by Andrew Small
Nearly twelve years later, on 5 September 2008, US officials were desperately trying to get an answer out of Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao. The centre of the action was Vienna, where the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was meeting to reach a decision about whether an exemption should be granted to India. The NSG had been founded after India’s nuclear test in 1974, in which material and technology supplied by the United States and Canada under bilateral agreements committing India to their peaceful use had instead been diverted to its bomb programme. As a result, the United States and six other governments concluded that the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) alone would be insufficient to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, and established a informal “nuclear cartel” to coordinate and control exports of nuclear material, equipment and technology.14 India’s undeclared nuclear activities outside the NPT left it barred from most international nuclear commerce for decades. But now the United States was leading the effort to persuade the members of the NSG to grant India a waiver and allow it to engage in the civil nuclear trade. It was the final hurdle to clear in a process that had started when the Bush administration sought a symbolic centrepiece in its plans for a fundamental transformation of the US-India relationship. Instead of being a source of contention and division between the world’s largest democracy and its most powerful, as it had been only a few years before, the civil-nuclear agreement would make the United States the principal country responsible for bringing India into the international nuclear order—on India’s terms.15 New Delhi would not place all its nuclear facilities under safeguards, would not be a member of the NPT, and would not sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.16
Getting to Vienna had been a long and gruelling task. Domestic opposition in both India and the United States needed to be overcome, an India-IAEA agreement needed to be reached, and an array of countries needed to be persuaded that this was a means of strengthening the non-proliferation order rather than undermining it—or at least to swallow their reservations. NSG meetings are generally low-key affairs, attended by mid-level officials who are able to convene without attracting even a hint of press attention. Not this one. The final push to gain the unanimous agreement required for the waiver involved a diplomatic marathon at the highest levels of the governments involved in what was by now a 45-nation body. From the president down, every top US official was deployed to cajole and persuade the hold-outs. Opponents to the exemption were gradually peeled off, with the Japanese, the Norwegians, the Dutch, and the New Zealanders all folding. In the closing stages, it appeared that there were two countries blocking the deal—Ireland and Austria.17 Ireland’s consent was finally secured in a phone-call between George W. Bush and Taoiseach Brian Cowen.18 Austria was in the middle of an election campaign and its government feared that the India exemption could be exploited by the opposition Green Party. The Austrian Foreign Minister, Ursula Plassnik, was at a European Council meeting in Brussels, and proving to be elusive. Condoleezza Rice had to break from her landmark visit to Libya to place a call to the German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who managed to track Plassnik down. She finally instructed her negotiator to agree.19 It seemed there was now a green light.
Yet at a late stage in the negotiations, the behaviour of the Chinese delegates took an unexpected turn. China had been among the countries to express their reservations about the deal, but had given assurances in Vienna and through separate bilateral communications with the Indians and the Americans that it “won’t be an obstacle”.20 Beijing had provided discreet support to the principal opponents of the deal, who were starting to cast around for additional ballast in their attempts to resist US pressure, but China largely hid behind them, quietly supporting their amendments but otherwise keeping its head down. Signs that something was afoot were first evident when the Chinese negotiators started putting forward proposals of their own.21 These included language that could have opened the door for Pakistan to seek a similar waiver, which attracted near-complete opposition from the other NSG members and curiosity about whether Beijing was genuinely testing the water or just finding ways to bring about procedural delays.22 At this stage, Chinese officials still had cover from the European opponents of the deal, but it became increasingly evident that Beijing had been counting on the Europeans to hold out and that its negotiators were not actually authorized to give their nod to the exemption. The result was a minor panic. Chinese officials proposed an adjournment, to no avail. Then, at midnight, China’s two senior negotiators, including Cheng Jingye, the head of the Chinese delegation, walked out.23 With the diplomacy in Vienna in danger of unravelling, the focus switched back to the channel between Washington and Beijing. