China moves troops into India

[Fu Lai]

Chinese incursion leaves India on verge of crisis

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NEW DELHI (AP) — The platoon of Chinese soldiers slipped across the boundary into India in the middle of the night, according to Indian officials. They were ferried across the bitterly cold moonscape in Chinese army vehicles, then got out to traverse a dry creek bed with a helicopter hovering overhead for protection.

 

They finally reached their destination and pitched a tent in the barren Depsang Valley in the Ladakh region, a symbolic claim of sovereignty deep inside Indian-held territory. So stealthy was the operation that India did not discover the incursion until a day later, Indian officials said.

China denies any incursion, but Indian officials say that for two weeks, the soldiers have refused to move back over the so-called Line of Actual Control that divides Indian-ruled territory from Chinese-run land, leaving the government on the verge of a crisis with its powerful northeastern neighbor.

Indian officials fear that if they react with force, the face-off could escalate into a battle with the powerful People's Liberation Army. But doing nothing would leave a Chinese outpost deep in territory India has ruled since independence.

"If they have come 19 kilometers into India, it is not a minor LAC violation. It is a deliberate military operation. And even as India protests, more tents have come up," said Sujit Dutta, a China specialist at the Jamia Milia Islamia university in New Delhi.

"Clearly, the Chinese are testing India to see how far they can go," he said.

That is not China's stated view.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Thursday that Chinese troops had been carrying out normal patrols and had not crossed the boundary.

"China is firmly opposed to any acts that involve crossing the Line of Actual Control and sabotaging the status quo," she said at a daily briefing in Beijing as she was repeatedly questioned about the dispute.

Hua said talks to defuse the dispute were ongoing and that it should not affect relations. "As we pointed out many times, the China-India border issue is one which was left over from the past. The two sides reached important consensus that this issue should not affect the overall bilateral relations," Hua said.

Local army commanders from both sides have held three meetings over the crisis, according to Indian officials. India's foreign secretary called in the Chinese ambassador to register a strong protest. Yet the troops did not move, and even pitched a second tent, Indian officials said.

The timing of the crisis, weeks before Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is to visit India, has surprised many here. The Chinese leader's decision to make India his first trip abroad since taking office two months ago had been seen as an important gesture toward strengthening ties between rival powers that have longstanding border disputes but also growing trade relations.

Manoj Joshi, a defense analyst at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, said the timing of the incursion raises questions about "whether there is infighting within the Chinese leadership, or whether someone is trying to upstage Li."

Indian External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said Wednesday that while he had no plans to cancel a trip to Beijing next week to prepare for Li's visit, the government could reconsider in the coming week.

"A week is a long time in politics," he told reporters.

Indian politicians accused the scandal-plagued government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of floundering in fear before China.

"China realizes that India has a weak government, and a prime minister who is powerless," said Yashwant Sinha, a former foreign minister from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.

He demanded a stronger response. "A bully will back off the moment it realizes that it's dealing with a country which will not submit to its will," Sinha said.

Former Defense Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav called the government "cowardly and incompetent." He warned that China was trying to annex more territory to add to the spoils it took following its victory over India in a brief 1962 border war.

Defense Minister A.K. Antony countered that India is "united in its commitment to take every possible step to safeguard our interests."

Supporters of the right-wing Shiv Sena party burned effigies of Singh, Antony and other top officials Wednesday, demanding India retaliate by barring Chinese imports.

China is India's biggest trading partner, with bilateral trade heavily skewed in China's favor, crossing $75 billion in 2011.

Analysts feel linking a troop withdrawal to continued trade could work.

"The Chinese have to learn that such aggression cannot be delinked from trade," Dutta said.

Though the two countries have held 15 rounds of talks, their border disputes remain unresolved. India says China is occupying 38,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles) in the Aksai Chin plateau in the western Himalayas, while China claims around 90,000 square kilometers (35,000 square miles) in India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Analysts said they were baffled by Beijing's motives, since its actions could force India to move closer to Beijing's biggest rival, the United States.

"The Chinese for some reason don't seem able to see that," said Joshi.

China's aggressive posture could also force India to accelerate its own military modernization program, analysts said.

The stand-off may eventually be resolved diplomatically, "but what it really shows is the PLA's contempt for our military capability," former Indian navy chief Sushil Kumar wrote in The Indian Express newspaper.

It could also push the government to agree to the army's longstanding demand to create its own strike corps on the border.

"By needling the Indians, they are helping us to accelerate our modernization," Joshi said.

___

Associated Press researcher Zhao Liang in Beijing contributed to this report.

 

 

This is an AP story so it is not exactly balanced reporting but some facts are facts, Chinese troops moved into India.

