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.
The border conflict stemmed from the declaration on April 27, 1914 of the McMahon Line by Henry McMahon, then foreign secretary of the British-run government of India, to mark the divide between the two countries.
Sun said the biggest barrier to a resolution is the size of that area. "The key obstacle Xi and other Chinese leaders have in tackling the border question is that the disputed area is too large. And both Beijing and New Delhi dug in their heels," he said.
The neighbours also dispute their border in the western Himalayas, where Indian soldiers last week confronted People's Liberation Army troops whom New Delhi accused of occupying Indian territory in Ladakh. The stand-off continued despite Xi telling Modi that he had asked the military to withdraw.
D.S. Rajan, former director of India's Chennai Centre for China Studies, said Chinese border incursions often coincided with high-level exchanges with India, including a three-week stand-off last year in which Indian authorities said Chinese troops set up tents in Ladakh ahead of a visit by Premier Li Keqiang .
"The [incursions] could be intended to apply pressure on India during talks with the Chinese side," he said.
"Xi was not expected to come out with anything tangible on the border during his India visit. He will follow the declared 'two pillars' of Chinese diplomacy - assertion and win-win cooperation - ignoring opinions outside China that these pillars contradict each other."
In the joint statement, the two countries said the first round of talks on maritime cooperation would be held this year.
