China’s reluctance to accept India as a regional power is a major constraint.
In all the nations constituting North Eastern and Far Eastern Asia—Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan—the role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is pivotal. Ever since China was established in 1949, its leadership has aspired to attain the high status enjoyed for over 300 years until 1911, when British forces ended the Qing dynasty-ruled Middle Kingdom. Since the days of founder President Mao Zedong initially, and now under the incumbent Xi Jinping for the last dozen years, China has strived to re-acquire this lofty position. Unconcerned with being labelled “expansionist” and exhibiting raw ambitions, China now uses its recently acquired heft and resources to dominate East Asia. China considers itself a global superpower, second only to the United States, and the sole regional leader of the Indo-Pacific region.
Right from 1949, it has not accepted the creation of Taiwan as a separate nation, upping the ante vis-à-vis all countries perceived as lenient on this issue. It has challenged Japan by questioning its sovereignty over the barren Senkaku Islands. By continuously supporting the “roguishness” of nuclear-armed North Korea, it has kept both South Korea and nearby Japan on their toes. This is a part of China’s well-deployed strategy to divert the progress and prosperity of other potential competitors in the region by creating fresh border disputes and keeping them simmering for decades together.
India is a case in point. No serious efforts have been made by China to settle the un-demarcated Indian border with Tibet, which it had forcibly occupied in the early years after coming into being. The border with India in Arunachal Pradesh continues to manifest its unsettled nature for similar reasons. In 1962, Chinese troops even marched deep into Assam and what was then called NEFA (Arunachal Pradesh). Under President Xi, the timelines for its numerous territorial and influence expansions have been noticeably advanced and widened. To counter India’s rise, China has allied itself with Pakistan. In exchange for passage rights over swathes of land and access to Pakistan’s southern port of Gwadar, it provides Pakistan with nuclear and conventional arms capabilities, as well as heaps of other military and civilian assistance. Since June 2020 when it occupied the Galwan Valley along the Line of Actual Control (LAC)in Ladakh, it has intensified its incursions all along the 3,500 km international border, and especially at vantage points in the Depsang and Doklam plains near the trijunction with Bhutan. It has built extensive all weather infrastructure of highways and created new settlements aimed at creating a virtually new Line of Control. Thereby, through such assertive conduct, it has made the situation more unfavourable and tense for India.
More lately, through the construction of a navy— reportedly comparable in size and lethality to USA’s —China has acquired military dominance over the South China Sea. In fact, as M.D. Nalapat notes in his new book, “Cold War 2.0, Illusion vs Reality”, through “its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) occupying several small islands and creating artificial islands subsequently garrisoned by naval and other pickets, China has expanded its geographical boundaries and controlled the passage through this sea link”. By seizing islands like the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, it has blocked the Filipinos from exploiting their own marine resources within the country’s economic zone. Vietnam finds itself similarly constrained. Controlling the vital trade route to the rest of Asia, the Gulf, Europe, and beyond via the Malacca Strait seems to be the PRC’s immediate goal. Unfortunately, even the US and its allies have not been able to effectively check such ambitious endeavors.
Along with striving for significant military-based gains, China has been at the forefront of achieving a high pace of all-round economic growth. An annual double-digit GDP increase for almost two decades, has made it the world’s second-largest economy, with a national income of nearly US$13 trillion and a per capita income of over $12,500, as well as the world’s largest merchandise -exporter. Initially known for low-cost manufactured goods, China now dispatches a variety of high-tech products as well as run-of-the-mill items, combined with numerous critical components needed worldwide for renewable energy -generation and transmission, electric and conventional automobiles, ordinary as well as complex pharmaceuticals, and a host of weapon systems. Moreover, through acquiring and developing assets of several rare earths essential in all kinds of manufacturing and assembly processes, it has become a virtual monopolist, able to influence their global availability and prices. Despite facing challenges in its extensive and bloated property market,and in boosting domestic consumption in recent years, through greater control over the larger industrial outfits especially in high-tech areas, China could soon be back on the path to economic recovery.
