Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence
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The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence or Panchsheel are a series of agreements between the People's Republic of China and India. After the Central Chinese Government took control of Tibet, China came into increasing conflict with India. However, both nations were newly-established and interested in finding ways to avoid further conflict. Therefore in 1954 the two nations drew up the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence:
- Mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty
- Mutual non-aggression
- Mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs
- Equality and mutual benefit
- Peaceful co-existence
The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence were first put forth by Premier Zhou Enlai of China at the start of negotiations that took place in Beijing from December 1953 to April 1954 between the Delegation of the Chinese Government and the Delegation of the Indian Government on the relations between the two countries with respect to Tibet.
Later, the Five Principles were formally written into the preface to the "Agreement Between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of India on Trade and Intercourse Between the Tibet Region of China and India" concluded between the two sides. Since June 1954, the Five Principles were contained in the joint communique issued by Premier Zhou Enlai of China and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and have been adopted in many other international documents. As norms of relations between nations, they have become widely recognized and accepted throughout the world.
Despite the existence of the Panchsheel, continued differences between the two nations led to the Sino-Indian War in 1962.
Indian historians have claimed[citation needed] the Panchsheel to be a naïve diplomatic document. Nehru's motivation was that in the absence of either the resources or a policy for defense for the Himalayan region, Indian hope seemed to rest on the premise that establishing a physiological buffer between India and the People’s Republic of China would act in place of a physical buffer zone. Thus the catch phrase of India's diplomacy with China in the 1950s was “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” which means, in Hindi, "Indians and Chinese are brothers"
