April 27


	April 27, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

BOOK REVIEW
Dragon versus peacock
By Sreeram Sundar Chaulia

(A review of John W Garver's Protracted Contest. Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century. University of Washington Press, 2001. ISBN- 0-295-98074-5. Price US $ 44.56. 447 pages)

Eminent sinologist John Garver has been working on the draft of a comprehensive survey of China-India relations for nearly 15 years. It is only fitting that the end product of his scholarly perseverance and labor, under review, surpasses all existing studies of the mercurial relationship between two of the world's largest, most populated and fastest-growing economies. The story of the dragon against the peacock has fascinated many a pundit of international relations, but none had managed to cover every single facet of the kaleidoscopic tussle in one compact volume until Garver (Wang Hongwei, Brahma Chellaney, Leo Rose et al have all made instructive but haphazard contributions).

The author's central thesis about China and India in the past five decades is that "conflict has been the dominant characteristic of that relationship and thus requires analysis, explanation and elucidation" (p 6). He then proceeds to untie each of the Gordian knots of this conflict.

Intersecting spheres of influence
At the generic level, the perceived traditional spheres of influence enjoyed by both countries overlap and clash, with Chinese nationalist history claiming past suzerainty over tributaries ranging from the Himalayan-Karakoram region of Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, kingdoms of India's northeast, Burma, Indochina and Southeast Asia, and Indian civilizational/cultural nationalism claiming Nepal, Tibet, Burma, Indochina and Southeast Asia to be falling within what was once India's cultural empire.

Exacerbating this contested history is ideology. Prone to viewing the world through ideological lenses, Maoist China was ever suspicious of the "reactionary class nature" of Indian leaders and Nehru's inheritance of British designs of "imperial expansionism". Garver finds no evidence that this wariness of India has ever changed in the Dengist or post-Deng Xiaoping eras. India's unofficial Monroe Doctrine treating South Asia as its exclusive national security zone is considered by Beijing "as regional hegemonism that presumes to block the natural and rightful expansion of China's relations with India's neighbors" (p 31).

The Tibetan factor
China's annexation of Tibet from 1951 onward led to trepidation in Delhi about the permanent stationing of gargantuan Chinese armies on India's northern borders for the first time in history, obviating the centuries-old buffer that insulated the Sinic world from the Indian. Many Indians also lamented (and continue to deplore) Beijing's gradual destruction of Tibet's unique and deeply Indian-influenced Lamaist culture (in Nehru's words, "Tibet, culturally speaking, is an offshoot of India"). For China, that same Tibetan culture had to be "reformed", brought out of "exploitative feudalism" and integrated into the mainstream socialist society envisioned by the Chinese Communist Party.

Tibet's natural richness (it boasts 40 percent of all of China's mineral resources) and strategic location have strengthened Chinese resolve never to allow it to relapse into the pre-1951 status quo ante, which is exactly what successive Indian governments since 1958 have campaigned for in the name of "Tibetan autonomy". The 1962 Sino-Indian war, to cite Mao Zedong, "was not [about] the problem of the McMahon line, but the Tibet question", ie because he believed India to be in collusion with US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) efforts to aid the Tibetan insurgency (a new book on the subject, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet, confirms that India and the United States were "secret partners" in the covert operations). India has often "played the Tibetan card" as a mechanism of leverage and attempted to exploit China's ethnic vulnerabilities there, but Garver feels that forcible flooding of the Tibetan plateau by the Han and improving transport and communications between Beijing and Lhasa "will nullify India's hope that Tibet be autonomous in any meaningful sense, and it will mean the final obliteration of India's cultural interests in Tibet" (p 71).

The territorial dispute
Control of Aksai Chin (claimed by India as part of Jammu and Kashmir) is geopolitically and strategically essential to Chinese control of western Tibet and vital to its control over all of Tibet. The significance of the Aksai Chin highway in Chinese calculations has attenuated over decades of construction and road-building across treacherous terrain into Tibet, but many Chinese strategists still consider Indian claims over the disputed territory a disguised attempt to force the People's Liberation Army (PLA) out of Tibet.

The eastern sector of the border dispute revolves around the 90,000 square kilometer "southern slope" of the Himalayas, better known as Arunachal Pradesh. India covets this territory as crucial to the defense of the "Siliguri Neck" and its entire northeast, a region troubled by ethnic separatist movements that were openly supported and encouraged by China between 1962 and 1979.

Since there are rough similarities in the situations of the western and eastern sectors with roles reversed, Garver examines the option of a China-India "swap". Chou En-lai's hint in 1960 to that effect was rejected by Nehru on grounds that Indian public opinion would not tolerate it ("If I give them Aksai Chin, I will no longer be prime minister of India"), but also because India would be relinquishing land "stolen by China" but not get anything in return in the eastern sector except China's waiver over the North Eastern Frontier Agency area, which was already part of India. After another Indian rebuttal in 1980, China changed tack and began to stress that the "eastern sector is the biggest dispute", culminating in armed clashes at Sumdurong Chu in 1987 (the nearest the two countries have come to war since 1967). Unresolved border disputes continue to be on the top of the diplomatic agenda as recently as Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh's visit to China two weeks ago.

