Routledge Handbook of China–India Relations 2019049361, 9781138545939, 9781351001564

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Routledge Handbook of China–India Relations

The Routledge Handbook of China–India Relations provides a much-needed understanding of the important and complex relationship between India and China. Reflecting the consequential and multifaceted nature of the bilateral relationship, it brings together thirty-five original contributions by a wide range of experts in the field. The chapters show that China–India relations are more far-reaching and complicated than ever and marked by both conflict and cooperation. Following a thorough introduction by the Editors, the handbook is divided into seven parts which combine thematic and chronological principles: • • • • • • •

Historical overviews Culture and strategic culture Core bilateral conflicts Military relations Economy and connectivity Relations with third parties China, India, and global order

This handbook will be an essential reference work for scholars interested in International Relations, Asian Politics, Global Politics, and China–India relations. Kanti Bajpai is Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies and Director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Selina Ho is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Master in International Affairs Programme at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Manjari Chatterjee Miller is Associate Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, USA, and a Research Associate at the School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, UK.

Routledge Handbook of China–India Relations

Edited by Kanti Bajpai, Selina Ho and Manjari Chatterjee Miller

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Kanti Bajpai, Selina Ho and Manjari Chatterjee Miller; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kanti Bajpai, Selina Ho and Manjari Chatterjee Miller to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bajpai, Kanti P., 1955– editor | Ho, Selina, editor. | Miller, Manjari Chatterjee, 1976– editor. Title: Routledge handbook of China–India relations / edited by Kanti Bajpai, Selina Ho and Manjari Chatterjee Miller. Other titles: China India relations Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019049361 Subjects: LCSH: China—Foreign relations—India. | India—Foreign relations—China. Classification: LCC DS740.5.I5 R68 2020 | DDC 303.48/251054—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049361 ISBN: 978-1-138-54593-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-00156-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Advisory Council Rosemary Foot, Oxford University Carla P. Freeman, Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies John Garver, Georgia Institute of Technology Jia Qingguo, Peking University David M. Lampton, Stanford University Roderick MacFarquhar, Harvard University Shivshankar Menon, former Foreign Secretary and National Security Advisor of India T.V. Paul, McGill University Nirupama Rao, former Foreign Secretary of India Shen Dingli, Fudan University

To the memory of Roderick MacFarquhar (1930–2019) and Rudolf Wagner (1941–2019)

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: taking stock—a multi-disciplinary view of China–India relations

