http://www.niticentral.com/2013/04/29/chinas-dream-is-indias-nightmare-71493.html
China’s dream is India’s nightmare
By Claude Arpi
April 29, 2013
Whatever happens in the future in Ladakh, India has already lost the battle.
Even if the Chinese agree to withdraw, they will still claim that particular area near the Karakoram pass as theirs and this, forever.
Though the Chinese incursions or transgressions, as it is poetically termed by the MEA, occur regularly, this time it was much deeper than usual and while during ‘routine visits’, Chinese troops come and go (after leaving some ‘souvenirs’ of their visit, such as rock paintings in red), this time, they came with their tents and provisions. It is a big difference.
Postponing Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to India next month could have been an option for India to show its displeasure. Unfortunately, the present leaders do not have the political will.
Look at what China did to the British Prime Minister David Cameron. He had to cancel his visit to Beijing.
His crime?
He had met the Dalai Lama in May 2012 in London. The South China Morning Post says: “British Prime Minister David Cameron abandoned a trip to China planned for this month as Beijing punished him for meeting the Dalai Lama.”
Delhi should have shown its displeasure in that way; simply because it is a language Beijing can understand. But it is not the Indian way!
When one studies the Chinese incursions in Ladakh (as well as in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand), it is important to look at them in the context of ‘the Chinese Dream’.
Since November 2012, when he reached the top of the Party, Xi Jinping regularly speaks of the ‘Chinese Dream’, a dream of a rejuvenated, non-corrupt China, where the Chinese ‘race’ could live a happy, prosperous and harmonious life.
In an article in Asia Times, Francesco Sisci, a China watcher, made a fascinating analysis of Xi Jinping’s new concept.
Sisci argued that this dream is not enough: “Both Chinese and Westerners have spent a lot of time and spilled much ink trying to explain the significance of the Chinese dream, yet Xi Jinping presented also another concept that is possibly even more important. He said the earth needs a ‘world dream’ (shijie meng).”
Does Xi have a World Dream?
It seems so.
In an interview with BRICS journalists before he left for his foreign tour, Xi said: “China being the world’s second largest economy, the China Dream also will bring opportunities to the world. … The China Dream will be realised through a road of peace.”
A few days later, addressing the Moscow Academy of International Relations, the Chinese President asserted: “The China Dream will bring blessings and goodness to not only the Chinese people but also people in other countries.”
On April 10, commenting on Xi Jinping’s speech at the Boao Forum in which he rebuked North Korea, The China Daily wrote: “This new concept of shared security is in stark contrast to the parochial approach, which tends to view security based on one’s own interests and needs. Driven by such an undesirable approach, a country will always calculate its own gains first whenever there is a regional or global security crisis.”
An editorial published in Beijing by The Voice of China (zhongsheng) at the time of the visit of General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General, spoke of “an interdependent global village in which security comes from cooperative measures and allowing other states space for their security, rather than unilateral measures.”
Peter Mattis, in an article in the China Brief of the Jamestown Foundation explained further: “[It] means countries must respect each state’s right to pursue its own political and economic development. Xi noted the world’s increasing interdependence and non-traditional security threats meant that states should not pursue security unilaterally, but should rely on cooperative security, collective security and common security to address their threat environment.”
Sisci rightly affirmed: “Despite the fact that the content of the Chinese dream is still vague and hazy, it is clear that the Chinese dream and the world dream must be consistent with one another. China should not clash with the rest of the world or with the incumbent powers, but should lead alongside them. China speaks of a dream of living a good life, free of need and hunger.”
His conclusion was: “China’s world view needs in fact to be consistent with the broad world view that has shaped and dominated the world for the past 500 years.”
Now, considering Xi’s dual Dreams (for China and for the World), how to explain the deep Chinese intrusions into Indian territory in Ladakh?
Is the Chinese Dream’s aim grabbing more Indian territory? Does China want to show India its place as a subordinate country?
When Xi says that “the China Dream will be realised through a road of peace”, can it be after humiliating and putting down a ‘friendly’ neighbour like India?
Clearly, if President Xi wants his Dream to be holistic, it will have to include China’s neighbours and the world at large.
Unfortunately, the Ladakh episode does not seem to go in this direction.
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http://centreright.in/2013/04/china-the-nature-of-the-dragon/#.UYCygkoZTyQ
China – The nature of the dragon
By Jaideep A. Prabhu
April 28, 2013
On April 15, Chinese troops of about a platoon’s strength crossed the Line of Actual Control that separates India from Tibet and penetrated 10 kms into India with helicopter support and set up a frontier post. Not surprisingly, China has denied the entire incident, accusing India instead of “aggressive patrolling.”
The pattern is familiar, seen around China’s peripheries in its conflicts with Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India.
This pattern is played out not only geographically but also chronologically. China has always raised tensions along its border to keep other powers off balance in their relationship with Beijing. This habit serves a dual purpose in that it also diverts its people from internal dissatisfaction. While Chinese territorial claims remain outrageous, the actual incursions on the ground are always small enough to tempt observers into arguing that the change from status quo is insignificant.
It is this seeming insignificance that is most worrisome. The Chinese leadership has mastered the art of creating small incidents at the most opportune time – the 1962 Sino-Indian War, for example, started in the midst of a very tense Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Second Taiwan Crisis in 1958 took place in the middle of US intervention in Lebanon.
