Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a former adviser to India’s National Security Council. He is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

The latest round of talks between China and Bhutan over their unsettled border concluded last week with an agreement about the responsibilities and functions of a new joint technical team set up to demarcate the frontier.

The team was formed as the result of an agreement the two governments reached in August. That in turn followed a 2021 memorandum of understanding to expedite the border talks, which have been going on since 1984.

Despite these recent outward signs of accord, however, China and Bhutan in fact remain far apart and a resolution to the border talks is not imminent.

For China, the talks are a way to deflect attention from its incremental encroachments into Bhutanese territory, one pasture and one valley at a time. Beijing has linked fundamental resolution of its border claims to the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations and securing permission to open an embassy in Thimphu.

That is a sensitive point. Under a 1949 treaty of friendship, Bhutan pledged “to be guided by the advice of the government of India in regard to its external relations.” In a revised 2007 treaty, this promise was reframed as a commitment by both countries to “cooperate closely with each other on the issues relating to their national interests.”

India, however, remains the de facto security guarantor of Bhutan, which is a diplomatic minnow. It has no official diplomatic relations with any of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and only India, Bangladesh and Kuwait have embassies in the Bhutanese capital.

To be sure, China has also dragged out the border settlement talks it launched with India in 1981. Seeking to replicate in the Himalayas its expansionism in the South China Sea, Beijing has made stealth encroachments on Indian borderlands. China’s ongoing military standoff with India at multiple points along their frontier was triggered by Chinese incursions into the northernmost Indian territory of Ladakh in April 2020.

In Bhutan, Beijing is seeking to carve out a strategic footprint in the way it has done in nearby Nepal, which also has close ties to India. China’s influence has been on the rise in recent years in Nepal, as it has poured money into loans and infrastructure projects despite concerns from observers about the sustainability of the debt Kathmandu is taking on.

A banner erected by the Indian army near Pangong Tso lake along the country’s frontier with China.   © AP

It was Mao Zedong’s 1951 annexation of Tibet, whose religion and culture have shaped Bhutanese society, that made China the neighbor of Bhutan as well as of Nepal and India.

Mao considered Tibet to be the palm of China’s right hand. In turn, he saw the “fingers” of that hand, “to be liberated” in due course, as Bhutan, Nepal, and what are now the Indian territories of Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Chinese incursions into the borderlands of the five fingers in recent years suggest that President Xi Jinping may be seeking to complete Mao’s expansionist vision.

Beijing has previously signaled a willingness to withdraw from areas it has occupied in northern Bhutan, including the sacred, monastery-rich valley of Beyul Khenpajong, if Thimphu were to give up some of its western borderlands. Since 2017, China has been encroaching on Bhutan’s western regions as well, including the Doklam Plateau, a Sino-Indian strategic flashpoint, despite a 1998 commitment “not to resort to unilateral action to alter the status quo of the border.”

By building military roads through Bhutanese territory and planting settlers on encroached land, China has effectively opened a new front on India’s most vulnerable point, the Siliguri Corridor that connects the country’s remote northeast to its heartland. The corridor, sandwiched between Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, is barely 22 kilometers wide at its narrowest point.

The settlements, roads and military facilities China has constructed on occupied land suggest that the encroachments may not be rolled back, even if Beijing eventually reached a border settlement with Bhutan.

If anything, Beijing has continued to up the ante against Bhutan. In 2020, it laid claim to the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, home to some of the world’s most-endangered mammals, in the east of Bhutan. The fact that this sanctuary can be accessed only through the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh suggests that the move was directed against both Bhutan and India. Chinese maps already show Arunachal Pradesh — more than twice the size of Bhutan — as part of China.

Against this backdrop, it is scarcely a surprise that a Sino-Bhutanese border settlement is still not on the cards. Indeed, Bhutanese Prime Minister Lotay Tshering said in March that demarcation of the frontiers of Bhutan, China and India where they converge at the Doklam Plateau can be done only trilaterally.

“It is not up to Bhutan alone to solve the problem,” he told an interviewer. “We are three.”

Bhutan remains treaty-bound to respect Indian interests. India remains opposed to the cession of Bhutanese territory to China, particularly around the Doklam Plateau. So while Bhutan and China may reach more incremental agreements on how to take forward their talks, the end still appears nowhere in sight.