The Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement (BPTA or MPTA; formally the Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility along the Line of Actual Control in the India–China Border Areas) is an agreement signed by China and India in September 1993, agreeing to maintain the status quo on their mutual border pending an eventual boundary settlement.

[5] On the other hand, the agreements have also been seriously and completely violated on numerous occasions, most recently during the 2020 China–India skirmishes.

[14] Scholar Sumit Ganguly postulates that one of the reasons for India to initiate the restored ambassadorial relations in 1976 might have been the change in status of Sikkim and China's reaction to it.

[16] In the fourth round it was decided that other areas of relations should be normalized without linking them to the border issues.

[17] This caused tensions to decrease to a point where during the fifth round, the border issue was again confronted head on but no outcome was made for numerous reasons including domestic incidents such as the assassination of Indian Prime Minister.

[17] The seventh round in July 1986 was held in the background of the Sumdorong Chu standoff.

[12] The Joint Working Group (JWG) on the boundary question was set up in 1988 to recommend solutions to the border dispute.

In the end, both sides agreed upon the term Line of Actual Control, the phrase that Zhou had used in 1959.

[26] Hence, the 1993 became the first bilateral agreement between China and India to contain the phrase Line of Actual Control.

A provision to sort out issues related to crisscrossing patrol routes in at least 13 locations was also inserted.

[30] Force levels would be regulated and confidence building measures would be developed to maintain peace in areas along the LAC.

[22] The standard operating procedures and bilateral mechanisms that were put in place since the 1993 agreement helped make the India-China LAC relatively one of India's most peaceful borders for a number of years despite remaining undelineated or undemarcated.

[2] The focus of the agreement was on maintaining peace and tranquility, and not on resolving the border dispute.

In the military sphere, an officer exchange program and high level visits took place.

In June 2001 the Indian and Chinese sides had the first in-depth discussion on the LAC in the central sector.

[43][44] In July 2020 the Chinese ambassador to India said that Beijing isn't interested in continuing with the exchange of maps process which had stopped in 2002.

[45] A drawback of the process of exchanging maps was that it gave an "incentive to exaggerate their claims of where the LAC lay".

[46] The Protocol for the Implementation of Military Confidence Building Measures (formally the Protocol between the Government of the Republic of India and the Government of the People's Republic of China on Modalities for the Implementation of Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field Along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas) was signed in April 2005.

According to sinologist B. R. Deepak, following the Galwan Valley clash, "all the agreements were now effectively left in tatters".

[47] Notes CitationsBibliography Agreements via Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China: