Talk:Simla Convention

Section April 2009 continued in March 2021

For the previous discussion see the section, see § April 2009.

Now archived at Talk:Simla Convention/Archive 1#April 2009

In trying to figure out how to clean up the chaotic footnotes in the middle of the page, I noticed this edit made by PBS (I hope you are still around?), and this section of the talk page.

Some comments here before I start cleaning up.

• The citation to Maxwell is pointless without a page number or a quote. We can't figure out what it is referring to.
• Calvin's is student research and so it is also a substandard source.
• Sinha is perfectly fine, but the page numbers don't make sense. But all that it is being used for is the fact that the draft convention was signed by three parties but the final convention by only two parties. That fact can be sourced easily in myriads of places.
• Reading through the discussion above, I see that the people were exercises about two things (1) the McMahon Line wasn't negotiated with the Chinese representative (2) the Chinese representative only got to see a small-scale map. I will try to find better sources for these, but I also think they should be stated in the main body of the article, not buried in some footnotes. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 16:04, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. I am still around. I will have a look at this in the next day or so. -- PBS (talk) 17:06, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

I have not got time at right now to address all the points you mention (and I will look at them over the next day or so) however a quick look at the link you provided above to one of my edits explains the Neville Maxwell citation. Some one removed the long citation from the References section. Probably because the of link rot, without checking for an archived version), see here. That Maxwell is a web page explains why there are no page numbers. -- PBS (talk) 17:24, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks PBS. I have another problem, whenever you want to look into it. The text says:

During the Simlar conference a small scale map of the Tibetan Indian border was provided as an annex to the proposed agreement, the annex was not discussed by the Chinese, and the details on a large scale map of what would become known as the McMahon Line were not furnished to the Chinese for their consideration.

References

The text is wrong, and it doesn't say what the source is saying. There was only one map used in the tripartite discussions, which is part of the official record. It can be found at the top of this page of Claude Arpi. It shows only two lines: a red line, which represents the boundary of Tibet (against India, Burma, China, Mongolia, Xinjiang and what have you) and a blue line, which shows the line between Inner and Outer Tibet. The "red line" and the "blue line" are referred to in the text of the Convention as well as practically every source disucssing it.

The "large scale map" representing the "McMahon Line" was only used in Tibet-British bilateral discussions. It is doubtful if the Chinese representative ever saw it. But its miniaturized version was part of the tripartite map.

The map sitting at the bottom of the page right now, uploaded by somebody called Abcabc1980 seems to be a doctored version. I have never heard of so many colours being used. So I am going to remove this map, and replace it by one of Hugh Richardson's maps. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 18:15, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

I have revised the text now. I would appreciate if you can look over it.

I still don't like this Calvin guy who claims that the McMahon Line was an "appendix" to the Tibet-China boundary. He was probably looking at the same kind of doctored map that we had here. I will find a better source soon. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 19:11, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Interjecction: Move od this talk page conversation from the section "April 2009" down to here

Interjection I have moved this talk page conversation from the section #April 2009 down to here for two reasons. A conversation 11 years old should be archived by now. Placing new commentry in so old a talk page section at the top of the talk page could easily be missed by other intersted parties. So moving it to the bottom in chronological order makes it more visible to any hypothetical interested parties. -- PBS (talk) 11:42, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

I need to make it clear to you and to any one else who is reading this exchange that I have not made a substantive edit to this article since Revision as of 11:57, 27 February 2012 (which was a largely a revert to a previous version) and since then there have been many other edits to the article so although I can help I will not necessarily be the person to answer you questions. However there is a useful tool that you can use to find out information (such as full citations) that may originally have been in the article but have subsequently been accidental (or purposefully) removed. See "Wikipedia:WikiBlame". Now to go through you points all of which seem to be items I was involved with.

1. Maxwell is dealt with. Is the link adequate?
2. "Calvin's is student research". Yes and no. He Calvin was at the time a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy and the paper was written for and published by the "[U.S.] Marine Corps Command and Staff College", and it carries a lot of citations. Is there an information supported by that paper to which you object to being inaccurate? If so what?
3. Sinha. Someone has messed with the citation format since I first added then eg "Sinha, pp. 5,12 (pdf pp. 1,8)" seems to me clear enough, what is it with the page numbers as they are now that "don't make sense"?
4. The "nb 1" note above is cited as "(Barnard 1984)". This is a mistake it should have been ("Calvin 1984)"
   • Calvin, James Barnard, "The China-India Border War", Marine Corps Command and Staff College, April 1984 (cited 38 times in Google Scholar)

   And that seems to contain the quote verbatim (with the line break difference of "be-come" changed to "become"). As I wrote before the paper contains a lot of citations in this case Calvin cites: Lamb, Alastair (1964). The China-India Border. London: Oxford, p. 145.

