What Chou Wants

After taking more than a month to answer Nehru's last note on the border dispute, China's Premier Chou En-lai last week called for a meeting in just eight days because of "our unshirkable responsibility not only to our two peoples, but also to world peace."

Chou's answer amounts to a total rejection of all of Nehru's proposals, except the one about not sending out border patrols. Though headlines played up Chou's willingness to negotiate, the fine print showed that he was in no real bargaining mood.

Main points: 1) in the East, China will give up its occupation of the Longju outpost, six miles inside the Indian frontier, if India will evacuate ten other passes and strongpoints along the border; 2) in the Western or Kashmir region, China claims to have been in occupation of large areas of Ladakh not for just two years but since 1950, and with the help of frontier-guard units and "3,000 civilian builders" to have laid big roads, "cutting across high mountains, throwing bridges and building culverts" without India's knowledge, thus making "absolutely unconvincing" India's claim to jurisdiction; 3) the strong implication that unless China gets what it wants in Ladakh, the Communists may enlarge their demands in other areas of the 2,500-mile border where China has "not up to now made any demand"; and 4) border peace and mutual confidence "are unattainable by other provisional measures." After asserting these squatter rights, Chou blandly declared that China is so big a country, and so sparsely settled in half of its area, that it would be "extremely ludicrous" to suspect that Peking would "encroach one inch upon foreign territory."

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