Edited May 2, 2013 by Fu Lai (see edit history)

[Randy W]

From the New York Times

 

Where China Meets India in a High-Altitude Desert, Push Comes to Shove

What puzzles Indian analysts is that China has chosen to squabble over a barren moonscape frequented only by nomadic cattle herders.

 

“It’s an inexplicable provocation,” said Gen. Vasantha R. Raghavan, a former top Indian military commander who once commanded the region in dispute. “There is something happening inside China which is making the military act in an irrational manner.”

[Randy W]

It's not clear who Max Fisher (the author of this article) is, but this looks like a good analysis from him and the Washington Post. "Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. Before joining the Post, he edited international coverage for TheAtlantic.com. Find him on Twitter and Facebook."

 

The study that shows why China and India probably won’t clash over border dispute

 

 

The question of “why now?” is a difficult one to answer. Jake Maxwell Watts suggests in Quartz that it may be a deliberate Chinese expression of military might or that the Chinese troops might simply have gotten lost and don’t want to admit it.

Either way, we can probably breathe easy on this one, and not just because neither China nor India would be served by a conflict. China, despite its sometimes-bellicose rhetoric and its otherwise deep interest in territorial integrity, has actually shown remarkable flexibility in resolving border disputes, according to a fascinating 2005 study by the scholar M. Taylor Fravel.

 

Fravel, who published his research in the journal International Security, found that China has “frequently used cooperative means to manage its territorial conflicts, revealing a pattern of behavior far more complex than many portray. Since 1949, China has settled seventeen of its twenty-three territorial disputes. Moreover, it has offered substantial compromises in most of these settlements, usually receiving less than 50 percent of the contested land.”

 

. . .

 

Fravel also found that “China offered many concessions despite clear incentives that its simultaneous involvement in multiple conflicts created to signal toughness and resolve, not conciliation.” In other words, just because China might have wanted to project a tough image – something still true today with its island disputes in the Pacific – did not actually make it any more assertive in individual disputes. And he notes that China actually proposed a plan in 1960 to resolve Aksai Chin with India by divvying it up, along with another territory. The proposal “failed spectacularly,” but the point is that China was interested in seeking a peaceful, negotiated agreement.

 

. . .

 

The timing of compromise efforts, official documents, and statements by China’s leaders demonstrate that internal threats, not external ones, account for why and when China pursued cooperation.

 

[Fu Lai]

India and China withdraw troops from Himalayan face off

 

SRINAGAR/NEW DELHI, Indian (Reuters) - India and China simultaneously withdrew troops from camps a few meters apart in a Himalayan desert on Sunday, apparently ending a three-week standoff on a freezing plateau where the border is disputed and the Asian giants fought a war 50 years ago.

The two sides stood down after reaching an agreement during a meeting between border commanders, an Indian army official told Reuters, after the tension threatened to overshadow a planned visit by India's foreign minister to Beijing on Thursday.

 

But it was not immediately clear how far China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers had withdrawn - Delhi had claimed they were 19 km (12 miles) beyond the point it understands to be the border with China, a vaguely defined de facto line called the Line of Actual Control, which neither side agrees on.

 

Defence and foreign ministry spokesmen did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

 

"Our troops have moved one kilometer backwards from the position they were on since April 16," said the officer, from the Indian army's Northern Command, which oversees the disputed region on the fringes of India's Jammu and Kashmir state.

 

"Chinese troops have also moved away from their position they were holding on since April 15 when they intruded in Indian territory. It is not clear yet how (far) the PLA moved back."

 

India considered it the worst border incursion for years.

 

New Delhi often appears insecure about relations with its powerful neighbor, despite slowly warming relations between Asia's largest countries. China is India's top trade partner, but the unresolved border sours the friendship.

 

India's opposition and much of the media has been critical of the government's handling of the standoff, drawing parallels with a 1962 war which ended in its humiliating defeat. On Friday, parliament was adjourned after members shouted "Get China out, save the country".

 

"YOU ARE IN CHINESE TERRITORY"

 

India says Chinese troops intruded into its territory on the western rim of the Himalayas on April 15. Some officials and experts believe the incursion signaled Chinese concern about increased Indian military activity in the area.

 

A group of about 30 Chinese soldiers, backed by helicopters, had pitched several tents near a 16th century Silk Road campsite called Daulat Beg Oldi, close to an air strip New Delhi uses to support troops on the Siachen glacier.

 

Each day since, Indian and Chinese soldiers and border guards left their camps and stood about 100 meters (330 feet) apart on the Depsang Plain, a 5,000 meter (16,400 feet) high desert ringed by jagged peaks of the Karakoram range.

