Despite the ongoing diplomatic and military dialogues to reduce border tensions, the PRC has continued taking incremental and tactical actions to press its claims at the LAC. Sometime in 2020, the PRC built a large 100-home civilian village inside disputed territory between the PRC’s Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s Arunachal Pradesh state in the eastern sector of the LAC. These and other infrastructure development efforts along India-China have been a source of consternation in the Indian government and media, the report said.

In contrast, PRC has attempted to blame India for provoking the standoff through India’s increased infrastructure development near the LAC. Asserting that its deployments to the LAC were in response to Indian provocation, Beijing has refused to withdraw any forces until India’s forces have withdrawn behind the PRC’s version of the LAC and ceased infrastructure improvements in the area, the report said. As of April 2021, PLA and Indian Army representatives have held eleven rounds of Corps-level negotiations since the beginning of the standoff in May 2020, consisting of meetings between the commanders of the PLA’s South Xinjiang (Nanjiang) Military District and the Indian Army’s 14th Corps. The negotiations have yielded limited disengagement at specific areas along the LAC. In addition to military negotiations, on 10 September, the PRC’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, met with India’s Minister of External Affairs, S. Jaishankar, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow.

The two ministers released a plan, which has yet to be carried out, for resolving the dispute and expressed a desire to resolve the standoff peacefully while maintaining dialogue, the Defence Department report said.