BEIJING – China needs to deal with the Indians in a language that Indiansunderstand. Without a strong military deterrent, the Indian troops wouldnot stop illegal crossing the Line of Actual Control (LAC) to occupy theChinese territory, Chinese scholar Prof. Cheng Xizhong said on Friday.
“It seems that to be indulgent and tolerant is not suitable for India. Inorder to maintain the general direction of friendly cooperation betweenChina and India, and to maintain peace and tranquility in the border areasbetween the two countries, we need to make full military preparations,”Cheng, also a former Chinese Defense Attache in South Asian countriesobserved in his article.
India is a big country in South Asia with a population of 1.3 billion andis one of the major emerging market economies in the world. Franklyspeaking, for decades, China has been very patient in making friendshipwith India. In recent years, China has paid more attention to thedevelopment of comprehensive and pragmatic cooperation with India.
In 2018, China’s President Xi Jinping invited India`s Prime MinisterNarendra Modi to Wuhan, China to hold the first informal meeting. In 2019,President Xi Jinping visited Chennai, India to hold the second informalmeetings with Narendra Modi. With a new diplomatic mode, China has openedup the development of the China-India relations in a new era and the twosides have reached a series of important consensus with historicalsignificance.
The China-India relations have just recovered from the trauma of theconfrontation in Dong Lang Village on June 18, 2017, and then on June 15,2020, serious physical clash occurred in the Galwan Valley, resulting inthe tragic death of 20 Indian troops in the cold high-altitude area. Indiahas not learned the bloody lesson, and continued to illegally cross theLine of Actual Control (LAC), aggravating the military confrontation andpushing border tensions to new heights.
On August 31, the Indian troops illegally crossed the LAC in the south bankof Bangong Lake and near the Reqin Pass in an attempt to occupy theterritory controlled by China.On September 7, the Indian troops illegally crossed the LAC and blatantlythreatened the patrolling personnel of the Chinese border defense force byfiring guns in the air, which broke the record of no gunfire in the past 45years on the China-India border, seriously violated the two borderagreements signed by the two countries in 1993 and 1996 respectively, andabandoned a series of consensus reached in recent meetings between the twosides. The consequences are very serious.
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The Indian troops keep illegal crossing the LAC in an attempt to occupymore and more Chinese territory, and the border tension is rising. At thesame time, high-level meetings and diplomatic and military negotiationsbetween China and India are being held intensively.
On September 4, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe and Indian DefenseMinister Rajnath Singh held a meeting in Moscow. On September 10, ChineseForeign Minister Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar met inMoscow and reached five-point important consensus.
It is difficult to understand why so many high-level consensuses have notworked, the border area is still very tense, and the face-to-face militaryconfrontation may lead to new conflicts or even unexpected incidents at anytime. At a meeting with Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh on September4, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said strongly: China’s territorycannot be lost, and the Chinese military is fully determined, capable andconfident to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
