The 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement, also called the Panchsheel Agreement,[1] officially the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse Between Tibet Region of China and India, was signed by China and India in Peking on 29 April 1954. The preamble of the agreement stated the panchsheel, or the five principles of peaceful coexistence, that China proposed and India favoured. The agreement reflected the adjustment of the previously existing trade relations between Tibet and India to the changed context of India's decolonisation and China's assertion of suzerainty over Tibet. Bertil Lintner writes that in the agreement, "Tibet was referred to, for the first time in history, as 'the Tibet Region of China'".[2]
The agreement expired on 6 June 1962, as per the original term limit, in the midst of the Sino-Indian border tensions. It was not renewed. By October of that year, war broke out between the two sides.[3]
- ^ Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India (2010), pp. 240–243.
- ^ Lintner, Bertil (2012). Great Game East : India, China And The Struggle For Asia's Most VolatileFrontier. HarperCollins Publishers India. Introduction. ISBN 978-93-5029-536-6.
- ^ Lintner, China's India War (2018), pp. 142–143: "But the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India, which was concluded in 1954, expired on 6 June 1962, and, at a time when tension was mounting along the frontier, there was no interest on either side to have the agreement extended."