China enlists researchers to reinforce its borders with a strong historical narrative

Name: Will India and China’s new border deal lead to long-term peace in the disputed Himalayas?
Uploaded: 2025-04-17T22:00:12.000Z
Duration: 4 min 20 s
Description: Will India and China’s new border deal lead to long-term peace in the disputed Himalayas?

As tech advances, definition of border regions and national sovereignty expected to expand to airspace sovereignty and digital frontiers

Reading Time:7 minutes

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Meredith Chen

Published: 6:00am, 18 Apr 2025Updated: 1:11am, 19 Apr 2025

Corrected [12:27am, 19 Apr, 2025]

[12:27am, 19 Apr, 2025]
An earlier version of this story inaccurately described Eric Schluessel's job as "an associate professor in the department of history at Columbian College of Arts and Sciences". It also initially said that his sources told him that Beijing considers issues in both Tibet and Xinjiang to be settled, but he has since clarified that he meant to refer to only Tibet, not Xinjiang.

From the Himalayan stand-off with India and island disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea to sporadic ethnic tensions in China’s far-western regions, borderland security is a paramount national imperative for Beijing.

Now, Chinese academics are being mobilised to rapidly build up indigenous expertise in borderland governance as Beijing calls for deeper research on related theoretical and practical issues.

As its rivalry with the United States escalates, China sees greater urgency than ever to ensure local stability, secure relations with its neighbours, grow the economy, forge a strong Chinese consciousness in ethnic communities and gain a strong footing in the narrative.

Xing Guangcheng, director of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said accelerated efforts were a “necessity” because the borderlands held an “extremely significant strategic” position.

“[This is] to meet the country’s major needs, provide theoretical support for borderland governance and deconstruct the Western theoretical discourse on China’s borderlands from an academic and theoretical perspective,” he said at a symposium in January.

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Will India and China’s new border deal lead to long-term peace in the disputed Himalayas?

China has more than 22,000km (13,700 miles) of land borders shared with 14 countries and inhabited by dozens of ethnic groups. Nine provinces and autonomous regions along China’s land frontier occupy around 62 per cent of the country’s land area. It also has 18,000km of coastline.