Power, threat, and Chinese assertiveness on the Sino–Indian border

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ABSTRACT After decades of relative stability, recent years have seen a spike in the number of militarized crises between the troops of China and India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) on their disputed border. What explains this sudden upsurge in violence on the Sino–Indian border, and how specifically can we make sense of China’s increasingly assertive posture leading to intrusions at multiple points along the LAC in May 2020? This paper argues that China’s growing assertiveness can be best understood to be a function of the country’s growing power. Its growing material capabilities – economic and military – in recent decades, and particularly relative to India, by both increasing China’s military options on its borders, as well as reducing the kind of external and internal vulnerabilities that may have encouraged more conciliatory stances in the past, have created the conditions for Beijing to adopt more aggressive postures in its territorial disputes, including with India.