xi xii xiii xviii

1

K A N T I B A J PA I , S E L I N A H O A N D M A N J A R I C H AT T E R J E E M I L L E R

1 Reflections on comparing China and India

18

TA RU N K H A N N A

PART 1

Historical overviews 2 China and India pre-1939

33 35

RU D O L F G . WAG N E R

3 Relations between the Republic of China and India, 1937–1949

63

TA N S E N S E N

4 The 1950s in China–India relations

87

H U X I AOW E N

PART 2

Culture and strategic culture 5 The new Indian communities in China

105 107

PA L L AV I A I YA R

6 The alien next door: media images in China and India S I M O N S H E N A N D D E B A S I S H ROY C H OW D H U RY

119

viii Contents

Contents  ix PART 5

Economy and connectivity

289

17 Bilateral economic relations amid trade and trust deficits

291

P R A D E E P TA N E J A

18 China, India, and Asian connectivity: China’s view

303

L I N M I N WA N G

19 China, India, and Asian connectivity: India’s view

315

J A B I N T. J AC O B

20 Divergent capitalism in China and India: a historical institutionalist approach

333

YE MIN

21 Contested partnership: China and India in a changing BRICS

349

GU JING A N D N EI L R EN W ICK

PART 6

Relations with third parties

363

22 The China–India–US triangle: a view from Washington

365

JEFF M. SMITH

23 Russia: a balancer in India–China relations?

380

V I DYA N A D K A R N I

24 India, China, and Japan’s policy of Asian regionalism

396

I Z U YA M A M A R I E

25 India and the China–Pakistan relationship: de-hyphenation and re-hyphenation

410

A N DR EW SM A LL

26 Across the Himalayas: China in India’s neighborhood

420

C O N S TA N T I N O X AV I E R

27 Unequal rivals: China, India, and the struggle for influence in Southeast Asia S H E RY N L E E

434

x Contents



Figures



Tables



Contributors

Adriana Erthal Abdenur  (Ph.D. Princeton, AB Harvard) is Coordinator of the Peace & Security Division at Instituto Igarapé, a think tank based in Rio de Janeiro. Dr. Abdenur works broadly at the intersection of international security, development cooperation, and global governance, especially as these themes relate to rising powers, the BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the United Nations. Pallavi Aiyar is an award-winning journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent for two decades reporting from China, Europe, Indonesia and Japan. She is the author of several books including the China-memoir, Smoke and Mirrors, and the novel, Chinese Whiskers. Aiyar is the youngest winner of the Prem Bhatia memorial prize for political reporting for her dispatches from China. Kanti Bajpai  is Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies and Director, Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He is working on a book on China–India relations and has recently published articles on India’s China policy in International Affairs and Pacific Affairs. Sebastian Biba is a Lecturer at the Institute for Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His research interests lie in the field of China’s foreign policy, with a special focus on China’s international river politics. He is author of the monograph China’s Hydro-politics in the Mekong and his articles have appeared in journals such as Security Dialogue, Third World Quarterly, and Water International. Nicolas Blarel is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University in The Netherlands. He focuses on foreign and security policy issues in South Asia as well as relations between India and the Middle East. His most books are The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922 (2015) and the co-edited Oxford Handbook of India’s National Security (2018). David Brewster  is a Senior Research Fellow with the National Security College, Australian National University where he works on the Indo-Pacific and maritime security. Dr Brewster’s books include India’s Ocean: The Story of India’s Bid for Regional Leadership which examines India’s strategic ambitions in the Indian Ocean, and the edited volume India and China at Sea: Competition for Naval Dominance in the Indian Ocean. He is also the author of Australia’s Second Sea: Facing our Multipolar Future in the Indian Ocean.

xiv Contributors

Rishika Chauhan  is currently an Associate Fellow at the Indian Pugwash Society. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for India Studies in China West Normal University, China. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of Delhi and the Observer Research Foundation. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and the Routledge Handbook of Asia in World Politics, among others. Debasish Roy Chowdhury  is a Senior Research Fellow at the Sydney Democracy Network. He is an award-winning journalist who has lived and worked in India, Brazil, Thailand, Beijing and Hong Kong. He was most recently the Deputy China Editor at Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and is currently working on a book on Indian democracy and governance. Fang Tien-sze  is an Associate Professor at the Center for General Education and Deputy Director of the India Studies Center at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He is the author of Asymmetrical Threat Perceptions in India–China Relations. His recent research interests include India’s foreign policy, China–India relations, Taiwan–India relations, and global political economy. M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His latest book is Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy Since 1949 (2019). Courtney J. Fung is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on how rising powers, like China and India, address the norms and provisions for a global security order. She is the author of China and Intervention at the UN Security Council (2019). Gu Jing  is Director of the Centre for Rising Powers and Global Development and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. She is a political economist with extensive experience in research and advisory work of governance, business, and sustainable development. She publishes on the BRICS in international development, China, and emerging powers, including The BRICS in International Development (co-edited with Alex Shankland and Anuradha Chenoy). She is a member of the International Editorial Board of Third World Quarterly. Ian Hall is a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, the Deputy Director (Research) of the Griffith Asia Institute, and an Academic Fellow of the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne. He is also the co-editor, with Sara E. Davies, of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. Selina Ho  is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Master in International Affairs Program at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She specializes in Chinese foreign policy and politics, with a focus on China– India relations and China-Southeast Asia relations. Hu Xiaowen  is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Indian Studies in Yunnan University. She got her PhD from the Centre for East Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the India China Institute, The New School, US. Her research focuses on Indian foreign policy and China–India relations. She is the co-editor of the volume One Belt One Road: China’s Global Outreach (New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2017).

Contributors  xv

Huang Yanzhong is Professor and Director of Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. He is also a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the founding editor of the journal Global Health Governance. Izuyama Marie is Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS). She joined NIDS in 1994. She received her MA from University of Tokyo. Working on foreign and security policy of India, her recent research interests are India-China relations, and India’s power of order making. Her publications include “Border and Connectivity in India’s North Eastern Region: India-China Border and Arunachal Pradesh,” in M. Murayama ed., India’s North Eastern Region and Japan: Engagement through Connectivity (forthcoming); “India, Japan and Global/Regional Order Making,” in T. Horimoto ed., Introduction to Contemporary Japan-India Relations (2017) (in Japanese). Jabin T. Jacob is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University, India. His research interests include Chinese foreign policy, Sino-Indian border areas, and centre-province relations in China. Jacob’s latest work is a co-edited volume, China and its Neighbourhood: Perspectives from India and Vietnam (2017) and his work can be found online at https://indiandchina. com/. Yogesh Joshi  is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore. He was previously a MacArthur and Stanton Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University. He is the co-author of India and Nuclear Asia: Forces, Doctrines and Dangers (2018). Tarun Khanna has taught at Harvard Business School and Harvard College for 25 years, focusing on the role of entrepreneurs across developing countries. He is the first director of Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, a university-wide endeavor that brings together natural and social scientists with artists and humanists in joint academic pursuits. His latest book, Trust, and his earlier Billions of Entrepreneurs, chronicle creative ventures in China, India, and beyond. Julie Michelle Klinger holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware. Sheryn Lee  is a Lecturer at the Department of Security Studies and Criminology, Macquarie University, Sydney. Her current research interests are emerging and disruptive technologies and military modernization, China-Taiwan relations, and Japanese defense policy. She has previously published in Texas National Security Review and Survival. Nicola Leveringhaus  is Lecturer in War Studies (East Asian Security and International Relations) at King’s College London. She specialises on China and nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia. Her book China and Global Nuclear Order, from Estrangement to Active Engagement was nominated for the 2017 ECPR Hedley Bull Prize.