The Third World as a turf battle
China and India competed intensely in the post-1945 decolonizing world for influence and prestige, albeit with differing means and resources. In 1947, the first Asian Relations Conference was dogged by a dispute on where to locate the headquarters of a permanent organization - Delhi or Beijing - pouring water on India's hopes of leading a "third force" in world politics without effective challenge. Maoist China came up with "Afro-Asianism" as a counter to Nehru's non-alignment, drawing a line between the "revolutionary camp" and the "imperialist camp" and often accusing India of acting as a Trojan horse for the West and later the USSR. Chinese Afro-Asianism culminated in the "Beijing-Rawalpindi-Jakarta axis", a triangle Nehru described as "a forum that allowed China to advance its radical and anti-Indian views" (p 123). China's punitive war of 1962 was interpreted by many Indian commentators as an action to diminish India's influence in the developing world and boost Afro-Asianism.

In the 1990s, China has shown disdain for Indian aspirations to a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, as "Indian or Japanese membership would be a serious setback for China, which would no longer be the clear senior power ... the only recognized and legitimate great power in Asia" (p 134). If the Third World is to have a new permanent member, China insists that "the principle of consensus in the UN Security Council" should prevail, insinuating that it can veto Indian admission to the P-5 (permanent five members of the council) club.

Jousting in the Himalayan kingdoms
From 1959-79, Chinese propaganda on Nepal was "to praise and encourage brave little Nepal for its resistance to Indian domination" (p 143). As India sympathized with and aided democratic change in Nepal, China took the side of the royalty and Nepali nationalists and strove to establish diplomatic, economic and military relations with Kathmandu regardless of Indian sensibilities. Secret Nepal-PLA military-intelligence cooperation (in the 1960s and again in 1988), the Kathmandu-Lhasa road and increased incidences of Maoist insurgency have alarmed paternalistic India for the past four decades and bolstered fears of "Chinese encirclement". Using historical reasoning, Garver estimates that "one can expect continuing Chinese rivalry with India for influence in South Asia, beginning with Nepal" (p 165).

China's irredentist claims over Bhutan and Sikkim, however "deeply biased by exclusive reliance on Chinese sources and nationalist urge" (p 168), are another major cause for conflict with India. Once PLA occupation eliminated the Tibetan buffer, Sikkim's value was magnified in Indian eyes and China upped the ante by contesting India's predominance there, leading to bloody border clashes in 1967 and a tense standoff in 1975 when India incorporated Sikkim after a positive democratic referendum.

Bhutan's special relations with India have also witnessed Chinese fussing over "regional bullies" in South Asia who threaten the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Panchsheel). Garver summarizes Chinese sentiment on the entire Himalayan kingdoms thus: "Beijing is deeply unhappy with the Indian-upheld regime. It feels that it is unjust, hegemonist and fundamentally unfair to China and to the nations and peoples of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan. It has consistently sought to alter that regime fundamentally" (p 186).

The Sino-Pakistani entente cordiale
India's biggest grouse against China concerns the latter's remarkably consistent and barnacle-like ties with Pakistan. Chinese strategists are well aware that "Indian-Pakistani enmity is India's albatross in its struggle for global eminence and equivalence with China" (p 189) and have maintained propping up an independent and anti-India Pakistan as a sine qua non of policy. Chou's assurance of military support to Ayub Khan emboldened Pakistan before the 1965 war and it was indeed China's "three-day ultimatum" in September threatening to start war on the Sikkim boundary that forced India to accept the ceasefire. In the 1971 war, China's response was feebler even though it protested "gross Indian interference in the internal affairs of Pakistan". Garver thinks that the most significant deterrent stanching Beijing during Bangladesh's creation was "a Soviet strike against China, the results of which were incalculable" (p 213).

Dengist China's reorientation from militant and conflictual relations with neighbors to economic development and liberalization resulted in slow Chinese rapprochement with India and its delinking with the Sino-Pakistani entente, a process Garver traces to Rajiv Gandhi's visit to Beijing in 1988. However, Indian acceptance of the delinkage is very reluctant with accumulating evidence of Chinese nuclear, fissile material and missile technology transfers to Islamabad. Garver gives short shrift to China's denials on this front and considers Beijing's pitch that "Western imperialists" are spreading these "rumors" as "political camouflage" to develop detente with India without eschewing its military fraternity with Pakistan (p 324).

Despite the more balanced and nuanced position of China over Kashmir in the '90s, Garver suggests that China has several military, diplomatic and economic vested interests in continued India-Pakistan sparring and that "China would not necessarily like to see a final, definitive resolution of the Kashmir question since that could recast the India-Pakistan relation, reducing China's leverage". He further states that "a prudent Chinese policy would sustain Pakistan against India in Kashmir" (p 242).