-- PBS (talk) 13:14, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Sources don't matter a great deal. As long as they are established facts, many sources can be found. It is only the POV commentaries that are specific to particular sources that are an issue, and, in those cases, we need to exercise caution as per WP:CONTEXTMATTERS. Calvin might have been a good officer of the Marine Corps, but that doesn't make him an expert on obscure British colonial history. (See my comments at Talk:Sino-Indian War#Sources.) The same goes for Maxwell. He was a journalist based in India during the 1950s and 1960s. Both he and his newspaper, The Times, seem to have had preconceived notions of what was going on with the Assam Himalaya (Arunachal Pradesh) and their entire coverage is corrupted as a result. For instance, in 1963, apparently The Times printed a map putting it into China. Olaf Caroe was pained to remark:

Of all the National dailies that appeared today-some of them have rather good maps, particularly the Daily Mail-not one of them repeated this error. Why on earth The Times, which has always prided itself on being so well informed on foreign correspondence, should publish a thing which definitely supports Chinese claims against a member of the Commonwealth, I think I must leave it to the audience to judge.

Coming back to Calvin, I do intend to replace him with a better source which doesn't make any claims about an "appendix". -- Kautilya3 (talk) 13:43, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Hugh Richardson's map of the Simla Conference lines

Thanks for pointing out Calvin's citation to Lamb. (It is in Volume 1, funnily, whereas the Simla Convention itself is discussed in Volume 2.) Calvin is right that the term "appendix" was used by Lamb but the map Lamb shows is the standard map (as on Claude Arpi's web site) and no such thing as an "appendix" is visible.

Checking Mehra (McMahon Line and After), I find that the discussion started on 17 February 1915, in the fourth meeting of the Conference, where McMahon made a statement on "Limits of Tibet" and placed on the conference table a map showing the "red line" as well as the "blue line". We can see these lines on Hugh Richardson's map on the main page as well as here, as dashed red line and dashed blue line. And we can also see here the Chinese counterproposal (light blue line), claiming all the area up to the bend in the Brahmaputra river as part of China (not Tibet). So we can see that the Assam Himalayan region was very much in the frame and wasn't some kind of an appendix.

I was also greatly amused to read about the "British trick", which was apparently a Chinese complaint, but one which Lamb agrees with. Mehra points out that the boundary claimed by China was the same one that the Russians had proposed during the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. There is no mention of any Russian tricks or Chinese tricks in Lamb's writings. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:08, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Also worth noting that the Encyclopedia Britannica claims that the McMahon Line runs from the border of Bhutan till the "great bend in the Brahmaputra River". Purely an accident that it matches with the Chinese claim? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:18, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

References

I originally wrote this article because of the mention of it in the British press back in 2008. When I looked it up on Wikipedia there was no mention of it. So I wrote the article with what was easily available on the internet. There is a badge that is sold in Britain which reads "I didn't vote for them", and most people of voting age in the Britain do not vote for the party or parties that form the Government, so I have no dog in this fight. In many ways it demonstrated the decline of the Britain as a global power and the corresponding ascendency of China. It amused me at the time that the HMG (Her Majesty Government) thought it worth throwing this bargaining chip onto the table for a perceived small financial benefit. I bet HMG would be pleased to still have this chip to play, given the souring relationship between London and Beijing. There were two issues at the time which puzzled me:

1. Why was there little to no reported noise out of the "Tibet is a country" lobby?
2. Why was there so little noise from the Indian government? Because although the borders in the region do not now affect Britain's interests directly they do affect India's.

In hind sight I ought to have realised that this issue would excite some POV slants. However I think that the article has been reasonably balanced most of the time, but I am no expert and I have no direct access to detailed academic papers on the subject. As you seem to do so, I am happy to let you fix any mistakes, but please follow the advise of "Assert facts, not opinions" (and "Let the facts speak for themselves"). -- PBS (talk) 11:56, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks PBS. I didn't notice that you had written the article first. I admit it is remarkably free of POV, except what got introduced through lobbying in April 2009.

As for "Tibet is a country", I noticed that when the British Indian government first acquired a border with Tibet in 1816, they called it the "Chinese Tartary". So the "Tibet is a country" ship has long sailed away. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:56, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

"Unequal treaty"

This page has been categorised as an "unequal treaty" (supposedly imposed on China). That is completely silly. China came to Simla of its own accord, because the British were trying to get it back into Tibet from where they were driven out. And they didn't even sign it in the end! Nothing has been imposed on them. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 13:24, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

British actions in Tibet- 'expedition' or 'invasion'?