xvi Contributors

Lin Minwang is Professor at the Institute of International Studies, Fudan University. His main research includes China–India relations, international relations in South Asian, and international relations theory. He has published widely on China’s new diplomacy, geopolitics of South Asia. His writings mostly appear in World Economics and Politics, Foreign Affairs Review, Journal of Contemporary Asia-Pacific Studies, International Studies. He has published two monographs Choosing War (2010) and The BRI and Geopolitics in South Asia (2018). Oriana Skylar Mastro  is an Assistant Professor of security studies at Georgetown University, where her research focuses on interstate conflict, great power relations, and the challenges of rising powers – with a focus on China and East Asian security. She is the author of The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (2019). Manjari Chatterjee Miller  is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and a Research Associate at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She works on foreign policy and security issues with a focus on China and India. Anit Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Military in India (2019) Vidya Nadkarni is Professor of Political Science at the University of San Diego. Her research interests span the foreign policies of resurgent (Russia) and aspiring (China, India) global powers. Among other works, she is the author of Strategic Partnerships in Asia: Balancing without Alliances (2010) and co-author of The Foreign Policy of Russia (2019). Lydia Powell  has been with the Observer Research Foundation for over 18 years working on policy issues in energy, water, and the environment in the Indian context. Her current interests include energy access, carbon constraints on energy use, clean coal and natural gas for energy, and environmental security. Neil Renwick  is Professor of Global Security, Coventry University specialising in human security and development. He has published Northeast Asian Critical Security (Palgrave). A Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, his latest book is China, Sustainable Development and South-South Cooperation (2019). Lora Saalman  is a Senior Fellow with the EastWest Institute and SIPRI. She has worked at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, Tsinghua University, Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, Observer Research Foundation, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and IAEA. She graduated from The University of Chicago, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and Tsinghua University. Tansen Sen is Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai, and Global Network Professor at NYU. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (2003; 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017). Simon Shen  is founder of the international relations startup group GLOs, Adjunct Associate Professor of University of Hong Kong/Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Contributors  xvii

Andrew Small is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow on the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is the author of The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics. Jeff M. Smith is a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is the author of Cold Peace: China–India Rivalry in the 21st Century (2014) and author/editor of Asia’s Quest for Balance (2018). Additionally, he has authored chapters for China Steps Out (Routledge, 2018) and The Thickening Web of Asian Security Cooperation (2019). Kate Sullivan de Estrada is Director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme and Associate Professor in the International Relations of South Asia at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She is author, with Rajesh Basrur, of Rising India: Status and Power (2017). Pradeep Taneja lectures in Asian politics and international relations at the University of Melbourne, where he is also a Fellow of the Australia India Institute and an Associate of the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies. He is currently working on a book looking at the rise of China and its implications for India. Arzan Tarapore  is a Nonresident Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, where his research focuses on strategy, military effectiveness, and South Asian security issues. His work has been published in The Washington Quarterly, Joint Force Quarterly, and several other publications. He previously served in the Australian Defence Department. Rudolf G. Wagner was Senior Professor of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University, and Associate at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University. An intellectual historian he published widely on the political implications of philosophical and literary works and on the transcultural interaction between China and the world, in premodern and modern times. He was a recipient of the Leibniz Award. Wu Fuzuo is a Lecturer at the University of Salford. Her research focuses on China and India and international affairs as well as global governance. Her book Energy and Climate Policies in China and India: A Two-Level Comparative Study was published by Cambridge University Press. Constantino Xavier is a Fellow at Brookings India, in New Delhi. He researches on India’s foreign policy with a focus on security, connectivity, and democracy in South Asia. He contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy and holds a Ph.D. in South Asian studies from the Johns Hopkins University. Ye Min is Associate Professor at the Pardee School, Boston University. Her publications include The Belt, Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (2014), and The Making of Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press, 2010). Zhang Feng  is Professor of International Relations and Executive Dean of the Institute of Public Policy at the South China University of Technology. He studies Chinese foreign policy in East Asia (especially China–US and China–Southeast Asia relations), international relations in East Asian history, and international relations theory. His first book, Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History, was published by Stanford University Press in 2015. He has taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Murdoch University and Australian National University in Australia.

Acknowledgments

We would like to gratefully acknowledge financial support for China–India research from Wilmar International Limited which allowed us to assemble a large and diverse group of authors. We were enormously helped in putting together the volume by the staff of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation (CAG), Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, especially Serene Teang, Esther Yeoh, Xu Shengwei, and, above all, Byron Chong who, as Research Associate, helped tirelessly with every aspect of the book allowing the editors to stay on schedule. Our deep thanks to all, especially Byron. We also thank Libby Beri for her sharp-eyed editorial work on the manuscript. At Routledge, we are indebted to Dorothea Schaefter for initiating the idea of the handbook and Alexandra de Brauw for her patience in seeing it all through. We are also indebted to a stellar Advisory Board who generously agreed to be involved with the project. In Professor Roderick MacFarquhar’s passing, the Board and project lost a stalwart and well-wisher. He is profoundly missed. Last, and above all, we thank our authors for their terrific contributions and for so good-humoredly working through the process from start to finish. As the book went to press, we were informed of the sad passing of one of our authors, Professor Rudolf Wagner, who wrote a wonderful chapter on the history of China–India relations from ancient times to the 1930s. He too will be profoundly missed in Chinese studies and scholarship on China–India relations.

