Experts baffled by China-India border stand-off amid improving ties

It's more than 5,000 metres above sea level, cold, inhospitable, uninhabited, with hardly any vegetation or wildlife in sight. Welcome to the icy desert wastelands of Daulat Beg Oldi, a forgotten pit stop on the Silk Road catapulted to overnight geopolitical fame as two nuclear neighbours vie for its possession in a dangerous game of tactical brinkmanship.

For two weeks now, Chinese and Indian soldiers have been standing eyeball to eyeball, barely 100 metres apart, at this easternmost point of the Karakoram Range on the western sector of the China-India border.

Both sides claim the land as their own in an unusually public show of mutual defiance that threatens to unhinge some of their newfound comity in an otherwise fraught relationship, and cast a shadow on Premier Li Keqiang's visit to India next month.

The trouble began when Indian media started reporting a "deep incursion" on April 15 in which a platoon of about 30 Chinese soldiers entered the Daulat Beg Oldi area in the Depsang Valley of eastern Ladakh in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Shrill media reports of Chinese incursions are not uncommon in India, where Sinophobia has been wired deep into the national psyche since a drubbing by China in a border war in 1962. Every time such reports appear, New Delhi's stock response is that it's a misunderstanding caused by "perceptual differences". This time is no different.

India and China do not have a real border marked out on the ground as they never got around to negotiating one. What they follow is an undemarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC), but each side has its own perception of where that line actually lies. As a result, it is not uncommon for patrols to stray into each other's territory. Years of painstaking talks have gone into creating an elaborate mechanism to prevent such transgressions from snowballing, keeping the peace for 25 years.