Is China encroaching upon Indian territory in Arunachal Pradesh? 

New Delhi, India — China has denied the Indian army access to key patrolling points and encroached on land in the Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh, according to a fact-finding team of regional politicians allied with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

The report has sparked political outrage in New Delhi, where the opposition has criticised Modi for silence over alleged Chinese encroachment on several border fronts in recent years.

The new revelations pertain to Upper Subansiri, a remote and rugged, mountainous district in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. The fact-finding report threatens to upend a thaw in ties between India and China, bitter rivals that fought a war in 1962, amid US President Donald Trump’s trade wars that have targeted both New Delhi and Beijing. It also comes weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit India for the BRICS summit, which New Delhi is hosting on September 12-13.

India shares a 3,488-km border with China, which runs along New Delhi’s northern and eastern borders, in regions like Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Large parts of the border are disputed. India and China do not even agree on the demarcation line — the so-called Line of Actual Control — that is supposed to notionally distinguish between territory controlled by the two countries.

Here is everything we know about the alleged Chinese encroachment in northeastern India.

What did the fact-finding team find?

Following initial reports of alleged encroachment, the People’s Party of Arunachal Pradesh (PPA) sent a four-member fact-finding team to the remote location, the party’s Vice President Kaling Jerang told Al Jazeera.

The PPA is part of the North East Democratic Alliance, a Bharatiya Janata Party-led regional bloc. Arunachal Pradesh is also ruled by the BJP.

After the visit, the team noted that Indian armed forces are unable to patrol in the Taksing area of the state from April to October due to inclement weather — devastating flash floods, pre-monsoon and monsoon downpours and resulting landslides. On the other hand, the report said, Chinese forces “continue to remain active throughout” this period in the border region, in effect raising questions about the preparedness of infrastructure on the Indian side for the military to be able to defend against potential aggression.

Jerang’s report also claimed that residents told the team that Indian forces had abandoned Shera 5, a border patrolling point, after a confrontation with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 2023.

Jerang also told Al Jazeera that locals were furious over losing ancestral hunting grounds. “The ground reports of these intrusions are irrefutable,” he said.

“These encroachments are not new or sudden, but expanded over the years gradually,” he said, “while the BJP governments in New Delhi and in the state have turned their back on the people at the border”.

Last month, the Nah Welfare Society (NWS), a local tribal body, also wrote to government officials that Chinese encroachment has “increased manifold with an intention to occupy as much land as possible”.

How have China and India responded?

The Indian army said that media reports on the alleged encroachment by Chinese forces “are incorrect and without any basis”.

But India’s Foreign Ministry has been less categorical in dismissing the reports.

Randhir Jaiswal, the Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters that New Delhi has “always emphasised in discussions with the Chinese side that we consider [border] issues as most serious and that the maintenance of peace and tranquillity in these areas is of the utmost importance”.

“We have also stated that the state of border affairs will reflect on the state of our larger bilateral ties,” he added.

Like New Delhi, Beijing also has responded with caution, appearing to neither confirm nor deny fresh border tensions.

“The China-India border situation is generally stable at the moment,” said Guo Jiakun, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Beijing, adding that both countries held their 36th meeting on China-India Border Affairs last week.

“The two sides agreed to maintain communication via diplomatic and military channels and jointly uphold peace and tranquility in the border areas,” Guo added.

Do India and China have a border dispute?

Yes, and it’s at the heart of their larger differences.

And like most border disputes involving South Asia, the British played a historical role.

In 1914, British India and Tibet, not under Chinese control at the time, signed what’s known as the Simla Convention, demarcating their border as the so-called McMahon Line. Henry McMahon was the foreign secretary of British India at the time and the central negotiator of that pact.

Since gaining independence in 1947, India has treated the McMahon Line as its border with China. But China, which came under communist rule in 1949, rejects the line as the boundary with India, arguing that it wasn’t involved in the Simla Convention negotiations.

Beijing claims the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh and refers to it as “South Tibet” or “Zangnan”. China also controls Aksai Chin, a slice of the disputed Kashmir region that India and Pakistan claim in full.

In 1962, India and China agreed to treat the Line of Actual Control (LAC), meant to acknowledge the actual areas they each control, as their de facto boundary while negotiating their broader border differences.

But they haven’t even been able to agree on the same LAC, said BR Deepak, a professor of Chinese studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi.

Their claims of where the LAC lies differ in several areas, allowing patrols by both sides to enter areas that are claimed by the other, he added.

Along the western sector of the LAC, in mountainous Ladakh, both New Delhi and Beijing have been engaged in face-offs and tensions at multiple points in recent years. In June 2020, Indian and Chinese troops engaged in hand-to-hand combat, leading to the deaths of at least 20 Indians and four Chinese soldiers.

Tensions persist over the eastern sector of the border as well, which includes the states of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh from India’s side. In Sikkim’s Naku La, Indian and Chinese troops clashed in May 2020, then again in January 2021.

In the middle sector of the LAC, China and India have smaller disputes in Uttarakhand’s Barahoti and Himachal Pradesh’s Shipki La regions.

And in Doklam, a plateau at the trijunction of China, India and Bhutan, Beijing moved heavy road-building equipment to extend a military road southward, leading to a 73-day tense military standoff with Indian forces in 2017.

“These issues snowballing is always a possibility. A small untoward incident can lead up to massive escalation, as it has happened earlier at times, for example in Galwan,” said JNU’s Deepak, referring to the clash in Ladakh in June 2020.

Praveen Donthi, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said that even though Trump’s tariffs have forced India and China to try to revive their bilateral ties, they are still engaged in “cautious re-engagement”, recovering from their border tensions in recent years.

“China uses the border dispute as a pressure point and to send mixed signals, as it has in the past, leaving India guessing whether local commanders are acting on their own or under direction from the [military] leadership,” Donthi told Al Jazeera.

How are India-China trade ties?

Even though border relations remain tense, bilateral trade has ballooned over the last decade.

According to the Indian Embassy in Beijing, the bilateral goods trade reached $151.1bn in the 2025-26 financial year. That’s more than double the $71.45bn of trade between the neighbours in 2016-17.

Those numbers are driven overwhelmingly by Indian imports from China, which rose from $61.28bn in 2016-17 to $131.63bn in 2025-26, while Indian exports only increased from $10.17bn to $19.47bn in this period.

In fact, the Trump administration in Washington recently identified India as the tier-1 country that it alleges is part of a “shadow transhipment network” designed to help China circumvent American sanctions and tariffs.

Saheli Chattaraj, an assistant professor at Somaiya Vidyavihar University, in Mumbai, who specialises in relations with China, said that this dichotomy of better diplomatic and trade relations in the face of border disputes is central to the bilateral relationship.

“Economic and diplomatic engagement can improve without resolving the underlying strategic dispute. The border is not simply a bilateral irritant,” she told Al Jazeera. “India-China relations are best characterised as managed competition rather than genuine normalisation.”

“China’s behaviour can be understood as an attempt to preserve an asymmetry of power along the disputed frontier and to remind India that improved bilateral relations do not alter the underlying strategic balance,” she noted.

Donthi agreed.

In the larger geopolitical equation, “India and China are destined to be competitors”, he said. “The unresolved boundary dispute will continue to haunt relations until it is settled.”