Page 2 of
2 SINO-INDIAN WAR: 50
YEARS ON Beijing, Delhi tread fine
line By Chietigj
Bajpaee
This is reflected in the jingoistic
media reporting of both countries, which is
illustrated by sensationalist headlines claiming
that "China seeks to breakup India","China will
launch a war in a decade", the construction of a
Chinese "astronomical observatory in Aksai Chin"
and proposals by China to "divide the Indian and
Pacific Oceans between China and the US".
Exacerbating this strategic mistrust and
misunderstanding are rising levels of nationalism
that accompany the growing international clout of
both countries.
At the international
level, China and India's relations with "third
parties" have served to inflame their
long-standing bilateral tensions. Notably, China's
"all-weather" relationship with Pakistan has been
complemented by deepening relations with other states
around India's
periphery, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal
and Afghanistan. These deepening relations have
been evidenced in China emerging as a leading
trade partner, source of diplomatic support and
foreign investment and provider of military
hardware to several countries in the region.
While these initiatives are largely driven
by commercial considerations, New Delhi fears that
these partnerships and projects could emerge as
catalysts for "creeping" or "strategic
encirclement".These countries themselves are
likely to gain from improved infrastructure and
greater access to aid and investment from both
countries. However, as this competition grows
fiercer it may come at the cost of governance as
domestic elites face less pressure to pursue
reform amid financial and diplomatic aid with
fewer "strings attached".
Meanwhile, India
has pursued a deepening relationship with China's
traditional adversaries, including Japan, Vietnam
and the United States. Notably, the concerted US
effort to draw India into the East Asia region has
been perceived by Beijing as a means of balancing
China's rising regional influence. Calls by US
officials for India to go beyond its 'Look East'
policy and 'Be East' while shifting its
characterization of the region from the
'Asia-Pacific' to the 'Indo-Pacific' allude to
attempts by Washington to further embed India into
the region. [2] Meanwhile, the fact that India's
rapprochement with Japan and Vietnam coincides
with renewed Chinese tensions with both states
over maritime territorial disputes in the East and
South China Seas signal the potential for the
Sino-Indian relationship to "spill over" into the
East Asia region.
Return of
"Chindia"? To be sure, competition between
China and India is by no means a certainty nor
necessarily and a cause for concern. Both
countries face shared interests spanning their
growth and development trajectories, energy and
maritime security concerns, and ensuring a more
equitable distribution of power in the
international system.
Reports that China
and India will emerge as the world's leading
trading partners by 2030 demonstrate that their
economic relationship is likely to continue to
deepen.India with its huge market, demographic
dividend and high growth rates also offers an
ideal destination for China's surplus foreign
exchange reserves with the potential to offer a
better and safer return on investment than US and
European government bonds or infrastructure
projects in unstable regions of Africa and the
Middle East.
In return, Chinese capital
and expertise also offers a boon for India's
manufacturing and infrastructure sectors.
Both countries' expanding military
capabilities also do not necessarily preclude the
possibility of cooperation. Given both countries'
mutual dependence on trade and imported resources
to fuel their economies they share an interest in
protecting sea-lines of communication (SLOCs) and
maintaining freedom of navigation. The Indian
navy has generally outpaced its Chinese
counterpart in the sphere of protecting the
"maritime commons", including maintaining the free
flow of maritime trade and transport and
addressing humanitarian disasters. This has been
demonstrated by the proliferation of joint naval
exercises between the India and other major or
aspiring naval powers, as well as its assistance
following the Asian tsunami in 2004 and the
cyclone that struck Myanmar (Burma) in 2008 and
the evacuation of Indian, Sri Lankan and Nepalese
civilians from the conflict in Lebanon in 2006.
However, China is fast catching up in its
humanitarian response capabilities, as
demonstrated by the PLA Navy escorting non-Chinese
vessels, including UN World Food Program convoys,
through the Gulf of Aden, as well as the
deployment of a Chinese missile frigate to the
Mediterranean Sea in early 2011 to support the
evacuation of Chinese nationals from Libya.
China's rhetoric of maintaining
"Harmonious Seas" and pursuing "new historic
missions" through engaging in "military operations
other than war" (MOOTW) suggest that Beijing's
potential for cooperation in the maritime domain
could grow as its maritime security interests move
further from its coastline. In this context,
reports that China, India and Japan have
coordinated their anti-piracy patrols in the
Indian Ocean within the framework of the Shared
Awareness and Deconfliction (SHADE) mechanism
demonstrates the potential for
military-to-military cooperation to grow.
Moving center-stage China and
India face an increasingly complex and
multi-layered relationship as their growing
economic and military capabilities and political
clout on the world stage provides both states with
more resources to interact with each other while
projecting their bilateral relationship to the
regional and international level.
The
Sino-Indian relationship is more nuanced than the
US-Soviet rivalry of the Cold War with a more
complex relationship interspersed with
cooperation, competition and a latent rivalry,
which has been characterized as a policy of
"congagement".
