With India and China wrapping up the 14th round of boundary talks without much tangible progress,
some Chinese experts feel that both sides need to adopt a "new thinking" matched with political will to make compromises in order to resolve the issue.
The talks, which took place ahead of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to India later this month, were very important but the two countries required new thinking without which the
issue cannot be resolved, former Chinese Ambassador to India Cheng Ruisheng said.
"I think both sides need some kind of new thinking, so that they can find out a kind of compromise, if they can find that, this will be a major breakthrough for the final settlement," he told the state-run CCTV.
Cheng, a firm advocate of a compromise for many years, did not specify the nature of compromise but his general stand had been that there should be meaningful re-adjustments
acceptable to both sides.
According to him, the leaders of both nations should work to take a historic decision to find out a middle way.
The two countries share over 4000 km-long border and the dispute confined to Aksai Chin in Ladakh region and Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as southern Tibet.
National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, who concluded his talks with his Chinese counterpart Dai Bingguo here Tuesday, said that steady progress was being made with discussions focussed on working out a framework to resolve the
issue, but final decision had to be taken by the political leaderships of both countries.
Though India-China began discussions to resolve the border differences in 1980, the process got an impetus after the two countries agreed to hold talks through designated
Special Representatives.
The two countries also signed agreements in 1993 and 1996 to maintain peace and stability in the border areas besides inking a political guiding principle on demarcation of the
boundary in 2005.
While Cheng advocates compromise and new thinking, some other prominent academics say that considering complexities involved in resolving the border issue, the two countries should shelve it and focus on other aspects of the
relationship.
Professor Xie Tao, the current affairs commentator of the CCTV, said that the Sino-India border dispute is different from China's border issues with Russia and other countries.
It has become complex due to inherent distress, Xie said without referring to China's strategic ties with Pakistan which cast a shadow over Beijing's relationship with New Delhi.
The negotiations are taking too long and if the situation continues, "go back to what (late Chinese leader) Deng Xiaoping said 'let us shelve the dispute'," Xie said. "It is going on for long time."
"As long as we maintain peace and as long we try to build trust, peace and coexistence can be maintained in that area," he said, adding that India's emerging strategic relationship
with the United States also made China wary.
Another Chinese analyst Hu Shisheng, a scholar of South Asian studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said while the dispute continued, it
was highly unlikely that a military confrontation would break out between the two countries.
Both sides should continue negotiations to find a solution as political talks were not a show of weakness, but rather the fundamental means to solve the disputes, he said.
"If the disputes cannot be solved immediately, at least they should not be made more complicated," Hu said, adding that both countries have the freedom to develop into
militarily-strong nations but should not use "threats from the other" which would "only further hamper the bilateral