The ongoing uproar across the Asian
political spectrum surrounding a map of a Greater
China in an updated biometric version of the
country's passport has made headlines around the
globe, particularly in the neighboring
nation-states who found this cartographic
territorial grab a deep diplomatic affront.
Beyond the fairly simplistic matter of the
map itself, the issue has shed light on a host of
territorial disputes in which Beijing clearly
seeks to maintain the upper hand, all the while
insisting the controversy regarding the vexing map
is either overblown or misinterpreted.
Though the passports were introduced on
May 15, they began being scrutinized in the media
last week when it became widely circulated that
the offending map on the document's eighth page
illustrated that Taiwan,
the Spratly and Paracel Island groups, and
Himalayan territories held in dispute with India
were components of a sovereign China.
Under the umbrella of China's "peaceful
rise", the Middle Kingdom is continuing to expand
its influence and presence in the South China Sea
and Indian Ocean maritime realms through a number
of means. China's well-documented deep sea port
construction projects in Hambantota (Sri Lanka)
and Gwadar (Pakistan), along with the lesser-known
port projects in Kyaukpyu, on Myanmar's Ramree
Island, have received a good degree of reportage
in the Anglophone media in noting China's
commercial expansion into the Indian Ocean. This
is heralding a degree of peer competition from the
Indian Navy, which views the region as its
inherent domain.
China will almost
assuredly be a major stakeholder in a
controversial newly inaugurated port project
underway on the Kenyan island of Lamu that aims to
transport South Sudanese crude to the coast and
lessen landlocked Ethiopia's dependence on
Djibouti while further isolating its hermetic
Eritrean rival.
For India, China's
hyper-speed spate of large-scale construction
initiatives spread far and wide throughout its
historical maritime sphere is akin to a form of
strategic future encirclement somewhat analogous
to the manner in which the Kremlin perceived the
mushrooming of US/NATO military facilities and
opportunistic, post-revolutionary states in
Russia's "near abroad" in the name of combating
Sunni Islamist terrorism in the decade after 9/11.
When possible, Delhi has worked at
outmaneuvering the Chinese in archipelagic states
such as the Maldives, Mauritius, and the
Seychelles and directly competing with them in the
cases of Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.
West of Gwadar along the Makran Coast in
Iranian Baluchestan, India has begun to match what
Delhi perceives as the encroaching Chinese
presence on the Gulf of Oman by countering the
advanced state of the Gwadar project with future
development of the nearby port of Chahbahar, which
would eventually give India access to
Afghanistan's ring road with Iranian acquiescence.
Irrespective of the extensive sanctions
imposed on Iran, New Delhi sees cooperation with
Tehran as an avenue to expand Indian influence in
Afghanistan and compete with China's Pakistan
strategy for potential Afghan resources by
bypassing Pakistan altogether, having the dual
effect of simultaneously undermining Islamabad's
traditional "strategic depth" in that country.
Whether India and Iran can efficiently
cooperate to outfox both China and Pakistan
remains to be seen. India - with its complex web
of pragmatic foreign relations - has quite
amicable relations with Israel to the point of
launching an Israeli spy satellite in 2008 for use
in monitoring Iranian activities from space.
Pakistan is in the incipient phases of
playing a critical role in China's two key
objectives of consolidating the ideologically
contested territories of Xinjiang Province
[historically known as East Turkestan] and Tibet
while setting the stage for an increasing Chinese
presence throughout the Indian Ocean. China's
massive road project in improving the Pakistani
side of the Karakoram Highway in Gilgit-Baltistan
(until recently known as the "Northern Areas")
coupled with the Gwadar port mean that China may
soon have a friendly conduit from Kashgar,
Xinjiang, to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea
and wider Indian Ocean.
This race for
port, and hence resources, access among weaker
states along the Indian Ocean's periphery carries
the risk of reinvigorating dormant yet very much
unresolved half-century old disputes between India
and China in Kashmir and along the Line of Actual
Control commonly referred to as the McMahon Line.
The McMahon Line is a 1914 delimitation created by
a Raj-era diplomat called Lieutenant Colonel Sir
Arthur Henry McMahon that agreed upon the boundary
between British India, pre-communist China and its
Tibetan suzerain. Mao viewed such treaties as
humiliating colonial vestiges that a strong
anti-imperial China need not respect if it saw
fit.
For ASEAN member states, the passport
map controversy may come across as confounding and
quixotic in light of China's increasing trade
relations and efforts at economic integration with
its Southeast Asia neighbors. In Southeast Asia
however, the issue is slightly more of an
abstraction in that the disputes, though fervently
nationalist in character, involve places far from
their shores where no one actually lives.
