The 25th round of talks between the Special Representatives of India and China – National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval and Foreign Minister Wang Yi – on August 25 could mark a turning point in the two countries’ efforts to resolve their boundary dispute.An eight-point joint press release, the first in 11 years, spoke of advancing discussions “on an Early and Substantial Harvest of boundary delimitation and Border Management.” When a word like “substantial” shows up in a Sino-Indian diplomatic document, something is clearly afoot.India and China have been trying to resolve the dispute over their 3,488 km border since the 1950s. The process has seen official-level talks, tension, and even a war. Yet they are no closer to establishing a mutually acceptable boundary. Now that tortuous process may be taking a new turn.HistoryThe history of their efforts has been long and convoluted. India initially assumed there was no dispute and that China accepted the boundaries reflected in Indian maps. But in 1959 they were disabused of this through two letters from Zhou Enlai, the first in September and the second in November, noting that the entire border was open to dispute and rejecting the McMahon Line in Arunachal Pradesh (then the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA)) as the border. He proposed both sides withdraw their armed forces 20 km from the existing line they were controlling – the Line of Actual Control – to ease tensions.By this time, China was in de facto control of Aksai Chin. Indeed, between Zhou’s two letters came the first serious clash, on October 20, when Chinese troops ambushed an Indian police patrol at Kongka La, killing nine Indian policemen.Tensions were already high that year because of the Tibetan uprising, which saw the Dalai Lama flee to India at the end of March 1959, where he was given asylum.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Over the next two years, the two countries strengthened their border defences and drifted toward war. In April 1960, premier Zhou, accompanied by foreign minister Chen Yi, arrived in New Delhi for high-level talks. Zhou attempted to negotiate a package deal: India would accept Chinese control of Aksai Chin in exchange for China recognising NEFA as part of India in the east. The talks ended in deadlock, but the two sides did agree to have officials jointly examine the historical record and produce a report. The voluminous document was still being examined when war broke out in October 1962.The package deal resurfaced repeatedly over the next quarter-century, and each time domestic politics or timing killed it. Deng Xiaoping raised it in Beijing in February 1979 to visiting Indian foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But the Janata government collapsed before anything could come of it. Deng, now China’s paramount leader, revived the offer in a 1980 interview with an Indian magazine and again in 1982 with G. Parthasarathi, then chairman of the Policy Planning Committee.But there was no Indian response. In 1983, the Indian side countered with an “LAC Plus” formula, under which China would recognise Indian control of Arunachal Pradesh and additionally vacate the roughly 3,000 sq km of Ladakh it had occupied during the war – this proposal, too, went nowhere.Official-level talks proper began with a 1981 visit by foreign minister Huang Hua; eight rounds were held between 1981 and 1987, but the differences were too wide to bridge. China wanted to push its package deal; India wanted a sector-by-sector discussion.In 1985 there was a sudden and unexplained shift in the Chinese position. At the start of the sixth round, which began in November, Vice-Foreign Minister Liu Shuqing informed his Indian counterpart that there was, in fact, a larger dispute in the eastern sector, and that India would have to make unspecified concessions in NEFA before China could offer concessions in the west.New Delhi initially read this as tactical, but it soon became clear the shift was fundamental. Meanwhile a marked thaw followed Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 visit to China – the first by an Indian prime minister since Nehru’s in 1954. The visit produced an agreement to intensify efforts toward a settlement, and official-level talks were replaced by a Joint Working Group (JWG). But the ground for the JWG was rough: India had renamed NEFA as Arunachal Pradesh and promoted it to be a state of the Indian Union in 1987, and China raised the Tawang tract to an irreducible minimum for any settlement.The Rajiv Gandhi visit also brought India around to the need to stabilise the border and normalise other aspects of the relationship. New Delhi accepted the notion of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and signed the 1993 Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement and the 1996 Agreement on Military Confidence-Building Measures – both of which stressed the importance of clarifying the LAC, since there were nearly two dozen points of overlapping claims that the process might help resolve.Relations stayed broadly stable through the next decade, India’s 1998 nuclear tests notwithstanding, but there was little movement on the border itself across 15 rounds of JWG talks between 1989 and 2005. The two sides managed to exchange maps only of the central sector before that process collapsed in 