DESPITE GHQ-PLA UNRESTRICTED WARFARE, INDIA’S TIME BEGINS NOW

The battle of systems for mastery over the Indo-pacific will be decided during the current decade. The reality is that the PRC seems much more formidable than it actually is in operational terms, as became clear at Galwan last year.

The founder of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong, sought to create a New China out of the debris left behind by the decades of chaos since the close of the 19th century. To achieve that, he sought to engineer a “New

Citizen”. Thus began the process in the 1950s of “dispensing with the olds to bring in the new”. Dissatisfied with the slow pace of progress of his societal reforms in a population taught from childhood to revere tradition, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. The GPCR was technically continued until 1976, but in effect was abandoned by the close of 1971. By then, its managed dissent against much of the CCP leadership at different levels had paralysed the party apparatus and rendered it helpless in the face of Mao assisted by the military led by Defence Minister Lin Biao. The presumed heir to Mao suffered the same fate in 1971 as did the NKVD executioners of Stalin’s Red Terror in the

USSR. Lin Biao “died while attempting to flee to Russia” in a commandeered aircraft. With a shattered party unable to question his moves, Mao carried out the longstanding wish of his to befriend the US as a counter to the USSR. Mao also saw to it that the most prominent reformist still left in the CCP, Deng Xiaoping, was preserved from death or irreparable obloquy. Soon after Mao’s demise in 1976, Deng took control of the CCP and launched his production reforms in the favourable investment conditions created by the alliance with the US. Within a generation, the PRC had become a major economy that rejuvenated its once shattered agriculture and industry. Another generation later, the PRC became the other superpower soon after the reins of control were handed over to Xi Jinping in 2012.

XI JINPING’S TITANIC GAMBLE

It had been Mao’s dream since the 1930s to make his country the centre of global gravity, but it was CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping who first expressed this objective aloud. Even more telling than his words were Xi’s actions. So far as India was concerned, he made his intentions clear in 2013 by approving the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which cut through Pakistanoccupied Kashmir and ended in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean through the backbone of Pakistan. From the start, the CPEC was, in essence, a security pact that created an amalgamated

GHQ-PLA alliance designed to counter India within the subcontinent and beyond. In this partnership, it was the PLA that was in the driver’s seat, with the PRC paying the bills and GHQ undertaking “special projects” in India and elsewhere as part payment. In the US, for example, the PRC and Pakistan missions have worked closely if