Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

by Shashi Tharoor

  Behind the unpleasantness between Beijing and New Delhi over Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh, and China’s disinclination to resolve the border dispute (as it has resolved its disagreements on all its other land borders, even with Russia and Vietnam), may lie a broader strategic calculation. With the end of the Cold War, Beijing had two options in relation to India: to see the country as a natural ally, together with Russia, in building up an alternative pole to US dominance in the region, or to identify it as a potential adversary to its own aspirations. The emergence of a stronger US–India partnership in recent years appears to have convinced China to place New Delhi in the latter category, even as an instrument of ‘containment’ of China. Such a perception may have been reinforced by India’s frequent military exercises with the United States, Japan and Australia, its cultivation of the former Soviet ‘stans’ in Central Asia (including sowing the seeds of a potential military presence by establishing an Indian air force unit at the Aini airbase in Tajikistan) and its attempts in recent years to establish strategic ties with countries that Beijing sees as falling within its own sphere of influence (from Mongolia to Vietnam, and including direct competition over Myanmar).

  For these reasons, Beijing has signalled that it is in no hurry whatsoever to resolve its frontier issues with India. During his visit to New Delhi in December 2010, Prime Minister Wen bluntly declared that settling his country’s border dispute with India ‘will take a fairly long period of time’. His government publicly signalled that despite all the good economic developments showcased during Wen’s visit, the bilateral geopolitics was still problematic. On the eve of Wen’s visit, the Chinese ambassador to India, Zhang Yan, told the press that ‘China– India relations are very fragile and very easy to be damaged and very difficult to repair’. Needling an anxious-to-please New Delhi on its troubled northern borders helps China to keep India guessing about its intentions, exposes the giant democracy’s vulnerabilities at a time when internal tensions and dissensions abound and elections in one state or another loom every few months, and cuts a potential strategic rival to size.

  The two countries’ competition for scarce energy resources and investment opportunities in markets such as Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America have regularly pitted them against each other, usually to China’s advantage. Indeed, India’s refusal to condemn the Myanmar junta’s crackdown on monks in mid-2007 was directly linked to its competition with China for influence, strategic assets and oil and gas from that unhappy country—because its earlier policy of support for Myanmar’s democratic forces had simply allowed China, and its ally Pakistan, to steal a march on India.

  Other factors have added to the strains in the relationship. One was a great Indian diplomatic triumph: the Indo-US nuclear deal. China, concerned that the American willingness to create an ‘Indian exception’ reflected a desire to build India up as a strategic counterweight to China, made its hesitations apparent in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, thus incurring public statements of disappointment from senior officials in New Delhi. The deal went through nonetheless, but not without reminding Indians that Beijing was fundamentally negative on India’s acquisition of a significant strategic capability.

  And yet, in the context of the global contention for power and global influence between the United States and China, India may well have an intriguing role: the increasing Indo-US closeness could actually serve to make improving relations with India a higher priority for China than it might otherwise have been, by reminding China of India’s potential to serve US interests, perhaps to China’s detriment. This could well be one of the less visible motivations for Beijing’s recent interest in India.

  China’s consistent and long-standing support for Pakistan, including military assistance and help for Pakistan’s nuclear programme, confirms Indian suspicions that China wishes to use our troublesome neighbour to keep our regional, let alone global, ambitions in check. In addition, China’s development of the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, of the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota and of a Burmese port on the Bay of Bengal, all reflecting its development of a naval capacity on India’s flanks, causes understandable concern that the proximity of such a presence is at least partly intended to choke India.

  From Beijing’s point of view, it is not just New Delhi that has grounds for concern. India’s inclusion in the East Asian summit, which was pushed by Japan, Singapore and Indonesia primarily to limit China’s influence in intergovernmental Asian institutions, suggests that India may be getting too big for its subcontinental boots, seeking to spread its influence to China’s own backyard. China’s reluctance to support Indian (and for that matter Japanese) aspirations to a permanent seat in the UN Security Council partially reflects this concern. Beijing has no desire to dilute its own status as a P5 member by sharing it with other Asian powers. Equally, India resents China’s reluctance—alone among the current P5—to endorse what it sees as India’s self-evident case for such a seat in a reformed Security Council.

  Gurmeet Kanwal, director of a Delhi-based military think tank, the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), argues that ‘China’s foreign and defence policies are quite obviously designed to marginalize India in the long term and reduce India to the status of a sub-regional power by increasing Chinese influence and leverage in the South Asian region.’ A Princeton University scholar of Indian origin, Rohan Mukherjee, goes further, writing that ‘India’s competition with China is not just economic or geo-strategic; in a sense it is existential—a clash of two competing political systems, bases of state legitimacy, and ways of ordering state–society relations.’ If the clash is as fundamental as that, it is indeed difficult to imagine any conceivable geostrategic convergence between the two states.

