Hindustan Times
Chinese whispers on India
Tracking India-China ties last week was like a study of mood swings.
Wednesday, 11.30 pm: China’s official news agency denies reports of nearly 11,000 PLA soldiers in the disputed Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Beijing’s denial controversially refers to the region as ‘northern Pakistan’.
Thursday, 9.30 am: Scribble notes as the top finance officials of India and China sit across the table at Beijing’s official state guest house and pledge to present a united front on global financial affairs and help each other reduce national poverty.
Thursday, 2.45 pm: Scribble notes at the foreign ministry as spokesperson Jiang Yu responds with her own denial to a media query on Beijing’s visa denial to a top Indian army general because Jammu and Kashmir is under his command. “After reading the reports, we have checked with the competent authorities. The relevant media report is not true.” She said Beijing’s visa policy for residents of Indian-controlled Kashmir stays unchanged, indicating that they will continue to issue separate stapled visas to these residents despite New Delhi’s protests.
Friday morning: Environment officials of India and China release a statement in Beijing, promising to work together to save the endangered tiger.
Friday afternoon: India’s ambassador to China meets vice foreign minister Zhang Zhijun to convey concerns over Chinese ‘presence and activity’ in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the reference to Gilgit-Baltistan as ‘northern Pakistan’. The state-run Chinese media ignores the news.
On Sunday, HT analysed the making of China’s current India policy and the extreme ups and downs in the relationship. Read the story here. The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, is still silent on the latest dispute with India. Its online forum predictably dismisses the bilateral tension as a creation of the Indian media. Some Chinese analysts contacted for interviews last week did not respond. So insight on China’s eye on India must often be sourced from outside China.
A latest paper on India-China relations is available here. I interviewed the author Mohan Malik, an India-China specialist at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, over email.
Excerpts of his insight on how China sees India:
“The Chinese perception of India as a land of irreconcilable socio-religious cleavages with an inherently unstable polity and weak leadership that is easily contained through proxies is aggravating tensions between the two.
Beijing sees India’s rise as an economic and military power as prolonging American hegemony in Asia and hindering the establishment of a post-American Sino-centric regional order in the Asia-Pacific.
The long-term growth of Chinese supremacy in Asia is contingent upon having smaller and weaker compliant states on China’s periphery. These goals invariably pit India against China. China wants to nip in the bud any potential challenge that India might pose in the future. The Chinese have consistently followed a ‘contain India’ strategy since the 1960s.
Prior to 2005, there was no reference to Southern Tibet (Arunachal Pradesh) in China’s official media or any talk of the ‘unfinished business of the 1962 War’. Nor did the Chinese government or official media ever claim that the PLA’s ‘peaceful liberation of Tibet in 1950 was partial and incomplete’ or that ‘a part of Tibet was yet to be liberated’.
Resurrecting old issues and manufacturing new disputes to put the other side off balance and enhance negotiating leverage is an old negotiating tactic in Chinese statecraft. Chinese strategic writings indicate that as China becomes more economically and militarily powerful, its belligerence towards India in particular will increase.
The PLA has always played a key role in China’s policy towards the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and India. Now we see the PLA playing a similar assertive role in Beijing’s South China Sea/Southeast Asia policy as well.
The PLA-run media have begun to attack India for supposedly hegemonic designs, with some publications hinting at the merits of a confrontation. Beijing perceives India as the weakest link in an evolving anti-China coalition of maritime powers (the US-Japan-Vietnam-Australia-India) inimical to China’s growth. Some hawkish Chinese military planners believe in the inevitability of a military showdown in order to put India in its place in the next two decades.
So, for India, ‘the decade of living dangerously under China’s shadow’ begins in 2011. New railroad infrastructure projects in Pakistani-held Kashmir and Tibet are aimed at bolstering China’s military strength and intervention options against India in the event of another war between the sub-continental rivals or between China and India.
The real irony is that China and India could stumble into another war in future for exactly the same reasons that led them to a border war half-a-century ago in 1962. A geopolitical crisis of Himalayan proportions is in the making from Afghanistan to Burma.
India-China relations will continue to be characterised by competition, tension, interspersed with endless talks, and limited cooperation on issues of mutual concern.
Both will employ strategic maneuvers to checkmate each other from gaining advantage or expanding spheres of influence. According to Chinese analyst Dai Bing, ‘while a hot war is out of the question, a cold war between the two countries is increasingly likely’.”
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Hari Reply:
September 6th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
All your point is contradictory. Stop day dreaming and whining..
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