I feel that calling the British incursions into Tibet an 'expedition', as has been historically the case, is unjust and misleading. The Younghusband 'expedition' was through violent force, and many Tibetans lost their lives. I am aware that the name 'Younghusband expedition' is generally regarded as the standard historical term, but I feel that it is misleading in nature and a remnant of British colonial attempts at downplaying the events that transpired. Would it not be more suitable to label it the 1903-4 British incursion (or invasion) and have a link that ties it to the so-called Younghusband Expedition's wiki? I have already attempted this, but the change was revoked. If I am wrong, could someone explain their reasoning? Many thanks. Taishō219 (talk) 10:28, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

New edits to the lead

MainBody, after several trials, you have introduced the following descriptors in the lead sentence.

unratified and unequal treaty

References

Both are problematic.

"Unratified" is wrong, because all the participants at the Simla Conference were plenipotentiaries, authorised to sign the Convention on behalf of their countries. No "ratification" is required. The Chinese representative did not sign it. No further question regarding it. The British and Tibetan representatives signed it. So it was binding on those two countries. "Unratified" doesn't capture any of these complexities, which are explained later in the lead.

The second term "unequal treaty" is not in the source. You have added a WP:FAKE source for this term. This source is itself problematic.The passage you quote does not have any evidence or citation given in the book. It is pure speculation.

Even otherwise, the book is based on India Office records in London, which are highly inadequate for writing about British India. There are serious errors due to this. For example, she states on the same page that In an attempt to try to remedy the situation, and in the lull before delegates left Simla during the summer of 1914, Hardinge seized the opportunity to sign the bipartite treaty with Tibet. Almost everything in the sentence is wrong. The McMahon Line agreement was signed in March 1914 (not summer) in Delhi (not Simla) by McMahon (not Hardinge). All of this is carefully stued in Mehra, McMahon Line and After (1974), which she lists in the Bibliography, but never cites even once! Mehra wrote a review of this book, where he points out:

A major difficulty with this study is its near-complete dependence on the old Public Records Office and IO Library records in the UK, with little or no reference to the holdings of the Government of India in the National Archives at New Delhi.... Clearly though for most of what happened in Tibet the initiative came from Calcutta/New Delhi.

Due to such errors, this book is quite useless for this page, and should not be used. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:06, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

I would also urge you to provide WP:Full citations for the sources. Even though you have made an effort here, there is no ISBN number or Google Books link. So, we have no idea which edition the page numbers refer to. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:08, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

MainBody, you have silently reinstated the disputed content, without any discussion, not even edit summaries. This doesn't bode well. You have been informed about ARBIPA sanctions in place for this topic. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 13:11, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

References

I have retained "unratified" in the short description for the time being, but removed it from the lead. The treaty did not require any ratification. The Article 11 says: The present Convention will take effect from the date of signature. It is misleading to suggest that it was "unratified". It was simply not signed by China. There is no controversy about that. Everybody agrees. If some scholars use the term "unratified" to describe it, they are being disingenuous. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:29, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Commentaries

More out of date commentary

I have also removed an elaborate quote from a book review by Alfred Rubin dated back to 1967. Moreover, Lamb's book(s) suffer from the same limitations as pointed out above for Wendy Palace. The conference took place in Simla and Delhi, and these authors try to figure out what happened sitting in Londin, without making any effort to look at the records in India. Scholar Parshotam Mehra has demonstrated quite conclusively that all these judgements based on London records (whcih are patchy, not to mention the colonial-imperalist biases) are wrong. Mehra's book is now available on archive.org. And we can read it for our selves. We can't accpept these out-of-date analyses any more. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 23:41, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

The text has been reinserted again, after my removal, saying:

The documents reveal the responsible officials of British India to have acted to the injury of China in conscious violation of their instructions; deliberately misinforming their superiors in London of their actions altering documents whose publication had been ordered by Parliament; lying at an international conference table and deliberately breaking a treaty between the United Kingdom and Russia.

References

Alfred Rubin is a legal scholar, not a historian, and these comments can be taken to be a commentary on Alastair Lamb's book from a legal point of view, They do not however constitute any independent assessment of the book's historical arguments.

Professor Leo E. Rose, a Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and who specialised in the history of the Himalayan region, wrote a hisitorian's assessment of Lamb's book. Among the points he made are:

1. Lamb's book is not "objective scholarship" but rather a "special pleading". He says that Lamb makes the Chinese case better than the Chinese government itself can.
2. The non-specialist reader should be "fully aware" of the author's bias.
3. There are many places in this study in which the factual data and interpretation of the chronology could and should be questioned.
4. Lamb had access in London to only a small proportion of British Indian records on this subject, and has not used Tibetan soures at all.

Rose rejects Lamb's arguments regarding the competence of the Tibetan and British governments to sign a bipartite agreement. He says Tibet was at that time independennt and was fully in a position to sign its own agreements. Britain was ostensibly violating the Peking Convention and the Anglo-Russian Convention but under circumstances in which they didn't directly apply (by virtue of Tibet's declaration of independence). The precedents against such an interpretation [of claiming that it was against international law] are overwhelming.

