“The explosion lit up the sky and reverberated between the mountains,” an Indian soldier told Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist and author. India’s War on China: Collision Course on Top of the World.

The Chinese army invaded the Indian positions, killing 17 Indian soldiers and capturing 13 others. Meeting little resistance from the surprised and incomplete Indian troops, they pushed on.

The next day they took Tawang, a town that had a Buddhist temple near the valley.

Chinese troops marched south. In mid-November they reached the town of Bomdila, a hillside temple town some 250 kilometers from Assam, home to lush tea gardens, oil fields and hessian plantations. from India.

And then, on November 21, China announced a ceasefire.

His troops quickly withdrew to an area 20 kilometers north of the border of the two countries that had status de facto. The area is known as the Line of Actual Control and is marked on maps made when the British ruled India.

“The war is over. Within weeks, the PLA troops returned to the parts of the mountains under Chinese control,” Linter said. India lost 1,383 soldiers and nearly 1,700 “lost in action”.

China recorded the death toll on the Indian side of nearly 4,900 people and another 3,968 were captured alive.

Manoj Joshi, Indian defense analyst and author of the new book, Understanding the Indo-Chinese Bordersaid it was unclear why China was backing down.

“Is it because of their extended lines of supply? Are they afraid of American intervention? Or is it the fact that they don’t take their demands very seriously [perbatasan] east of them?” he said.

The disputed border between China and India is divided into three areas: the western sector around Ladakh; the central sector includes the border between the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and Tibet; and the eastern sector includes the border in Arunachal Pradesh.

Experts say it’s really an “imaginary line” – the Indians say it’s 3,488 kilometers long; while the Chinese say it’s 2,000 kilometers less.

India claims the Aksai Chin Plateau, an area the size of Switzerland controlled by China on the western side of the border. China claims Arunachal Pradesh.

The eastern border, 1,126 kilometers long according to India, and the never-recognized territory of Arunachal Pradesh by China, is formed by the McMahon line. Its name comes from an Englishman – Henry McMahon – who was India’s Foreign Minister in 1914.

Asia’s two biggest nations – and their nuclear-armed neighbors – have hammered out a deal to end fighting in one of the world’s oldest border disputes.

The two sides have largely kept the peace, but have also regularly accused each other of abuses and attacks.

However, China has not given up its claim to Arunachal Pradesh and still refers to most of it as “Southern Tibet”.

Last year, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs changed the names of several places in the disputed territory. State media said China’s territorial claims had a “historical and administrative basis”.

Analysts say Beijing sees Arunachal Pradesh as having a role in final border negotiations with India, which would see Delhi accept Chinese sovereignty over Aksai Chin, the strategically located frozen desert that has been occupied since the 1950s in return for Beijing accepted Indian sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh.

However, experts like Dr. Tsering Topgyal from the University of Birmingham in England believe this is no longer the case.

“There may be a link between China’s confidence in controlling Tibet and the call for exchanges between Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin for Beijing,” Dr Topgyal told me.

“Now, I think China is approaching the frontier of these disputes not only in terms of local territorial gains or losses, but also increasingly taking into account its broader domestic and foreign interests.”

Previously, Arunachal Pradesh was governed directly from Delhi, which became a state in 1987, much to China’s chagrin.

Over the years, India has also improved its defenses and infrastructure along the border and built villages near it.

The visit of Indian leaders to Arunachal Pradesh has annoyed Beijing. China officially protested when former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in 2008 and announced a series of road construction projects.

Beijing has also opposed Asian Development Bank (ADB) loans for the region and denied visas to Indian military officials and officers based in the region.

In 2014 Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced plans to construct 2,000 kilometers of new roads and develop remote and neglected areas of Arunachal Pradesh.

“We are not doing anything to disrupt relations. This is not about challenging or competing with China, but about securing our own territory,” Kiren Rijiju, a federal minister from the state, told Bloomberg at the time. era.

From China’s perspective, it may make sense to maintain border disputes with India, including claims over Arunachal Pradesh, as a means of containing India’s ambitions and regulating its behavior, for example its developing relationship with the United States,” Dr. Tsering said.

“Why, of all the border disputes China has with all its neighbors, only the India-China dispute is still open?” he said

The Yangtze, where the latest fighting took place, is a sparsely populated place just five kilometers from a village on the Chinese side, experts say.

It is one of dozens of disputed areas along the disputed border, which both sides claim overlap.

“The eastern border seems to be heating up again,” Joshi said. “And that’s not surprising.”