Sizing up the Chinese Dragon

NEW DELHI
2 May 2013

Delivering the late Air Chief Marshal PC Lal 25th Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on 26 March 2008, the then national security adviser of India, MK Narayanan, said that a “national consensus across the board” was required on issues such as whether China is “a threat or is China a neighbour that we can go along with”. In his lecture, entitled “Managing India’s national security and building a consensus for the 21st century”, Narayanan suggested that a consensus was also required on what would be the optimum terms of a boundary settlement with China.

Four years later, Narayanan’s successor Shivshankar Menon took to the podium in New Delhi to deliver the same memorial lecture but on a different topic: “India’s National Security: Challenges and Issues.” Speaking on 2 April 2012, Menon noted that “while intent is the stuff of diplomacy, the national security calculus must include, and prepare to deal with, the capabilities we see around us.” Later that year, Menon said in Beijing that both sides had made considerable progress on the boundary negotiations and that “we have increased our area of understanding between us steadily, thanks to the SR [special representative] process.”

It could be argued that New Delhi is still none the wiser today about Beijing, not in the least for lack of application on its part but because China may not have helped matters with its attitude as manifested in its foray into Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), issuing of stapled visas to Indian nationals, cartographic aggression, damming of rivers in Tibet, or, more recently, incursions into Indian territory in Jammu and Kashmir. For its part, New Delhi tweaked the Dragon's tail, first by feting Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in Norway, and then by omitting any reference to one-China from the joint statement issued towards the end of the then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to New Delhi in December 2010.

As New Delhi mulls options to deal with the latest Chinese incursion into Indian territory, passions are running high among some political parties and media alike, with calls for reproaching China and a retaliatory action. There is a view that the latest incursion represents the largest and most strategic land-grab since China’s launch of a more muscular policy toward its neighbours. Another view is that if China does not respect India’s territorial integrity, India is no longer bound to respect China’s. However, there are others who believe that it would be premature to talk of a retaliatory action. They insist that matters concerning relations with important neighbours such as China deserve much greater attention to detail.

The Chinese media, which had hitherto remained silent on the issue, spoke out on May 2 when the Communist Party-run Global Times said in an editorial that “... staking claims to its borders is of crucial significance to China and peace and stability along the border are also vital to India. Current peace and status quo is not bestowed by India alone. China should firmly maintain its friendly policy toward India. However, this doesn’t mean that China will ignore provocations.”

Incidentally, on the day (May 1) when Indian Army Chief Gen Bikram Singh briefed the political leadership on the situation obtaining on the ground following the latest Chinese incursion, India held trilateral talks with the US and Japan in Washington on a wide range of regional and global issues of mutual interest. Their talks focussed on regional and maritime security, and cooperation in multilateral fora.

As External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid prepares to visit Beijing next week ahead of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to New Delhi later this month, it would be instructive to take a step back and look in the rearview mirror in order to make sense of the present and the future.

The outcome of Li Keqiang’s forthcoming visit to India is not likely to be any different from that of his predecessor Wen Jiabao in 2010, when all that the two sides had to show by way of an outcome was a joint statement that hid more than it revealed. There was no mention of any contentious issues, nor did it hold out any promise for realignment of the trajectory of Sino-Indian relationship, which by their own admission, has “acquired global and strategic significance”. In fact, Wen’s visit did not compare favourably with his last visit here in 2005, when both sides had at least an “Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the Boundary Question” to show. The 2010 joint statement was interesting to the extent that for the first time in many years, it did not contain the usual formulations such as “Tibet Autonomous Region [is] part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China”.