2002.Enter the ‘Special Representatives’The next move came from prime minister Vajpayee, who visited Beijing in 2003 and told his counterparts that the legal-historical argument had run its course; it was time for a straightforward political deal. China went along, somewhat reluctantly. The resulting joint declaration stated that “the two sides agreed to each appoint a Special Representative (SR) to explore from the political perspective of the overall bilateral relationship the framework of a boundary settlement.”The SR process’s major output was the April 2005 Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the India-China Boundary Question, whose centerpieces were Articles IV and VII.Article IV committed both sides to give due consideration “to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests” within a framework of “mutual and equal security.”Article VII declared that any settlement “shall safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”These suggested a swap of areas strategically important to China, (Aksai Chin) for the safeguarding of settled populations (Arunachal Pradesh).The SRs’ task was now to arrive at “an agreed framework” for the “delineation and demarcation” of the boundary. To assist them, a Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) was set up in 2012 to provide institutional official level support to the SRs.By around 2013 the two SRs had broadly agreed on a framework, but movement toward actual delineation and demarcation stalled – not least because China was unhappy with the deepening US-India strategic relationship.Beijing denied that settled populations had any bearing on its claim to Tawang; Dai Bingguo, in an interview after demitting his decade-long role as Special Representative (2003–2013), declared Tawang was Chinese “in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction,” and later said China and India were “standing in front of the gate towards a final settlement… now the Indian side holds the key to the gate.”The years since have seen China step up incursions along the LAC: a stand-off at Depsang in 2013, the Chumar incursion of 2014, a clash at Pangong Lake in 2017, the Doklam face-off later that year, and in 2020 a blockade of Indian access to six points along the LAC that culminated in the deadly Galwan clash.What exactly is ‘early harvest’?“Early harvest” first appeared in a Chinese note in the wake of the 2017 Doklam crisis, where it said that Indian and Chinese Special Representatives had been discussing the idea of making the Sikkim border an “early harvest” ahead of a full settlement. This is because the Sikkim-Tibet boundary was settled by the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1890 – not merely delimited but demarcated, along the watershed between the Mochu and Teesta rivers. India maintains a difference with China over the location of the trijunction with Bhutan but otherwise accepts the alignment.The idea resurfaced in SR talks in December 2019, following the Mamallapuram summit between Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, but India rejected it, insisting it would stand by the 2005 Political Parameters Agreement’s vision of a comprehensive package deal.Talks then went into a prolonged freeze after Galwan; there were no SR meetings between December 2019 and December 2024, but the slack was taken up by the WMCC that had 15 meetings in this period. The idea resurfaced in the 24th round, held in New Delhi in August 2025, when both India and China’s press releases noted they were going along with setting up an Expert Group within the WMCC “to explore Early Harvest in boundary delimitation.”The latest eight-point release commits both sides to work toward an “early and substantial harvest” and directs the WMCC’s Expert Group to draw up terms of reference. No sector has been named, but the assumption is that the two sides are eyeing the Sikkim-Tibet border (220 km) and the Central Sector (545 km), stretching from Shipki La in Himachal Pradesh to Lipulekh in Uttarakhand.China and India continue to swear by the 2005 Political Parameters Agreement and its promise of a comprehensive package deal. Yet they are now preparing “early harvests” covering over a fifth of their boundary. Clearly pragmatism has decided the course.Efforts to resolve the border have oscillated between the political and official levels from the start – Zhou and Nehru negotiating directly in 1950s, officials and the Joint Working Group grinding through the 1980s and ‘90s, Rajiv Gandhi and Vajpayee stepping back in at moments of stalemate. The 2003 decision to appoint Special Representatives was itself such a moment: political leaders delegating the technical spadework to trusted envoys while keeping the ultimate deal for themselves. Whatever the SRs and their Expert Group produce, a final settlement – one that necessarily involves give and take — will have to be signed off by Xi and whoever is India’s PM at the time.By definition, the early harvest is the easy part. The hard problems – Aksai Chin, the Tawang tract – remain untouched. One would have to be an optimist indeed to expect a quick resolution of the entire border.The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation and the author of Understanding the India-China Border: The enduring threat of war in high Himalaya (London, 2022).This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.