Talk:Southern Tibet

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Comment in support of inclusion I want to address the claim that my previous edit was a POV fork of Arunachal Pradesh. It is not, and here is why.

Southern Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh are not the same topic. They refer to overlapping geography but represent fundamentally different subjects. "Arunachal Pradesh" is an Indian state with its own governance, demographics, economy, and administrative history. "Southern Tibet" (藏南) is a term used in Chinese political, diplomatic, and cartographic discourse to describe a territorial claim. The article covers the history of that claim: Qing-era boundary markers, the Simla Conference and the origins of the McMahon Line, the Republic of China's rejection of the convention, PRC diplomatic positions, the 1962 war from the perspective of the dispute, China's administrative divisions over claimed territory, and the stapled visa issue. None of this material belongs on the Arunachal Pradesh article, which covers a functioning Indian state. Placing Chinese territorial claim history, PRC administrative divisions, and Sino-Indian diplomatic correspondence on the Arunachal Pradesh page would itself be a WP:POV problem.

The content is sourced to reliable references. The article cites academic journals, published books by scholars such as Neville Maxwell, Steven Hoffmann, John Garver, and Taylor Fravel, as well as news coverage from Reuters, BBC, Times of India, and others. Chinese-language academic sources are used where they document the Chinese governmental position, which is standard practice per WP:RS when covering a foreign government's claims. The presence of Chinese-language sources does not make content WP:POV any more than Hindi or English sources would.

Wikipedia already maintains separate articles for overlapping territorial disputes. Kashmir and Azad Kashmir coexist. Northern Cyprus and Cyprus coexist. Western Sahara and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic coexist. In each case, the disputed territory or claim has its own article because the subject matter, sourcing, and encyclopedic scope are distinct. Southern Tibet fits this pattern exactly.

Removing sourced content about a notable territorial dispute does not serve neutrality. Per WP:NPOV, Wikipedia must represent all significant viewpoints in proportion to their prominence in reliable sources. The Chinese claim over this region is one of the most prominent and well-documented territorial disputes in Asia. Refusing to cover it in its own article, while covering the Indian administrative reality in the Arunachal Pradesh article, would itself be a failure of balance. We must thus cover the administrative structure and history from the chinese perspective on this article as well. You can very well include stuff from the Indian perspective if they are well documented as a counter claim

I say this as an Indian editor. I understand the nationalistic sensitivities around this topic, and I recognise that other editors like @Kautilya3 may share those concerns. But our job is to follow policy, not to let national sentiment dictate what sourced content gets included. The material is verifiable, the topic is distinct, and the article follows established Wikipedia conventions for disputed territories.

Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 14:57, 5 April 2026 (UTC)

Is this AI-written? UnpetitproleX (talk) 04:58, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

• This is a malformed RfC, there has been absolutely zero discussion prior to its opening. As such, close and initiate discussion instead. --UnpetitproleX (talk) 05:03, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
• Indeed, as per WP:RFCBEFORE, you need to discuss it before filing an RfC. I suggest you withdraw it.

• As to your expansion of the page, it is clearly a WP:POV expansion because it canvasses Chinese positions that are not internationally accepted, whereas the current text rightly attributes it to the Chinese government.
• As to the question of whether the Chinese scholarly sources are "reliable", please note WP:CONTEXTMATTERS: In general, the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication. So Chinese scholars, writing in the Chinese language for Chinese audience are basically flying under the radar, without scrutiny from the international scholars. So their claims would be obviously downgraded in that respect. Coupled with the fact that PRC is not known for its freedom of expression, it is reaonable to surmise that only those writings that support the Chinese national position would ever see the light of the day within China, and any dissenting voices would be suppressed. That is a huge POV quagmire that Wikipedia should not get into. So I would say that only those Chinese writings that are published in English in international publications would count as "reliable" (even if they might still suffer from POV).
• Secondly, note that any claims that these scholars make are historical, and WP:HISTRS applies. Only peer-reviewed academic publications would fit the bill, not random website write-ups. Zhao Erfeng's forays into the southeastern Tibet are well-documented, and there is no information that he had established any sovereignty/suzerainty on any part of Arunachal Pradesh. The stable version of the page includes a citation to Hsiao-ting Lin, a Taiwanese-origin scholar who has studied the ROC claims on Sino-Indian border extensively, which concludes that China's sovereignty over the Tibet-Assam frontier thus existed only in cartography and imagination. So, the so-called "Southern Tibet" ("Zhangnan") is entirely imaginary and has no basis in reality.
• Finally, as per WP:POVFORK, two pages cannot exist on the same topic. So any Chinese "Southern Tibet"-related claims need to go into the Arunachal Pradesh page, and not on a separate POV page.

