The Chinese crackdown on demonstrating monks at the turn of the year gave Beijing a public relations black eye which must have been a mark against a number of senior officials and a reversal no matter how strongly they feel about the rightness of their cause. A measure of their anger can be gauged by their calling the Dalai Lama a 'terrorist' — even for the propagandists of Beijing that is a conceptual stretch.

And the Dalai finds himself once again at the eye of the storm because of his forthcoming visit to India's eastern-most state of Arunachal Pradesh which is claimed by China. The 90,000 square kilometres of land claimed by Beijing is approximately equivalent to the area that the Chinese regard as 'disputed' or 'southern Tibet'.

All the signs are that the Dalai Lama's visit is going to prompt the next downward spiral in the souring relationship after Jang Yu, spokesman for the foreign ministry in Beijing intoned: 'We firmly oppose (the) Dalai visiting the so-called Arunachal Pradesh.' The Indian Minister of External Affairs S.M. Krishna was equally firm: 'Arunachal Pradesh is a part of India and the Dalai Lama is free to go anywhere in India.'

In reality the Dalai Lama is a lightning conductor for the broader Chinese-Indian tension which is perhaps inevitable as the two Asian powers assume a greater role not only in their own region but in the world at large. The spiritual leader's visit is planned to take in the sensitive area of Tawang where the Indian Army suffered a lightning defeat in 1962.  Following on his visit to Taiwan, which was 'resolutely opposed' by Beijing, one can understand, if not endorse, why the ideologues make these visits out to be 'provocations'.

Most disturbing for Delhi is the re-opening of the issue of border areas which they had considered closed for some time. Beijing had regarded many areas of border territory its own because they were delineated during the British colonial period and therefore considered illegitimate by the Chinese in the modern era. There have been reported incursions not only in Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir but also Sikkim where China acknowledged India's supremacy as far back as 2003. Chinese troops were reported to have come across their mutual border's middle sector despite the exchange of maps in 2001. Indian media reports claimed that Chinese troops had daubed the word 'China' on rocks and boulders in Ladakh, something that the Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected as 'groundless.'

In the past the Indian authorities have gone out of their way to avoid confrontation with the Chinese, backing down whenever Beijing expressed displeasure. Perhaps this time it will be different. It certainly is time that Delhi stood up for its own interests or otherwise the Chinese will feel free to continue to ride roughshod over much smaller fry than India.

In that context Japan's approach has been somewhat disappointing. When a loan for Arunachal Pradesh from the Asian Development Bank was mooted the Chinese mounted a powerful campaign to have it denied maintaining that the area was not Indian territory. Disappointingly the Japanese government sided with Beijing but happily the campaign failed anyway and the assistance went through. 

But the confrontation is not just about territory. There appear to be more fundamental reasons why two cultures, which are as old as each other, should bicker like an old married couple. There are a number of ideological reasons why the mutual disaffection persists: Beijing seems to believe its nationalist credentials are to be more highly valued than India's because they were achieved in a more revolutionary context than India's ridding itself of the British. There is also the little matter of democracy which India rates highly and which comes a very poor second to the priority of economic development in China. The Chinese also appear to have a disdain for a society which they consider not as well ordered as their own.

More immediately there is new closeness between India and the United States. This plays on the Chinese notion of encirclement and with the might of the U.S. and India combined so close to Tibet, Beijing knows that the issue will not go away. Whether true or not, Beijing sees the hand of the West behind the unrest there and even in the Muslim areas of its Xinjiang province in the northwest. The modern trend for the independence of even postage-stamp size states is not lost on the Chinese.    

Beijing's response to all this seems to indicate that hard power rather than soft power will dominate in the future and could well come to be used to settle arguments with neighbours like India.

Admittedly China's birthday — its 60th — was a rather special one but there was a completely different atmosphere on the military front to that seen in the past and it spoke graphically of the country's growing confidence in taking its place as one of the great powers of the modern world. Not only were details of the parade, unusually, announced in advance but correspondents were invited to practice parades. The parade featured thousands of troops, a 2,000-man military band and the very latest in new weapons systems, including airborne early warning aircraft, many of them developed domestically. Reportedly 52 types of new weapon system were to be on show, all developed with domestic expertise.
   
The lesson for Delhi, as it modernises its military with the help of the West and Russia, is that this is not the time to back down on any of its principals.

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