 

Winter temperatures can drop to minus 30 degrees centigrade, and the area is lashed by icy strong winds all year round.

 

A photograph released by a source in the Indian army showed a group of six Chinese soldiers on a rock-strewn landscape holding a bright orange banner that read, in English and Mandarin, "This is the Line of Actual Control, You are in Chinese territory".

 

Delhi reopened the Daulat Beg Oldi airstrip in 2008. Two other runways, out of use since the war, have been opened and Daulat Beg Oldi has been upgraded since.

 

Siachen, at the north of the disputed region of Kashmir, is claimed by both India and Pakistan and has the dubious distinction of being the world's highest battlefield.

 

Tensions are likely to persist given India and China's increased presence in an area that for centuries was largely unclaimed and criss-crossed with caravan routes. Now the land abuts the Karakoram Highway joining Pakistan to China, which Beijing hopes to develop further as trade route linking it to the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar.

 

Speaking before Sunday's resolution, Srikanth Kondapalli, an Indian analyst who specialises in China studies, said the dispute lay close to large hydroelectric projects and an ambitious plan to expand the Karakoram highway.

 

He said the lack of agreement about where the border lies, combined with increased military and infrastructure activity meant more flashpoints were likely.

 

"It is a no-man's land," said Kondapalli, who considers the current standoff to be more serious than the usual cross-border incidents. "Even if the (present) issue is resolved, this will only flare up."

 

Whew! WORLD WAR THREE AVERTED!!!! :cold:

[Fu Lai]

India demolishes Himalaya outpost to end China standoff

 

India has agreed to a Chinese demand to demolish a remote army position near their de facto border in the Himalayas, Indian sources said, as part of a deal to end a standoff that threatened to scupper slowly improving relations.

Indian and Chinese soldiers faced off 100 meters (330 feet) apart on a plateau near the Karakoram mountain range, where they fought a war 50 years ago, for three weeks until they reached a deal on Sunday for both sides to withdraw.

 

The tension had threatened to overshadow a visit by the Indian foreign minister to Beijing on May 9. China's Premier Li Keqiang is expected to visit India later this month.

 

India said up to 50 Chinese soldiers set up camp in its territory on the western rim of the Himalayas on April 15. Some Indian officials and experts believed the incursion signaled Chinese concern about increased Indian activity in the area.

 

The Chinese camp was in an area India said was 19 km (12 miles) beyond what it understands to be the border in the Ladakh region of Kashmir, a vaguely defined line called the Line of Actual Control, which neither side agrees on.

 

Details of the deal have not been made public and there were differing versions about what had been dismantled. A source with direct knowledge of the decision making in New Delhi said India agreed to take down a temporary metal-roofed shelter in the Chumar area, further south along the disputed border.

 

The source said the dismantled shelter had been erected in Chumar shortly after China set up camp on the plateau.

 

However, an official from the Indian army's northern command said India had taken down more permanent structures from Chumar.

 

"The bunkers in Chumar were dismantled after we acceded to Chinese demand in the last flag meeting. These bunkers were live-in bunkers," the army officer told Reuters on Tuesday.

 

China won the border war they fought in 1962, which soured relations for decades, but ties between the Asian giants have been improving. China is India's top trade partner and the two occasionally hold joint military exercises.

 

India has been beefing up its military presence for several years on the remote Ladakh plateau, building roads and runways to catch up with Chinese development across the border in a disputed area known as Aksai Chin

 

The decision to agree to the Chinese demand followed heavy criticism of the Indian government over its handling of the incident by the opposition.

An official in India's Defense Ministry said on Monday the deal to end the standoff was "quid pro quo" and said China had also demanded India take down listening and observation posts in the Chumar area, which is close to a Chinese road through Tibet.

 

The source in New Delhi denied India was dismantling anything more than the border shelter.

 

 

Curious how this is so-called "no man's land" yet both countries have military there

[Randy W]

Another reported boundary skirmish - People's Daily

 

China condemns fatal shooting of Taiwanese fisherman

China strongly condemned the reported fatal shooting of a Taiwanese fisherman, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Thursday.

. . .

 

Media reports said the fisherman was shot dead on Thursday morning when a Filipino military ship fired at a Taiwanese fishing boat.

[Fu Lai]

India's top diplomat praises co-op with China

By Li Xiaokun and Pu Zhendong ( China Daily)

Beijing, New Delhi discuss relations days after border standoff resolved

 

Top diplomats of China and India met in Beijing on Thursday, right after an end to their three-week standoff along a disputed border.

The visit, however, was not under a cloud because of the border incident, as Indian Minister of External Affairs Salman Khurshid is in China's capital preparing for diplomatic arrangements in relations between Beijing and New Delhi this year, observers have said.