The Burma front
From 1950-88, Burma (now Myanmar) followed a policy of strict neutralism, fearful of Chinese or Indian domination. Once China ceased actively aiding the Communist Party of Burma and befriended the military junta, however, a close cooperative politico-military relationship germinated between Beijing and Yangon. India countered by championing Aung San Suu Kyi's pro-democracy movement, but while this policy seemed morally superior, it actually ended in driving the Myanmarese State Law and Order Council/State Peace and Development Council deeper into Chinese arms in the '90s. India was a specific object of the military junta's China-supported armed buildup as well as the China-financed Irrawaddy "corridor to the sea". Realizing lost ground, recent Indian governments have moved toward normalizing relations with the powers that rule Yangon, and Garver maintains categorically that "India will do everything it can to check or undo the Sino-Burmese strategic partnership" (p 273).

Supremacy in the Indian Ocean
With foreign trade playing an increasingly valuable role in the expansion of both Indian and Chinese economies, the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) provides the canvas for a new arena of conflict. Sixty-seven percent of China's trade with the European Union is carried by sea across the Malacca Straits, the IOR and the Suez Canal, and the predominance of the Indian Navy along these sea lanes is viewed as a major threat by Chinese analysts. Chinese "navalism" and proliferation of a long-legged blue-water naval force make it tenable to search for ways to prise open the IOR, and it is in response to this lengthening PLA naval shadow that India has activated an Operational Command on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and only last month began joint surveillance with the US navy at the mouth of the Malacca Straits.

"China is not prepared to accept the Indian Ocean as India's ocean" and is exploring alternative points of entry to the waters through Myanmar and Bangladesh, writes Garver. He also links growing Sino-Sri Lankan ties before 1987 to this search for entree into the Indian Ocean and locates Rajiv Gandhi's fatal intervention in the emerald isle within the context of India countering growing Chinese interference in the IOR. "What exists in the Indian Ocean is a classic security dilemma in naval guise. Each side acts to defend itself, but in doing so, threatens the other" (p 311).

The nuclear rivalry
According to Garver, the emergence of India as a nuclear-weapons power stems from the post-1962 change in Delhi's perceptions of China and its first nuclear test in 1964. But Beijing has never viewed India as a nuclear threat, at least not on the scale of the US and the USSR/Russia. Garver terms this dichotomy of threat perceptions "asymmetry". Because of asymmetry, Sino-Indian nuclear rivalry must be characterized as "indirect" (ie, involving Chinese clandestine support for the Pakistani bomb): "By helping Pakistan acquire nuclear weapons, China was righting the balance of power in South Asia, which was developing dangerously to China's disadvantage" after 1971 (p 327). Garver notes the interesting denouement in 1992, whereby "after [author's emphasis] China helped Pakistan develop nuclear weapons, then it joined the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty]" (p 332). A nuclear-armed, "self-supporting" Pakistan being a major Chinese objective, once it was achieved around 1990, Deng could hop over onto the non-proliferation bandwagon.

Even though Beijing decried Indian comments after the 1998 Pokhran tests linking nuclearization to the Chinese threat as "completely groundless", Garver thinks "Indian [threat] perceptions are fairly well grounded" (p 339). Just as for Pakistan, the atomic bomb seems as an ultimate equalizer with mightier India, for Delhi, the Indian bomb is a guarantee against a preponderant and aggressive China that has numerous territorial and strategic claims over it.

On a psychological plane, Indians view acquisition of nuclear weapons also as a march toward being recognized as a "powerful nation of the world" and no longer in a category inferior to China. Considerations of global status were in the backdrop during the mid-'90s, when "Washington seemed to be treating China as the new number two power in the world ... and conducting joint Sino-American efforts to force India to accept [a] status as a non-nuclear-weapons state" (p 354). India's tests can therefore be seen from one angle as a rejection of a perceived Sino-American alliance to coerce Delhi into "second-tier status" dependent on Chinese and US clout and goodwill.

Conclusion
Garver winds up by envisaging two different scenarios on the Sino-Indian dyad in the 21st century. First, China could acquiesce in South Asia remaining within the Indian sphere of influence and desist from incrementally penetrating the Indian "empire". Second, India "co-opts" China into South Asia through partnership and joint management of security problems and possibly allows Chinese preeminence in the region. In Garver's view, the first projection is unfeasible since, "in South Asia, Beijing has no interest in the formation of barriers to the growth of PRC [People's Republic of China] power and recognizing an Indian sphere of influence would be such a barrier" (p 374).

Given phenomenal Chinese economic growth and military capabilities, it is "rather more likely that India will accommodate itself to a steadily expanding Chinese presence and role in South Asia" (p 377). Nevertheless, it is not at all clear whether Indian leaders will accept such an arrangement, given India's perceptions of its civilizational greatness, national psychology and character. The question of whether India can adjust to the role of "junior partner to an emerging Chinese superpower" will, of course, be ultimately decided by Delhi's future equations with Russia and the United States. The speed with which China reabsorbs Taiwan and the tenor of its relations with Japan will also impact upon Beijing's long-term locus standi vis-a-vis India.

Protracted Contest is a vintage exercise in geopolitics, map reading, tabulation and strategic thought. It serves both the student of Asian history and the lay follower of global events. Without a trace of personal bias or inclination, Garver has presented international-relations literature with a magnum opus that will be consulted and quoted for years to come.

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