On the one hand, a climate
of mistrust permeates the bilateral relationship
rooted in their unresolved territorial dispute,
economic disparities, limited people-to-people
contacts, deficient institutional mechanisms of
interaction, and both countries' growing overseas
interests. However, this coexists with an emerging
"Himalayan Consensus" whereby both countries see
eye-to-eye on a number of global issues ranging
from climate change to poverty reduction,
relations with pariah regimes and calls a
multi-polar world order.
In this context,
over the short-term cooperation at the global
level and latent rivalry at the regional level is
likely to be the norm. The weakening of the US-led
hub-and-spoke bilateral alliance model and
deficiencies in regional forums led by mid-ranking
powers such as the states of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is likely to
create a void for major regional powers such as
India and China to play an increasingly prominent
role in shaping the regional architecture. [3]
However, over the longer term as both
states acquire the capabilities and ambitions to
mould the international system, the relationship
is likely to increasingly play out on the world
stage. There have already been a few instances of
this, such as India's push for a permanent seat at
the United Nations Security Council, which has
brought it into conflict with China's resistance
to an expanded role for India. Another instance of
this was China's veiled opposition to the Nuclear
Suppliers Group granting a waiver to conduct trade
with India in civilian nuclear technology in 2008.
Contrary to the rhetoric of an emerging
Sino-US rivalry amid the United States' so-called
"pivot" or "strategic rebalancing" toward East
Asia, the reality is that this competition is
likely to lose momentum given the fiscal pressure
on the United States to reduce its defense budget.
Despite recent claims that the US will
devote 60% of its global forces to the Asia
Pacific by 2020, the United States appears to be
experiencing an "East of Suez" moment in its
foreign policy as it gradually disengages itself
from messy regional conflicts while calling on its
allies fill the void. Similarly, Japan's aging
population, "lost decades" of economic stagnation,
and it current era of short-lived, coalition
governments makes it an unlikely candidate of a
prolonged strategic competition with China.
Rather, it is the Sino-Indian
relationship, with both countries' growing
overseas interests and capabilities and fueled by
a demographic dividend that is likely to be the
most potent source of rivalry between major powers
in the 21st century.
What is clear is that
the next time a conflict breaks out between both
countries it is no longer going to be a footnote
of history; it is unlikely to be confined to their
disputed land border; it will involve both
countries' air force and navies and will likely
spill-over beyond the confines of their bilateral
relationship with greater repercussions for the
regional and global security architecture.
Furthermore, renewed Sino-Indian
hostilities will no longer be relegated to
secondary importance as it did in 1962 when it
came amid the tensions of the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Instead, given the rising stature of both
countries another Sino-Indian war is likely to be
center-stage on the global stage.
This is
not an attempt at fear mongering. It is a call for
both countries to realize the significance of
their bilateral relationship and devote more
resources to ensure a stable and cordial
relationship for the continuation of their growth
and development trajectories and the emergence of
stable and peaceful international system.
This will require both countries to move
beyond the extreme rhetoric that has traditionally
plagued their bilateral relationship, ranging from
the idealistic cordiality of "Hindi-Chin bhai
bhai" (India and China are brothers) to
China's belligerent claims that India is an
"appendage of Western imperialism".
Notes: 1. India claims
38,000 square km of territory in Aksai Chin (in
Jammu and Kashmir) that is held by China while
Pakistan also handed over another 5,180 square km
of territory to China in 1963. China claims 90,000
sq km of Arunachal Pradesh (originally the North
East Frontier Agency), which was granted statehood
in India in 1986, leading to skirmishes between
both countries at Sumdurong Chu Valley the
following year. China refuses recognition of the
1914 Simla Accord, which demarcated the
China-India border, on the grounds of challenging
the legitimacy of the Tibetan and British Indian
interlocutors. 2. Geoffrey Pyatt, principal
deputy secretary for South and Central Asian
affairs at the US State Department has called on
India to move beyond "Look East" and instead adopt
a "Be East" policy by playing a more proactive
role in shaping the trajectory of regional
integration. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
echoed these views when she called on India to
"not just to look east but engage east and act
east as well" while Ben Rhodes, US deputy national
security advisor for strategic communication noted
that "just as the United States, as a Pacific
Ocean power, is going to be deeply engaged in the
future of East Asia, so should India as an Indian
Ocean power and as an Asian nation". 3. ASEAN's
deficiencies were demonstrated by the inability of
the forum to issue a joint communique at its
ministerial meeting in July 2012 due to a
disagreement between member states over the issue
of maritime territorial disputes with China - See:
Amitav Acharya, The
end of ASEAN centrality?, Asia Times Online,
August 8, 2012.
Chietigj Bajpaee
is a doctoral candidate in the Department of War
Studies at King’s College London and an associate
fellow at the Vivekananda International
Foundation, a New Delhi-based public policy think
tank. He has worked with several public policy
think-tanks and political risk consulting firms,
including the London-based International Institute
for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in
Washington, DC, Control Risks and IHS Global
Insight. He obtained his Master’s degree in
International Relations at the London School of
Economics and completed his undergraduate studies
in Economics and Political Science at Wesleyan
University and the University of Oxford. He can be
contacted at cbajpaee@hotmail.com.
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