Rename the River, Own the Valley: China Names the Land it has Never Held

What if I told you, from today onwards, your name would be different, something similar, but not the same. It won’t be the one that you recognise and identify with, it won’t be the one you learned the meaning of, it won’t be the one you keep telling people when they ask you who you are. Why? Just because I have the right to. This right doesn’t stem from any legal or written source but purely from entitlement.

Illustration by The Geostrata

Now, read this, as slowly as you can,

“China has full sovereign rights to name places in Zangnan”,

said their foreign ministry. Zangan is not a region in China. It is, was and will always be an integral part of India. Then again, on April 12, 2026, India's Ministry of External Affairs had to issue a statement rejecting what it called "mischievous" attempts by China to assign fictitious names to Indian territory. The word mischievous is doing all the work in that sentence, diplomatic enough to avoid escalation, but sharp enough to signal that this is not something India would entertain.

This was not a one-time silly mistake. It was the sixth such attempt in a decade that China has published a batch of renamed locations in Arunachal Pradesh, a state it calls Zangnan and claims as "south Tibet."

THE ANCIENT LOGIC OF NAMING

The Ancient Egyptians had a word — ren — for the name as a component of the soul itself. To know a person's true name was to have power over them. Erase the name, and you begin to erase the person.

It is a belief that predates diplomacy, predates borders, predates the nation-state. But it has never really gone away.

India has the tradition of naamkaran, the naming ceremony, a ritual that roots a child in identity, family, and place. It is a claim of belonging. China, interestingly, also has the tradition of “乳名, rǔmíng or 小名, xiǎomíng”; which are informal names given to children that are replaced in adulthood. One wonders, watching Beijing's diplomatic exercises, whether Chinese diplomacy has adopted something similar: provisional names, casually assigned, meant to be normalised over time until the provisional becomes the permanent.

WHAT IS THIS ACTUALLY ABOUT?

Here is the honest read: this was never about names. To understand the issue deeper, look at this map, which explains which regions are being renamed by China and into what. The difference has been kept minute, similar names, to avoid any criticism or speculation, but different enough to sound Chinese at a glance. 

China's claim over Arunachal Pradesh rests on historical and religious arguments; the second-most important monastery in Tibetan Buddhism is in Tawang, the sixth Dalai Lama was born there, and Beijing insists the region is historically part of Tibet, which it considers its own. The Tibetan government-in-exile, notably, holds the opposite view: that Arunachal Pradesh is India's. Oh, the irony!

However, this renaming was not at all about settling a historical dispute. It was about creating a paper trail. Each batch of Chinese names is a bureaucratic act that tries to build an alternative geography. One where Indian towns appear in Chinese administrative records under Chinese names, where rivers carry designations assigned in Beijing rather than by the people who have lived along them for generations. Over time, this repetition becomes familiarity. Familiarity becomes precedent.

This is a form of psychological warfare, and the most common one. Kings and empires have done this for centuries, renaming conquered territories as a first act of administrative absorption. What China is doing now is the modern, paperwork version of the same tendency

MEANWHILE, IN XINJIANG

The renaming of locations in Arunachal Pradesh coincided this month with another development: China's announcement of a new county in Xinjiang called Cenling, located near the Karakoram range, close to both Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the western sector of the Line of Actual Control. It is the third new county established by China in Xinjiang in just over a year, following Hean and Hekang, against which India lodged protests last year because parts of their jurisdiction fall within Ladakh.

Read together, these moves: renaming in the east, new counties in the west, are not unrelated events. They are part of the same cartographic project: the administrative consolidation of contested geography, piece by piece, on paper and then, eventually, in fact.

THE CIVILISATION UNDERNEATH THE DISPUTE

Following China's latest move to assign fictitious Chinese names to several places in Arunachal Pradesh, the MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal issued a strong response on April 12, 2026, in New Delhi, categorically rejecting the "mischievous attempts" and asserting that

Arunachal Pradesh is an integral and inalienable part of India.

But the depth of what is being contested here goes beyond just sovereignty in the legal sense. The locations China renamed include rivers, mountain passes, valleys and towns. They carry local names that have been in use for generations, names embedded in language, in memory, in the everyday navigation of people's lives, in culture. When you rename a river that a community has called by one name for five hundred years, you are not updating a map. You are insulting the place's historicity.

BEIJING IS BEING TOLD

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun responded to India's rejection, 

“The Zangnan region belongs to China. The Chinese government’s recent effort to standardise the names of some of the places in Zangnan is fully within China’s sovereignty”. 

India's consistent, firm rejections are the right response. But firmness alone, in the long run, will not be enough. The renaming project is a symptom of something larger: the accumulation of symbolic and strategic instruments through which China communicates power across the region. Names are where manipulation starts, but they are rarely where it ends.

There is an old idea in international relations, “that territory belongs to whoever can hold it.” China seems to be testing a corollary: that territory eventually belongs to whoever names it and repeats the claim long enough. India's answer, for six rounds now, has been that history and reality are not so easily rewritten.

But, somewhere in Arunachal Pradesh, people still call their rivers by what they have always been called and at the end.

WILL HINDI-CHINI EVER BE "BHAI-BHAI" AGAIN?

The phrase meant something once upon a time, "Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai" — Indians and Chinese are brothers, was the rallying cry of a friendship that, although briefly, felt real. That was 1954. A lot of mountains have been crossed since then, and many of those were not in the spirit of brotherhood.

Yet, history offers a different story. Long before borders were drawn in ink and disputed in briefing rooms, India and China were brothers. Silk and scripture moved between them. Buddhist pilgrims like Xuanzang crossed the mighty Himalayas and were received with hospitality. The mountains that divide these two civilisations never fully succeeded in doing so, because the desire to understand each other was stronger than the instinct to dominate. That history belongs to both countries equally, and it is being quietly dishonoured every time Beijing publishes another list of names that nobody in Arunachal Pradesh asked for.

If China is serious about people-to-people ties, about something deeper than trade figures and border protocols, then it needs to reckon with what these exercises actually communicate; not to governments, but to people. You do not build fraternity by erasing someone's geography. You do not open a new chapter by rewriting someone else's. India has, repeatedly and at considerable cost, extended its hand. What comes back, each time, is another list. At some point, the question stops being about names and starts being about whether China actually wants a friend in the neighbourhood or just more territory.

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BY SHUBHANGI ASHISH

COVERING PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

TEAM GEOSTRATA

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