Chinese motives for continually stoking the tension along its borders has rarely had anything to do with actual possession of territory and more to do with creating leverage, both domestically and internationally.
One incident in this pattern, the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1958, was orchestrated by China to signal its arrival upon the world stage – after living in the shadow of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Beijing took the opportunity of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization to set itself up as another locus in the communist brotherhood and non-aligned world.
While Beijing’s commitment to a single China may be serious, its posture over Taiwan in 1958 certainly was not. Diplomatic documents reveal that “Chairman Mao said that the bombardment of Jinmen [Quemoy], frankly speaking, was our turn to create international tension for a purpose. We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time?”
In another meeting, Mao explained, “[Our bombardment] was merely aimed at testing and scaring the Americans, but we would land if circumstances allowed. Why should we not take over Jinmen-Mazu [Quemoy-Matsu] if there came an opportunity?”
This is not to imply that China had little concern over US shipment of state-of-the-art military hardware to Chiang Kai-shek from 1955 to 1958. Mao was certainly reacting to American attempts to redress the balance of power situation in Taiwan, but the bombings were merely meant as a probing of American attitudes given that the United States had not signed a formal treaty obligating it to come to the defence of Taiwan in the case of a Chinese invasion.
A similar modus operandi is seen in another event in the pattern, the prelude to China’s invasion of India in 1962. New Delhi’s stubborn refusal to declassify diplomatic documents has made an already difficult issue controversial as well, with some scholars heaping the blame for the conflict on Jawaharlal Nehru and India.
Nonetheless, China’s behaviour with India has interesting parallels with the Taiwan crisis. As Nehru saw the Himalayan Crisis, the question of a few square miles of barren wasteland was not merely a question of sovereignty or international prestige but one of whether Chinese belligerence could be allowed to intimidate smaller, non-aligned countries, whether they could survive free from a mantle of Chinese leadership.
Beijing carefully maintained Nehru’s faith in diplomacy throughout the 1950s and early 1960s; Chinese praise of India’s role in the Korean War, the warmth Mao showed towards Nehru, and the signing of the Panchsheel Treaty between the two Asian giants were markers of a positive relationship. Chou Enlai had explicitly stated that China had no territorial claims against India in 1951, a claim that was seconded by other senior officials repeated even as late as 1960.
In a high-level meeting between the two countries in April 1960, Marshall Chen Yi and Chou Enlai assured India’s Ambassador to Beijing, RK Nehru, that war between India and China was inconceivable. In another meeting, Chou Enlai repeated to the Indian Vice President, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, his earlier assertion that China had no claims south of the MacMahon Line and that China had no intention of laying claim either. However, the very next day, both Chen Yi and Chou Enlai told the Indian Finance Minister, Morarji Desai, that they had no intention of ever accepting the McMahon Line.
As the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office noted, “It looks as if the Chinese intended one day to challenge the McMahon Line, quite apart from the Tibetan disturbances. Otherwise why did not Chou ever let Mr. Nehru have anything in writing recognising the Line and why did not the Chinese Government do anything about the maps? It seemed…that this was deliberate, that Chou’s reassurances to Mr. Nehru about the Line were purely tactical.”
There is another dimension to the Sino-Indian War that is usually over looked in India – the contribution of Sino-Soviet rivalry. The Indian Embassy in Beijing reported back to New Delhi in late 1960 that “in their ideological battle with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), India’s non-alignment had become a target for the [Chinese Communist Party].”
While Chou Enlai opposed the aggressive tone of Chinese policy towards India, Liu Shaoqi pursued it relentlessly. These “leftist dogmatists” in the CCP saw Nehru not as a nationalist leader but as a reactionary bourgeoisie. Therefore, they argued, non-alignment was just a ploy and it was only a matter of time before India joined the Western Bloc. Chinese brinkmanship in the Himalayas was, thus, meant to expose the weakness of Indian neutrality and the duplicity of Soviet peaceful coexistence and had much less to do with Nehru’s “aggressive forward patrolling” or Tibet as many believe.
The same pattern is observed in 1965 and 1971 (albeit with some US encouragement) when China threatened the use of force against India’s “aggressive patrolling” of the border region, and in 1979 during the Third Sino-Vietnamese War when the supposed and actual reason for the initiation of hostilities didn’t line up.
Returning to 2013, these patterns from the past are immediately visible – proclamations of the desire for peaceful coexistence, feigned anger at a supposed slight, ambiguous diplomatic positioning, and military risk-taking with the hope of usurping territory and rights undefended. Enough ink has already been spilled on how the Indian military might better defend the country’s frontiers, how India lacks a coherent China policy, and how Indians need to calm down about an incident that is more routine than one would like.
However, it might also behoove policy makers to take a step back and see the larger pattern of Chinese behaviour with its neighbours: duplicity, opacity, and belligerence when they can get away with it. The present border skirmish is not an isolated incident but fits uncomfortably well with Chinese strategy over the past few decades. India needs to consider the entirety of Chinese strategy and not restrict its response to a singular event but develop a range of options by which to undermine China’s game.
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Jaideep A. Prabhu is a doctoral student in History at Vanderbilt University, where he is writing his dissertation on India’s nuclear policy. Prabhu also holds an undergraduate degree in Engineering from the same university and a Master’s from the George Washington University.
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‡: All documentation for this article came from the author’s dissertation research in the National Archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the Cold War International History Project.