China's Silent Army
Page 29
The recent democratic election of the Tibetan prime minister, Lobsang Sangay,5 who now leads the exiled government in secular matters, as well as the Dalai Lama’s seventy-seven years of age, is a source of concern both in Beijing and in the region itself, as it is possible that the Tibetan movement will become radicalized after the death of the Buddhist leader. Tempa Tsering is confident that the principle of nonviolence will prevail, but he also recognizes that nobody knows what will happen if the destruction of Tibetan culture and identity continues in this way.
“Now people say that Tibet is on the verge of death. They say it would be better to do something for Tibet and die, than to do nothing and die anyway,” he points out. The future is viewed with trepidation, particularly in New Delhi, as the combination of a new generation of less moderate Tibetan leaders and the absence of a Dalai Lama who has spent decades uniting the various different factions with his balanced form of government could potentially see relations flaring up once more between the two Asian countries.6
“I see a hot scenario in the years to come [between China and India]. If the Tibetan movement gets radical, the Chinese will have to react, and that is going to be seen badly in the rest of the world. At the same time, the Chinese will increasingly accuse India of harboring terrorists in our home ground, which will add more fuel to the fire in Pakistan.7 Therefore, the best scenario for the Chinese would be to deal directly with the Dalai Lama, and not with the new generation. Not dealing with the Dalai Lama would be a historic missed opportunity for them,” argues Madhu Bhalla, director of the East Asian Studies Department at the University of Delhi.
The deterioration in relations dates back to the invasion of Tibet in 1950. This climate of mutual distrust between the two Asian powers led to the border war between them in 1962, a hugely humiliating ordeal for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government. The wound left by the war is still raw today. With his markedly left-wing ideology, the first leader of India after the country’s independence sympathized in principle with Mao Zedong’s “liberation” of Tibet. Nehru believed that the outdated feudal system in place in the region at that time needed to be demolished and replaced with a new system along socialist lines. Furthermore, as an alternative to the two blocs of the Cold War, Nehru hoped to form an Asian axis between the two countries which had just shaken off their colonial past. As proof of his friendship, Nehru not only recognized Beijing’s authority in Tibet but also decisively helped China to consolidate its power in the region by providing Beijing with invaluable diplomatic support at the UN. New Delhi provided this clear show of support in the hope that Beijing would grant a certain degree of autonomy to the conquered territory, because of India’s centuries of “sentimental and cultural interest” in Tibet. For India, this was a way of guaranteeing a lesser Chinese political and military presence on the new border.
However, Nehru’s hopes of mutual friendship soon fell by the wayside. Not only did Mao distrust the Indian prime minister’s good intentions, but relations also deteriorated significantly throughout the 1950s, and particularly after the Lhasa uprising in 1959 which sent the Dalai Lama into exile.8 That year, India had “fulfilled” its part of the agreement by recognizing China’s sovereignty in Tibet. However, China had not honored its side of the bargain, as Tibetan autonomy was abolished once and for all after the 1959 revolt. In fact, at that time Mao was already convinced that there was an Indian conspiracy behind the uprising, with the aim of undermining Chinese rule in Tibet and of eventually annexing the territory to the “Great Indian Empire.” Beijing also misinterpreted the exile of the Dalai Lama, seeing it as proof of the Indian government’s supposed support for exiled Tibetans and therefore an unacceptable act of interference in China’s domestic affairs. It was then that India became China’s enemy.
It is also important to take into account the undercover operations of the CIA which came to the attention of Chinese intelligence services, as well as India’s policy of advancing on and militarizing the border in 1961, a policy aimed at strengthening the undefined border in the naive belief that Beijing would not react.9 However, the recently founded People’s Republic—which had just managed to rise above its century of “imperialist humiliation”—interpreted India’s attitude in hostile terms, seeing it as a lack of respect towards the power of the new Communist China. In October 1962, Mao made a decisive move. After an erroneous historical reading of India’s actions over the course of those years,10 he decided to teach his neighbor an important lesson. He launched a lightning offensive on two sectors of the border with India, separated by a thousand kilometers. In a question of weeks, China inflicted a painful military defeat on the Indian troops.11
Beijing achieved both of its objectives: to stabilize the Tibetan border and to win the respect of the Indian leaders. However, in New Delhi the Chinese aggression was seen—and continues to be seen—as a “great betrayal” which left a profound scar on the country’s collective national memory and which has poisoned relations between the two nations ever since.12
“IF YOU GIVE US THE DALAI LAMA, WE CAN BE FRIENDS”
The official visit of the Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao to Bangalore in 2005 left behind one phrase for posterity. In the Mecca of technology, Wen compared co-operation between India and China to “two pagodas, one hardware and one software. Combined, we can take the leadership position in the world. When the particular day comes, it will signify the coming of the Asian century of the IT industry.” The words of the Chinese government’s number two inevitably sounded like an echo—in economic terms—of the old alliance aspired to by Nehru half a century before. The data on bilateral trade soon backed up what seemed to be a clear thawing in relations: while trade between the two countries barely exceeded $260 million in 1999, this shot up to $74 billion in 2011. One year earlier, Wen Jiabao and his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, had set an even more ambitious target: $100 billion by 2015. Did this mean that the two giants had finally put their differences behind them?13
“The wound of 1962 is not closed. It has not healed because the territorial issue remains.14 The border has not been settled, and India is still anxious. On other [land-based] borders, China has been able to settle its disputes efficiently and rapidly—except for the ones with India and Bhutan. So the question that comes up is: what is China waiting for?” The words of Professor Madhu Bhalla sum up the general opinion held on both sides of the Himalayas: that the territorial disputes and, by extension, the Tibet issue are still the main obstacles to restoring normality to relations between the two countries. “We have held fourteen rounds of meetings between the representatives of the two prime ministers. So far, we have been unable to make any progress at all on the resolution of the territorial dispute,” says Gurmeet Kanwal, a retired brigadier-general and director of the Center for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), the think-tank of India’s armed forces. In order to break the deadlock in the border dispute, the Indian government knows that the price demanded by Beijing is both unspoken and clear: the dismantling of the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala. The loyalty commanded by the Dalai Lama and, by extension, the headquarters of the Tibetan government raises hackles in China as these powers are seen as an alternative to Beijing’s authority in Tibet.
