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From International Socialism (1st series), No.17, Summer 1964, p.31.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The China-India Border
Alastair Lamb
Chatham House Essays No. 2
Published for RIIA by OUP, 12s 6d.
Peking Versus Delhi
George N. Patterson
Faber, 35s.
The small change of Sino-Indian bargaining – the historic evidence, for each claiming bits of frontier territory of the other – are reviewed competently in Alastair Lamb’s essay. Assuming – as he does, and this reviewer doesn’t – that the present Governments in Delhi and Peking are bound by the treaties and practices of previous regimes covering roughly the same geographical areas, the Indian and Chinese border claims are justified in the ratio of about 5 : 1. Patterson’s aim is larger: ‘to describe and analyse the origins and cause of the conflict between China and India ... (and) to deal with all the areas in which conflict either has arisen or is likely to arise!’. His performance is uneven. There is in in fact no analysis of causes beyond the stereotypes of Chinese nationalism and Indian weakness of will (the latter embodied in Nehru and Panikkar, Indian Ambassador to Peking throughout most of the period). As for the arena of conflict, only those areas of which the author has personal experience, Tibet, Nepal and some of the border territories, are dealt with coherently.
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Last updated on 9 April 2010