No progress on Sino-Indian border dispute during Xi Jinping visit, analysts say
Agreements reached on a number of issues, but no progress on long-running boundary row
Beijing and New Delhi failed to make progress on resolving their decades-old border dispute during President Xi Jinping's visit to India last week, despite high public expectations in China of a breakthrough, analysts said.
In a joint statement released on Friday, Xi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed their country's commitment "to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution" to the dispute, underscoring a guiding principle both sides agreed to in April 2005.
The guiding principle reaffirmed earlier agreements by China and India to appoint representatives to explore a framework to settle border issues in a "friendly, cooperative and constructive atmosphere".
Friday's joint statement said: "Pending a final resolution of the boundary question, the two sides will continue to make joint efforts to maintain peace and tranquillity in the border areas."
Dr Sun Shihai , a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the statement indicated that Xi failed to make any headway on the Sino-Indian boundary issue in his trip, even though he and Modi reached agreements in various other areas.
But Sun said the statement also sent a message to the world that "China and India will spare no efforts to prevent the 1962 bloody border conflict from happening again".
That conflict concerned a remote, Indian-administered Himalayan area of nearly 90,000 square kilometres. China calls the contested zone Southern Tibet while India refers to it as Arunachal Pradesh. Neither side has demarcated borders there.