The war fought between China and India 51 years ago has always been a nightmare for Brigadier R. Jatar, an Indian veteran of the war.

"Food was always frozen and fruits were hard like cricket balls and just were not edible, so mere survival was itself a huge challenge apart from a well-prepared enemy," he said.

Many of Jatar's comrades, whose uniforms were too thin to match the freezing temperatures, died from frostbite and hypothermia.

A dispute over a large chunk of land along the Himalayan border, estimated to be 138,000 square kilometers, between the two Asian giants was the pretext of the war. After a series of violent border incidents in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the war was finally triggered by the Forward Policy initiated by the Indian government, in which it built outposts along the border, including several north of the eastern portion of a Line of Actual Control (LAC), a 2,000-kilometer-long line first proposed by then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in 1959 as the China-India border.

The war ended when the Chinese declared a cease-fire on November 20, 1962, and simultaneously announced its withdrawal to 20 kilometers behind the LAC.

Continuing conflict

However, the border dispute remains unsettled though the two countries have held 15 rounds of talks after the war. In the latest standoff, Chinese and Indian soldiers faced off several hundred meters apart on a plateau near the Karakoram mountain range for three weeks until the two sides reached a deal on May 5 and withdrew the troops.

Indian media reported that a platoon of Chinese soldiers "intruded" into Indian territory in Ladakh's Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) sector on April 15 and set up tents nearly 19 kilometers inside Indian territory. Indian troops also established several tented posts several hundred meters away.

Sujoy Dhar, an Indian journalist who has visited the Ladakh region, told the Global Times that "talks about Chinese aggression is discussed often" in the region.

"I heard in border villages people often are fearful of Chinese 'intrusion.' There have been reports of exodus too from border villages," he said.

However, according to two local Indian residents who live about 350 kilometers from the DBO reached by the Global Times, there is no perceptible feeling of insecurity.

"No, there is no known exodus of the locals from Ladakh because of the fear of the Chinese and we surely will never even think about leaving this area," said Stanzin Dorje, who has a bustling fruit and vegetable business in the area.

However, Dorje said the recent border tension hyped by the Indian media has dealt a severe blow to local tourism.

"Hotels and guest houses that were gearing up for the season rush till September and October have been affected. An estimated 50,000 tourists who wanted to visit these areas stayed put," he said.

But he added that the fear is ebbing now after the border tension was peacefully resolved.

Colonial legacy

Many Chinese and Indian experts point out that the border conflicts are fundamentally caused by the two neighbors' different perceptions as to where the LAC is.

"There is no demarcation done on India-China border regions. The understanding (of India and China) varies as to where the Line of Actual Control is," Swaran Singh, a professor from the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told the Global Times.

The site of the latest standoff, referred to as the Depsang Valley, is called Tiannan River Valley by the Chinese. It is located in the western sector of Aksai Chin, which is largely a vast high-altitude desert covering an area of about 37,000 square kilometers.

Aksai Chin is also one of the two main disputed border areas over which China and India fought the 1962 war. Administered by China as part of Hotan county in the Hotan Prefecture of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Aksai Chin is also claimed by India as a part of the Ladakh district.

India's claim to Aksai Chin is mainly based on the Johnson Line proposed in 1865. Aksai Chin was put inside Kashmir in the proposal. However, the line was never presented to the Chinese government and was severely criticized for its gross inaccuracies by the British government, which had dominant colonial power in India at that time.

From the 1950s, India started establishing outposts in the area, having set up 43 in its heyday in the border regions of Xinjiang and Tibet.

Although China dismantled the Indian outposts after the 1962 war and has since reinforced its actual control of the area, Indian troops continue to patrol the area.

In order to avoid future flare-ups, it is essential for China and India to exchange their perceptions of the LAC, said General Nirbhay Sharma, one of the most distinguished and decorated field commanders of the Indian army and a Distinguished Fellow with the Observer Research Foundation.

"I hope when leaders of the two countries meet each other soon, they can talk on that. That is good for both China and India," he told the Global Times, referring to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's upcoming visit to India starting from May 19.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will pay a return visit to Beijing later this year, Indian media reported.

Trust deficit

As two of the world's most ancient and populous countries, China and India have seen more cooperation in recent years. However, experts say the two countries still need to bridge a large trust deficit in order to resolve the border dispute.

Professor Singh noted that there is a strong perception that China is perhaps becoming assertive against its neighbors, and said the perception seems to have been reinforced by the territorial tension between China and its neighbors in recent years.

"China is increasingly being perceived as a cat among the pigeons by the threatened neighbors," Rajeev Sharma, a New Delhi-based journalist-author and a strategic affairs analyst, told the Global Times. "If India is much closer to Japan, Vietnam, Korea and Myanmar today it is largely because of the China factor," he added.

However, Hu Shisheng, an expert on South Asia research at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times that India is unlikely to become an ally with countries involved in territorial disputes with China.

"Only if India maintains its strategic independence can it maximize gains from its relations with other countries."