India - China Border Tensions Continue To Escalate

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Image from The Telegraph (India)

China’s India Land Grab -- Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

NEW DELHI – Stoking tensions with Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines over islands in the South and East China Seas has not prevented an increasingly assertive China from opening yet another front by staging a military incursion across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier. On the night of April 15, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) platoon stealthily intruded near the China-India-Pakistan tri-junction, established a camp 19 kilometers (12 miles) inside Indian-controlled territory, and presented India’s government with the potential loss of a strategically vital 750-square-kilometer high-altitude plateau.

A stunned India, already reeling under a crippling domestic political crisis, has groped for an effective response to China’s land-grab – the largest and most strategic real estate China has seized since it began pursuing a more muscular policy toward its neighbors. Whether China intends to stay put by building permanent structures for its troops on the plateau’s icy heights, or plans to withdraw after having extracted humiliating military concessions from India, remains an open – and in some ways a moot – question.

Read more ....

My Comments: Even with all of these threats and warnings .... the Chinese are still looking for opportunities and openings along the border .... stroking tensions even further. The above map illustrates how the much situation has changed on the border .... and why going back will now be very difficult for both sides.

Update #1: China's border rows mirror grim history -- Peter Lee, Asia Times

Update #2: The Most Dangerous Border in the World. Why is China picking a fight with India? -- Ely Ratner and Alexander Sullivan, Foreign Policy