The US Department of War's annual report to the Congress, which notes that China's conceptualisation of 'core interests' has expanded to now include Arunachal Pradesh, should be a matter of concern for India.

The formulation of 'core interests' is said to have entered Chinese diplomatese around the 2000s. In 2003, the then Chinese Foreign Minister, Tang Jiaquan, had told his US counterpart that Taiwan was China's core interest and that it was important to handle this since it would have implications for the broader Sino-US relations. Later, reacting to a decision by the US to sell a radar system to Taiwan in 2004, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that China would not tolerate actions of foreign powers that would damage its core interests. It also evoked the tenet of 'core interest' after then French President Nicolas Sarkozy met the Dalai Lama in 2008, asserting that Tibet concerned Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity. In the 2010s, Japanese media outlets interpreted China as expanding its ambit of 'core interests' to include the Diaoyu-Senkaku islands.    

The Chinese began to up the ante on Arunachal in the mid-2000s. The then Chinese envoy to India asserted that the entire state belonged to China. A bureaucrat serving in Arunachal was denied a visa in 2006, and following this, the practice of........

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