Introduction Taking stock—a multi-disciplinary view of China–India relations Kanti Bajpai, Selina Ho and Manjari Chatterjee Miller

The relationship between China and India is widely regarded as one of the central pivots of world politics. While China–US relations will be determinative of global security, global governance, and even global prosperity, the interactions between the two Asian giants could well become the second most consequential bilateral relationship in international politics. China–India relations will influence China–US relations, diplomacy in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, the future of global and regional institutions, and the world economy. The sheer scale and significance of China and India and their relationship can be captured by some jaw-dropping facts and figures. In 2020, nearly four out of every ten people on the planet live in China and India. By 2050, the population of China and India combined will be three billion souls out of a global total of 9.7 billion. At that point, China and India will still account for thirty percent of the world’s population (see Hurworth 2019). Economically, China already accounts for nearly twenty percent of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on a Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) basis; India accounts for eight percent. Together, they account for about thirty percent of world GDP (the US accounts for fifteen percent) (IMF 2019). In nominal terms, together they represent twenty percent of world GDP, with the US at twenty-four percent (The World Bank 2019). Militarily, the two have the largest and third largest standing armies (see IISS 2019: 26). The Chinese navy is growing fast, and by 2030 is poised to have a total of 550 vessels (Fanell 2019: 19). The Indian navy too is expanding rapidly, and by 2027 will have a total of 200 vessels (PTI 2018). China has 290 nuclear weapons while India has 140 (ACA 2019). In terms of comprehensive power—hard power (military and economic) plus soft power—the Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index places them at second and fourth spot, respectively. China is placed behind the US, and India is placed behind Japan (Lowry Institute 2019: 4). The question behind much of the growing interest in China–India relations is: how will the relationship between these two giants evolve and with what consequences? Our volume is an effort to make available scholarship from all over the world that will help readers grapple with this question. A fairly conventional view is that China and India will be competitive, even conflictual toward each other; they may even go to war (again). While this view has some basis (though total war seems unlikely), our volume begins from the standpoint that China–India relations need to be understood as a complex, “mixed-motive game” driven by a variety of forces—international and regional developments, bilateral and domestic imperatives, economic and functional opportunities, historical and cultural structures, symbolic and social psychological needs, and of course geopolitical and security calculations.

2  Kanti Bajpai et al.

Situating the handbook The scale of China and India, their growing power and reach, and interest in the future of their bilateral relations have generated a substantial volume of writings. From the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, China–India scholarship was largely about their border dispute. The 1962 war, which India lost and China won, led to numerous dissections of the contesting claims, to accounts of the events leading up to war, and to analyses of bilateral diplomacy, particularly after the resumption of full diplomatic ties in 1976.1 The last two decades have seen the publication of an array of authored volumes, following in the footsteps of influential earlier studies that dealt principally with the two countries’ bilateral and geopolitical interactions (Garver 2001; Whiting 2001). Most of these more recent studies deal not just with the border dispute but also the larger competition between the two powers, including in regions.2 China–India relations are the subject of a number of edited volumes as well. These are not compendium-like handbooks even though their scope is usually broader than the authored volumes.3 They fall into three broad categories. The first consists of collections that deal with the geopolitical rivalry—the border dispute, military relations, competition in third areas (e.g. Southeast Asia, Africa)—and differences over economic interactions, environment, energy, and river waters.4 A recent example in this category is T.V. Paul’s edited volume, The China–India Rivalry in the Globalization Era, which consists of a set of theoretically guided, analytical essays on the sources, strategies, and mitigators of the rivalry (Paul 2018). A less theory-oriented but equally substantive collection is Jagannath Panda’s India and China in Asia, which brings together a set of essays on the core issues of the border, Tibet, and military relations; their bilateral diplomacy and strategic perceptions of each other; triangular diplomacy (with the US and Russia); and emerging arenas of competition and engagement, including the South China Sea, Central Asia, Europe, and connectivity (Panda 2019). The second set of edited books deals with comparisons between China and India, historically and contemporaneously. The most recent of these is by two well-known historians of India and China, Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Elman, whose volume, What China and India Once Were, examines “the pasts that may shape the global future” (Pollock and Elman 2018). Older volumes in this category are Ira Pande’s India China: Neighbours Strangers (Pande 2010), David A. Kelly, Ramkishen S. Rajan, and Gillian H. Goh’s Managing Globalization: Lessons from China and India (Kelly, Rajan, and Goh 2006), Edward Friedman and Bruce Gilley’s Asia’s Giants: Comparing China and India (Friedman and Gilley 2005), Madhavi Thampi’s India and China in the Colonial World (Thampi 2018), and Tan Chung’s massive Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China (Tan 1998). These range over a wide array of topics—ancient history, colonial history, Cold War history, the role of domestic politics in foreign policy, national security thinking, economic policy and development, business models, internal political organization, social security, ethnicity and identity, emigration and overseas communities, demography, gender relations, student attitudes, urbanization, and art and culture, among others. The final and smallest category of edited volumes deals with understanding the bilateral relationship from a primarily policy perspective. The classic example of this is Francine Frankel and Harry Harding’s The India–China Relationship: What the United States Needs to Know (Frankel and Harding 2004) which consists of mostly American assessments of the relationship and how to manage it in line with US interests. More recently, we note Alyssa Ayres and C. Raja Mohan’s Power Realignments in Asia: China,

