China's War with India

On Oct. 20, 1962, some 20,000 Chinese troops poured out of the Himalayas overlooking India's North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). Other Chinese forces marched through the rocky wastes of the Ladakh region of Kashmir, about 1,000 miles to the west. Outgunned and outmanned by the invaders, the ill-equipped Indian army fell back. After a month of smashing Chinese victories, much of northern India lay open to conquest. But suddenly the invaders stopped dead in their tracks. Radio Peking announced that "on its own initiative" China was declaring a ceasefire. Chinese troops pulled back from the front, in some cases by as much as 60 miles. It was all being done, the Chinese boasted, so that a speedy "peaceful settlement of the boundary question" that had touched off the month-long conflict could be worked out.

That earlier clash is now being studied by analysts seeking clues to China's aims in the current war. Historians now generally agree that the Chinese invasion of India had a limited goal: to establish control over a long-disputed desert plateau called the Aksai Chin. For centuries, caravans linking Tibet with China's remote Sinkiang province had traversed the area, whose border had never been clearly marked. So tenuous was the Indian presence that it took two years for India's border police to discover a paved highway that the Chinese had constructed in 1956-57.

In the months before the invasion, Jawaharlal Nehru, then India's Prime Minister, cast aside his policy of peaceful coexistence with Communists. He demanded that the Chinese quit the plateau and ordered his own army to occupy it. Attempts to resolve the dispute broke down, and units skirmished in Kashmir. But even during the attack, the nations maintained diplomatic relations--as Peking and Hanoi have done in the present crisis.

The Sino-Indian border conflict coincided roughly with the U.S.-Soviet clash over Russian missiles in Cuba. There is no evidence to prove that the Chinese attacked when they did to take advantage of Soviet preoccupation elsewhere. Once their grip on the Aksai Chin was secure, the Chinese withdrew from land they had occupied in NEFA (now known as Arunachal Pradesh) and offered to negotiate a mutually acceptable border in Kashmir. The Indians, whose call for assistance was answered by an outpouring of arms from Britain and the U.S., refused to discuss the matter until the Chinese completely departed from Aksai Chin, which they still retain. Today a few Chinese and Indian troops still face each other in the mountain passes of the former battleground. And on the official maps of both countries, the borders are still drawn in exactly the same places they were before China's invasion.

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