  There is also the question of China’s view of the world and its own place in it, going well beyond India. In his 2011 book On China, Henry Kissinger, architect of the United States’ 1971 opening up to that country, portrays this in almost mystical terms. Kissinger’s book is replete with genuflections to the Chinese people and their ‘subtle sense of the intangible’, as he seeks to explain ‘the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order’. Thus he makes much of the Chinese fondness for playing wei qi, a complicated game of encirclement far different from the West’s (and presumably India’s) preference for chess. In an eight-page account of ‘the Himalayan border dispute and the 1962 Sino-Indian war’, which is far more sympathetic to the Chinese version of events than the Indian, Kissinger describes the Chinese strategy as ‘the exercise of wei qi in the Himalayas’. China’s war with Vietnam in 1979 ‘resulted from Beijing’s analysis of Sun Tzu’s concept of shi—the trend and “potential energy” of the strategic landscape’. Kissinger, of course, writes from the point of view of an American Sinophile. Both Washington and Beijing are capitals of countries that consider themselves exceptional. ‘American exceptionalism is missionary,’ Kissinger writes. ‘It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world.’ China’s exceptionalism, on the other hand, is cultural: China does not seek to impart its ways to other countries, but it judges ‘all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms’. This is potentially worrying for India (a land which is anything but an ‘approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms’), especially when one considers another major potential problem. China has so far shown little interest in concluding an agreement regarding the sharing of river waters with India, which lies downstream of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Reports of China damming or diverting these waters have so far proved to be unfounded—China has claimed its river constructions all involve no diversion of waters—but the situation involves a risk of major unpleasantness developing, especially given increasing water scarcity for India’s 1.2 billion thirsty people.

  And then there is the inevitable worry that the United States might plump for China to the exclusion
of all others, including India. Kissinger seems to advocate this in his book. Arguing that a close and cooperative US–China relationship is ‘essential to global stability and peace’, Kissinger repeats his traditional and oft-iterated preference for ‘a rebalancing of the global equilibrium’, calling for a ‘co-evolution’ by China and the United States to ‘a more comprehensive framework’. He envisions the emergence of a ‘Pacific community’ with China, paralleling the Atlantic community that America has created with Europe, under which both countries would ‘establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect’, making a shared world order ‘an expression of parallel national aspirations’. This sounds alarmingly like the ‘G2 condominium’ that some Washington strategists would like to see run the world of the twenty-first century—and it doesn’t leave much room for the rest of us (though Kissinger, never one to shirk a contradiction, is simultaneously an advocate of close American relations with India too).

  Such thinking, which is never far from the surface in Washington, engenders an understandable level of disquiet in New Delhi. But one issue that no longer does is the now-fading enthusiasm for China in India’s own left, whose previous zealotry (‘China’s Chairman is our Chairman’, said communist graffiti scrawled on Kolkata’s walls in the 1960s and 1970s) had given rise to worries of a Beijing-inspired fifth column seeking to destroy the Indian state from within. China’s evolution into a highly capitalist state, accompanied by a thoroughgoing disinclination to foment revolution elsewhere, has cost it the loyalty of India’s communist cadres, whose disillusionment with Beijing is now palpable. Indeed, there are more true believers in Maoism in India than in China. The Hong Kong magnate Ronnie Chan once remarked to me that ‘China is officially a communist country, but you would have to look very hard to find a communist in China. If you want to find a real communist, you will have to go to Kerala.’ The leading Indian communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had been the only party in the world to pass a resolution hailing the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, displayed great ideological angst in its 2012 party congress over the direction China was taking. Whatever else New Delhi might have to worry about with regard to Beijing, it is no longer its capacity to foment revolution in India.

  But all the other factors outlined above mean that the usually complacent elephant is wary of the hissing dragon, and for the first time it has begun showing its distrust. In December 2010, Premier Wen was obliged to sign a joint communiqué which did not explicitly mention India’s routine affirmation of ‘One China’ (an acknowledgement of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and Taiwan). Though there is little prospect of India changing its policy on either Tibet or Taiwan, failing to reaffirm it—in what had become a ritual the Chinese took for granted—was a clear signal of Indian displeasure with Chinese attitudes on the political issues dividing the two countries. Until the Sino-Indian frontier is satisfactorily demarcated and the dispute ended, bilateral relations are likely to remain mildly frosty.

  And yet, there is a lot that India and China can achieve by joining hands, and it will not only be for their interest, but for the common good in Asia and the developing world. India is not an obstacle to China’s aspirations, far less an instrument for its ‘containment’, as was wrongly suggested by some in that country. Even the purported competition for resources between the two countries in Africa and Latin America is, in my view, overblown. The two Asian giants actually have far greater common interests than is generally believed—in keeping open sea lanes, stabilizing overseas markets and securing vital resources from developing countries. Since there are enough resources to go around, this is not a zero-sum game but one where both could cooperate towards the same objectives. But it is true that such a perception is not yet widely shared in the two countries.

