China has little respect for India's efforts on solving border dispute: US think tank

current Si-India border crisis has revealed that China has little respect for India's long-standing efforts to freeze status quo along its frontiers, a top US observer on South Asia has claimed. By its brazen actions, Beijing has forced New Delhi to join rest of Asia in figuring out how to deal with newest turn in China''s "salami-slicing tactics" Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Ashley Tellis said.

" current Si-Indian border crisis has revealed that China has little respect for India''s long-standing efforts to freeze status quo along two countries'' disputed frontiers or for New Delhi''s cautious efforts to avoid appearance of balancing against Beijing," he said.

Rar, treating India’s internal actions regarding Jammu and Kashmir as a provocation, it has chosen to expand its control over new parts of Himalayan borderlands through brazen actions that confront India with difficult choice of eir lumping its losses or escalating through force if negotiations presently underway yield mer returns, Tellis wrote in his latest research paper.

"By so doing, it has forced India to join rest of Asia in figuring out how to deal with newest turn in China''s salami-slicing tactics, which w distinctively mark its trajectory as a rising power," he said.

Unlike discrete and geographically localised confrontations of past, latest encounters are occurring at multiple locations along Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Lakh in eastern section of Jammu and Kashmir, which suggests a high degree of Chinese premeditation and approval for its military''s activities from very top, Tellis claimed.

" unfortunate truth is that China, having exploited initiative to seize pieces of India''s claimed territory, can w hold on to its new acquisitions forever unless India chooses to eject Chinese troops by force or decides to impose tit-for-tat costs on China by symmetrically occupying or pockets in disputed territory where it possesses a tactical vant," he said.

This rejoinder mittedly carries risks because China could parry such Indian actions using its significant reserves alrey deployed at key locations along front, in which case st would be set for perhaps a wider confrontation, he ted. Tellis said pattern of Chinese patrolling since late 1990s suggests that Beijing seeks to eventually control entire Aksai Chin plateau, on which parts of Lakh are located.

China has laid claim to this region since 1950s, but as Si-Indian rivalry has increased after Cold War, Beijing has attempted to grually bring bits and pieces of disputed frontier under its de facto authority, he said. term de facto authority itself is inequate in this context because, in absence of maps that clearly delineate which areas each side actively controls, China’s creeping appropriation of territory cant be eir contested or contained except by physical Indian obstruction, Tellis ted.

"On this count, Chinese actions have been singularly mischievous: although both countries have long committed to exchanging maps describing ir presence in disputed territories as first step toward a boundary settlement, Beijing has thus far consistently declined to follow through on its obligations,” Tellis wrote in his paper.

In large measures, this is because accepting any Indian map that marks an extant Indian presence would make it difficult for China to claim that territory in future negotiations. What China actually wants is entirety of disputed borderlands simply on strength of its claim that it once possessed m, he claimed.