ORF Occasional Paper - China’s Two-Front Conundrum: A Perspective on the India-China Border Situation

This article was published by Amit Kumar as an Occasional Paper : Amit Kumar, “China’s Two-Front Conundrum: A Perspective on the India-China Border Situation,” ORF Occasional Paper No. 393, March 2023, Observer Research Foundation.

China’s actions in Ladakh since 2020 are in violation of common understandings and have brought the focus of bilateral relationship back to the issue of the border. This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of China’s behaviour along the India-China border by exploring a fresh perspective that explains the instability along the border as a function of China’s two-front conundrum. It makes a historical account of past events to argue that China’s two-front threat perception is not new. The paper finds a correlation between China’s insecurity around a two-front threat and a rise in the tensions along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). It concludes that Beijing has indeed used instability along the LAC as a tool to manage its two-front threat.

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