The recent announcement by the Dalai Lama that he had renounced his political role as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and would henceforth seek to confine himself to a purely spiritual and ecclesiastical role, has further confounded the Chinese, who have made it clear that they see it as yet another example of his Machiavellian design. By organizing free and fair elections among the Tibetan diaspora — which elected Lobsang Sangay, a forty-two-year-old Harvard academic, as the new political head of the exiled government — the Dalai Lama has effectively insulated the political leadership of the Tibetan diaspora from the question of his own succession. Even if the Chinese were to identify and indoctrinate a new ‘Dalai Lama’, that child would only be regarded by Tibetans at large as having succeeded to a religious role, while political authority would continue to inhere in the elected leader, Sangay, or his successors. Sangay, an impressive young man I have met and spoken with at length, is a plausible twenty-first-century political leader, unlike the other-worldly spiritual Dalai Lama. China has unleashed an unrelenting tirade against this development, denouncing the so-called Dalai clique and categorizing the new arrangements, in its idiosyncratic lexicon, as ‘splittist’. That India has acquiesced in the new dispensation and allows Sangay to live in, and operate from, its territory remains a sore point for Beijing.
The limitations of China’s diplomatic appeal to the world have become apparent in a number of recent diplomatic disasters. Beijing’s pronouncement that the South China Sea was an area of core concern for China did not go down well with its neighbours. Several countries spoke against the declaration at the meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Hanoi in 2010, leaving the Chinese foreign minister fuming in the meeting at the perceived ‘ganging up’ against his country. There followed a diplomatic spat with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and Beijing’s overreaction to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, which backfired in worldwide revulsion at China’s behaviour. Meanwhile, China’s relations with North Korea have increased tensions with both South Korea and Japan at the same time. China’s refusal to condemn Pyongyang’s outrageous behaviour, such as its sinking of a South Korean naval vessel and the persistent shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, has damaged its relations with Seoul. All these actions have pushed China’s East Asian and Southeast Asian neighbours towards American arms purchases and increasingly towards improving their relations with India. The Chinese push in Southeast Asia has resulted in a push back from these countries. Vietnam, for instance, has sought to offset the presence of its Chinese neighbour by developing remarkably good relations with the United States, a former adversary, going so far as to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with Washington. Malaysia and Indonesia have sought to develop better relations with India.
Behind the unpleasantness between Beijing and New Delhi over Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh, and China’s disinclination to resolve the border dispute (as it has resolved its disagreements on all its other land borders, even with Russia and Vietnam), may lie a broader strategic calculation. With the end of the Cold War, Beijing had two options in relation to India: to see the country as a natural ally, together with Russia, in building up an alternative pole to US dominance in the region, or to identify it as a potential adversary to its own aspirations. The emergence of a stronger US — India partnership in recent years appears to have convinced China to place New Delhi in the latter category, even as an instrument of ‘containment’ of China. Such a perception may have been reinforced by India’s frequent military exercises with the United States, Japan and Australia, its cultivation of the former Soviet ‘stans’ in Central Asia (including sowing the seeds of a potential military presence by establishing an Indian air force unit at the Aini airbase in Tajikistan) and its attempts in recent years to establish strategic ties with countries that Beijing sees as falling within its own sphere of influence (from Mongolia to Vietnam, and including direct competition over Myanmar).
For these reasons, Beijing has signalled that it is in no hurry whatsoever to resolve its frontier issues with India. During his visit to New Delhi in December 2010, Prime Minister Wen bluntly declared that settling his country’s border dispute with India ‘will take a fairly long period of time’. His government publicly signalled that despite all the good economic developments showcased during Wen’s visit, the bilateral geopolitics was still problematic. On the eve of Wen’s visit, the Chinese ambassador to India, Zhang Yan, told the press that ‘China— India relations are very fragile and very easy to be damaged and very difficult to repair’. Needling an anxious-to-please New Delhi on its troubled northern borders helps China to keep India guessing about its intentions, exposes the giant democracy’s vulnerabilities at a time when internal tensions and dissensions abound and elections in one state or another loom every few months, and cuts a potential strategic rival to size.
The two countries’ competition for scarce energy resources and investment opportunities in markets such as Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America have regularly pitted them against each other, usually to China’s advantage. Indeed, India’s refusal to condemn the Myanmar junta’s crackdown on monks in mid-2007 was directly linked to its competition with China for influence, strategic assets and oil and gas from that unhappy country — because its earlier policy of support for Myanmar’s democratic forces had simply allowed China, and its ally Pakistan, to steal a march on India.
Other factors have added to the strains in the relationship. One was a great Indian diplomatic triumph: the Indo-US nuclear deal. China, concerned that the American willingness to create an ‘Indian exception’ reflected a desire to build India up as a strategic counterweight to China, made its hesitations apparent in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, thus incurring public statements of disappointment from senior officials in New Delhi. The deal went through nonetheless, but not without reminding Indians that Beijing was fundamentally negative on India’s acquisition of a significant strategic capability.
And yet, in the context of the global contention for power and global influence between the United States and China, India may well have an intriguing role: the increasing Indo-US closeness could actually serve to make improving relations with India a higher priority for China than it might otherwise have been, by reminding China of India’s potential to serve US interests, perhaps to China’s detriment. This could well be one of the less visible motivations for Beijing’s recent interest in India.
China’s consistent and long-standing support for Pakistan, including military assistance and help for Pakistan’s nuclear programme, confirms Indian suspicions that China wishes to use our troublesome neighbour to keep our regional, let alone global, ambitions in check. In addition, China’s development of the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, of the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota and of a Burmese port on the Bay of Bengal, all reflecting its development of a naval capacity on India’s flanks, causes understandable concern that the proximity of such a presence is at least partly intended to choke India.