Introduction  3

India, and the United States (Ayres and Mohan 2009) which features American and Indian analyses of China, China–India relations, the trilateral relationship between the three powers, and the policy implications for both the US and India. Our handbook overlaps with the concerns of these earlier volumes but has at least four quite distinct features. First of all, in contrast to volumes that are either relational or comparative, our handbook strikes a balance. While it is closer to the first category of edited volumes in its focus on China–India relations, it has several essays that compare China’s and India’s interests and policies. A good portion of the volume is devoted to China–India interactions over bilateral issues (the border, military stability, economic flows), with third parties (other big powers and regional states), and in multilateral settings. Yet, several essays are more comparative than relational. Thus, the volume opens with Tarun Khanna’s reflection on his journey into China–India comparative business studies. A number of other chapters, too, are comparative in nature, in varying degrees, especially Adriana Abdenur, Courtney Fung, Wu Fuzuo, Huang Yanzhong, Julie Klinger, Nicola Leveringhaus and Kate Sullivan de Estrada, Oriana Skylar Mastro and Arzan Tarapore, Lydia Powell, Lora Saalman, Simon Shen and Debasish Chowdhury, and Ye Min. Khanna’s wide-ranging chapter on his own comparative research in China–India studies suggests that comparisons in the human sciences help compensate for the lack of laboratory settings typical of the natural sciences. In addition, comparisons are suggestive of theoretical directions that might be developed: comparisons stimulate and provoke. The China–India comparison is also consequential in the sense that Chinese and Indian similarities and differences on a range of issues impact the rest of the world, and it is vital therefore to understand their similarities and differences. Khanna’s comparative journey shows how instructive the approach can be. From the perspective of this volume, it is inescapable that China and India comparisons must feature. As the two most important countries in the developing world, the parallels and divergences between their governance structures, development paths, and approaches to civil-society relations hold many important lessons for countries in different stages of economic advance.5 A second distinct feature of the volume is the section on the history of the China– India relationship going back to ancient times. In planning the volume, we felt strongly that contemporary interactions between the two societies needed to be set against the longue duree. Even if we cannot always trace through the path dependencies by which we have arrived in the present, the past does constrain the present and the future. Third, this volume also situates the relationship in cultural and social ties of the present—an aspect that has been much neglected in previous collections. Finally, the volume brings in diverse voices. The authors in previous collections on China–India have had a high proportion of scholars based in the West, and they have been overwhelmingly male. This volume, in contrast, has contributors based not just in China and India, but also in Latin America, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan, in addition to those based in the West. Also, almost half our contributors are female.

The impact of history and culture The volume opens with three chapters that show how the past is mined and interpreted to suit present needs. Rudolf Wagner, Tansen Sen, and Hu Xiaowen critically trace through China–India interactions from the arrival of Buddhism in China to the outbreak of war in 1962.

4  Kanti Bajpai et al.

Wagner’s survey of China–India interactions from the arrival of Buddhism in China to the Chinese advocacy press’s depictions of India in the 1930s shows that over six “stages” of the relationship knowledge of each other was relatively limited. Using largely Chinese sources, he argues that “direct transcultural exchanges” were at no time dominant in the relationship; indeed, economic exchanges were not terribly intense either. Chinese reactions to and links with India varied greatly over time and were often brokered through third parties. By the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and elites looked at India negatively: India represented political and social backwardness. Wagner concludes that on neither side was there a great attempt to know the other, and in any case ordinary Chinese and Indians had little contact. Sen’s chapter on the crucial period of China–India interactions between 1937 and 1949 presents a somewhat different picture. Reviewing their political, cultural, and economic interactions and the experiences of Chinese and Indian migrants in India and China, respectively, he argues that the two societies were quite intensely linked at a time of global, continental, and local transformations. While there were attempts at political and strategic cooperation during World War II, and while there was some economic exchange, Sen shows that tensions were already evident, most importantly over Tibet. The treatment of migrants too deteriorated. It was largely in the cultural sphere that interactions were more positive, centering around Rabindranath Tagore and his Chinese friends and admirers. The revival of interest in Sino-Indian Buddhist studies and British interest in developing student exchanges between China and India during World War II also marked this period. Hu’s chapter picks up the China–India story where Sen ends but with a focus on diplomatic–political relations between the two governments. While the 1950s is often portrayed as the golden period between the two states, her account shows that the period of good feeling was brief and superficial. Differences over Tibet, noted by Sen as an emerging quarrel in the 1940s, cast a shadow over the various efforts at cooperation. However, Chinese and Indian differences went deeper. The two governments were in competition over Asian leadership, were in a complex triangle with the Soviet Union complicated by the incipient split between Beijing and Moscow, and were buffeted by international and domestic change. These three historical reconstructions of the China–India relationship show that over a very long period of time the two had only a very partial, hazy understanding of each other and limited contact. By the late nineteenth century, mediated through third parties, their mutual knowledge and interactions grew, particularly in the cultural sphere; and as they did, the seeds of misalignment and conflict were sown. In the 1950s, despite efforts at cooperation and accommodation, international, regional, and domestic changes coincided to intensify conflict to the point of war. These factors could be transposed to the contemporary relationship. China and India’s understanding of particularly the West is much greater than is their knowledge of each other; their mutual knowledge is often mediated through third parties; and with their rising power, at a time of international, regional, and domestic change, despite efforts at official dialogue and cooperation, a range of tensions are evident, going beyond strictly bilateral differences. Contemporary China–India relations are framed not only by the past but also by present-day culture and strategic culture. Pallavi Aiyar, drawing on her time as an Indian correspondent in China, draws a picture of the reverse pilgrimage between China and India—of modern Indians making their way to China to study and to work. The presence