For India, the conflict with China
involves what it sees as patches of its contiguous
territory. In a nuance beyond that, India's two
disputes are quite different in nature. Since
1962, Aksai Chin has been occupied by the Chinese
military whereas Arunchal Pradesh was only briefly
conquered by the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
The PLA then withdrew allowing the routed
Indian forces to regain their territory which
their opponents claimed was in fact part of
"South" Tibet and therefore rightfully Chinese.
Complicating matters further and only
adding the Nehru government's aggravations, in
1963 Pakistan ceded an area of Kashmir called the
Shaksgam Valley - also known as the
Trans-Karakoram Tract - which is still claimed by
India as is the totality of Kashmir, to China.
It was thought that then Pakistani leader
Muhammad Ayub Khan allowed a friendly China to
administer the area in order to strengthen
military ties between the two states as a bulwark
against both India and the Soviet Union. In
effect, by the end of 1963 the Kashmir dispute had
transformed from a bilateral to a trilateral one,
making its possible political resolution that much
more intractable.
China's long game could
eventually help Beijing develop deeper commercial
ties with Afghanistan and more importantly help to
quiet its restive Uyghur population through the
strengthening of transport and trade links while
denying radical Uyghur elements sanctuary in
Central Asian spaces where China has managed to
resolve its disputes peacefully.
So while
Chinese issues in Central Asia and Pakistan's
north-south corridor have all been swept under the
rug in the face of cross-border development
projects busily humming along in the name of
shoring up some of its most deadly ethnic schisms
in the hinterlands far beyond its Han core, the
quelling of its more vigorous disputes in South
and Southeast Asia will likely continue to remain
perpetually over the horizon in the near term.
Beijing has been managing a series of
nationalist-inflected, multi-front feuds with many
of its neighbors over the status of once rather
insignificant archipelagos that are off its
eastern seaboard and to the country's south. The
Spratly and Paracel chains comprising previously
uninhabited islets, atolls and rocks protruding
from the sea could stand to gain immense
geopolitical importance in the context of
potential gains from energy exploration.
The one immensely important ongoing
dispute the passport approaches somewhat less
stridently is the Senkaku/Diaoyu flap with Japan
in the East China Sea. Out of all the territorial
spats highlighted by the map issue, the
Senkaku/Diaoyu has the power to stoke nationalist
rivalry with Japan within China. According to The
Telegraph's Malcolm Moore "the scale of the
[Senkaku/Diaoyu] islands is so small as to be
invisible", unlike the bold dashes with which
China encompasses the Paracels and Spratlys
further south.
The irate states have taken
an ad hoc stance on how to deal with the
problematic new passports. Vietnam has reacted by
refusing to stamp them and is instead issuing new
visas on separate sheets of paper while canceling
the originals. Vietnam inherited the languishing
Paracels conflict following its absorption of the
Republic of [South] Vietnam which had fought a
day-long naval battle with the People's Liberation
Army Navy in 1974 before South Vietnam collapsed.
In a July report, the International Crisis
Group described the creation in June 2012 of a
Chinese civilian beachhead titled the "Sansha
prefecture" on Woody Island in the Paracels as
being in direct defiance of Hanoi's maritime
policy. Sansha is meant to be an administrative
center to help Beijing govern the sprawling
disputed region and create facts on the ground by
artificially populating the tiny Woody Island with
bureaucrats and other expeditionary workers.
Xinhua then announced in late July that a
"military garrison" was to be established on
Sansha in case there was any doubt about Beijing's
intentions.
The Philippines initially took
a more subdued wait-and-see approach by lodging a
formal complaint while continuing to accept the
new passports. But after Manila briefly
deliberated, it then adopted Hanoi's approach and
began refusing to stamp the passports of incoming
Chinese visitors, instead issuing on separate
documents fearful that it would be inadvertently
acquiescing to Chinese claims over the Spratly
chain by doing otherwise.
Beijing is in
the process of vast power projection project in
the South China Sea while having largely wound
down its Soviet-era legacy border disputes that
were inherited by the politically stagnant
independent successor republics of Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. China has made
concessions in order to resolve the respective
disputes in Central Asia, where its main interests
are containing political Islam, suppressing Uyghur
irredentism and increasing modest trade and energy
linkages with three fairly weak states rather than
an overtly assertive land grabbing policy. Turn to
China's maritime stance however, and it appears
far more aggressive.
Particularly
troublesome is China's decision to include India
in its embossed version of a neo-Greater China.
This comes on the heels of the 50th anniversary of
the Sino-Indian war. India seems to have had the
most original response. It is issuing new visas in
Beijing that reject the Chinese territorial claims
on large swaths of its northeastern Arunchal
Pradesh state and the Aksai Chin plateau in
Kashmir's desolate far north.