-- Kautilya3 (talk) 07:54, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I fully agree on calling for a withdrawal of this RfC or otherwise a procedural close for it but I do want to note that it is theoretically possible to make an article on specifically the term "Southern Tibet", if it is notable enough on it's own. ⹃Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley${\displaystyle \lor }$investigateᛅ} 23:29, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I have withdrawn the RfC but noting your objections, I would like to respectfully disagree. Citing Chinese scholarly sources does not mean Wikipedia endorses their position, only that it reports it with attribution. So I very well, support inclusion of Chinese scholarly sources, and arguing against it in many ways amounts to WP:Censorship. Source reliability should be judged case by case under WP:RS, not rejected simply because a source is Chinese-language or published by a chinese guy in China. Also just to remind you as an encyclopedia, Wikipedia can very well cover historical claims from scholarly sources without requiring that they be internationally accepted, or accepted by the Indian government. As an encyclopedia, reporting facts I dont think we need acceptance of the Indian administration on what to include and what not to include Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 14:04, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

There are various criteria for WP:RS and you know them well. Nothing becomes reliable just because it is Chinese, nor does it become unreliable. You are barking up the wrong tree. I suggest you stop mentioning the nationality, and start talking about the reliability criteria. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 15:04, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

The thing is WP:RS policy judges reliability on editorial oversight, fact-checking, and peer review on a case-by-case basis, not on the nationality or language of the publication.. that is why I brought it up in the first place. I agree that Sources 1 and 2 do warrant scrutiny for the institutional reasons outlined above, but Source 3 (University of Macau journal) operates outside the PRC's editorial constraints and survives that criticism entirely. More importantly, WP:CENSORSHIP is relevant here: systematically excluding an entire national scholarly tradition because its conclusions align with that country's government position is not a neutrality policy, it is itself a POV judgment, and it would equally disqualify Indian scholars writing in Indian journals about Indian territorial claims.

The point what I am trying to make here is that, we should also include stuff about China's administrative claims, and how they view the specific history and how they divide the region politically, if we are talking about terminology of the word. We can specifically attribute this to china Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 01:49, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Indian scholars don't align themselves with national policy; they routinely go against it. They also publish in international journals and with international publishers, and thereby submit to international scrutiny. Their books get reviewed in international journals too. Sory to say, there is no comparison between Indian and Chinese sources.

Your invocation of WP:CENSORSHIP is wrong. That policy says don't rule out content because somebody finds it "objectionable". It doesn't say, include questionable content just because somebody said it.

The point here is that when you are dealing with an international dispute, international scrutiny is required. It doesn't make sense to claim "editorial oversight", when all the oversight is within the same ideological ecosystem. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 21:29, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

History

Republic of China

The 1926 Complete Map of the Republic of China, noting "stateless mountain tribes" (无定山族) along the southern Himalayan slopes, in the approximate location of the Southern Tibet region.

In 1912, a Republic of China special envoy to the Sichuan-Yunnan borderlands arrived at Yabiqu Gong and erected a new boundary marker beside the original Qing-era one.^[2]

From 1913 to 1914, the Simla Conference was convened at Shimla in British India, attended by representatives of Britain, the Republic of China, and Tibet. Sir Henry McMahon, Foreign Secretary of the Government of British India, and the Tibetan government (Kashag) representative Lonchen Shatra Paljor Dorje exchanged secret correspondence incorporating a new "Indo-Tibetan boundary line" into the conference maps, giving rise to the McMahon Line. This line transferred roughly 90,000 square kilometres of territory historically under Tibetan administration to British India, shifting India's northeastern boundary northward from the foothills at the base of the Himalayas (the traditional customary line recognised by China) to the Himalayan ridge, in some places extending beyond it, and compressing Tibetan territory by over a hundred kilometres.

The Republic of China government representative refused to formally sign the convention, in response to opposition from the central Beiyang Government, thereby rejecting and refusing to recognise it. The Tibetan side also declined to recognise the McMahon Line and the convention, as Britain had not delivered on its promised concessions to Tibet. The Republic of China government subsequently issued multiple statements rejecting the Simla Convention and the McMahon Line.^[1]

In 1948, with China embroiled in the Chinese Civil War, the newly independent India considered itself the legal successor to British India's territorial claims following the Partition of India and began deploying troops into the area. China maintained that the Simla Convention had no legal validity and refused to recognise it. In 1949, the Government of the Republic of China relocated to Taiwan following its defeat in the civil war and severed diplomatic relations with India.

During the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the Government of the Republic of China publicly stated on multiple occasions that it had never accepted and firmly opposed the use of the McMahon Line as the Sino-Indian boundary, maintaining its position as what it described as the sole legitimate government of China. The ROC government also formally protested the United States government's recognition of the McMahon Line.^[3]