asianaffairs-Feb 2008                           

                               India-China

A complex equation

The Chinese do not want to settle the border question because it gives them leverage to pressurise India when required, comments Inder Malhotra, urging that we need to look for rude reality behind sweet and soothing words

  In keeping with the long-standing tradition of this country, the Indian media gave a larger-than-life picture of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to China, his first, in mid-January. In the process, it created, with the eager help of official spin doctors, some euphoria. However, by now enough corrective has been applied to exag-gerated expectations. Indian analysts, wiser by experience, have learnt to look for rude reality behind sweet and soothing words.

  To be sure, Manmohan Singh’s mission to China was not a waste of time. His courteous dialogue with his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao, as well as President Hu Jintao was, for a change, candid, no longer stilted and slurred. Indian concerns have therefore been registered clearly enough. The government is also belatedly conscious of the need for a coherent, viable and long-term policy on China because the complex rela-tionship calls for both cooperation and competition, with a tinge of rivalry. Before drawing up a balance-sheet of the Prime Ministerial visit, therefore, let me outline its broader backdrop.
   The first and foremost element in the relationship between the two Asian giants is that although the document titled ‘A Shared Vision of the 21st Century’, signed by the two Prime Ministers, waxes eloquent on the relationship being one of ‘friendship and trust, on the basis of equality’, China has never considered India — or any other country, for that matter — to be in the same league as itself. This message was delivered as far back as October 1954 when Jawaharlal Nehru, as he said it, was taken to see Mao Zedong and ‘ushered in as if to a presence’. Nor will this attitude change, for the Middle Kingdom syndrome is very strong.
   Yet, and this is the second important point, the Chinese are — in Henry Kissinger’s words — ‘pragmatic bastards’. They have contempt for the weak but respect the strong. Like the rest of the world, they, too, have taken note of India’s rapidly growing economic and military might, and adjusted their policies accordingly. But here again, they can afford to be smug because both economically and militarily, they are miles ahead of India. We have every right to feel proud of our 9 per cent rate of growth. But it cannot compare with China’s sizzling rate of more than 11 per cent over a much longer period. In fact, 2007 has been, in virtually every respect, China’s year. Beijing began it by flexing its military muscle in space and ended it with mind-boggling economic achievements, excelling America in contribution to global growth, something no other country has been able to do since 1930. The state-of-the-art construction China has done for the Olympics, to begin on Mao’s birthday on 8 August 2008, has to be seen to be believed.
   Thirdly, and this is crucial, it is the surge in the India-America relations that China has noted the most, and this has had interestingly contradictory consequences. On the one hand, it was only after the US announced that it was determined, in its own interest, to help India become a major power in the twenty-first century that Premier Wen first acknowledged India’s global role. Until then, in Chinese eyes, India was only a ‘major power in South Asia’. On the other hand, China has protested strongly against the ‘concert of democracies’, consisting of India, Japan, Australia and the US, and even more vehemently against their joint naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal. Fortunately, during the Prime Minister’s visit, India emphasised that it was doing nothing with the US that China was not doing. Significantly, the Chinese side reportedly did not demur.
   It is in this context — relying on the Vision Document that President Bush Sr. would have dismissed as ‘that vision thing’ — that the Indian government and several media enthusiasts have made overblown claims in some important respects. First, the Indian team has returned home convinced that China would support India’s claim to a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. The basis for this belief is the Chinese statement that it wants India to play a ‘greater role in the United Nations, including the Security Council’. The ground reality is that the last time when the issue came up, the Chinese without making any noise neatly scuttled India’s quest. Interestingly, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who arrived in Delhi from a visit to Beijing the other day, vigorously supported the move to seat India around the famous horseshoe table at Turtle Bay. If he and Manmohan Singh compared notes on China, no one has heard anything about it. But it is a safe bet that China would not want a second Asian country to be a veto-wielding member of the Security Council.
   Secondly, the spin doctors also spread the exciting impression that the Chinese leaders had agreed to endorse the Indo-US nuclear deal that has run into great difficulties because of strong political discord at home. Not only the Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), but also the principal Opposition party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), are against the deal though it was the BJP that, when in power from 1998 to 2004, had embarked on a policy of ‘all the way with the US of A’. All that the Chinese have committed on paper is ‘bilateral cooperation’ in the civilian nuclear energy field ‘consistent’ with their ‘international obligations’. The spin doctors and some independent commentators are interpreting these words to mean that China would want the deal with America to go through so that the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) can make the necessary changes in its guidelines enabling China to cooperate with India. This seems an illusion. Russia and France are doubtless keen to sell reactors to India, and they are publicly declaring that the Indo-US deal is necessary to make this possible. On 23 January a Chinese delegate to a seminar in Kochi stated that nuclear cooperation between India and China could become possible only after India had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). China would not oppose the changes in the NSG guidelines itself but would encourage others to do so. In any case, China has to do nothing to sabotage the Indo-US nuclear deal; its friends in the Indian political structure are raring to do the job for it.
   Thirdly, the vexed boundary dispute — it led to the brief but brutal border war in the high Himalayas in 1962, and talks for resolving it have gone on since 1981 to no avail — is something over which only the naïve can have any hope. Yet, at least a few members of the Prime Minister’s media entourage rushed to the conclusion that 70 per cent of the border had been settled and only 30 per cent remained! This is absurd. The bitter truth is that the Chinese do not want to settle the border question because it gives them leverage to pressurise India when required. To ensure a deadlock, they have aggressively pressed their claim on the whole of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, especially on the strategically vital Tawang Tract. Renewal of this ancient claim runs counter to what Premier Wen and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed to as guidelines for settling the problem. One was that no area of settled population should be disturbed. Arunachal Pradesh is surely such an area. No Indian government can give it away.
   Indeed, the Indian government can also afford to sit tight as long as Arunachal remains under Indian position — as the disputed Aksai Chin in the west is under Chinese control — and peace and tranquillity continue to prevail along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), as it has for 45 years. However, one problem, nicely suiting the Chinese arises. The Chinese are committed to respecting the LAC as drawn by Henry McMahon at Simla (now Shimla, and never ratified by China) with a thick nib. There are therefore several grey areas that both sides claim and patrol. This leads to about 120 ‘irritating incidents’ every year. Recently, Defence Minister A. K. Antony inspected the LAC and was horrified by the enormous difference between the super-slick military infrastructure on the Chinese side and appalling one on the Indian. He has since ordered speedy construction of 72 border roads.
   Whatever the geo-strategic and political differences, economic relations between the two largest Asian countries are soaring. Their two-way trade has burgeoned from a measly $300 million some 15 years ago to $38 billion last year, and the two Prime Ministers have fixed the target of $60 billion for 2010. Unsurprisingly, the trade balance is adverse to India to the tune of $10 billion a year. There is little hope of it being redressed because Indian investors in desperately needed power stations find that China is the only dependable source for import of big power generators.

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