Indian origin.
Tibetan culture is not of Indian origin. The Tibetan alphabet does share similarities with the Hindi alphabet. When the British Raj landed on the subcontinent, there was no such thing as the Hindi script. The dominant language is Urdu, a court language used by the Mughal by writing the spoken language in the Arabic alphabet. The British borrowed from the Tibetan alphabet to write the spoken language to create Hindi.
3) Repression of the Tibetan people and culture appalls the Indians.
Repression of people has been an integral part of Indian culture for thousands of years. It has even been institutionalized into the Caste system. That Indians are appalled at the repression of people is absurd.
4) India was not interested in becoming militarized at all before 1962.
India is the first Asian country to acquire an aircraft carrier, way back in 1957 from the British. Buying fancy weapons to arm itself to the teeth is an Indian tradition going back to the beginning of India.
The PRC (People's Republic of China) was bending backwards trying to settle the border disputes with India in the 50s, but it backfired badly because India interpreted PRC accommodations as weakness, resulting in an even more belligerent India. In February 1951, India invaded and annexed Tawang. Tawang is the birthplace of the Sixth Dalai Lama and home to a four-hundred-year-old Tibetan monastery. The Tibetan government in Lhasa protested to India, and so did the ROC (Republic of China, which had already retreated to Taiwan). The PRC made no noise. In 1954, the PRC proposed to India (in a letter to Nehru) that South Tibet be ceded to India. India rejected the proposal because India also claims sovereignty over Aksai Chin, which the PRC refused to relinquish. In the late 1950s, Nehru initiated the 'Forward Policy' to establish border posts deeper into the north, beyond the so-called McMahon Line, and at the same time refused to negotiate with the PRC, which eventually precipitated the 1962 war between the two countries. In 1987, India made South Tibet a state and named it Arunachal Pradesh. South Tibet today is an unresolved territorial dispute between the two countries.
After the war, when Indian domestic politics asked for culpability of the war, Nehru lied to his people that the PRC backstabbed India unprovoked, that India was an innocent victim against an aggressive China. This narrative is still prevalent among the Indian people.
Gregory Clark, an Australian academic, had a front row seat to the conflict and witnessed firsthand the dishonesty of the establishment:
In fact, shortly after the war, John Addis, who later became British ambassador to China, spent the winter of 1962/63 in a Harvard library analyzing the correspondence and documents between India and China and found that India had built upon and elaborated the original British falsification of its border claims. His findings were conveniently ignored because it sways from the conventional narrative that India was on the defensive and China was on the offense. At the time, there was this conviction that a democracy is inherently peaceful and that India, being the world's largest democracy, is engaging in expansionism, which must be scandalous to Western beliefs.
Interested people can look up the "THE INDIA-CHINA BORDER QUESTION" paper by John Addis.
I might add that India's expansionism is one of the factors that drove the US into the Vietnam War.
Many inaccuracies in this lecture.
1. India did not recognize China’s sovereignty over Tibet until 2003.
2. China didn’t seize Aksai Chin (AC) in 1962 war. China always had AC & had military presence at least since 1959 when India began Forward Policy to invade AC.
3. China was also generous to India by supporting annexation of Portuguese Goa which western countries disapproved and tried to prevent.
4. India already doubled its military from 248k to 570k between 1947 and 1962…..
5. Nonlignment has nothing to do with China. It was neither a nonaligned country nor a NATO nor Warsaw Pact country.
6. Whatever Nehru said was rhetoric. US Presidents repeatedly claimed betrayed by likes of Noriega and Sadam Hussein.
This is amazing, thank you!
I had the impression that your podcast was popular, so I'm surprised to see only one other comment.
This was a good episode: I like the format of lecture -> intense Q&A. Your greatest strength is your ability to ask direct, serious questions, and you did a great job here.
I thought that in some places the responses to your questions were less direct, but I suppose that's a cultural difference between academic and rationalist styles of conversation.
Thank you!
"Today’s episode is brought to you by Scale AI. Scale partners with the U.S. government to fuel America’s AI"
Tell me to disregard every damn bit and byte without telling me you are completely full of shit? Fuck off, I'm going elsewhere you silly cunts.
