ABSTRACT
The skirmishes with China were a long-standing result of simmering disagreements between the Indian and Chinese governments over where exactly the borders between the two countries lay. Initially, both Nehru and Zhou Enlai deferred the problem; Nehru believed it would be a minor issue of readjustments and comparisons of incompatible Indian and Chinese maps to determine where the borders between India and China actually stood. This was a vexed question that had its origins in the machinations and disputes of predecessor governments of an imperial era that neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Republic of India necessarily wished to claim as theirs; in the heady days of Sino-Indian friendship, neither side was keen to bring up an issue that might lead to disagreement.
