Geopolitics

2017: Was a tough Year for China-India Relations
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Issue Net Edition | Date : 13 Jan , 2018

China–India relations refers to the bilateral relationship between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of India. The modern relationship began in 1950 when India was among the first countries to end formal ties with the Republic of China (Taiwan) and recognised the PRC as the legitimate government of Mainland China. China and India are the two most populous countries and fastest growing major economies in the world. Growth in diplomatic and economic influence has increased the significance of their bilateral relationship. Currently ties between the two nuclear-armed countries had severely deteriorated due to a military standoff in Doklam in Bhutan however peace prevails.

2017 was comparatively a difficult year for China-India relations. With military tensions close to their disputed territories, increasing competition in their neighborhood, and growing strategic mistrust, Beijing and New Delhi’s relations reached a nadir in 2017. Luckily, the damage of 2017 inflicted on the relationship between the two Asian giants is not only irreparable but also well under control due to top leadership’s cordial relations. Nevertheless, it reflects larger trends and indicates that Sino-Indian relations increasingly stand at a crossroads, with growing likelihood that they could go in the wrong direction with hasty and erratic action at the lower levels. Hence, New Delhi and Beijing need to start rethinking and rebuilding their relationship in 2018.

Episodes in 2017

The past year witnessed several episodes that seriously damaged India-China relations and put them on a downward trajectory. Several of these were serious as well as routine, such as the tensions around the Dalai Lama’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh, China’s continued blocking of the bid to design Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, Doklam standoff, stoppage of nuclear supply group (NSG) membership to India, blockade of Indian ONGC exploration of oil in Vietnam’s coast of South China Sea, India’s refusal to join Belt and Road Initiative and increase in transgressions by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) along the disputed Sino-Indian territory.

Increase in Transgressions

There was a 25-30 per cent increase in transgressions by the Chinese PLA, particularly in Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. On an average around 300 transgressions are reported along the China border due to “difference in perception.”

About 15 soldiers of PLA entered the northern bank of Pangong Lake in Ladakh in the Indian Territory in August 2017.  Although the situation in the lake area was quickly defused, things may spin out of control and lead to a conflict if more such incursion attempts occur on either side of the 3,488-km border dividing the two countries.

In one of the great paradoxes that define the India-China relationship, the violation of fourth Indian airspace by Chinese choppers all at once in Uttarakhand, important and inconsequential. This is not a logical impossibility but the truest representation of the current state of affairs between the two countries.

When the tensions were running high at the Doklam plateau in Bhutan, around 50 Chinese soldiers breached the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Uttarakhand’s Barahoti region, the troops crossed over into Barahoti on 25 July and went back after the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) halted them. However, these were minor incursions compared with three episodes that shook bilateral relations and had serious strategic consequences.

Doklam Standoff

The most important episode was the unprecedented Doklam military standoff, a two-and-a half-month test of wills prompt by China’s construction of a road in territory it disputes with Bhutan, not far from a strategically key section of the India-China border. The standoff featured unprecedented Indian military involvement in its two neighbours territorial dispute and a shockingly strong Chinese reaction against India’s firm stand, which included implicit military threats against India and a massive media campaign against New Delhi, the first such campaign against India in decades. While the Doklam standoff was eventually resolved, however, it has left a deep sense of mistrust between the two sides.

Belt and Road Initiative

India’s decision to boycott the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) summit held in Beijing in May 2017, which even Chinese adversaries such as Japan and the United States attended, was another major blow to China-India relations. To China, the boycott was not only a signal of India’s hostility to its most important international project, but also an affront both to Beijing’s self-image as international leader and, personally, to the BRI’s champion, President Xi Jinping. The most important immediate reason for this unprecedented snub was the fact that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the crucial Pakistan leg of the BRI, includes projects in Pakistan-held Kashmir, which India claims, thus legitimising Pakistan’s position on the issue and establishing facts on the ground.

However, at deeper level, India’s decision to not attend reflected New Delhi’s profound unease with the BRI, a project that in its eyes would extend Chinese power in South Asia, encircle India, and bring Beijing and Islamabad even closer.

Quadrilateral Security Dialogue

The event that quietly damaged China-India relations in 2017 was India’s decision in November to join the revived Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), a strategic dialogue between the United States, Japan, India, and Australia with a naval component. Beijing has opposed the Quad as a potential anti-Chinese alliance of democracies aimed at containing it and checking its maritime rise in the Indo-Pacific; that opposition played a major role in the dialogue’s earlier abandonment. India’s decision to join the resurrected but still somewhat amorphous Quad inevitably reflects its worries about China’s growing power and assertiveness, particularly in the Indian Ocean, and Delhi’s readiness to hedge against them.