  It would certainly help if Chinese scholars and commentators broadened and deepened their understanding of India. The liberal Chinese-American scholar Minxin Pei has described how ‘ignorance, stereotyping, and latent hostility characterize the views of India held by a large segment of Chinese society’. In his view, ‘The combination of under-appreciation of India’s achievement and exaggeration of India’s role as a geopolitical rival could generate dangerous self-reinforcing dynamics that may make strategic competition between India and China more likely in the future.’

  There is statistical evidence for his concerns. A 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Survey found that 43 per cent of Chinese had an unfavourable opinion of India, while 39 per cent of Indians had an unfavourable opinion of China. Looking at specific issues dividing the two countries, 63 per cent of Indians described China’s growing military power as a ‘bad thing’ for their country, while 50 per cent said the same about China’s growing economic power. A poll released in 2010 by the respected Chinese private market research firm Horizon Research, which asked respondents to rate their ‘friendly feelings’ towards twenty-five countries, has demonstrated that the average Chinese citizen views India more negatively than an average Indian views China. While Indians expressed an ‘average’ level of ‘friendly feeling’ towards China, the Chinese polled had a much lower level of ‘friendly feelings’ towards India, higher only than their traditional negativism towards Japan. Whereas more Indians viewed China as a ‘partner’ than as an ‘adversary’, Chinese respondents saw India as the number three threat, behind the United States and Japan, and as the ‘weakest’ of the four BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China.

  Equally, knowledge and scholarship of China in India needs to be augmented: we need to understand China better. Exchanges of scholars and journalists, and a significant improvement in tourism between the two countries, would go a long way towards making this possible. It is striking that only 56,000 Chinese visited India in 2008, a year in which about one million Chinese visited Malaysia. Indian traffic in the other direction is not much better—roughly 380,000 Indians visited China in 2010, fewer than travellers from Mongolia. Till very recently, there was only one non-stop commercial airline service which connects the two countries, and it flew from New Delhi to Shanghai; there was no direct flight between the two major Asian capitals. Chinese carriers have now corrected this anomaly but no Indian airline has yet undertaken a Delhi–Beijing flight. Ironically, there is a daily flight connecting New Delhi with Taipei.

  If there is one assumption taken for granted by all of us familiar with Chinese sensitivities, it is that of ‘One China’—the inflexible policy adhered to by Beijing that requires the world to accept the unity and indivisibility of the Chinese nation, including not only Tibet but also Hong Kong (despite its autonomy, separate administration and currency) and Taiwan (despite its de facto, but not de jure, independence).

  Taiwan has tended to go along with the assertion of One China: it still officially calls itself the Republic of China (ROC), claiming descent from the regime established in Beijing by Sun Yat-sen when he overthrew the last emperor of the Q’ing dynasty in 1911. Still, it has been a while since the world took seriously the Taipei government’s pretence of speaking for the whole country. Once seen by the majority of members of the United Nations in the 1950s as the legitimate government of China temporarily displaced by communist usurpers, Taiwan has been marginalized for decades: it was forced to surrender its UN seat to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by an overwhelming vote in 1971, and has been largely ostracized from the global political community since.

  At the same time, no one pretends that Beijing speaks for this island nation of 23 million, with its GDP of $460 billion (a per capita income of over $20,000) and its robust democracy. Taiwan has not been ruled from the mainland since 1949, and for all practical purposes it conducts itself as a separate country. Not only is it a major trade powerhouse, out of all proportion to its size, but a significant source of foreign investment. It also has a robust defence establishment, designed to ward off threats from the mainland, and a proactive foreign policy. But it is recognized as a sovereign state by only twenty-three of the 193 member
states of the United Nations. As a result, the other 169 nations must deal with it by subterfuge. So the United States, India and other countries maintain quasi-diplomatic relations with Taiwan by assigning foreign office personnel to Taipei in nominally trade-related jobs. The Indian ‘ambassador’ in Taiwan is officially the director-general of the India-Taipei Association; his Taiwanese counterpart in India rejoices in the designation of representative at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre in India.

  Seems fair enough. There’s only one catch: deal with Taiwan more formally, and China goes ballistic. Any contact that implies official recognition of a ‘state’ or a government of Taiwan provokes furious outrage and protests on Beijing’s part. Thus the president of Taiwan could not set foot on US soil as long as he was president; ministers of countries recognizing Beijing are forbidden from meeting ministers from Taiwan. Taiwanese officials are, of course, banned at the United Nations, where the PRC’s sway is confirmed by a General Assembly resolution. I remember, in my UN days, apoplectic Chinese diplomats prompting successive Secretary-Generals to bar entry to Taiwanese representatives who had been invited to address the UN Correspondents’ Association. The resultant standoff at the UN gates usually got the Taiwanese diplomats more publicity than if China had simply ignored them altogether, but the bad press was less important to Chinese officialdom than insisting on their rights to prevent the pretenders from sullying the UN’s precincts.