Introduction  5

of Indians in China brings elements of Indian culture to Chinese shores, but, in turn, the Indians return with an immersion in Chinese culture—classical, popular, quotidian. As Simon Shen and Debasish Roy Chowdhury show in their study of the Chinese and Indian media, including the Chinese social media in particular, there exist powerful images and narratives of each other, quite often negative though not always so (for instance, in China’s engagement with Bollywood films). While Aiyar is largely positive about cultural interchange between the two societies, Shen and Roy Chowdhury are more cautious. Beyond culture, China–India relations are framed through the lens of strategic ideas. Strategic culture studies have suggested that security communities construct their evaluation of threats and security responses based on dominant ideas. These ideas might be classical in nature, going back to a foundational text/s in antiquity or to some critical historical moment; or they may be more modern and contemporary. Societies may have contending strategic ideas at any given time, with no one dominant school of thought— strategic ideas may be located in various institutions and sectors, and security policy may be the resultant of the interplay between different schools and institutions. At any rate, Zhang Feng and Ian Hall abstract for us the ways in which Chinese and Indian thinkers conceive of India and China strategically. Zhang argues that over four periods Chinese views of India have varied between friendship, rivalry, and partnership-with-rivalry since Xi Jinping’s leadership. For Zhang, the intellectual roots of these different viewpoints are in constructivism/liberalism and realism. China’s attitudes have fluctuated depending on the international and domestic context, but it may be moving toward more realist preferences in dealing with India. Hall, like Zhang, parses Indian strategic thinking. He identifies four schools of thought—Nehruvian, realist, liberal, and Hindu nationalist. These have dominated at different times, though the past decade, first under Manmohan Singh and then Narendra Modi, has seen a growing emphasis on realist and Hindu nationalist preferences in India’s China policy. Both schools emphasize hard power in dealing with China, but the Hindu nationalists, Hall suggests, invoke the importance of soft power as well. In any case, if strategic dispositions matter for policy, then Zhang and Hall’s analysis suggests that Beijing and Delhi are both realist in their inclinations toward each other. This could presage a period of stability brought on by deterrence and balance of power, or it could, at a critical moment, bring on a military confrontation. What seems unlikely is much friendship or partnership. Nor does a border settlement appear probable.

The impact of bilateral conflicts After the historical and cultural/strategic culture framing of China–India relations, the volume moves on to a section on key bilateral conflicts. Here our authors deal what is widely regarded as the core conflict—the border dispute—but also with two related flashpoints: Tibet; and the waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra (hereafter YTB). Clearly, the border conflict stands at the center of any understanding of China–India relations. Quite why the border is so central is something of a puzzle.6 However, in dealing with the border, our two authors do not so much reconstruct in detail the history of the negotiations from 1949 to the outbreak of war in 1962: scholars as well as former policy-makers have written insightfully and rigorously over the years on the security, diplomatic, legal, and domestic political forces that played on the negotiations leading up to the war. Rather, they focus on the aftermath and the implications of the border dispute for both countries in the present day. Taylor Fravel in his contribution shows

