HEGEMONY, NOT TERRITORY
What India must learn to counter China’s incursions on its borders and in its neighbourhood
AVIOLENT FACE-OFF AGAINST INDIA in the highlands of Ladakh. A new security law for Hong Kong that eliminates basic civil rights. Chinese military jets flying into Taiwan’s air defence space. A border conflict with Bhutan in a specific area where there previously was none. The sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea. Territorial disputes in the same maritime area with not only Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia but also Indonesia. And meddling in Australia’s domestic politics, for the first time giving rise to critical voices against China in a country which until now has been extremely reluctant to criticise its most important trading partner.
Is China shooting itself in the foot with increasingly aggressive policies that appear to be making more foes than friends? Or is China’s muscle-flexing, not only in the Himalayas but also in the South China Sea, in Hong Kong and over Taiwan, a sort of Cold War litmus test to gauge which nations are willing to openly criticise Beijing’s more assertive posture and which will remain reticent? Is China, as some analysts would argue, merely testing the limits of impunity?
It is hardly any secret that President Xi Jinping sees himself as the third great leader in modern Chinese history. Mao Zedong destroyed the old order and liberated China from feudalism and oppression. Deng Xiaoping laid the foundations for a modern economy. And Xi wants to turn China into the dominant world power that the rest of the world has to listen to, not oppose. He wants to make China great again.
In Asia, China, it seems, is keen to send a message to India and its neighbours on who now rules the roost in the region, particularly at a juncture when India and many of its allies and partners—not the least the United States—struggle to contain the Covid-19 pandemic at home. It is becoming clear that the confrontation in Ladakh is not chiefly about which side should control an uninhabited piece of barren mountain rock. The conflict is about something much bigger: strategic rivalry between Asia’s two giants and more specifically a desire on the part of China to punish India for rejecting Xi’s pet project, the multi-billion-dollar infrastructure development scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
China’s vernacular media did not cover the bloody events in Ladakh, but the English-language Communist Party mouthpiece The Global Times published strong threats against India. On June 15, it quoted a supposedly independent scholar in Shanghai saying that ‘if India escalates border tensions, it could face military pressure from two or even three fronts’, namely China’s ‘reliable strategic partners’ Nepal and Pakistan. It also raised the spectre of the 1962 war, warning ‘India’s feverish nationalists’ not to repeat ‘past mistakes’.
India, clearly, is seen as a major obstacle on China’s road to greatness. Hence the need to humiliate it in the Himalayas, and ongoing efforts to pick off one smaller country in South Asia after another. Pakistan is an old ally; China may be succeeding in Nepal as well. When Nepal banned all Indian news
channels except Doordarshan on July 9, China no doubt was pleased as it was the latest of many signs of Nepal’s drift away from India and towards China. More importantly, Nepal is a partner in Xi’s BRI and plans are still under way to extend the Lhasa-Xigaze railway to the Nepalese border and even as far as Kathmandu, thus lessening the landlocked Himalayan country’s traditional dependence on India for foreign trade.
But it has not been only smooth sailing for Xi and his government in Beijing. In November 2018, China’s man in the Maldives, Abdulla Yameen, lost his position in the presidential election and, in April last year, his pro-Indian enemies in the Maldivian Democratic Party won a landslide victory in the country’s parliamentary election. The Maldives are a small but strategically important country from which China had hoped to protect its lines of communications and shipping routes with the Middle East, Africa and Europe. China has not lost the Maldives completely—major investment projects are still on the books—but India has regained considerable ground once lost to China in the Indian Ocean nation.
In Myanmar, another target for Chinese penetration, the country’s powerful military chief General Min Aung Hlaing stunned many observers by lashing out in an interview with a Russian news channel in June against “terrorist groups” that exist “because of the strong forces that support them.” Although he did not name any group or force in particular, it was clear that he was referring to the insurgent Arakan Army in the country’s western Rakhine State, which is equipped with Chinese-made weapons.
In November last year, the Myanmar military also seized a huge cache of Chinese weapons, including brand-new rocket launchers and a surface-to-air missile, from another rebel army in northern Shan State. In Myanmar, the Chinese carrot consists of loans, grants and support for anti-Covid-19 campaigns while the stick is giving some of the country’s many ethnic rebel armies access to China’s huge, informal arms market, which is grey rather than black. The aim is to gain more influence in Myanmar, a country that would provide it direct access to the Indian Ocean. The so-called ‘China-Myanmar Economic Corridor’, which involves the construction of high-speed railways, highways and upgraded waterways along Myanmar’s rivers, is a crucial BRI link China would do anything to control and protect.
BHUTAN IS ANOTHER COUNTRY attracting increased Chinese attention, not because it is important for trade and economic expansion, but because it is seen as a close Indian ally. Bhutan is the only neighbouring country with which China does not have diplomatic relations, which complicates matters. But China’s soft-power overtures towards Bhutan have been wide-ranging, including the dispatch of circus artists, acrobats and footballers, and by granting a limited but growing number of Bhutanese students scholarships to study at Chinese universities. The number of Chinese tourists visiting Bhutan was also substantial—until the Covid-19 crisis struck.
Seen in this context, the newly-invented “border conflict” with Bhutan is nothing more than a ruse, which in the absence of diplomatic ties, will enable Chinese officials to meet their Bhutanese counterparts. The dispute with Bhutan—and the much more serious confrontation in Ladakh—may have been concocted by Beijing for wider strategic purposes, but the Chinese shenanigans in the region come, hardly by coincidence, at a time when India is severely weakened by Covid-19.
However, as recent events also show, China has gone too far—and the challenge for India is how to face up to these new realities. As anti-China sentiments get stronger in Myanmar, India has new opportunities to improve government-togovernment as well as people-to-people relations. It is also important to call China’s bluff and not fall into the trap of believing that the conflicts in the Himalayas are about border demarcation. They are about hegemony. In the Indian Ocean, India will have to work closely with regional partners such as Japan and Australia. In short, it will have to be proactive rather than reactive. At the same time, India will have to tread carefully in its relations with countries such as Bhutan, the Maldives and Myanmar so as not to antagonise them as it did Nepal with the 2015 blockade. If skilfully mastered, the endgame might well be that Beijing’s aggressive postures make the encirclement it supposedly dreads a reality.
INDIA SHOULD WORK WITH REGIONAL PARTNERS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN, BE PROACTIVE AND LEARN NOT TO ANTAGONISE ITS IMMEDIATE NEIGHBOURS