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This report in the Washington Post uses Frequently Asked Questions to give readers an understanding of the India China border conflict. The roots of the conflict lie in  China's claim to Tibet based on Chinese troops going to aid Tibet in 1792. This based on the Qing dynasty sending troops to aid Tibet after a Nepalese invasion of Tibet. Tibet and Nepal are neighboring countries in the Himalayan mountains,  Nepal has a border with Indian state of Bihar, and Tibet is north and northeast of Nepal, all in close proximity of several hundred kilometres from India but four thousand kilometres from Beijing near Korea and Japan. The Sino Nepalese war, called the Gurkha war in Chinese, was the result of a dispute between Nepal and Tibet over debased silver coinage supplied by Nepal to Tibet and Tibet's demand for compensation, as well as a dispute about salt supplied by Tibet to Nepal. Chinese forces were repelled by  the Nepalese Gorkhas, and eventually the conflict was settled with a peace treaty between Nepal and Tibet with Chinese mediation for the Tibetan side. When the British East India company intervened in the region in 1815 China was not present, and when Nepal and Tibet had another war in 1855 China was not present.  For the first half of the twentieth century Tibet printed its own stamps and was an independent country negotiating treaties with Britain. China's brief intervention in 1792 is the fact cited by China for its claim to Tibet. Crossing the high mountains to get to Tibet from China's western frontier was for most of history and during this 1792 intervention, a journey that took 3 or 4 months with yaks and mules. Because of the sheer logistics China was present only in a symbolic way in Tibet or Nepal, both regions far more autonomous and remote from China than say a Finland near Russia. It takes 5 hours to go from Helsinki to St Petersburg in Russia. This is about the distance between the border with Nepal in Bihar, India, to Tibetan border with Nepal. By contrast it takes four thousand kilometres journey from Beijing to Tibet and over steep mountain ranges and rivers which would took months of journey with mules and yaks all the way into the twentieth century.  Finland was part of Sweden till 1809 when it became part of Russian Empire, till 1917 when it became an independent country. The Soviet Union invaded Finland one more time before World War II and was repelled, but this is attributed to Russian fears that Finland could be used as a base for an invasion of Russia. Tibet was a buffer between the British Empire and China. Chinese Nationalists party and Communist party thinking may have changed after Japan's invasion of China in the thirties, making extending China's western frontiers to the borders of India as part of the new nationalist idea.  How else can one see Beijing in East Asia throughout its history suddenly at the border with India after its takeover of Tibet in 1950. The period in 1950 when India was just coming out of the partition and tackling millions of refugees on the border with newly created Pakistan.      ...

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The Guardian provides this first account of what happened in the Galwan Valley border between India and China at the Line of Actual Control. It is described as the worst fighting in 60 years. On the high steep ridge lines above the rapidly moving Galwan River a patrol of Indian soldiers encountered Chinese troops in a steep section of a high mountainous region. They believed the PLA Chinese Army had withdrawn from the ridge in line with a June 6 disengagement agreement. The Indian government says that what happened afterwards was pre-meditated ambush by the PLA forces. In the fighting that ensued the Indian commanding officer was pushed from the narrow ridge falling to the gorge below. Reinforcements from the Indian side were called from a post 2 miles away and about 600 men were fighting in near total darkness in high mountain ridge with stones iron rods for upto 6 hours. Following a decades long tradition to avoid escalation of hostilities because of nuclear weapons of both countries the two sides have not used other weapons. Most deaths on both sides were from soldiers falling or being knocked from mountain ridges. The main problem in the conflict is the Line of Actual Control exists but since China's takeover of Tibet in 1950 there is no agreement that has set the official border. The British Simla agreement in 1912 set the border with Tibet in an agreement between Tibet and the British Empire in India, when Tibet was an independent country. China claims that historically going back to Ming and Qing dynasty Tibet was part of its region. For most of its history Tibet was an autonomous region with closer contacts with India because it is close to Nepal and Nepal is very near the Indian Bihar state border.  A new rail link from Raxaul, Bihar in India to Kathmandu is only 137 kilometres, and from Kathmandu to the Tibet border is only 205 kilometres. Fast rail or road links would put Tibet within a few hours by rail or road to Tibet from India. For the entire period the US exists as a nation about 250 years and from the first landing of the colonists on American shores about 1607 Tibet was a mountainous region that was so remote that few people even knew about the country's existence. Beijing and Shanghai are four thousand kilometres away, India much closer to Tibet through Kathmandu, Nepal and India sharing a common culture, and no one thought much about the mountainous borders at 15000- 20,000 feet in the western Himalayas, till China's takeover of Tibet in 1950. India had no clear idea what this meant in 1950- no clear border except for what was agreed between the Tibetan independent government  and the British in 1912 which was set under the British Empire- resulting in a fluid border. And China had no clear idea that this would put in a place it would not want to be thousands of miles from the Yangtse valley region home to most of China's population, in a remote mountain region at heights of 15,000 -20,000 feet, with little to gain. Throughout history since 1000 and earlier Tibet remained a region that acted as a buffer between China's western provinces and India, the high mountains at 15,000- 20,000 feet making it inaccessible. Which is why the Ganges plains and the Yangtse river valley plains contact was made more through the oceans than by land, and the areas developing distinctly different language and cultures. All this changed after 1954 when the Qinghai Tibet highway was built, the closest city on the Chinese side is Xining. Xining to Tibet is a distance of about 2000 kilometres at an average height of 4500 metres or about 14,000 feet.  ...