6  Kanti Bajpai et al.

that after the war China has focused on military stability and maintaining dominance on the border. It has shown no great urgency in seeking a settlement or in recovering its territorial claims by force. Fravel illustrates this with an analysis of key military confrontations since 1962 which in Beijing’s view have been provoked by aggressive Indian actions. He suggests that Chinese forbearance can be attributed to the fact that it is preoccupied with East Asian security challenges and not the border with India. Rishika Chauhan, in her analysis of Indian perceptions and policy, concludes that after 1962 Delhi too has opted for stability in a period of what she characterizes as “armed coexistence.” 7 However, her account suggests at least three differences between China and India. First, unlike Beijing, Delhi has been keen to get a final settlement. Second, from the Indian perspective, it is China and not India that has precipitated the confrontations since 1962 and in particular after 2010. Third, for India, the rivalry with China is increasingly regarded as being the primary strategic theater. We conclude from their papers that the Chinese and Indian preoccupation with stability as well as the differences between them on the urgency of a border settlement, on the responsibility for instability, and on the strategic importance of the quarrel suggests that the relationship is likely to remain mired in a brittle stasis. Beyond the border issue are the tensions over Tibet and over the waters of the YTB rivers—the former being part of the original quarrel between China and India and the latter being a more contemporary point of difference. While Tibet is a legacy issue going back to the late 1940s when Chiang Kai Shek was still in power in China and Nehru had just taken charge in independent India, as Fang Tien-sze shows it continues to cast a shadow over the relationship. The situation within Tibet appears to be relatively calm, but the health of the current Dalai Lama raises questions about the nature of a post-Dalai Tibet and China–India relations in the transition to a new Dalai. Concern over Tibet was evident at the Wuhan summit between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2018. Media reports suggest that Modi took the opportunity to brief Xi on the Dalai’s health (Kuronuma 2018). Before the summit, Delhi very publicly stated that it would not allow the Dalai to engage in political activities in India and that no Indian officials would attend the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Dalai’s arrival in India (Kazmin 2018). Far more recent in the list of China–India disputes is the primarily Indian concern over water flows from the YTB river. As the Yarlung Tsangpo, the river flows through Tibet before turning southwest into the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and proceeding further inland into India. It finally debouches into Bangladesh. India raised the issue of Chinese dams and possible water diversion as well as downstream flooding as early as 1998, but the matter really gained public attention in the late 2000s through a series of articles in the Indian media.8 Since then, the two governments have agreed that Beijing will share its river-water data, and Delhi seems to have backed away from its more alarmist stand. Nonetheless, China’s insistence that it is within its legal rights to use the waters of the river in whatever way it sees fit has stoked Indian concerns. The conflation of the river dispute with the border dispute (Arunachal Pradesh is rich in water resources) has added to the complexity of the disputes and fuelled suspicion and distrust.9 While the idea of a “water war” is fanciful, as Sebastian Biba points out in his chapter, what has been lost in the discussions over hydrological tensions is the possibility of cooperation between China and India and possibly also Bangladesh. Biba suggests that instead of a conflict spiral, it may be possible to construct a cooperation spiral over river waters.

Introduction  7

The impact of military and economic relations The border quarrel and perhaps even the Tibet issue between China and India could become militarized to the point of hostilities, as in the period 1959–1962. Our fourth section therefore turns to military relations. Here Yogesh Joshi and Anit Mukherjee, Oriana Skylar Mastro and Arzan Tarapore, and David Brewster map out the perceptions of threats and challenges as well as responses in terms of the broad strategic dispositions and actual military capabilities of the two powers. Clearly, in a strict “bean counting” sense, China is better placed than India. But terrain, geography, softer capabilities, and contending strategic imperatives suggest that China–India military relations are more complex than may be revealed by sheer numbers. For example, while China has many material and organizational strengths, its m ilitary is relatively untested. It has not fought a war since the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979. By contrast, the Indian army and air force are battle tested, particularly the army, which has been deployed in counter-insurgency duties continuously since the 1980s and went to war against Pakistan in 1999. Strategically, China has to look out on several fronts. It has more neighbors on land and sea than any other country—fourteen in total that it shares a border with. Among these are major military and economic powers as well as significant regional powers (India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, North and South Korea, and Vietnam). Four of them possess nuclear weapons and one, Japan, could go nuclear quickly. In addition, and most importantly, China has to contend with the US military as a massive regional presence. India, by contrast, has only two serious military powers on its borders—China and Pakistan. This makes for a relatively uncluttered strategic picture. Having said that, reading across the four chapters, it is clear that China’s military capabilities outstrip India’s by some distance—and that distance is growing. The most striking structural difference is that China produces all weapon systems, in varying degrees of sophistication (even as it imports some advanced systems from Russia), whereas India’s only real indigenous competences are in nuclear warheads and missiles. As Lora Saalman shows in her chapter, in the emerging area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration in the military, China is well ahead, which suggests that the capability gap with India is poised to grow even further. While China and India are military rivals, they are not always economic rivals. Indeed, going back at least to 1988, when Rajiv Gandhi travelled to Beijing to meet Deng Xiaoping (becoming the first Indian prime minister to travel to China in thirty-four years), economics has been regarded as an area of interaction that would bring the two sides closer. After the 1962 war, Delhi had insisted that it would not resume broad, normal intercourse with China until the restoration of the status quo ante. Gandhi took the decision to move beyond this standard position, giving a fillip to economic relations. From the 1990s onward, with India’s economic liberalization, the two countries gradually opened up to bilateral trade and investment. Trade in particular dramatically increased, from a mere $200 million in 1990 (Singh 2005) to $95.54 billion in 2017–2018 (PTI 2019). This section takes a broader view of economic relations than just trade and investment, the core areas of interaction, to include an emerging area of competition but also possible cooperation, namely, connectivity. As with most of the world, China’s trade relations with India are asymmetric. In 2018, the trade deficit between the two countries was $57.86 billion in favor of China. Although Beijing and Delhi had hoped