During our meeting, Gurmeet Kanwal shared an episode which perfectly sums up the general feeling within Beijing’s circles of power. “While at a conference in Singapore, one Chinese general told me, ‘Brigadier, if you give us the Dalai Lama in custody, we can be friends.’ ” However, in democratic, religious and multi-cultural India, the option of “giving up” the Tibetan cause—whether literally or figuratively—seems impossible.15 And if the Tibet issue is not resolved, the territorial dispute will remain deadlocked.
A far cry from the impression created by the ever growing commercial ties, relations between the two countries are therefore still greatly conditioned by what academics describe as “the bone in the throat of Indo-Chinese relations.” On the ground, this means t
hat an area measuring 138,000 square kilometers, or more than Greece’s total surface area, is still under dispute and represents a site of potential future hostility. Although a relative calm has reigned over the region in recent decades, mutual distrust has led to the fierce militarization of the 4,056-kilometer shared border: New Delhi has deployed six divisions or 90,000 men on the Indian side, while Beijing has four divisions or 60,000 troops positioned on the Chinese side.16 “We are defensively well positioned now. China would not make any major gains. We learned the lesson of 1962,” Gurmeet Kanwal assures us.
BLEEDING INDIA WITH 10,000 CUTS
It was around seven o’clock in the morning when we heard the beeping sound of a text message arriving. The first rays of sunlight were coming in through the window, and from this backstreet close to old Delhi we could already hear the noise of crowds and vehicles as the new day began to dawn. The message was sent by Huawei’s PR officer in the Indian capital. “Good morning. I’m sorry to inform you that the executives who had planned to meet you today in Delhi are out of town on an urgent business matter which has just come up in Mumbai. The interview is canceled. Please accept my apologies.”17 Less than three hours before our meeting, Huawei had canceled the planned interview with the Chinese executives at its Indian office. This tactic of avoidance was strikingly similar to the one we had experienced just months before in Latin America. For a corporation which insists that it is entirely a private company and that it has no connection whatsoever to the Chinese state, Huawei had behaved exactly as a state-owned Chinese company acts when one of its executives finds himself having to deal with the insolent foreign press.
We had flown for six hours and 3,700 kilometers from Hong Kong to follow in the footsteps of Huawei—a leading Chinese company—in one of the most important technology markets in the world. More than any other corporation, Huawei represents both the strengths of the new China and the fears caused by its emergence. Founded out of nowhere in 1988, Huawei now has a presence in 140 countries, employs 140,000 members of staff and has become a powerful competitor for the major players in the telecommunications industry, such as Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson and Cisco Systems. Amid accusations of piracy and of favoritism on the part of the Chinese government, the company has erupted into the sector like a whirlwind. Its winning formula has not only allowed the company to take the market by storm but has also forced the other players to drastically reduce their margins in order to compete. Meanwhile, Huawei continues to raise suspicions, not only as a result of the alleged connection between its founder, Ren Zhengfei—a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army—and the Chinese secret services, but also because of the company’s refusal to be listed on the stock exchange, which fuels constant criticism because of the lack of transparency surrounding it. In 2011, Huawei’s turnover exceeded $32 billion.18
After failing in Delhi, we landed in Bangalore in the hope of learning more about the challenges facing the jewel in China’s technological crown in India’s Silicon Valley. Huawei sent a top-of-the-range Mercedes to pick us up, which crawled through the traffic that has transformed the cradle of Indian talent into a logistical nightmare. At the luxurious Leela Palace hotel, the company has filled the length and breadth of seven floors with 1,200 of the 2,200 engineers working for the company in Bangalore. Most of them are young Indian nationals who crowd in groups around computers, brainstorm ideas in fifteen-minute meetings or work on new applications for Google Android. The R&D Center in Bangalore is Huawei’s biggest center outside China, offering proof of the company’s hopes for a market where it plans to invest $2 billion over the next five years. In 2013 the company will move to a modern campus on the outskirts of the city with room for 3,500 brainboxes, a nerve center aimed at world domination.