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao had been avoiding calls from the Indian prime minister,24 but were now on the spot. They blinked. Rice reached Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, to urge China not to block the deal.25 With a few hours to go until the meeting was scheduled to break up, the junior official that the Chinese had left in the room conveyed China’s evidently very reluctant assent. To rub salt into India’s wound, Chinese diplomats—including Yang, on the eve of a visit to New Delhi—attempted in the immediate aftermath to pretend to their Indian counterparts that they had been supportive all along.26
China had been hoping and expecting that the US-India civil nuclear deal would fall at one of the many hurdles in its way—the US Congress, the Indian parliament, the non-proliferation hard-liners—but all of them had been cleared. It paved the way for what many in Beijing saw as a potential “anti-China” containment effort and a soft alliance being hatched between Washington and New Delhi, a refreshed version of the Indo-Soviet relationship: friends, if not actually allies.27 Observers in Beijing were hardly reassured by the alternative explanation furnished by US and Indian advocates of the deal.28 In this account, “containment” or even “counterbalancing” was a crudely reductive way of thinking about what was going on—India had no interest in being dragged into a US containment effort, and the United States had no interest in mounting one anyway.29 But instead, they portrayed an even grander scheme that would disrupt China’s rise to pre-eminent status in the coming century: a baton-passing across the Anglosphere from the United States to India, as from the UK to the United States over the early decades of the 20th century. India was not merely the short-term ally, it was the like-minded successor, which the United States would “help become a major world power in the twenty-first century.”30 China had tended to be dismissive of India’s prospects for surpassing its own rise, seeing the country as ten years behind it economically and showing little sign of catching up. But India was on an economic roll now, and with access to US arms and technology, the picture looked altogether different.31 China no longer felt confident that it had the luxury to be disdainful: what Shyam Saran, the former Indian Foreign Secretary, described as the “Chinese predilection to dismiss India’s role in international affairs as that of a pretender too big for its boots, while China’s super power status is, of course, regarded as manifest destiny”.32
But China had a tried and tested solution to hand. If the United States was going to smooth the path for India’s ascent, Pakistan would be the means for China to hold it down.
Nominally, India is the principal point of continuity in the China-Pakistan relationship, yet in some ways it is anything but. The Sino-Indian and Indo-Pakistani rivalries today are vastly removed from those that laid the foundations for the Sino-Pakistani relationship in the 1960s. While their border dispute certainly hasn’t gone away, India and China are now two globally capable powers that clear $74 billion in trade,33 and collaborate closely on climate talks34 and WTO negotiations,35 even as their corporate giants square up over ports and pipelines around South Asia and the Middle East. And the India-Pakistan rivalry now takes place between one state with a $225 billion economy and the means to pursue a strategy of asymmetric conflict under a nuclear umbrella, and another with an economy closer to $2 trillion and an acute sense that even a limited war could be devastating to its po
sition as a centre of global commerce.
Yet in recent years, it is striking how far the original rationale for the “all-weather-friendship” is reasserting itself. Nehru said in 1962, “It is a little naïve to think that the trouble with China was essentially due to a dispute over some territories. It had deeper reasons. Two of the largest countries in Asia confronted each other over a vast border. They differed in many ways. And the test was whether any one of them would have a more dominating position than the other on the border and in Asia itself ”.36 While the US-India deal had a significant impact on Chinese perceptions, India’s rising power in the region and beyond was already a fact that China had to address, and the pattern of relations with many of Beijing’s other neighbours since 2008 suggests that the rivalry would have intensified even without US involvement.