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Security is at the heart of India's foreign policy. S. Jaishankar points this out at Thiruvanathapuram. He says this was true of the effort at Balakot and even in the midst of Covid at the Line of Actual Control with China when India sent up enormous numbers of troops to defend the border. This is also behind the stand with China that security and LAC comes first in all relations with China. Trade and exchanges all come in the context of LAC, settle the LAC issues first then we can proceed with better bilateral relations, this is what India is telling China.  There are good reasons for this. India has a large border in the most formidable terrain of the Himalayas which is also close to the plains of India in the LAC with China. Any difficulties at the border would weaken India's secuerity and weaken development efforts in the same way that Japan sought to weaken Chinese development through invasion in the 1930's. Tibet looms out of the past. When China invaded Tibet Nehru's couple of pages in Discovery of India on China show that he had no idea of the China that had emerged with Mao and the CCP in its historical struggle against Japanese nationalists and imperialists. He had an idea of China that came from the Buddhist period and India's links from the past. The ruthless Japanese invasion that China confronted on its soil, and British colonial incursions before that, had already transformed the China of the past, which now under Mao in 1948 may have sought more defensible borders by extending them to Tibet as a buffer state. Historically the British had never tolerated Russian or other European or Japanese interference in the border states such as Tibet. There was also the question of capacity. By the time of the invasion of Tibet in the early 1950's China had already fought the Korean War with the US. India's army and defense forces were just coming out of partition and ill equipped for the task of defending the borders in Tibet region. Current governments in a more normal setting cannot change this part of history, yet can take full recognition of the facts that this has created. A strong defense has to be created for defending a border that extends for thousand of miles now that China has unlawfully occupied Tibet. On it also depends a strong and vigorous development effort that helps build the kind of modern defenses as the economy grows and absorbs new technologies rapidly. Both defense and development go together, one cannot have defense without rapid modernization and development, and one cannot have rapid modernization and development without defense. A weak defense would lead to distractions in development leading to the lack of rapid modernization and development as the intruding power interferes in insidious ways in the internal and external links of the country. This is the lesson of colonial interference of western powers in Asia. As Brendan Simms shows in his new book, Europe - Struggle for Supremacy 1500 to the Present, it is also the lesson of a different kind of colonialism inside Europe since 1500, where weaker states inside Europe fell behind with interference in turns by the imperial powers of France, UK, Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia. Poland, Finland, Czech Republic in the past and even Ukraine today are just some examples of what can happen when one loses sight of this principle. Poland and the Polish Commonwealth in the 19th century, Hungary right down to 1956, and China in the 1910-1930, India in the 18th and 19th century were weakened internally even after recognizing the problem, so that recognition of the problem is not an adequate condition to prevent countries from facing such foreign interference. ...

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Chinese views on the India war of 1962 are shown at the Beijing Military Museum in a display effort "One Hundred Questions on the China-India Border Self-Defense Counterattack."  China's PLA on its 95th anniversary looks at the 33 day war and calls it a "counterattack." It also says China withdrew because its goals were accomplished of getting back the territory it lost since August 1959 to India, that on the Indian side "the decision making was in the hands of civilian officials who did not understand the military at all," and called it "chaotic." It also brings up the international situation that Russia supported both China and India in the conflict and India had the US on its side. It says PLA withdrew because of the difficulty of supplying the military in the Arunachal region at a great distance from China particularly after the famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward. Today there is a clear chain of command and joint work by the Indian Air force and the Army, infrastructure to support mountain operations being built at rapid speed, and building of modern defense manufacturing capabilities for the airforce and army as shown at the Defense Expo in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, this week.  One of the first aspects of the border that one sees in the region is how close it is to large population cities and towns in India and how remote it is from large population towns and cities in China. In this sense China after the experience with Russian conflict before 1900, later a large Japanese invasion in 1931and 1937 appears to have responded to its period of semi-colonialism with an aggressive policy of extending its frontiers to regions that were throughout history acting as large buffers between India and China- such being the case of Tibet which was occupied in the 1950's leading to the war with India and a border dispute that had never existed before in history. Other aspects today are that in 1962 the PLA had fought the war against the Japanese and the war agains the Americans in Korea all within a 20 year period. In 2022 China has focused for 50 years on modernizing its economy. The supply chain in the Ukraine war showed shortcomings in the Russian army, and the difficulties of supplying forces at great distances. There is also the question of morale when it is about  miles of icy terrain at heights over 10,000 feet, thousands of miles away from major population cities and towns in China- for reasons of Russian and Japanese semicolonialism behaviour not to be found in regions that had never seen large armies in history such as Tibet or Arunachal or the Himalayan border regions. The distances tell much of the story- the distance from Shanghai, Shenzen or Beijing, to Tibet is over 4000 kilometers and the border region with India additional thousands of kilometers over some of the most rugged terrain on earth with only remote mountain communities existing in the most difficult environments.       ...

