The Sino-Indian Border Clashes and the Sino-Soviet Split: New Evidence from Chinese Archives

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars presents a panel discussion on Sino-Indian relations during the 1960s.

Drawing upon newly available evidence from China's Foreign Ministry Archive, Shen Zhihua, Dai Chaowu, Li Danhui, Srinath Raghavan, and Roderick MacFarquhar will discuss Sino-Indian relations during the 1960s with a particular focus on the Sino-Indian border clashes in relation to the Sino-Soviet split.

Chair
--Douglas Spelman (Kissinger Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center)

The Sino-Indian Conflict and the Sino-Soviet Split
--Shen Zhihua (Center for Cold War International History Studies, East China Normal University)

Sino-Indian Border War of 1962 and China's Response to the Colombo Proposals
--Dai Chaowu (Center for Cold War International History Studies, East China Normal University)

Mao Zedong's World Revolution Ideals and Sino-Indian Relations: Decoding Mao's Talk with the Delegation of the Communist Party of India (leftists) on 13 December 1967
--Li Danhui (Beijing University; Center for Cold War International History Studies, East China Normal University)

The Zhou Enlai-Nehru Talks
--Srinath Raghavan (National Institute of Advanced Studies)

Comments
--Roderick MacFarquhar (Harvard University)

Douglas Spelman is deputy director of the Wilson Center's Kissinger Institute on China and the United States and a former U.S. Foreign Service officer. His State Department career included postings in Hong Kong (twice), Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, AIT Taipei, and, from 2002 to 2005, as Consul General in Shanghai.

Shen Zhihua is the director of the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai, China. He is the author of numerous books on Cold War history, Sino-Soviet relations, and the history of the People’s Republic of China. His main works, in Chinese, include Thinking and Selecting: A History of the People’s Republic of China, Vol. 3, 1956-1957 (2008), Soviet Experts in China (2003), and Mao Zedong, Stalin and the Korean War (1998). He is also the editor-in-chief of A Collection of Historical Documents of the Soviet Union (2002), which comprises 34 volumes, published in Chinese.

Dai Chaowu is a professor of history at East China Normal University (ECNU) and a senior fellow at ECNU’s Center for Cold War International History Studies in Shanghai, China. Previously, he has taught at Nanjing International Studies University and Nanjing University. His main research interests encompass Chinese foreign policy during the Cold War, with a focus on China-U.S. and China-India relations; U.S. diplomatic history; and Cold War international history. Dai has authored and co-authored a number of publications, including: U.S. Intelligence Estimates and America’s China Policy: A Document History (2009), with Shen Zhihua, Yang Kuisong, et al.; Confrontation and Era of Crisis: Taiwan Strait Crises and China-United States Relations, 1954-1958 (2003); and American Diplomatic Thoughts in History (2007). His current research concentrates on the following projects: Mao, Nehru, and Sino-Indian Border War, 1959-1962, and Nixon Administration, U.S.-China Trade, and China’s Road to “Reforming and Opening.” Dai received his Ph.D. in 1996 from Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China.

Li Danhui is a professor of history at the School of International Relations at Peking University, and a senior research fellow at the Cold War International History Studies Center of East China Normal University (ECNU). Li serves as an editor-in-chief of Cold War International History Studies published by ECNU and has been the editor of Beijing-Moscow: From Alliance to Confrontation (2002), as well as China and the Indo-China Wars (2000). Li’s research focuses on post-World War II Sino-Soviet relations. Her numerous articles have appeared in major journals including Social Sciences in China and The International History Review. Among her most recent publications are “Competing for Leadership: Split or Détente in the Sino-Soviet Bloc, 1 959-1961” featured in International History Review (Volume XXX, September 2008), and “The Sino-Soviet Dispute over Assistance for Vietnam’s Anti-American War, 1965-1972,” an essay contribution to the volume Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World beyond Asia (2006), a co-publication of the Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Srinath Raghavan is a lecturer with the Defense Studies Department at King’s College in London and an associate fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore. Raghavan’s current research concentrates on the international history of post-colonial South Asia and Indian foreign and defense policies since 1947. His book War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru years will be published later this year. At present, Raghavan is writing an international history of the India-Pakistan war of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. Raghavan earned his Ph.D. from the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London.

Roderick MacFarquhar is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of history and political science and formerly the director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. He was the founding editor of The China Quarterly, and has been a fellow at a number of distinguished academic institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Columbia University in New York, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London. Previously, he has been a journalist, a TV commentator, and a Member of the British Parliament. He has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous publications on Chinese history, including the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with the late John Fairbank) and the trilogy The Origins of the Cultural Revolution.