What data tells us about the strategy driving China's border incursions
Welcome back to The India China Newsletter.
The big story this past week was Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping breaking the ice at the G20 in Bali after three years of no communication. The video of how their conversation came about is interesting:
It shows clearly that Modi initiated the contact, and had obviously thought this through carefully. We don’t know what was said, but I’m a bit skeptical about the official explanation that they merely exchanged courtesies. It is possible Modi was inviting Xi for the G20 in India next year (Xi will also travel to India for the SCO summit). I wouldn’t rule out a broader message from Modi as well about the relationship and the current low-level of ties, in general.
In the previous issue of this newsletter, I highlighted why it was important for them to re-open contact at the highest level. I've seen some criticism to Modi’s outreach on social media, and the argument being made that a meeting won't solve the outstanding problems. You don’t say! That’s a bit of a silly straw-man as no sane person would suggest a meeting will miraculously resolve every issue, and that’s the wrong way to approach it. As I argued previously, even a limited potential benefit would outweigh the costs. It would, at the same time, be misplaced and extremely premature to look at this as a turning point in ties or even as marking a thaw, which I do not, at all, see the meeting as. Many of the structural problems in the relationship remain as they are, and what high-level engagement can do at best is try and manage them and keep channels open.
Which brings me to the meat of this issue, which will be looking at a newly published paper that gives us an interesting take on the most important of those problems.
"Rising tension in the Himalayas: A geospatial analysis of Chinese border incursions into India", was published November 10. Its authors include Northwestern’s V.S. Subrahmanian, who is Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, Jan-Tino Brethouwer,
Robbert Fokkink ,Kevin Greene, Roy Lindelauf, and Caroline Tornquist. “By studying the number of incursions that occurred in the west and middle sectors over time, it became obvious, statistically, that these incursions are not random,” Subrahmanian said in an email that Northwestern sent out sharing the paper. “The probability of randomness is very low, which suggests to us that it’s a coordinated effort. When we looked at the eastern sector, however, there is much weaker evidence for coordination."
You can find the paper here. I'm highlighting some of the takeaways I found interesting:
— The paper looks at data on Chinese incursions into India over the period 2006–2020. It’s an interesting period, considering that some see the year 2005 as when relations peaked — and so did border management with the signing of Political Parameters and Guiding Principles that year, the first and only agreement on resolving the boundary question.
— The number of yearly incursions in the western sector and the eastern sector is uncorrelated, but those in the western and middle sector are. This suggests different Chinese approaches to the west and east (most of the serious tensions have been in the west). They write: “We conclude that Chinese incursions in the west and in the east are independent. Militarily, the west and east can be seen as two different conflicts. Furthermore, the Chinese incursions do not seem to be random encounters, but are strategically planned.”
— In the western sector, almost all incursions occurred in Chumur, Demchok Depsang, and Pangong. In the eastern sector, three quarters of the incursions occurred in Sikkim, Tawang, and Kibithu.
— The authors look at the Depsang standoff in April 2013 as “a decisive moment in the border dispute” and they say it was “followed by a sharp increase in incursions and a sequence of standoffs and skirmishes (Chumur 2014, 16 days; 2015 Burtse, 5 days; Doklam 2017, 73 days; Galwan 2020, 2 days)
— As they point out, “only a few contested areas lie at the root of the conflict, and seem to generate incursions in other red-zones all over the LAC.” Their suggestion for a way forward: “The two countries could try to reach an agreement on only a limited part of the LAC. A good starting point would be an agreement on the border in the Sikkim sector and its nearby disputed zones on the border between China and Nepal or Bhutan. This would defuse the conflict in the eastern sector, and if our analysis is right, likely also in the western sector. This could be an important first step in a step-by-step resolution of the entire conflict.”
My thoughts: The problem with this is both India and China have committed to a package settlement, so it’s probably a non-starter. It does, however, raise interesting questions about what the future of border management may look like. Currently, both sides have settled on buffer zones in the “contested areas” the paper refers to. The buffer zones always struck me as a rather pragmatic arrangement to keep the peace, though critics of the arrangement say it has denied patrolling rights to India. But it has also denied patrolling rights to China which is an undisputed, but sometimes ignored, fact. None of the buffer zones have been established on territory that is entirely claimed only by India and not claimed by China, so both have certainly had to give up patrolling claims. India, one would reckon, has had to give up more because of the PLA unilaterally transgressing in April 2020 and essentially pushing the LAC west. India would probably eventually push for resuming patrolling, and perhaps the next step would be for it to be done in a coordinated way in contested areas (by time or schedule), but you would imagine that is not on the horizon given that disengagement still isn’t completed in two of the seven friction points. Of course, the larger problem with the current arrangement is that it wasn’t borne out of both sides wanting to sit together and manage the boundary but only because of a full-blown crisis initiated entirely by the PLA’s aggressions in April 2020.
You can read the paper here. I found it very interesting, and a useful attempt at narrowing down what can seem like an enormously complicated dispute and diagnosing, with numbers, the crux of the problem and the few key areas at the heart of it.
Finally, two recent reports remind us that the border crisis is still on-going:
My colleague Dinakar Peri in The Hindu reports:
The Army has deployed new landing docks and speed boats for patrolling on the Pangong Tso Lake in Eastern Ladakh matching the Chinese deployments on the lake located close to 14,000 feet. This is part of an overall capability enhancement and infrastructure development taken up by India since the 2020 standoff in Eastern Ladakh to plug deficiencies and catch up with Chinese build up along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
Imran Siddiqui at The Telegraph on the situation in Depsang, one of the two still unresolved areas along with Demchok:
A recent intelligence report suggests the Chinese are building additional roads, helipads and military camps inside India-claimed lines on the strategic Depsang Plains, where they have so far resisted any disengagement process, sources in the security establishment said on Monday. The report appears to provide further corroboration of fears that China plans to hold on to territory that it has occupied at multiple transgression points in eastern Ladakh since May 2020 and declare a new status quo on the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
That’s it for this issue. Thank you for reading, and have a nice weekend!