However, in 2010 the Indian government came very close to putting an abrupt end to Huawei’s ambitious plans. For almost nine months, a government circular banned telephone operators from supplying themselves with Chinese equipment under the undisputable pretext of national security concerns.19 Amid the atmosphere of distrust and potential conflict which dominates relations between the two countries, the suspicion that equipment made by Huawei or ZTE—China’s other major technology provider—could be carrying viruses or could have been manipulated set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi. Access to tenders for Chinese companies was therefore put on hold, causing a serious dent in Huawei’s turnover: this dropped from $2.4 billion in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2010, according to J. Gilbert, head of corporate affairs at Huawei India. “Huawei was already number two in the market, and that was when it began to face a lot of opposition and lobbying from competitors. Some people started raising the question of the security threat and other issues,” he argues during our lunch at the Leela Palace hotel, clearly convinced that the controversy was orchestrated by their competitors who used their influence against them. “It is a suspicion that has never been proved. If it was proved, we would have been banned. Even if Huawei did everything possible to become transparent, there would still be some issues brought up by our competitors. This is because Huawei is from China.”
However, beyond the commercial battle, the fact is that India has legitimate cause for concern. From its complete lack of transparency—as we saw for ourselves in Delhi—to the ties which connect Huawei’s founder to the Chinese military, it is only fair to recognize that the company is one of a kind, to put it mildly.20 This is not only problematic in a setting overshadowed by the possibility of a military confrontation, as the border conflicts between China and India are still unresolved, but also in relation to the powerful alliance which Beijing has forged with Pakistan, a nuclear power and India’s bitter enemy. The possible links between Huawei and the Chinese military, and between the Chinese military and the Pakistani intelligence services, therefore raise all kinds of suspicions and fears in some Indian sectors, particularly—as we will see later in the chapter—as a result of the hostility shown by the Pakistani intelligence services towards India. This suspicion has been fed by the Chinese president Hu Jintao himself, who describes the nature of the Beijing–Islamabad axis in a highly enigmatic way: “The China–Pakistan friendship is higher than the mountains and deeper than oceans,” said the leader of a Communist regime which meticulously calculates all of its public announcements. What was President Hu trying to say?
His statement probably was nothing more than the verbal expression of a reality: that Pakistan is a fundamental ally for Beijing at this moment in time. China offers the country its unconditional support on all fronts, and not only in the economic or diplomatic arenas. China is the largest supplier of armaments to Pakistan, and has 11,000 men currently deployed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which India claims as its own.21 China also plans to link its Xinjiang region with Pakistan’s naval base at Gwadar and is supplying Islamabad with nuclear reactors, a technically civilian act of assistance which the Islamic Republic may be using inappropriately.22 Ever since India and the United States signed their military alliance in 2005, which infuriated Beijing, not least because India had not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), China’s tactical aggression has led it to openly recognize Pakistan’s sovereignty in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, while it considers the part of Kashmir under Indian control to be disputed territory. By keeping the Kashmir dispute ablaze and strengthening Pakistan, China is aiming to trouble India on one of its weakest flanks. In other words, this tactic allows China to “bleed India with 10,000 cuts.”23
In domestic terms, these bonds between the two countries also allow the Chinese government to neutralize the potential impact of Pakistan’s Islamization and “Talibanization” on the Uighur insurgency, both inside and outside Xinjiang province. “Beijing is very worried that Pakistan could become a failing state, because Pakistan has the huge role of being a facilitator for China in the region. It facilitated the US–China relations with [the American president Richard] Nixon, as well as China’s relationship with the Middle East and
Saudi Arabia, and certainly with Afghanistan and the Taliban. It’s all about China’s broader regional interests. Pakistan is the doorkeeper to the whole region,” argues Madhu Bhalla. “Pakistan’s market is extremely important, but most of all the country is fundamental to China’s security on its western border,” confirms Ma Jiali, research fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, and one of the most respected Chinese experts on Sino-Indian relations. Both China and India believe that if Pakistan does become a failed state it will become a nuclear time bomb in the hands of whatever faction takes power, each one more radical than the last. The general feeling is: if Pakistan falls, we all go up in flames.
Under these circumstances, this “friendship higher than the mountains and deeper than oceans” has disastrous consequences for India.
WHAT IF THE ELEPHANT DECIDES TO USE ITS FULL WEIGHT?
On November 26, 2008, a brutal Islamic terrorist attack in Mumbai left 164 people dead and over 300 injured on the streets of India’s economic capital. Months later, confirmation was given of what was already an open secret in the dramatic hours following the event: Pakistan’s secret services had helped finance the attack, which was carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group with known ties to the Pakistani military. It was one of the bloodiest attacks ever to have taken place in India, but it was not the first time that the Pakistani military had been accused of playing an active role. “Pakistan has been sponsoring terrorism [against India] for two decades now,” argues Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal, voicing an opinion which is deeply rooted in Indian society.