Chinese Map

China and its land grab


Thirty one per cent of China is forcefully occupied. That is when we go with the official Chinese record. China forcefully occupied Xinjiang in 1949 and Tibet in 1950. As per the official Chinese record, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has an area of 1.66 million square kilometers, that is 17.68% of total land area of China, i.e., 93,88,210 square kilometers, as per the World Bank Databank.

The Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) has an area of 1.22 million square kilometre, i.e., 13% of the total land area of China — that makes 31% of the total land area of China. And 44.31% if we take into account the claims made by Tibetan Government in Exile in India or Central Tibetan Administration.



The Central Tibetan Administration claims historical Greater Tibet has a land area of 2.5 million square kilometers and the bulk of historical Tibet lies outside the Tibet Autonomous Region. China had already merged more than half of the Greater Tibet in other Chinese provinces before it announced the formation of TAR in 1965.



China also occupies two pieces of Indian territories. It includes Aksai Chin, a 38,000 square kilometre border area in Ladakh that China occupied in 1962 India-China war while Pakistan ceded to China 5,180 square kilometre of occupied Indian territory in 1963 under Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement.

1.Xinjiang

2. Tibet

The native population of Xinjiang is Uyghur Muslims while Tibetans are followers of Buddhism. They have always been fiercely patriotic, throughout the history, struggling to make their homeland free from the Chinese and Mongol dynasties earlier and the People’s Republic of China now.

Uyghur Muslims’ government-in-exile is in USA,

the East Turkistan Government in Exile. They call Xinjiang East Turkistan based on their Turkic origin. Uyghur Muslims had brief periods of independence twice during the China’s civil war with an independent Islamic Republic of East Turkistan. Uyghur activists celebrate independency day on November 12.

Tibetan government-in-exile is located in India.

It is headed by a democratically elected President in Exile. Earlier, the Dalai Lama, a globally respected figure, Nobel Laureate and the most important Tibetan monk, was used to be the supreme spiritual and political authority of Tibet but he decided to hand over the political structure to a democratically elected system in 2011.

Tibetans celebrate their Independence Day on February 13 and Tibet Uprising Day on March 10. Tibet was declared an independent nation on February 13, 1913.

On March 10, 1959, Tibetans revolted against Chinese suppression. Tibetans suspected China planned to kidnap the Dalai Lama and start a new scale of violence and suppression. 300,000 Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama’s palace and he was evacuated to India. Violence broke out in Tibetan capital Lhasa and in other parts of Greater Tibet against the Chinese rule. In response, China destroyed the Dalai Lama’s palace and thousands of Tibetan monasteries and killed tens of thousands of people to crush the uprising according to different human rights reports.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2021 10:23AM by administrator.