Nuclear Supply Group Membership

Despite China’s adamant stand against India’s entry into the prestigious Nuclear Supplier’s Group (NSG), India announced in May 2017 that it wouldn’t stop its efforts to work towards securing the membership of the elite group.

Slimming India’s chance of entering the 48-member NSG, China said there is no change in its stance on the admission of non-NPT countries into the ‘elite club’.  Based on the consensus principle, China’s support is highly important for India’s membership into the NSG.

South China Sea Blockade

China is deadly against India carrying out oil exploration in part of South China Sea near Vietnam coast. The moves come at a delicate time in Beijing’s relations with Vietnam, which claims parts of the sea, and India, which recently sent warships to monitor the Malacca Straits, through which most of China’s energy supplies and trade passes.

Vietnam granted Indian oil firm ONGC Videsh a two-year extension to explore oil block 128 in a letter that arrived recently, the state-run company’s managing director Narendra K. Verma said. Part of that block is in the U-shaped ‘nine-dash line’, which marks the vast area that China claims in the sea, a route for more than $5 trillion in trade each year in which the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have claims.

These five episodes made 2017 a particularly tough year for China-Indian relations, with serious impact on how the two sides see each other. On the positive side, none of these events has done irreversible damage to bilateral relations. On the negative, all five episodes represent a particularly severe manifestation of larger trends that have adversely impacted the China-India relationship in recent years.

These trends and the episodes of the last year clearly point to the emergence of a larger and much more worrying picture of bilateral relations. Two major, ongoing changes define this picture. First, the India-China relationship is in the process of transformation and is slowly arriving at a crossroads. The strategic and economic landscape of Asia has been changing as the rise of Chinese power transforms both Asia and the Indian Ocean Region, and fuels greater competition between the Middle Kingdom on one hand and the United States and Japan on the other. These tectonic changes are transforming the international environment in which the Beijing-Delhi relationship operates and mean that the relationship cannot continue as before.

Finally, China and India have found it much more difficult to manage their tensions and disagreements, as evidenced by the Doklam standoff and India’s boycott of the BRI summit, a signal that the present format of the relationship is not working. All this indicates that the China-India relationship is increasingly standing at a crossroads and the two sides will have to choose in what direction they will go, or, if they don’t, accept the road that inertia would choose for them.

Second, the Indian-China relationship is progressively deteriorating. As China has increased its presence around India and has begun to vigorously shape Asia’s strategic landscape to its advantage, India has adopted a much tougher and more decisive stance toward Beijing.

The Indian Army claims it will not allow an expansionist China to intrude into Indian Territory at any cost, while roundly dismissing Pakistan’s reckless threats about its tactical nuclear weapons being an effective counter to India’s conventional military superiority.

“China is a powerful country but we are not a weak nation…We will not allow our territory to be invaded by anyone. We are prepared,” said Army chief General Bipin Rawat, in the backdrop of the PLA needling India with as many as 415 “border transgressions” LAC last year, which also saw the 73-day face-off at Doklam and 215 other troop confrontations.

Speaking in the run-up to the Army Day on January 15, Gen Rawat also said “Pakistan’s nuclear bogey” will be thoroughly exposed if it actually comes to a war with the western neighbour, which often brandishes its short-range Nasr (Hatf-IX) nuclear missiles as a battlefield counter to India’s `Cold Start’ strategy of swift, high-intensity conventional attacks into enemy territory. “We will call their bluff. If given the task, we will not say we cannot cross the border because they have nuclear weapons,” he said.

But even as Indian Army continues its punitive fire assaults to “inflict pain” on Pakistan Army for actively abetting cross-border terrorism and infiltration, with the latter suffering “three to four times more casualties”, Gen Rawat said his force was “shifting its focus” from the western front to the “northern borders” with China.

Though the government is dealing with China in a holistic manner, with the diplomatic engagement “going well”, India should take care to ensure its neighbours like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan “do not drift away” from it. “We have to see we are not isolated against China in this region,” he said, also referring to the emerging “quadrilateral” with the US, Australia and Japan in the Indo-Pacific maritime domain.

2017 was stressful for China-India relations, leaving a heavy legacy for 2018. However, it also leaves homework for Beijing and Delhi; to rethink their deteriorating relations. If the two sides do their homework well, 2018 and the coming years might see a peaceful coexistence. However, India has to work hard to make its army strong enough to thwart any misadventure from China and Pakistan jointly.

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The views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Indian Defence Review.

About the Author

Col (Dr) PK Vasudeva

is author of World Trade Organisation: Implications for Indian Economy, Pearson Education and also a former Professor International Trade.

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