evidence: China’s territorial disputes with India in Ladakh date back to the modern founding of the two countries. And Beijing’s claim lines have shifted west on at least two occasions, each involving demands for additional territory amounting to many thousands of square kilometers. Since at least the late 1980s (if not earlier), Chinese encroachments on claimed Indian possessions in Ladakh have intensified even as Indian leaders have attempted to negotiate new rules for managing the countries’ disputes along the entire frontier. [...] The pattern of Chinese patrolling since the late 1990s suggests that Beijing seeks to eventually control the entire Aksai Chin plateau (on which parts of Ladakh are located). China has laid claim to this region since the 1950s, but as the Sino-Indian rivalry has increased after the Cold War, Beijing has attempted to gradually bring bits and pieces of the disputed frontier under its de facto authority. The term de facto authority itself is inadequate in this context because, in the absence of maps that clearly delineate which areas each side actively controls, China’s creeping appropriation of territory cannot be either contested or contained except by physical Indian obstruction.