India Wins The First Round Of Ongoing Border Stand-off With China! Two More To Go

The team reported these new developments to their superiors in New Delhi, and India officially lodged a complaint with China, however, the latter denied any intrusion, and a month after that stepped up its presence by deploying around 200 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers. The PLA soldiers also constructed a helipad in the area.

In response to this, the then incumbent Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, together with the Chief of the Indian Army at the time, General K Sunderji formulated a truce offering for China, proposing that if the PLA troops withdrew from Sumdorong Chu, India will not occupy the area next summer.¹

China categorically rejected this truce offering, and the Indian Army then conducted what is known as ‘Operation Falcon’, as part of which, an entire brigade was airlifted to the nearest helipad in the region in the Zimithang village of Tawang. The Indian forces then moved to occupy several ridges overlooking the Sumdorong Chu valley, which included Langro La and the Hathung La ridge across the Namka Chu from Thag La. 

India’s move was met with a threat from the then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping who said that China would “teach India a lesson” just like 1962, to which India responded by granting full statehood to Arunachal Pradesh in December 1986, which was a Union Territory before that.

Things then escalated further in the summer of 1987, when the PLA deployed around 20,000 soldiers, and India responded in equal measure. Amidst this troop buildup, India’s External Affairs Minister undertook a visit to China, to make another attempt at resolving the situation. 

China then invited Mr. Gandhi for talks, who accepted this invitation and went to China in 1988. During this visit, India and China agreed to diffuse tensions on the border and set up a Joint Working Group (JWG) to resolve boundary disputes.

This led to a significant reduction of troops from both sides along the border, however, the stand-off still continued alongside the meetings of the JWG. After several rounds of JWG talks, India and China signed an agreement in 1993 for “the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility along the Line of Actual Control (LAC)”.

Two years after this, in August 1995, the confrontation between the Indian and Chinese forces at Sumdorong Chu finally came to an end. So, basically, there is still hope of eventual resolution of the current stand-off in the eastern Ladakh sector after a long and arduous process of negotiations with China. 

However, it is also important to consider the global geopolitical realities of today, which are very different from the late 1980s and mid 1990s, and how exactly the current stand-off between India and China figures in these global geopolitical realities. 

Global Geopolitics And India-China Tensions

Unravelling Geopolitics has covered China’s strategic discourse in extensive detail as well as its geopolitical imperatives in the Indian subcontinent in the past to gauge Beijing’s real intentions toward India. Readers can find this coverage here and here.

For the purpose of this particular article, readers should only bear in mind that according to Unravelling Geopolitics’ assessment, it is the ‘United States’ (US) which is the primary driver of China’s policy toward India. 

So, the reasons behind China’s aggression in the eastern Ladakh sector in 2020 can be found in its ongoing competition with the US for global supremacy. In particular, it was Beijing’s perception of threat from India to its ambitious $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project that motivated Chinese aggression in the eastern Ladakh sector.

Strictly geopolitically speaking, the CPEC project is aimed at addressing China’s energy security needs by providing it a land corridor for transporting energy resources, thereby reducing its reliance on maritime routes passing through strategic choke points in the Indian Ocean, which would come under threat in the event of a conflict with the US.

This land corridor passes through the Gilgit-Baltistan region in the Pakistan Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (PoJK) which is claimed by India, and is therefore under risk of an eventuality of war between India and Pakistan.

Also, the infrastructure projects led by India’s Narendra Modi government near the LAC, for instance, the expedited construction of the 225-km Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) road in eastern Ladakh provides the Indian military with an opening to the Karakoram Pass, threatening the China-Pakistan Karakoram highway to the north of this pass, which serves as a major communication route to the CPEC across Khunjerab Pass in Pakistan’s illegally occupied city of Gilgit.

So, China and Pakistan are hand -in-gloves in their efforts against India because of their shared perception of India’s rise as a potential threat to the CPEC project, which is a game changer for both the countries.

Evidence of this can be found in a Pakistani media report citing Dr. Wang Shida, the Deputy Director of the Institute for South Asian Studies of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), which is one of China’s most influential think tank and is directly under the Ministry of State Security (MoSS), China’s external intelligence arm.

The Express Tribune, a Pakistan-based English-language newspaper, reported that days before the violent Indo-China standoff in June 2020, Wang had argued that China was forced to enter into the Kashmir dispute because of India’s change to J&K’s status in August 2019.

