China is seeking 'fair' and 'reasonable' boundary demarcations with its neighbours and has so far signed border treaties or agreements with 12 neighbouring countries, except India and Bhutan, settling 90 per cent its land boundaries, the state media reported on Thursday.
With 14 neighbouring countries and a total of 22,000 kilometres of land boundaries, China is a country with the longest land borderlines and the largest number of neighbours in the world, Director General of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Department of Treaty and Law Liu Zhenmin said.
China signed border treaties and agreements with Myanmar, Nepal, Mongolia, Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1960s and has resolved the boundary issues with Russia, the Laos, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan since the 1990s, according to the article posted on the Foreign Ministry website.
On the demarcation work with India, with which China shares a 2,000-kilometre-long border, Liu said the borderlines between the two countries were never demarcated officially in the past and the disputed areas were as large as 125,000 square kilometres.
China and India began to discuss border issues since the 1980s. To maintain peace and stability at the border areas, the two countries signed two agreements in 1993 and 1996 respectively, Liu was quoted as saying by the state-run 'Oriental Outlook' magazine in its latest issue.
In 2003, the prime ministers of the two countries designated special envoys who conducted five rounds of negotiations in the following years.
In April 2005, China and India signed an agreement of political guideline on demarcation during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to India in April.