This seems definitive: A few days ago, China and India began “implementing an agreement to end a military standoff on their disputed Himalayan border, the two sides said on Friday, in the biggest thaw between the Asian giants since deadly clashes between their armies four years ago” (Reuters, October 25, 2024).
The process began on Wednesday and is expected to conclude by the end of the month, a senior Indian army official said.
The nuclear-armed neighbours struck a deal earlier this week on patrolling the frontier, which then paved the way for the first formal talks in five years between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia.
“According to the recently agreed solution between India and China…their frontline armies are implementing relevant work, with smooth progress so far,” Lin Jian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said.
In New Delhi, a government official aware of the details said troops on both sides had started withdrawing from the areas of Depsang and Demchok, the last remaining points where they had stood face-to-face.
Thus, I was wrong to assert in an earlier post that the border tension between the two countries would not detectably lessen for longer than ten minutes.
It’s been longer than ten minutes, and the agreement has not proved to be empty as quickly as the July 2024 so-called agreement between China and the Philippines proved to be empty, the agreement that was supposed to stop China from harassing Philippine vessels. Both China and India say that Chinese soldiers and Indian soldiers are withdrawing from points of tension in accordance with their agreement.
But the details of the agreement are not public. An Aljazeera report noted that it is unclear “whether the pact covered the length of the border or just points where the two sides have been involved in a standoff since 2020.”
So let’s wait and see. At present I am agnostic—about the timeline, not about whether China will sooner or later try some new incursion along this border. Perhaps China really does want to cool things off with India for some indefinite period of time so that it can concentrate more effectively on harassing some other country or countries. There are many possibilities, but not that China is relinquishing any of its territorial ambitions here or elsewhere.
The Indian government, which had severed many economic connections with China, even halting passenger flights to China, says it is in no great hurry to restore those severed links. Perhaps India is not so sure that everything along the border will now be hunky-dory either.
