China on Thursday renamed 15 places — including residential areas, mountains, rivers and a mountain pass — situated in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, which it claims as its own territory called ‘South Tibet’.

The move comes two days before Beijing’s new border law, initially passed earlier this year and titled the ‘Land Border Law of the People’s Republic of China’, is to come into effect on 1 January 2022. 

The law, which aims to strengthen border control, directly concerns countries that share a land border with China, and has potential implications for India’s ongoing tensions with it along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

India is yet to respond to the latest development. However, the Ministry of External Affairs has repeatedly maintained that Arunachal Pradesh is an “integral and inalienable part of India”.

According to a report in state-run daily Global Times Thursday, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs announced that it had “standardised” in Chinese characters and Tibetan and Roman alphabets the names of 15 places in what it refers to as ‘Zangnan’, the ‘southern part of Xizang’, as it calls the Tibet Autonomous Region.  

This is not the first time China has “standardised” names of places in Arunachal Pradesh. The first batch of changed names were issued in 2017 for six places in the state.

India and China have been locked in a border stand-off in the northern Ladakh sector of the LAC since May 2020.

(With inputs from agencies)