Regarding the specific allegations made by Rubin, we can only guess what they are since he doesn't cite any page numbers in Lamb's book. But to the best of my knowledge, they were all disproved in subsequent work, especially that of Parshotam Mehra, who had access to the British Indian records in India.

I hold that including this kind of a quotation on Wikipedia is WP:UNDUE and WP:POV. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 15:28, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

References

UK Foreign Office quote

Goldstein, on p. 399, published this pargraph from the UK Foreign Office:

A further reason for discarding our previous attitude towards Chinese suzerainty is that it hampers our freedom to make treaties with the Tibetans themselves. In the matter of the Indo-Tibetan frontier, for instance, the agreement reached in 1914 has not proved satisfactory in practice and the Government of India would like to conclude a new and more binding agreement with Lhasa. ... But so long as we continue to recognise the overlordship of China it will be difficult to assert the validity of an agreement with the vassal State as against the objections of the suzerain in such an important international matter as a frontier.[73: FO371/35755, Tibet and the question of Chinese suzerainty, dated 10 April 1943.]

It is clear that the last sentence refers to a possible "new and more binding agreement with Lhasa". However MainBody has chosen to quote the last sentence out of context in order to claim that it refers to the validity of the Simla convention. Even the keyword '"But'" has been removed. What kind of editing is this?

PBS, if you are still around, can you provide your input please? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 12:10, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

A. Tom Grunfeld quote

Another commentary inserted today runs as follows:

A. Tom Grunfeld, an SUNY Distinguished Professor, has noted the inequality in the Simla conference. In his The Making of Modern Tibet:

From its inception, there could be no doubt as to who was conducting the conference and for whose benefit. During the entire six months of the talks, British and Tibetan officials were meeting secretly to discuss trade matters and the demarcation of the frontiers. Not only were the Chinese delegates not invited to these talks, they were not even informed of their existence. Moreover, the British were secretly monitoring all the cable communications between the Chinese delegation at Simla and their government in China...Tibet gave up territory and switched suzerains from China to Britain. It certainly did not achieve independence - unless the state of independence is judged solely by the right to sign treaties with other nations.

References

A. Tom Grunfeld was called a "SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor" and that is not a research recognition. A "college" in the US, such as the Empire State College, is a teaching-focused institution and doesn't have PhD programmes. Grunfeld's notability is more likely to be as a public-facing academic who frequently comments on Chinese affairs. John Powers has rightly noted him to be one who "enthusiastically endorses the Chinse version of the events", which makes his bias pretty clear.

The claim that "During the entire six months of the talks, British and Tibetan officials were meeting secretly" is not evidenced. After tabling the "Limits of Tibet" map in the 17 February session (see Simla Convention#McMahon's proposals), McMahon deputed Charles Bell and Archibald Rose respectively to the Tibetan and Chinese representatives to answer 'any questions'. The finer points of the India-Tibet boundary (which was already tabled) were discussed between Bell and Shatra and agreements reached on several features. Then notes were exchanged on 24-25 March. How do we get "six months" between 17 February and 24 March? Bell left notes regarding these discussions and Mehra discusses them in Chapter 19. Similearly, Rose seems to have left notes on the negotations on the articles of the Convention, Mehra discusses them in Chapter 20.

Regarding the fact that China was not informed about these talks, there are two points to note. In 1908, China negotiated trade regulations with Britain on behalf of Tibet, but it never informed Tibet about them, not even after they were completed! A footnote in Mehra's book says:

[39] In November 1908 an envoy of the Dalai Lama in Peking asked Jordan [the British envoy in Peking] about the Anglo-Russian Convention and the Trade Regulations of 1908 of which the Lama 'had heard but not told anything by the Chinese Government'. Jordan, curious why the Lama did not apply directly to the Chinese, nevertheless condescended to assist him in obtaining copies of the English text. Jordan to Grey, 25 November 1908, No. 5 in FO 535/12. (page 51)

If this is the way China treats other countries, what kind of treatment should it expect back?

Secondly, China had no rights in Tibet during the Simla Conference. It would have gained rights only if it signed the Simla Convention, which it refused to do. Grunfeld is entirely congratulatory about that: They had nothing to gain by signing it except a reaffirmation of their suzerainty. This they felt to be unnecessary since it had been assured in so many previous pacts. If suzerainty was so "unnecessary", how can border negotations and trade regulations become so "necessary"? It is totally inconsistent. Van Praag says:

The Chinese government in 1914 had no legal basis to negotiate on behalf of Tibet nor to accept or reject boundary, trade or other bilateral agreements entered into by Tibet with other states. Thus we must conclude that not only were the Simla agreements valid and enforceable under international law as between the parties to those agreements, but China had and still has no legal basis to deny their validity.

-- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:53, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

References