The difference between the spirit of the Jiang speech in 1996 and the spirit of a Chinese blogosphere that invented the term “South Tibet”37 to refer to disputed territories in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh can be seen very directly among generations of South Asia specialists in the Chinese foreign policy community.38 The older generation are almost exclusively India experts, and still stress the need for “balance” in China’s relationships with the two South Asian powers. The younger generation is seeing the emergence of a growing number of Pakistan hands who generally believe that China should accept its rivalry with India and embrace the strategic relationship with Islamabad, for all of Pakistan’s internal challenges. The spirit of the 1990s has certainly not evaporated: the older generation is, of course, the more senior in level, and Chinese sensitivities over issues such as Gwadar’s potential use by the Chinese navy continue to reflect their influence. But the younger generation is more closely attuned to the broader trends in Chinese foreign policy. Those younger specialists see China in an environment of growing strategic competition, and are more inclined to believe that a forceful stance on territorial and other bilateral disputes is a natural reflection of the realities of China’s new power position. After decades of dismissing alliance politics as a product of “Cold War thinking”, they are also more comfortable with the prospect of Beijing developing closer friendships and alliances of its own to facilitate its strategic goals.39
If the US approach to India over the last decade has been one of de-hyphenation from Pakistan, China’s has been one of re-hyphenation. 40 The balancing role that Pakistan plays in Beijing’s India policy goes well beyond forcing India to keep a large number of its troops and military assets focused on its western frontier, though that undoubtedly helps. It also ensures that India is kept off balance, distracted, absorbing diplomatic, political and strategic energies that could otherwise be directed towards China. It puts a constant question mark over India’s aspirations to transcend its own neighbourhood. Every time a US Secretary of State declares support for New Delhi’s policy to “Look East” towards the Pacific, China sees another reason to keep India on edge in its own backyard.41 But while the spectrum of support that Beijing provides is a crucial enabling factor for many dimensions of Pakistan’s policies towards India, there are important limits to what China is willing to tolerate. In the past, where conflict between the two sides could be more readily controlled and limited, China could back Pakistan without paying too high a price. In a context where conflicts may take on a nuclear dimension, and where the role of terrorists and non-conventional forces blurs the lines of responsibility, that is no longer true.
China would like to see the India-Pakistan relationship exist in a state of managed mistrust, where tensions can be navigated bilaterally, economic ties can flourish despite political antagonism, and the risks of full-scale war are very distant. In other words, a version of China’s own relationship with India. An example of everything that China does not want to see came within a year of the two sides’ becoming declared nuclear weapon states—and as a result, Beijing hung Pakistan out to dry.
Eighteen months after Jiang Zemin’s 1996 visit to South Asia, India went ahead with five underground nuclear tests in Rajasthan, and Pakistan responded with six of its own in Balochistan, fundamentally changing the strategic situation in the region. In the lead up to May 1998, the relationship between New Delhi and Beijing had seemed to continue on its upswing. The Chinese chief of the general staff was on his first visit to India and plans were underway for further demarcation of the Line of Actual Control in Kashmir.42 Even verbal attacks on China by the Indian Defence Minister—calling it “potentially threat number one”—were offset through private reassurances to Beijing.43 In the end, China appeared to be riled less by the nuclear tests themselves than by the justifications given by the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In the immediate aftermath, China’s reaction was relatively restrained.44 Then a letter sent by Vajpayee to President Clinton was leaked to the press, stating that the threat from China—and its assistance to Pakistan—had motivated them:
We have an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962. Although our relations with that country have improved in the last decade or so, an atmosphere of distrust persists mainly due to the unresolved border problem. To add to the distrust that country has materially helped another neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state.45
China moved from statements that it was “seriously concerned”46 to declarations that India’s tests showed “outrageous contempt for the common will of the international community”, and expressions of “deep shock and condemnation”.47 Qian Qichen, China’s Vice-Premier, angrily stated that “This gratuitous accusation by India against China is solely for [the] purpose of finding excuses for the development of its nuclear weapons.”48 The People’s Daily claimed that it “wrecked in a single day the results of improving relations between these two countries over the past 10 years and more.”49 But China was not willing to sustain this performance for long. Beijing understood the rationale for India’s weapons programme perfectly well and had no intention of letting the testing derail the relationship. In the short term it even appeared to create additional diplomatic space to exploit—Beijing saw a chance to use the rift opened between Washington and New Delhi to improve ties with both sides.50 This calculation proved to be wrong. The mutual diplomatic energy invested between the United States and India following the tests, and President Clinton’s visit barely two years later, helped to lay the groundwork for a far more dramatic breakthrough in relations under President George W. Bush. It was New Delhi’s calculation that proved more accurate—its period of isolation would be brief, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons would not only serve its immediate strategic objectives, but also catalyze a shift in perceptions of its status into that of a first-rank power.