Here are three more references regarding the 1962 India-China War.
https://deepchina.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-the-zangnan-area-disputes
https://chinaindiaborderdispute.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/nevillemaxwellprehistoryborderdisputesimlamcmahonlinejan2011.pdf
https://ppr06262023.substack.com/p/how-south-tibet-became-arunachal
Sarah Paine is spouting a bunch of nonsense. Let me address some of these one by one.
1) India recognized the PRC in 1950 out of generosity.
India is one of the first countries to recognize the PRC. The reason has nothing to do with generosity. The reason is that the Nationalist Party of the Republic of China (ROC), PRC's predecessor, has been sending repeated diplomatic protests to the British Raj and later India over its territorial incursion into China. By recognizing PRC, and therefore the derecognition of the ROC because of the One China Principle upheld on both sides, India cut off the diplomatic channel the ROC used to deliver those diplomatic protests.
2) Tibetan culture is of Indian origin.
Tibetan culture is not of Indian origin. The Tibetan alphabet does share similarities with the Hindi alphabet. When the British Raj landed on the subcontinent, there was no such thing as the Hindi script. The dominant language is Urdu, a court language used by the Mughal by writing the spoken language in the Arabic alphabet. The British borrowed from the Tibetan alphabet to write the spoken language to create Hindi.
3) Repression of the Tibetan people and culture appalls the Indians.
Repression of people has been an integral part of Indian culture for thousands of years. It has even been institutionalized into the Caste system. That Indians are appalled at the repression of people is absurd.
4) India was not interested in becoming militarized at all before 1962.
India is the first Asian country to acquire an aircraft carrier, way back in 1957 from the British. Buying fancy weapons to arm itself to the teeth is an Indian tradition going back to the beginning of India.
The PRC (People's Republic of China) was bending backwards trying to settle the border disputes with India in the 50s, but it backfired badly because India interpreted PRC accommodations as weakness, resulting in an even more belligerent India. In February 1951, India invaded and annexed Tawang. Tawang is the birthplace of the Sixth Dalai Lama and home to a four-hundred-year-old Tibetan monastery. The Tibetan government in Lhasa protested to India, and so did the ROC (Republic of China, which had already retreated to Taiwan). The PRC made no noise. In 1954, the PRC proposed to India (in a letter to Nehru) that South Tibet be ceded to India. India rejected the proposal because India also claims sovereignty over Aksai Chin, which the PRC refused to relinquish. In the late 1950s, Nehru initiated the 'Forward Policy' to establish border posts deeper into the north, beyond the so-called McMahon Line, and at the same time refused to negotiate with the PRC, which eventually precipitated the 1962 war between the two countries. In 1987, India made South Tibet a state and named it Arunachal Pradesh. South Tibet today is an unresolved territorial dispute between the two countries.
https://ppr06262023.substack.com/p/renewed-tension-india-china-border
After the war, when Indian domestic politics asked for culpability of the war, Nehru lied to his people that the PRC backstabbed India unprovoked, that India was an innocent victim against an aggressive China. This narrative is still prevalent among the Indian people.
Gregory Clark, an Australian academic, had a front row seat to the conflict and witnessed firsthand the dishonesty of the establishment:
https://gregoryclark.net/others/remembering-a-war-the-1962-india-china-conflict/
In fact, shortly after the war, John Addis, who later became British ambassador to China, spent the winter of 1962/63 in a Harvard library analyzing the correspondence and documents between India and China and found that India had built upon and elaborated the original British falsification of its border claims. His findings were conveniently ignored because it sways from the conventional narrative that India was on the defensive and China was on the offense. At the time, there was this conviction that a democracy is inherently peaceful and that India, being the world's largest democracy, is engaging in expansionism, which must be scandalous to Western beliefs.
Interested people can look up the "THE INDIA-CHINA BORDER QUESTION" paper by John Addis.
I might add that India's expansionism is one of the factors that drove the US into the Vietnam War.
https://www.unz.com/article/the-causes-of-the-vietnam-war/
https://bayant.substack.com/