[After
months of tension that turned violent at times, the release signaled a respite
in a dispute that has led to a buildup of forces along the disputed mountainous
border.]
The soldier, a corporal who has not been publicly identified,
inadvertently crossed the border while helping local herdsmen search for
missing yaks, according to the news agency of the People’s Liberation Army,
which reported his return on
Wednesday morning.
The statement offered no new details about the circumstances of
his disappearance, including why he would have wandered off unaccompanied by
other troops. He was the first Chinese soldier detained by the Indian military
since tensions escalated this year.
The
soldier stumbled into an Indian border post at the base of a hill around 2 a.m.
on Monday, an Indian official said. He was wearing civilian clothes and
unarmed, and Indian officials believe that he was either genuinely lost or sent
on a mission to scout out Indian defenses.
Indian forces
have surged to the frontier, high in the Himalayas, following a series of
incursions by China that began in April into mountainous terrain that India
claims as its own, escalating a border dispute that has simmered for decades.
Violence
erupted in June, when Chinese and Indian soldiers fought with clubs and other
makeshift weapons. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed, as well as an
undisclosed number of Chinese. Soldiers have repeatedly confronted each other
since then, and at least one other soldier died after stepping on a land mine.
Both sides have
sent reinforcements to the border, settling in for the winter dangerously close
to each other, in many places only a few hundred yards apart. In September, a
few shots were fired for the first time in decades, breaking a longstanding
agreement not to use firearms during border confrontations.
The clash has
whipped up nationalist fervor on both sides of the border and derailed
relations that had in recent years shown signs of warming, leaving little room
for the countries’ leaders, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, to make concessions.
In September,
though, the foreign ministers of the two countries announced a five-point
agreement to defuse the immediate standoff, if not the underlying territorial
disputes. Since then, Indian and Chinese military officials have held a series
of discussions that appear to have made some progress in avoiding new violence.
An eighth round of talks is scheduled this week.
The Indian Army, in disclosing the soldier’s detention on Monday, said that it had given him food, warm clothes, oxygen and medical care to “protect him from the vagaries of extreme altitude and harsh climatic conditions.” Conditions along the frontier — where the elevation exceeds 14,000 feet — have become even more forbidding with the onset of winter.
The Global Times, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party of China that often assumes a nationalist tone, welcomed the soldier’s release on Wednesday, calling it a “positive sign” ahead of the next round of talks.
Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from New Delhi.
