In May 2025, China announced a new list of renamed places in Arunachal Pradesh, India’s northeastern state that Beijing insists on calling “Zangnan.” It is the fifth such list since 2017, and not just symbolic. These cartographic aggressions of renaming places seem to be part of a long-running strategy to undermine territorial norms and chip away at international boundaries using lawfare, infrastructure and semantics (the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning).
In geopolitics, names matter. They signal claims, establish narratives and lay the groundwork for future confrontations. China’s repeated renaming of places it does not control represents not only a challenge to India, it is an affront to the principles of the rules-based international order that the US and the West designed after World War II.