“India ‘opened up new territory on the map,’ incorporated part of the areas under the local jurisdiction of Xinjiang and Tibet into its Ladakh union territory and placed Pakistani-administered Kashmir within its so-called union territories of Jammu and Kashmir,” Wang was cited by The Express Tribune as having written shortly before the violent Indo-China standoff in June 2020.

“This forced China into the Kashmir dispute, stimulated China and Pakistan to take counter-actions, and dramatically increased the difficulty in resolving the border issue between China and India,” Wang further said.

Likewise, China’s actions along the eastern sector of the Indo-Tibetan border, particularly, in the Arunachal sector also need to be viewed in the same context. China needs to occupy the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh to be able to dominate the Indian subcontinent. 

This is because, the subcontinent is positioned in such a way that a country that dominates it can exert a strong influence over the maritime activity in the Indian Ocean, which is an essential requirement for China in its competition with the US, as the overland route through CPEC corridor cannot be an absolute alternative to China’s trade route through the Indian Ocean, which as pointed out earlier, could come under threat in the event of a conflict with the US.

Quite simply, maritime routes are the safest and most efficient medium for trade and commerce. Also, the viability of the CPEC corridor has come into question in recent years with reports pointing out how even after 20 years, the Chinese have not been able to build the infrastructure such as oil terminals, oil refineries and storage facilities, or dual highways or railroads for crude transportation to China through this corridor.

This is because the corridor passes through some of the most volatile regions of Pakistan which have seen an upsurge in insurgent activity against Pakistan’s security forces as well as Chinese engineers and workers involved in CPEC projects. 

Therefore, the ultimate insurance for China’s energy needs is only going to come through security of its maritime routes. So, how does Arunachal Pradesh factor in all of this?

Over 300 km northeast of Tawang, a river known as the ‘Yarlung Tsangpo River’ in Tibet, enters into India near the village of Gelling in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, and from there it flows southwest as the ‘Brahmaputra’ through another Indian state called Assam to enter into Bangladesh where it becomes ‘Jamuna’ before it drains into the Indian Ocean.

China’s control over the upper reaches of this river, which flows through Tibet, gives an impression that it can regulate the river’s flow into India and Bangladesh, creating water scarcity for these two countries that depend heavily on it for water supply. However, the interesting reality is that while two-thirds of this river flows through Tibet, most of its water actually collects in Arunachal Pradesh, and therefore it becomes so important for Beijing to occupy this region.

Control over such a crucial water supply could afford China a huge leverage in diplomatic and economic engagements with Bangladesh, which it could potentially use to acquire overseas basing rights for the PLA Navy in that country. This constitutes China’s core geopolitical interests in the Indian Subcontinent, and it is in this context that we must view the Chinese behaviour in the eastern sector of the Indo-Tibetan border.

Another important aspect to China’s behaviour toward India, is the timeline that Beijing has set for itself to supplant the US as a preeminent global power. The recent remarks made by retired PLA Colonel Liu Mingfu, known to be one of the most trusted advisors to President Xi Jinping, are noteworthy in this regard.

Liu said in an interview in March that the Sino-US competition has entered its final phase which could last 2-3 decades, making China “the most unsafe country in the world under the increasingly serious threat from the United States” and recommended strengthening country’s national defense and military construction.

So, going by Liu’s remarks, if the next 2-3 decades is indeed China’s timeline to finish off its competition with the US, the next decade should be considered as the duration when Beijing will be laying the groundwork for a potential kinetic war with the US. 

For instance, per the US Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) 2023 annual report on China, the CPEC energy pipeline could be completed in a decade at the earliest, meaning China’s resolve to protect its investments in the CPEC is currently perhaps the highest ever and it is only going to increase with the progress of CPEC.²

Likewise, China’s resolve to establish its undisputed dominance over the Indian subcontinent will also increase as it inches toward its goal to upend the US-led world order and fulfil the prophecy of Zhongguo, or the ‘Middle Kingdom’, as imperial China described itself, becoming the ‘civilised’ centre of the world. 

So, overall, the risk of a Sino-Indian regional conflict is only going to increase with the progress of CPEC and/or increasing infrastructure development on either side of the eastern sector of the Indo-Tibetan border. 

Tanmay Kadam is a geopolitical observer based in India. He has experience working as a Defense and International Affairs journalist for EurAsian Times. He can be contacted at tanmaykadam700@gmail.com.

1. Prabhash K. Datta, India-China tension: Sumdorong Chu military standoff that took 9 years to defuse, India Today, September 14, 2020 ↩︎
2. Samir Tata, War Clouds Over the Indian Horizon?, The Royal United Services Institute For Defense And Security Studies (RUSI), March 6, 2024 ↩︎