a few hundred acres

It started with a few metres in some cases and has been going on at multiple fronts.
Perhaps PRC needs to stop expecting people to forget the past and start noticing how they contradict their own self.
The tensions have been created by PRC's "an inch a day" tactics, which I honestly see as nothing more than petty (and I am saying this, knowing full well than PRC would want to call India "petty", to help them get more fake points).

For Nepal

And if it really was just about a "few hundred acres" and PRC really worked with a Socialist philosophy, then they would:
a) Not really need to worry about Nepal (a pretty small country with hardly any military power) being any sort of a threat that would require putting effort to take a small amount of land. b) Consider how the small amount of land would hardly make a difference to the people of China, while it would make a big difference to a country with was lesser land than China.

And that is where the inconsistency I talk about, comes in place.

Nepal is an otherwise docile country and I am pretty confident they would have been happy to have partial open borders with some kind of trade treaties in that area.

As such, while you try to play it down by calling it "contentious", Nepal was trying to hide any such transfer or annexation, fearing what exactly? If it were really fairly claimed, there wouldn't be a real reason for that, no?