4 July 2020, NIICE Commentary 5475
Dr. Hemant Adlakha
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi held a press conference on the sidelines of the third session of the 13th NPC on Sunday, May 24 in which he categorically denied China harbors any intention to change, less replace, the US. However, China’s recent actions against its neighbors, both on sea and on land, tell us an entirely conflicting narrative.
Changing China
There is no denying that COVID-19 has changed and is changing the world. Has China been changing too? The world does not think so. A couple of decades ago, China’s English-language CCTV channel’s lead slogan used to be “The world is changing, China is changing.” Then Beijing hosted the Olympics in 2008. And the new CCTV slogan was “One World, One Dream” or read as “China’s World, China’s Dream”. Following the spectacular success of the 2008 Olympics, and two years later, with China having replaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy, the slogan changed once again: “A changing China is changing the world”
The US, at the time, was the only nation which noticed the changing China. The US at the same time reckoned it (China) was not merely a changing but rather a rising China. Given the history of its own rise, the United States of America perceived a rising China as a potential future threat to replace the US as the world leader. Riding on the high wave of emerging out of the just started global financial crisis unscathed, China’s emboldened and “aggressive” foreign policy overtures did not leave anyone in doubt in Washington of Beijing’s ambitious appetite to establish itself as “revisionist” power. In other words, China had become a threatening force to something the world had come to believe will remain a constant, ie, the US-led world order. Not surprisingly, the US scholarly discourse proclaiming the US-China relations were entering a new phase, called the Thucydides Trap, soon became the official US administration view. The US, under President Obama, then introduced “Pivot to Asia” policy to “tame” the rising China.
Aggressive China
It has been over two months and several rounds of military-level and at least a couple of diplomatic talks, both before and after the fateful 15 June night in which twenty Indian soldiers had been brutally murdered. And yet India’s strategic affairs pundits and the security establishment have largely concluded, the Chinese motives are not clear behind the ongoing eyeball-to-eyeball between the troops on either side of the LAC in Ladakh. The Beijing-based veteran Irish freelance commentator, Tom Clifford, had earlier on called the Doklam standoff “Thucydides Trap” with a twist. In that the 72-day long “I dare you” confrontation was a contest of one-upmanship between what once was emerging power, China, now a risen power and India, once an established power and now emerging. Obviously, no one in India agreed. Just the other day, the former Indian foreign secretary, Shivshankar Menon, while speaking to the ace television interviewer Karan Thapar, described the Chinese offensive as “a part of general shift in China’s behavior. For a variety of internal and external reasons China was behaving more assertively and its response relies on ultra-nationalism.”
Like Menon and most Indian analysts, who are clueless and puzzled as to what could have been China’s motive to “build up” the crisis and Beijing’s “audacity” to refuse to back down, the print as well as electronic media too appear to have been completely lost in the Chinese-checkers game. While speculating what’s behind the Chinese intrusions, the country’s largest English-language daily said: “Beijing needs to save face globally. Expect a long LAC faceoff and no solutions.” The Economic Times, smells a larger Chinese gameplan and accuses Beijing of “trying to deny India any sort of respectable parity” on the LAC, just like China tried to deny nuclear parity to India when it sought to block the India-US civil nuclear deal at the Nuclear Suppliers Group. For want of a tangible explanation, another financial daily called China’s latest transgression as typically “snake in the garden” act. Perhaps the country’s largest read e-newsmagazine The Print, stands out amid prevailing confusion among Indian China-watchers – a “privileged” community which boasts more number of specialists than any other area studies. The Print, in fact, expressed surprise that the Indian establishment neither knew nor it was prepared for the “Chinese are coming.”
Chinese Warnings
In China, on the other hand, beyond the English-language Global Times, op-ed commentaries in the Mandarin-language media have largely been measured, precise and absolutely clear that like in Doklam three years ago, this time too it is India playing “belligerent.” “The Indian audacity to repeatedly provoke China on the LAC is mystifying,” “Only with a gun on its head will India agree and sit down to talk,” “It seems Modi’s past wounds have healed and he is no more in pain,” and “India playing out border games with China again, inviting death” – these are a few commentaries from the Mandarin press, including one in the PLA daily.
As China has always described its border “war” with India in 1962 as “counter attack in self-defence” or Ziwei fanji zhan, and like the standoff in Doklam three years ago, this time in Ladakh too, Beijing has accused India of creating trouble in an attempt at grabbing Chinese territory. In a stern warning to India, Long Xingchun, Director of a think tank recently wrote an article entitled: “India should not misread risks as opportunities.” Claiming the nature of standoff in Ladakh in the past couple of months as fundamentally different from the face-offs in the recent years, Long reckoned it was a “planned” action by India. “Although there is no agreement over the exact LAC in the region, it is clear that the Galwan River Valley has always been under the Chinese control. This time, the Indian army not only built infrastructure in controversial areas under its control and consolidated the construction, but it also eroded and built facilities in the areas actually under the Chinese control. To which the Chinese PLA opposed and that triggered a confrontation.” Long further cautioned India by saying, if this confrontation is not resolved soon, the damage to China-India relations will be far more than during the Doklam standoff.
Indian Dilemma
As the Galwan Valley tensions escalate, it is unclear what triggered the situation snowball into what threatens to get prolonged until at least the dangerously high Himalayan terrain actually looks all covered in snow again in a few months. While ambassador Menon summed up the Chinese latest coercive military action in Ladakh as clever Leninist tactic of “moving two steps forward and one step back,” implying the Chinese would still regain one step, even as they retreat from the Indian territory encroached by them. Interestingly, there are also those who claim, in recent years Beijing has been employing “probing behavior” tactic in its neighborhood, both on sea and on land – a tactic that tests how far China can go before encountering determined resistance. According to a recent study by warontherocks.com, this approach reflects a maxim of Vladimir Lenin, “Probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.” Be that as it may, Lenin’s “two steps forward and one step back,” or “probe with a bayonet…,” we do not know how well-acquainted Xi Jinping or his political bureau comrades are with Lenin. What we do know, however, is that the CPC continues to look up to Mao when it needs to. Much of Mao’s war strategy and tactic was learnt from the third century BC Chinese Classic Romance of Three Kingdoms or Sanguoyanyi: “If you dare, then attack; if you dare not, get out of way.”