While the Chinese economy getting back on track is beneficial for the entire global community, the concomitant hawkishness and belligerence in its actions on the international sphere tend to become a cause for concern. This is particularly pronounced in countries like India, South Korea, and Japan in the Far East, as well as Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia, all of whom it considers competitors and seeks to control through unexpected provocations and outright appeasement of their adversaries. Its recent overtures of friendliness toward a select few European nations—namely France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Serbia—are partly an effort to fracture the unity of the European Union and potentially NATO. By flattering the US and even publicly expressing a desire to mend relations and cooperate, China seeks to weaken the emerging Quad alliance, of which both India and Japan are members. Additionally, it hopes to soften the technology embargo imposed by the Biden administration, which has begun to hurt.
In this context, it is worth recalling that a major factor in the economic revival of the “Dragon Nation” since the 1980s has been both the open and surreptitious access it secured to advanced world technologies when at the instance of the Nixon regime, it had opened up to foreign capital, enterprise, and technology. China’s growing recent proximity to Russia in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine also has the potential to disrupt India’s bilateral ties with Russia, especially in military matters. Even a degree of reconciliation between China and the industrialized nations, as it currently seeks, could work to India’s disadvantage.
China’s track record in building relations with India has been inconsistent at best. Soon after the PRC came to be created in 1949, it did not match India’s enthusiasm for prompt recognition or for quickly opening the customary bilateral diplomatic missions. It consciously made Indian diplomats work towards both goals, giving the impression of merely relenting, although it benefited from both. Soon thereafter, it “outwitted” Nehru and his diplomatic team by quietly occupying Tibet, from where it exercises control over South Asia’s mightiest rivers besides coming to sit next door to India. The climax came in the early winter of 1962 when it deemed it opportune to physically invade India. China was visibly unhappy with India’s decision in 1975, to end the protectorate status of Sikkim and integrate it into itself. Subsequently, it was the George Bush Administration in the US that 2006 onwards, skilfully assisted India in joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and later signing the Safeguards Agreement (also called the 123 Agreement) with the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite India not being a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and without the obligations accepted by its regular members.
Under US pressure, China has had to, albeit reluctantly, accept India’s emergence as a nuclear power. Thereafter, it has used every possible means to belittle and irk India, whether by unabashedly arming Pakistan including nuclear weapons, intensifying tensions along the international border with India or preventing the UN and its bodies since 2009 from designating Maulana Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, despite his role as the mastermind behind the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft to Kandahar, Afghanistan. Through a well-crafted and executed foreign and defence policy, China has strung a “necklace of pearls” around India, starting from Nepal, extending through Myanmar and Maldives, to Sri Lanka and Pakistan, with its naval bases spread across the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea.
India would do well to recognize the true face and intentions of China rather than being misled by the gullibility and false claims of friendship from the days of Pandit Nehru. Gone are the expectations of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” or the potential joint Sino-Indian leadership of Asia and the developing world as envisaged by India’s well-meaning first Premier. In more concrete terms, India must maintain its precondition of not negotiating on any matter, including economic issues, until the strategic locations within Indian territory occupied by China since 2020 are vacated. Soon thereafter, timelines for settling the border should be agreed upon. In the final analysis, if necessary, this process could be facilitated with the informal assistance of other members of the Security Council.
Meanwhile, it must hasten the building of an extensive parallel infrastructure of roads, helipads and airports along the border and augment its naval prowess including by building new bases to check the intended Chinese dominance of the Indian Ocean. The Made in India mission for defence production can be further sharpened to ensure the prompt meeting of its diversifying military needs. The proven Indian strength in IT and space needs to be deployed to build the capabilities in cyber warfare as well as the space assets with military related communication applications.
On the international front, particularly in the East, Japan and South Korea, which share similar security and economic concerns with India, need to be further befriended. There is a strong case for India to support South Korea’s inclusion in the Quad. India and the populated nations of Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines need to be more closely aligned. The recent supply of Indian-made Brahmos missiles to the Philippines and assurances of similar arms support to the other two countries should prove beneficial. India and these similarly positioned nations including friendly Bangladesh, must get together more effectively to collaborate in developing robust global supply chains for almost all manufactured goods. Modern technologies and capital would flow into these countries from the ultimate beneficiaries, including the US, EU, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Taiwan.
Besides having ample workforces that are no longer solely unskilled, the economic buoyancy in these countries (with the exception of the Philippines) bodes well for them to become larger markets than China was, when it had first opened up to the products and services of the industrialized world.
Dr Ajay Dua, a development economist, is an ex Union Secretary, Commerce & Industry.