基于印度主流媒体的中印边界争端批判地缘政治解读

The border issue holds significant importance in China-India relations, persistently hampering their development. Existing scholarship tends to interpret the causes of China-India border disputes through lenses of colonization, history, security and third-party involvement. However, these approaches overlook the complex power dynamics within the state which regards the border as the tools. To comprehensively explore the new-round China-India border dispute since May 2020, this paper cites the thought and methods of critical geopolitics, applies discourse analysis of geopolitical imaginations, and proposes a novel perspective that analyzes the border dispute in terms of the synergetic role of multiple actors. The findings indicate that: (1) The border dispute can be considered as tools or resources for multiple actors to achieve their goals or interests through jointly constructing geopolitical discourses and imaginations related to border disputes; (2) Based on Indian mainstream media news from April 2020 to March 2021, the Bharatiya Janata Party, Congress Party, the military, Ministry of External Affairs and the business and social elites in India have utilized the border conflicts as tools and resources to pursue political and economic interests through three forms of geopolitical imagination: paranoid style, intimate metaphor and moral resistance, thereby exacerbating the dispute; (3) The border dispute from May 2020 to February 2021 is regarded as a continuous process exploited by Indian multi-actors, which means that the conflicts, like the confrontation in Pangong Lake, occurred when the multi-actors' interests were not yet secured, but tend to subside once their interests are largely met. In this regard, China should rationally understand the periodic and persistent nature of China- India border disputes and actively build complementary and cooperative structures between the two countries through positive methods like "appreciative inquiry" which may effectively mitigate or resolve border disputes.