 

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20130510/0023ae9885da12f669810c.jpg

Foreign Minister Wang Yi (right) meets with his Indian counterpart, Salman Khurshid, at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing. After the talk, the two signed a protocol on cooperation in bilateral relations between the two ministries of foreign affairs. Wang Jing / China Daily

Foreign Minister Wang Yi met Khurshid in the evening. After the talks, a protocol was signed to boost cooperation of the two countries' foreign ministries.

 

Wang highlighted the significance of Khurshid's visit, saying ties between Beijing and New Delhi are now embracing new opportunities.

 

"At present, the China-India relationship has shown a good momentum of development, as both sides are actively preparing the exchanges of visits between our leaders within this year," Wang said.

 

He said China and India need to work toward the common goal of further pushing forward the strategic and cooperative partnerships.

 

Khurshid said he believes a good working relationship can be established between the two governments, as China and India, two important countries in the world, are playing critical roles on the global stage.

 

As his first visit to China after assuming the position, Khurshid said he will be committed to expanding and deepening bilateral relations.

 

The visit came one day after Khurshid said in India that he was "comfortable" with the way India and China showed "tremendous maturity" in handling the border standoff that started in mid-April.

 

"The incident was handled at a proportional, limited and localized level. This fundamental understanding was developed over the past several years," Khurshid told journalists on the eve of his first visit to China as foreign minister.

 

The issue has now been resolved peacefully with the two countries agreeing to restore the status quo along the Line of Actual Control in the western sector of the border.

 

Beijing called on Monday for the two countries to work together to achieve a fair and reasonable border treaty that is acceptable to both sides. An Indian foreign ministry source in New Delhi told AFP that discussions on a cooperation agreement for better communications on the Line of Actual Control were "most likely".

 

Ye Hailin, an expert on South Asian studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the two ministers "will touch upon the border confrontation, but it is definitely not the point of the visit".

 

Khurshid is in China mainly to make diplomatic arrangements with China, he said. It has been reported that a Chinese leader might visit India soon, but that has yet to be confirmed.

 

Khurshid said on Wednesday he eyed "huge potential" in cooperation between the two nations and was expecting to build good working and personal relations with Wang.

 

During the trip, "both countries will discuss the future, and the leadership is committed toward that and the great things India and China can and must do together", he said.

 

He said both countries were ancient Asian civilizations and should "accommodate" each other's fundamental interests on issues such as border disputes with patience.

 

"We can learn from each other's experiences. Although we cannot be completely alike, we could align our position in the future over various issues," he added. The Indian source told AFP that commerce will feature "prominently" in the visit, describing India's trade deficit with China as a "huge issue".

 

Very nicey nice.

[Randy W]

 

Another reported boundary skirmish - People's Daily

 

China condemns fatal shooting of Taiwanese fisherman

China strongly condemned the reported fatal shooting of a Taiwanese fisherman, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Thursday.

 

. . .

 

Media reports said the fisherman was shot dead on Thursday morning when a Filipino military ship fired at a Taiwanese fishing boat.

 

 

 

From the Global Times:

 

Philippine coast guard admits to fatal shooting of Taiwan fisherman

 

 

 

In Taipei, Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou on Friday demanded that the Philippines apologize for Thursday's shooting, which the Taiwan fishing authority said killed a 65-year-old fisherman and badly damaged the vessel.

 

. . .

 

But Philippine coast guard spokesman Commander Armand Balilo said Friday the incident took place in "Philippine waters," and the Filipino personnel had been properly carrying out their duties to stop illegal fishing.

 

"If somebody died, they deserve our sympathy but not an apology," Balilo told reporters. He said the incident happened just north of the main Philippine island of Luzon in the Balintang Channel, which is part of "Philippine waters."

 

The 30-meter coast guard vessel initially saw two fishing vessels and tried to approach them, he said, and the coast guard crew fired at the smaller vessel after it tried to ram the Filipino boat.

 

"They fired at the machinery to disable it. They were able to disable the vessel, although they were not aware at the time that somebody had been hit," he said.

 

The incident dominated Taiwan media on Friday, which strongly condemned Manila and carried reports saying the Taiwan boat's captain insisted he did not cross over into "Philippine waters."

 

"Barbaric Philippine vessel fired at our fishing boat, seasoned fisherman shot dead," read the headline of a front-page story in the Taipei-based China Times newspaper.

 

 

[Doug]

Hmm, seems India's formidable air force would just have to have a bombing exercise in the area at night, and oops, what you Chinese doing here? If they don't have some goons pull a secret massacre in the night.