From Beijing’s point of view, it is not just New Delhi that has grounds for concern. India’s inclusion in the East Asian summit, which was pushed by Japan, Singapore and Indonesia primarily to limit China’s influence in intergovernmental Asian institutions, suggests that India may be getting too big for its subcontinental boots, seeking to spread its influence to China’s own backyard. China’s reluctance to support Indian (and for that matter Japanese) aspirations to a permanent seat in the UN Security Council partially reflects this concern. Beijing has no desire to dilute its own status as a P5 member by sharing it with other Asian powers. Equally, India resents China’s reluctance — alone among the current P5—to endorse what it sees as India’s self-evident case for such a seat in a reformed Security Council.
Gurmeet Kanwal, director of a Delhi-based military think tank, the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), argues that ‘China’s foreign and defence policies are quite obviously designed to marginalize India in the long term and reduce India to the status of a sub-regional power by increasing Chinese influence and leverage in the South Asian region.’ A Princeton University scholar of Indian origin, Rohan Mukherjee, goes further, writing that ‘India’s competition with China is not just economic or geo-strategic; in a sense it is existential — a clash of two competing political systems, bases of state legitimacy, and ways of ordering state — society relations.’ If the clash is as fundamental as that, it is indeed difficult to imagine any conceivable geostrategic convergence between the two states.
There is also the question of China’s view of the world and its own place in it, going well beyond India. In his 2011 book On China, Henry Kissinger, architect of the United States’ 1971 opening up to that country, portrays this in almost mystical terms. Kissinger’s book is replete with genuflections to the Chinese people and their ‘subtle sense of the intangible’, as he seeks to explain ‘the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order’. Thus he makes much of the Chinese fondness for playing wei qi, a complicated game of encirclement far different from the West’s (and presumably India’s) preference for chess. In an eight-page account of ‘the Himalayan border dispute and the 1962 Sino-Indian war’, which is far more sympathetic to the Chinese version of events than the Indian, Kissinger describes the Chinese strategy as ‘the exercise of wei qi in the Himalayas’. China’s war with Vietnam in 1979 ‘resulted from Beijing’s analysis of Sun Tzu’s concept of shi—the trend and “potential energy” of the strategic landscape’. Kissinger, of course, writes from the point of view of an American Sinophile. Both Washington and Beijing are capitals of countries that consider themselves exceptional. ‘American exceptionalism is missionary,’ Kissinger writes. ‘It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world.’ China’s exceptionalism, on the other hand, is culturaclass="underline" China does not seek to impart its ways to other countries, but it judges ‘all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms’. This is potentially worrying for India (a land which is anything but an ‘approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms’), especially when one considers another major potential problem. China has so far shown little interest in concluding an agreement regarding the sharing of river waters with India, which lies downstream of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Reports of China damming or diverting these waters have so far proved to be unfounded — China has claimed its river constructions all involve no diversion of waters — but the situation involves a risk of major unpleasantness developing, especially given increasing water scarcity for India’s 1.2 billion thirsty people.
And then there is the inevitable worry that the United States might plump for China to the exclusion of all others, including India. Kissinger seems to advocate this in his book. Arguing that a close and cooperative US — China relationship is ‘essential to global stability and peace’, Kissinger repeats his traditional and oft-iterated preference for ‘a rebalancing of the global equilibrium’, calling for a ‘co-evolution’ by China and the United States to ‘a more comprehensive framework’. He envisions the emergence of a ‘Pacific community’ with China, paralleling the Atlantic community that America has created with Europe, under which both countries would ‘establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect’, making a shared world order ‘an expression of parallel national aspirations’. This sounds alarmingly like the ‘G2 condominium’ that some Washington strategists would like to see run the world of the twenty-first century — and it doesn’t leave much room for the rest of us (though Kissinger, never one to shirk a contradiction, is simultaneously an advocate of close American relations with India too).
Such thinking, which is never far from the surface in Washington, engenders an understandable level of disquiet in New Delhi. But one issue that no longer does is the now-fading enthusiasm for China in India’s own left, whose previous zealotry (‘China’s Chairman is our Chairman’, said communist graffiti scrawled on Kolkata’s walls in the 1960s and 1970s) had given rise to worries of a Beijing-inspired fifth column seeking to destroy the Indian state from within. China’s evolution into a highly capitalist state, accompanied by a thoroughgoing disinclination to foment revolution elsewhere, has cost it the loyalty of India’s communist cadres, whose disillusionment with Beijing is now palpable. Indeed, there are more true believers in Maoism in India than in China. The Hong Kong magnate Ronnie Chan once remarked to me that ‘China is officially a communist country, but you would have to look very hard to find a communist in China. If you want to find a real communist, you will have to go to Kerala.’ The leading Indian communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had been the only party in the world to pass a resolution hailing the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, displayed great ideological angst in its 2012 party congress over the direction China was taking. Whatever else New Delhi might have to worry about with regard to Beijing, it is no longer its capacity to foment revolution in India.
But all the other factors outlined above mean that the usually complacent elephant is wary of the hissing dragon, and for the first time it has begun showing its distrust. In December 2010, Premier Wen was obliged to sign a joint communiqué which did not explicitly mention India’s routine affirmation of ‘One China’ (an acknowledgement of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and Taiwan). Though there is little prospect of India changing its policy on either Tibet or Taiwan, failing to reaffirm it — in what had become a ritual the Chinese took for granted — was a clear signal of Indian displeasure with Chinese attitudes on the political issues dividing the two countries. Until the Sino-Indian frontier is satisfactorily demarcated and the dispute ended, bilateral relations are likely to remain mildly frosty.
And yet, there is a lot that India and China can achieve by joining hands, and it will not only be for their interest, but for the common good in Asia and the developing world. India is not an obstacle to China’s aspirations, far less an instrument for its ‘containment’, as was wrongly suggested by some in that country. Even the purported competition for resources between the two countries in Africa and Latin America is, in my view, overblown. The two Asian giants actually have far greater common interests than is generally believed — in keeping open sea lanes, stabilizing overseas markets and securing vital resources from developing countries. Since there are enough resources to go around, this is not a zero-sum game but one where both could cooperate towards the same objectives. But it is true that such a perception is not yet widely shared in the two countries.