Though the
prospect of renewed land warfare in the heart of
Eurasia may seem a remote possibility in light of
the increasing trade between the two Asian giants,
tension remains with regard to these delicate
border issues that have sat unresolved for five
decades since the PLA retreated back across the
McMahon Line. Today's China of Hu Jintao seems no
more eager to back down in its attitude toward the
question of Indian sovereignty in the literal and
figurative frozen territorial conflicts plaguing
bilateral relations. India's hosting of the
Dalai Lama and his Tibetan adherents in exile and
tourism by his Western spiritual admirers are
thorns in the side of Sino-Indian talks, while
Chinese Communist party officials were incensed
when the Tibetan leader visited Arunchal Pradesh's
Tawang monastery in 2009 marking the 50th
anniversary of his harried flight from Tibet.
Chinese authorities viewed the relative
pomp and circumstance of the Dalai Lama's tour of
Arunchal Pradesh - where he was formally greeted
upon arrival by the state's chief minister and met
by an Assamese minister en route - as an affront
to legitimate Chinese sensitivities on their claim
to all of historical Tibet.
In the past,
China has rejected India's claims of sovereignty
over the entirety of Jammu and Kashmir by issuing
Kashmiris visas on separate chits that labeled
Kashmir a "disputed territory" while entirely
refusing to issue visas to residents of Arunchal
Pradesh.
The nagging issue that seems to
have escaped this latest diplomatic row is China's
stance toward Sikkim. Shortly before the final
year of Mao's rule, the monarchy in Sikkim was
abolished through a 1975 plebiscite, those
guarding the palace of Palden Thondup Namgyal and
his American socialite wife were overrun by Indian
Army soldiers, and Sikkim acceded to the Indian
Union.
Wedged between Nepal, Tibet, and
Bhutan, Sikkim had essentially been a protectorate
state and was formally absorbed into India as
Delhi continued to consolidate territory in the
decades after independence from the British crown.
When the single party state calling itself the
People's Republic of China was declared on October
1, 1949, the PLA leadership wasted little time in
aggressively asserting itself in Tibet the
following year - revolutionary China insisting its
action was one of "liberation" - while Jawaharlal
Nehru's nascent Indian republic looked on, quietly
aghast.
Unlike with the incredibly
intransigent issues regarding Aksai Chin and
Arunchal Pradesh, China appears to have slowly
come around to de facto accepting that Sikkim is
indeed Indian turf after a memorandum was signed
in 2003. On November 19, a trio of diplomats from
China's Delhi embassy somewhat curiously visited
Gangtok, the Sikkimese state capital. It was
speculated that the presence of Chinese
officialdom in Sikkim indicated the end Beijing's
dim view of the Indian state by inquiring about a
jailed Tibetan trader who was being held under
espionage charges after taking photos of the
border area, behavior Indian authorities deemed
suspicious.
It was then speculated in a
Northeast India daily that what prompted the
Chinese official visit was the possibility of the
suspect joining the Tibetan diaspora in Dharamsala
rather than returning to China (Tibet) and risking
torture.
Despite relative success of
resolutions along the border of a vulnerable
Xinjiang with the three aforementioned Central
Asian states, China's land disputes with a rising
India and the tiny, but Delhi-aligned Bhutan
appear as far from coming to a conclusion as at
many points during the Cold War.
In
August, Thimphu and Beijing - who have still yet
to establish formal diplomatic relations - marked
the 20th round of talks between the geographic
David and Goliath, according to the Press Trust of
India. While Chinese claims on Bhutanese land may
seem like the least exciting of its many
unresolved border disputes, it is considered
extraordinarily critical to policy makers in Delhi
for its proximity to the vulnerable Siliguri
Corridor, often called the "Chicken's Neck"
because it rather tenuously connects India's
peninsular demographic core to its
insurgency-wracked northeastern states.
If
Beijing can deftly wrest Bhutan from its current
Indian orbit and formally gain a slice of
Bhutanese territory, it may be able to apply more
pressure on the Arunchal Pradesh front or could
perhaps later revert its opaque stance on Sikkim.
All of this is against the backdrop of the
US so-called "pivot"' to Asia by President Barack
Obama - who has been referred to as America's
first "Pacific president" - and the fading of the
Cold War-centric Atlantic theater as the locus of
international relations. What the contest
between China and India and ASEAN members also
signifies is the decline of the United States Navy
as a unilateral post-war Pacific military hegemon
and the rise of a far more complex multi-lateral
geopolitical environment with all of the
emotional, nationalist baggage each state actor
will lug to the table.
What China in
particular does not desire is for its territorial
ambitions outlined in its new passport to drive
competing lesser powers into American arms to
unite against Beijing in the name of a common
threat. Only such an unvarnished realpolitik could
adequately drive such bitter foes like Vietnam and
the United States into an alliance or encourage an
India that once "tilted" toward the Soviet Union
to possibly tilt toward Washington.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance
journalist specializing in the Middle East and
South and Central Asia.
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