Understanding The India-China Border

In the summer of 2020, China and India came close to war. The nuclear-armed adversaries both amassed troops and equipment along their disputed border in eastern Ladakh. The two sides slugged it out with fists, stones and clubs next to a fast-flowing Himalayan stream, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries, many from hypothermia.

The entire 4,000-kilometre Sino-Indian boundary is disputed. In 1962, the two countries fought a short and vicious war that went badly for India, and from which Nehru never recovered. The border, called the Line of Actual Control, is not marked on any map agreed upon by the two sides; it runs through the largely unpopulated and inhospitable high mountains of the Himalayas. From the 1990s, as Beijing and New Delhi sought to resolve their seemingly intractable border dispute, an elaborate system of agreements kept the situation akin to a kettle on a slow boil.