Louis A. Delvoie
Thewhig.com
June 26, 2015
Reuters file photo Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, left, shakes hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during their meeting in New Delhi in June 2014. Wang promised to help India’s economic development and emphasized that the two countries see eye to eye on most issues, playing down differences over a trade deficit and a festering border dispute.
China’s remarkable economic and military resurgence over the past 30 years have led to ever more attention being paid to its foreign policy by western politicians, diplomats, scholars and journalists. That attention has focssed largely on these issues: (a) China’s relationship with the United States, amidst much speculation that China may soon emerge as a rival superpower; (b) China’s often highly contentious relationship with Japan, mired in historical grievances; and (c) China’s more aggressive assertion of its claims to territorial waters and islands in the East and South China seas. These are all topics worthy of serious consideration. Another topic that has attracted far less attention is China’s relationship with India, its largest neighbour and another emerging Asian power. Yet this is a highly complex relationship that could have a profound impact on the future of the region. It certainly deserves serious study.
Some historical baggage
In their present configurations, China and India emerged almost simultaneously on the world scene in the late 1940s. They embarked on radically different political courses. China became an authoritarian, one-party state dominated in every aspect of life by the Communist Party of China. India became a multi-party democracy in which periodic elections determined who should rule the country. These ideological differences were not the cause of friction between the two countries, but did create an unspoken rivalry as to which system could produce the best results for its people.
The first clouds began to appear on the bilateral horizon in 1950 when China invaded and occupied Tibet on the grounds that it had once been part of the Chinese empire. This action eliminated what India considered to be a useful buffer between itself and China and created a new border several thousand kilometres long between the two countries. Indian apprehensions were increased when China refused to recognize the border between India and Tibet, as one having been unilaterally dictated by the British earlier in the century. On this front, things were only to go from bad to worse.
In 1959, the Chinese dispatched a large force to subdue an uprising in Tibet. Their action not only succeeded in putting down the uprising but also led the political and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama, to flee the country. The Dalai Lama was granted asylum by India and established himself in the northeastern city of Dharamsala, where he lives to this day surrounded by more than 100,000 Tibetan refugees. For China, the presence of the Dalai Lama in India is a major irritant in the bilateral relationship, since the Chinese regard him and castigate him as a separatist bent on undermining the territorial integrity of China.
Matters took a turn for the worse in 1962 when a border war broke out between the two countries. While it is difficult to determine which country was responsible for starting the war, it is relatively easy to discern its consequences. First, the Indian army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). That defeat continues to rankle with many Indians to this day and colours their view of relations with China. Second, the PLA remained and remains in occupation of substantial strips of Indian territory. In the aftermath of the war, the Chinese government laid claim to the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh on the grounds that it was once part of southern Tibet. Third, more than 50 years of negotiations involving experts, diplomats and politicians have brought their border disputes no closer to resolution. They remain an active and highly negative ingredient in relations between China and India.
Some geopolitics
Following the 1962 war, China began to see Pakistan as a useful counterweight to India in South Asia. The alignment and friendship between China and Pakistan grew steadily in the ensuing decades, to the dismay of India. China not only provided Pakistan with political support on the Kashmir issue, but also became a major supplier of military equipment and technology to Pakistan. This involved not only tanks and artillery pieces, but also short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. And it is widely believed in many quarters that China provided critical technology to Pakistan in the development of its nuclear weapons program. All of this was seen by India as a direct threat to its security.
And the China-India-Pakistan triangle became enmeshed in the geopolitics of the Cold War. As China was becoming increasingly estranged from the Soviet Union, India was drawing ever closer to the Soviet Union, eventually signing a friendship and co-operation agreement with it in 1971. As a friend of both China and the United States, Pakistan became something of a lynchpin in the efforts of both countries to limit the spread of Soviet power and influence in Asia. Pakistan was to serve as an intermediary in the negotiations, which led to President Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972. Thereafter, the United States, China and Pakistan found themselves on one side of the Cold War divide, whereas India and the Soviet Union were on the other side. This situation was to prevail for nearly 20 years.
