In a classic replay of its old game, China intruded stealthily across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier with India recently and then disingenuously played conciliator by counseling "patience" and "negotiations." The incursion bore all the hallmarks of Chinese brinkmanship, including taking an adversary by surprise, seizing an opportunistic timing, masking offense as defense and discounting risks of wider escalation. Occurring at a time when India has never been so politically weak, the intrusion was shrewdly timed to exploit its political paralysis and leadership drift.
What China did was to audaciously violate border-peace agreements with India by employing coercive power on the ground. Then, armed with leverage from its encroachment onto the icy heights of the Debsang plateau — which overlooks the Chinese highway linking the restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang — it embarked on coercive diplomacy by setting out military demands for Indians to meet.
In doing so, it presented India with two equally objectionable alternatives: Either endure the Chinese ingress into a strategic border region controlling key access routes or meet China's demands at the cost of irremediably weakening Indian military interest in a wider strategic belt extending up to the disputed Siachin Glacier and the Karakoram Pass, which links China to Pakistan. After a three-week standoff, China withdrew from the occupied spot but only after India blinked by making concessions that it has since tried to rationalize as granting China a "necessary face saver."