Notwithstanding the Doka La standoff, Chinese military analysts say that India and China should sign a new boundary convention in the Sikkim sector to replace the 1890 Great Britain-China agreement and make it more contemporary
Chinese military analysts say that India and China should sign a new boundary convention in the Sikkim sector. File pic
ADVERTISEMENT
Notwithstanding the Doka La standoff, Chinese military analysts say that India and China should sign a new boundary convention in the Sikkim sector to replace the 1890 Great Britain-China agreement and make it more contemporary.
"For China early harvest means, we want to have a new agreement with India, because the 1890 convention was signed between Great Britain and China," Senior Colonel Zhao Xiaozhou, Director at the Centre on China-America Defence Relations of the Academy of Military Science, told an Indian media delegation here on Wednesday.
"At that time, it was not the People's Republic of China, (PRC). India became independent in 1947. It is better we change the signatures of the convention, that is what I mean early harvest," he said.
Early harvest
"It is very essential because there are territorial disputes in the eastern, central and western sectors of the India-China border.
"Only in the Sikkim section we have the fixed border. So, we want to start from the easiest, that is what we call early harvest," he added. The Chinese Foreign Ministry too in its August 2 fact-sheet on Doka La standoff referred to Beijing's expectations of an "early harvest" in the Sikkim sector.
Of the 3,488-km-long India-China border from Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh, a 220-km section falls in Sikkim.
1890
When the Great Britain-China agreement was made regarding the boundary