India-China: the making of a border

India has a complicated history with regards to its border with China. The border was the product of two empires — the Manchu and the British. Being in the Himalayas and in an unpopulated area, it was not precise.

After Independence, it would have been prudent for both countries to sit and lay down a precise and accurate border. Unfortunately, India took the position that it knew where the border was and that there was no need for negotiations. The Indian position was based on its confidence in British-era maps, but not on actual control on the ground.

The beginning of the conflict

While neither India nor China had a permanent presence in the Aksai Chin, a barren, high-altitude desert, China in order to facilitate its control of Tibet built a highway through the Aksai Chin from Xinjiang and occupied it. Similarly, in the east, India established control over Tawang, a major monastery town in what is now Arunachal Pradesh. It did so on the basis of the fact that it had signed a border agreement with Tibet in 1914, at a time when Tibet had been independent, which defined the boundary by the so-called McMahon Line.

The Chinese suggested various ways to deal with what they said was an undefined border. In 1959, they proposed that the two sides accept a Line of Actual Control as the border and move forces 20 kms back from it. In 1960, Zhou Enlai, former Premier of China, came to New Delhi and proposed a swap where India would concede the Chinese position in Aksai Chin in exchange for Chinese acceptance of India’s claim over Arunachal Pradesh.

However, India refused. When India belatedly tried to recapture Aksai Chin, it led to friction with China and eventually resulted in the 1962 India-China war. After the war, the Chinese withdrew to the areas north of the McMahon Line in the east, but in the west (Ladakh), they retained some areas they had captured in the war.

Post war developments

For nearly one and a half decades, both sides stayed away from the border. In 1975, India constituted a high-level China Study Group to monitor the Sino-Indian border. It was under the directions of this body that the border was mapped with satellite imagery, and Indian police/Army patrols were ordered to regularly police the border by establishing patrolling points along it.

In February 1979, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was the foreign minister of the then Janata Party government, visited Beijing and became the first senior Indian leader to go there since the war. Vajpayee, a veteran parliamentarian, had been a critic of Nehru’s China policy. But in 1979, he saw his mission as one to restore normalcy with India’s two neighbours, Pakistan and China. Though his visit had to be cut short because of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, it did succeed in restoring a degree of normalcy in India-China ties. The Chinese motivation for accepting the Indian outreach was to ensure that New Delhi did not get too close to the Soviet Union which was, at the time, viewed as China’s principal antagonist.

Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader, suggested a revival of the 1960 Zhou proposal. In June 1980, in an interview with Krishan Kumar, Editor of Vikrant, a now defunct defence journal, Deng said that China could recognise the McMahon Line if India was willing to recognise the existing status quo. The Chinese repeatedly tried to push this proposal but the Indian government, now headed by Indira Gandhi, comprised of officials who had not forgiven China for the 1962 “betrayal”, saw this as an effort to trade one chunk of Indian territory for another.

In 1983, the Chinese went a step further and proposed not just a swap, but also that India should concede areas their forces had captured in 1962 in Ladakh. This proposal was named the ‘LAC Plus’, and it also was not accepted by the Indian government.

A time for negotiations

Nevertheless, the two sides resumed their border talks with the first round being held in December of 1981. The initial talks did not yield much. The Chinese pushed their package deal, while India wanted the talks to be held sector by sector. Therefore, the two sides were unable to come to an agreement. By the fifth round of talks in September 1984, the Indian side felt that the Chinese were coming around to their view, but they were mistaken. Even as the sixth round began in November 1985, Chinese Vice-Minister Liu Shuqing informed his Indian counterpart, Secretary (East) A.P. Venkateswaran, that there was a bigger dispute in the eastern sector, and that India would have to make unspecified concessions here for the Chinese to be able to give concessions in the west. Though they did not state it at the time, they were demanding that India concede the Tawang tract as part of the settlement.

The demand for Tawang was more fundamental, and represented a shift in China’s domestic Tibet policy since the monastery was a major centre of Tibetan Buddhism and the area around it had been controlled by Tibet till well after the 1914 agreement.

Further on, Indian and Chinese troops clashed on the border in Nathu La and Cho La in Sikkim in 1967, but things settled down thereafter. In 1975, Sikkim was incorporated into the Indian Union, an action that led to Chinese protests.

In 1983, as part of a reset of the overall Indian security posture against China, Indian officials began visiting Wangdung in the region of the Namka Chu river where the first clashes of the 1962 war had occurred. In 1986, the Chinese occupied this region and triggered a crisis that saw the forward deployment of Indian forces at a pass overlooking Wangdung. Under Operation Falcon, India moved its forces forward along the entire LAC. The Chinese response was haphazard as they were clearly taken aback by this development. In any case, the two sides soon reached an agreement to de-escalate the situation. But the crisis did reveal that the Indian Army was now very different from the force that suffered disaster in 1962.

Move towards complete normalcy

By 1985, it was clear to the Chinese that the Soviet Union’s threat had reduced because of their mis-adventure in Afghanistan. Now in order to check India’s increasing closeness to the U.S., China invited Rajiv Gandhi to Beijing as a return for Zhou’s 1960 Delhi visit. The Gandhi visit to China in December 1988 was seen as the beginning of the true normalisation of ties that had been sundered by the 1962 war. Deng told Rajiv “let both sides forget the unpleasant period in our past relations.” The two sides agreed to restore, improve and develop good neighbourly relations.

As for the border, Premier Li Peng stated that it should be settled on the basis of mutual understanding and mutual accommodation (MUMA). Rajiv Gandhi’s response to this was that there should be a “fair and reasonable… mutually acceptable solution to this question.” In the meantime, the two sides agreed to develop bilateral relations in other fields which would create the conditions for a “fair and reasonable” settlement of the boundary issue.

This was a decisive break from the past, since till then India had insisted that without the settlement of the boundary issue, there could be no normalisation of ties. This situation suggested that the priority was to maintain peace and tranquillity on the borders. The two countries then eventually re-designated the meeting of their officials as a “joint working group” (JWG) on the border issue to work together for a settlement.

Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. This is the first of a three part series on India-China border relations.

Published – September 05, 2025 08:30 am IST