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Anton Harder in this Wilson Center publication of research uses correspondence between Jawaharlal Nehru and his sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit ambassador to the US in 1950, to show that the US made an offer for India to take a permanent seat at the UN Security Council. India had supported two resolutions on June 25, and June 27, first condemning the invasion by North Korea and second the organizing of a UN force of 29 countries to push back the North Korean invasion. Even though the US is not seen as actively engaging with India during that period and seeing through British eyes the colonial policies of encouraging  different powers in South Asia, that may not be true.  Who was India's foreign minister in 1950? Jawaharlal Nehru was both prime minister and foreign minister till 1964, which means there was less discussion of foreign policy than happens today during the Ukraine invasion with Jaishankar a career diplomat with 30 years experience, Rajnath Singh, and Mr. Modi, in talks with president Biden recently, and in further discussions Modi had with EU's Von der Leyen and UK's Boris Johnson, Kishida of Japan. Who was India's defense minister in 1950? Baldev Singh, a Sikh independence struggle leader was Minister of Defense for 1947-52 and tackled partition of Punjab and Kashmir issues. The rest of the years to 1957 when India faced the Chinese invasion of Tibet India's defense minister was also for most of the period Mr. Nehru, except Ayynagar in 1953, and Kailash Katju in 1955 and 1956. The controversial V.K. Krishna Menon was Defense Minister from 1957 to 1962, when Indian defenses were further neglected leading to the Chinese invasion of India in 1962, and his replacement by Yashwantrao Chavan. The purpose of this is to look back at what happened in earlier periods to understand where India stands today- and what choices it makes today. Clearly the US was looking for allies then and now. Nehru saw things from his own reading of history seeing China and India as both suffering from western invasion, not realizing that China's experience under Mao was different- that of Japanese invasion and bombing of China's major cities not just colonization of Hong Kong and other ports for trade under British trade based policies in 1850-1900. Thus a Communist Chinese version of China's defense involved taking over border regions such as Tibet putting China in direct and open opposition to India. Nehru never really grasped what was happening in Tibet and the war China fought against the Nationalists. American general Stilwell loved China deeply and had an understanding of its people as shown in Tuchman's account in her book Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-1945. Stilwell during that war had a better understanding of China, the strengths and weaknesses of Mao's China and of the Nationalists under Chiang, than Nehru. Some of these errors post 1950's and a concentration of foreign, defense and embassy positions in the person of Mr. Nehru and of Nehru family member such as Mrs. Pandit led to the Indian failure to act on Tibet and see it as see it for what it was -facing a Communist Mao led China that had fought the Japanese invasion as different from Bodhidharma's China of the history books. Bodhidharma's China will outlast Mao's China, yet it is Mao's China that India faces today. This also tells us that India has to think in new ways- as Lincoln said during a period when America was also making its own progress as an industrial nation in the 1860's. "The dogmas of the quiet past are not adequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew, we must act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and we shall save our country." India's values are values of democracy heightened not just by Mohandas Gandhi's ideas with Hind Swaraj written in 1910 just as powerful in 2022, but also by the heights of Ladakh where elections are held in remote regions of the Himalayas. India's values are values that are also shared in the best that America has in its values and culture and in the defense of freedom.    ...

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Japan's Foreign Minister tells Martin Fackler of the NYT in an interview that the Abe government will follow previous governments in the postwar period that apologized for colonial policies that caused suffering in other parts of Asia. He repeatedly calls for Japanese to be humble about the past. Previous statements by persons seen to be close to the government, including the head of NHK broadcaster, were interpreted negatively in S. Korea, China and the U.S. as needlessly escalating tensions in the region. China and S. Korea responded with a public relations campaign of their own to present what happened in the prewar period. S. Korean president Park refused to meet Japan's premier Abe. Kishida used NYT and Fackler to send a message to a global audience about Japan taking a path of peace since 1945.