While the US, Chinese and Indian manoeuvring would continue over the next few years, Beijing faced the immediate issue of how to respond to Pakistan. First there was the ritual of a visit to Beijing from a visiting Pakistani delegation and the associated international speculation. The Pakistani Foreign Minister, Shamshad Ahmed, arrived on 19 May amid articles in the press claiming that he was seeking a “nuclear guarantee” from China in order to stop Pakistan pressing ahead with its own test.51 One foreign ambassador in Beijing was quoted saying: “The Chinese can offer what no other country can offer, which is a public guarantee that they will reduce India to ashes if India dares to attack Pakistan. If they make this offer, which we should know fairly soon, there will be no need for Pakistan to test its own nuclear weapons.”52 This wholly implausible suggestion was neatly dismissed with the line from a Chinese researcher, “China is not a country that provides nuclear umbrellas to other countries’’.53 In fact, other than a reassurance that China would not actually sanction Pakistan, Islamabad received very little. There was no encouragement given to Pakistan’s testing and Jiang Zemin went as far as sending a letter to the Pakistani government, at Bill Clinton’s urging, discouraging it from doing so.54 Even diplomatic support was thin. China expre
ssed its “deep regret” over the test in its swiftly issued statement, a clear contrast with its denunciations of India but very far from a tacit endorsement.55 The Chinese permanent representative to the UN initially refused to support a Security Council resolution “strongly deploring”56 Pakistan’s action—lacking “clearance to support the statement from his superiors in Beijing”—but did so the next day.57 In a nationally televised speech after the tests, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif described “the manner in which China has supported us on this occasion” as “praiseworthy” and stated that “we are proud of our great neighbour”.58 It would have been churlish not to acknowledge the backing of the country that had done so much to give Pakistan its nuclear capabilities in the first place, but however understanding of Islamabad’s position Beijing was in private, the manner of China’s public support was distinctly lukewarm.
The nuclearization of South Asia had a profound effect on how China handled conflicts and near-conflicts in the region. While Beijing continued to provide backing to Pakistan outside the context of crises—ensuring, above all, that it had the military capabilities and technologies that it required—the Jiang-Clinton double act in 1998, which resulted in the “U.S.-China Joint Statement On South Asia” that June, would set the future pattern.59 Washington and Beijing may not have seen eye to eye on the region but both sides at least agreed on the need to prevent all-out war. Given the stakes that were now involved—hundreds of millions of people threatened by the possibility of nuclear exchange, potentially even the entire population of Pakistan—Islamabad could not expect to count on China’s support, especially if it brought the crises about itself. It would learn that lesson decisively within barely a year of its nuclear test.
In the spring of 1999, Pakistan infiltrated 1,000 troops from its paramilitary force, the Northern Light Infantry, across the Line of Control in Kashmir. The location was the inhospitable mountainous territory along the Himalayan borderlands above Kargil, where high-altitude warfare has been conducted by the two sides over the decades. Each year, the Indian and Pakistani forces retreated to their winter positions to reduce the strain of the extreme conditions on their respective forces. But this year, Pakistan put in motion a bold plan to seize the Indian positions and interdict the strategically important road running between Srinagar and Leh that functioned as the principal supply route for the Siachen Glacier.60 It was intended that the troops, posing as Kashmiri militants, would go undetected until they had time to harden their positions, forcing India to accept the occupation of the disputed territory and redraw the LoC in Pakistan’s favour. The incursion was intended to “right the wrong” of India’s seizure of Siachen in 1984 and preempt any future land-grab on India’s part. Like Operation Gibraltar and Operation Grand Slam in 1965, another set of audacious operations in Kashmir, it would involve only a handful of planners on the Pakistani side.61 Like those 1965 operations, it would go horribly wrong. Unlike 1965, the ensuing war would take place between two nuclear-armed states, the only conflict in the world to do so since the Sino-Soviet skirmishes in 1969. And unlike in 1965, China would provide no backing whatsoever for Pakistan’s position, working quietly with the United States to cut the political ground from under its feet.