The politics of encirclement
In more recent years, both India and China have become convinced that each is trying to circumscribe the power and influence of the other by penetrating or allying themselves with rival powers.
India views with great dismay some of the inroads made by China in its neighbourhood. First, there is the case of Myanmar, where China took advantage of that country’s isolation by the international community to secure a position of influence by offering generous aid for a wide variety of projects. Then there is Nepal, which used to be an Indian satrapy, where China has made large aid investments and where its intelligence services operate quite openly in monitoring the activities of Tibetan refugees. In the same general region, there are suspicions that China may be providing support to the armed secessionist movements that flare up periodically in India’s northeastern state of Nagaland, Assam, Mizoram and Maripan. Finally, there are the overtures that China has been making to the government of Sri Lanka since the end of that country’s civil war.
When all of this is combined with China’s longstanding relationship with Pakistan, India sees itself as being surrounded by countries under Chinese influence. One of India’s greatest concerns is that one or more of these countries may provide China with naval bases, thus allowing China to challenge India’s dominant position in South Asia and in the Indian Ocean. The spectacular growth in the Chinese navy’s capabilities in recent years has done nothing to alleviate these concerns.
The Chinese for their part have long been convinced that the United States is determined to contain the growing power of China in much the same sway as it contained that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. To their east and south, they see a long chain of security allies of the United States, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. In looking to their west they could for many years rest easy in the knowledge that relations between the United States and India were more often than not very cool, if not downright frosty. During the past 10 years, however, the American-Indian relationship has warmed up considerably, and there has been talk of a “strategic partnership” between the two countries. While no formal agreement exists creating such a partnership, these developments were sufficient to raise alarm bells in Beijing and to further deepen Chinese suspicions of India.
Economic co-operation and competition
Over the past 20 years, there has been a marked increase in economic co-operation between China and India. From very modest beginnings, bilateral trade reached the $60 billion mark and many observers believe that that figure could well double by 2020. A number of projects are now underway to create joint ventures in fields such as power generation, mining, infrastructure and telecommunications; and more are in the pipeline. These economic developments have led some to conclude that both countries are developing a stake in each other’s prosperity and that this bodes well for a relationship characterized by co-operation rather than conflict.
There are, however, two issues in the economic sphere that are somewhat less encouraging. Over the past 20 years, China has outpaced India on virtually all economic indicators. Its GDP and per capita GDP are four times greater than those of India. And China has been far more successful than India in lifting hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty. On this score at least, the one-party Communist dictatorship has spectacularly outdone the multi-party democracy. This grates with most of India’s educated elites.
A second and more serious cause of friction is to be found in the competition to secure energy and other resources. As rapidly developing economies, both China and India are anything but self-sufficient in oil, gas and a variety of minerals. Both are constantly in search of new sources of supply. For more than a decade, China has been present and highly active in Africa and Latin America, and has enjoyed considerable success in securing long-term supply contracts. India came to the game somewhat later but is now actively engaged on both these continents. How this competition for energy and other resources plays out will have a profound impact on the future of the bilateral relationship.
The future
How China and India relate to each other in the years ahead will have a major effect on Asia and the wider world in the 21st century. Will it be a relationship characterized primarily by co-operation, competition or conflict? It is very difficult to say, and historians are notoriously poor prophets. It is sometimes useful to fall back on the views of experts. Prof. Mohan Malik concluded his in-depth study of this subject with this thought: “It is possible that economically prosperous and militarily confident China and India might come to terms with each other eventually as their mutual containment policies start yielding diminishing returns, and the two Asian giants will become the co-leaders of a post-American world order. However, that is unlikely to happen in the short and medium term, that is before the 2040s.
To which one can only add that if a week is a long time in politics, 25 years is a veritable eternity. Much turbulent water may flow under the bridge between now and 2040.
Louis A. Delvoie is a Fellow in the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen’s University.