8  Kanti Bajpai et al.

that the economic benefits of trade would soften the rougher edges of their diplomatic and security relations and even lay the grounds for a border settlement, the opposite has happened. Economic relations themselves have become the site of conflict, and diplomatic–security relations have not greatly improved. On the border, the two countries are as far apart as ever; indeed the Chinese position on its claims has hardened to include all of Arunachal Pradesh (South Tibet). Pradeep Taneja analyses the two core areas of economic interaction. In his view, the record of bilateral economic cooperation is a positive one and can grow despite domestic resistance and strategic differences. The future will be determined by the balance between those in both countries who have real and growing material interests in a robust economic relationship and those who harbor suspicions and worries about the other’s intentions. An economic issue that is dividing the two countries more than bringing them together is connectivity. In their chapters, Lin Minwang and Jabin Jacob trace China and India’s policies toward connectivity and China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in particular. Both probe China’s motives in this massive scheme and refract India’s reactions. Lin sees hope in Beijing’s growing understanding of Delhi’s doubts and worries and, over time, in India’s less strident opposition to BRI. Jacob, by contrast, argues that Delhi has not comprehended the full extent of Beijing’s goals and policies which go well beyond investing in massive physical infrastructure. India therefore has not developed a comprehensive response. While Lin and Jacob take a more strategic view, Ye Min’s chapter traces differences in China and India’s approach to attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and more recently, in promoting connectivity, to historical institutionalist differences in their orientation toward capitalism. Gu Jing and Neil Renwick analyze the most collaborative international economic venture between China and India—the New Development Bank (NDB) of the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). They suggest that Beijing and Delhi’s motives in BRICS and the NDB are complex, reflecting both national and more cosmopolitan interests. The desire for greater status and influence, leveraging for their own economic advantage, reacting to international economic crises and opportunities, and furthering human development and human security globally are all in the mix. China and India have cooperated even as they wrestle with bilateral quarrels, the power gap between them, their responses to terrorism and BRI, and misalignment over BRICS procedures. In sum, while China–India military relations are contestatory (given the state of the border quarrel and their larger strategic rivalry), economic relations present a far more mixed picture and are closer to what Gu and Renwick call “contested partnership.”

The impact of triangular relations From a focus on the bilateral setting and direct interactions between the two countries, the book moves on to third-party settings within which the two interact—with other major powers (the US, Russia, and Japan) and with lesser but key countries such as Pakistan and key regions (South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America). Going back to the original days of the border dispute, the US and Russia/Soviet Union played into the strategic calculations of both China and India. The coincidence of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the China–India war only served to dramatize the

Introduction  9

connection of the developing quarrel between Beijing and Delhi with the much larger, systemic competition. The Cuban crisis directly impacted the China–India confrontation. It is clear now, with the opening up of the archives, that at the time Chinese behavior toward India was driven by its ideological and political differences with its Communist senior partner. So, also, it is clear that Indian actions were premised on assumptions about the attitude of the Anglo-American powers and the Soviets to a possible China–India conflict. China forced Moscow’s hand on the border quarrel at a time when the Soviets needed Beijing’s support against the Americans; and India suddenly found that the Anglo-Americans were preoccupied elsewhere and that the Soviets had been strategically cornered by China. China–India interactions have remained, to this day, quite intimately bound up with the relations of both Beijing and Delhi with Washington and Moscow, as is clear in the chapters by Jeff Smith and Vidya Nadkarni, respectively. As the two chapters show, the triangles formed with the two powers have been and continue to be rather complex but are dynamic and consequential for the China–India relationship. Japan has increasingly begun to form a third strategic triangle with China and India. As Marie Izuyama shows, Tokyo sought its own normalization and reintegration into international society after 1945 through trade and investment ties in Asia. But it also tried to build regionalist economic and diplomatic ties and institutions as a way of balancing China. Until 1960, India was regarded as a possible partner in Japan’s normalization, reintegration, and balancing policy. Later, Tokyo turned instead to Southeast Asia as a proving ground for itself and as a place to build strategic partnerships. It was only in the 1990s that India re-emerged in Japanese political, economic, and diplomatic calculations. From India’s point of view, too, Japan, after 1960, lost its sheen as a partner, and it was not until the late 1990s that Japan became an attractive counterweight economically and diplomatically to China. Japan’s latest diplomatic initiative in Asia, the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP), includes India. India is also a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“Quad”) with Japan, the US, and Australia. Yet, Delhi is hedging and has been quite cautious in its commitment to both groups, and Tokyo has warmed to Beijing as it deals with Indian ambivalence and the United States’ strategic unpredictability under President Donald Trump. Pakistan is a perennial third party in the China–India relationship, going back to the late 1950s when China–India relations deteriorated sharply over the border. While China and Pakistan’s closeness is not just a function of a shared concern with India, containing India is a major driver of their cooperation. China’s approach to the triangle, though, has not been consistent. Andrew Small shows in his chapter that China’s view of Pakistan in the strategic triangle has varied since about 2015: Beijing’s attempt at “dehyphenation” between Pakistan and India and treating the two countries as independently of each other as possible has been replaced by a shift to “rehyphenation” and accepting that its policies toward the two are interdependent. India’s other neighbors in South Asia, in varying degrees, also have reached out to Beijing to balance against Delhi. This is hardly surprising: India’s immediate geopolitical space overlaps with China’s expanding zone of influence. However, cultivating the smaller South Asian countries is not just about challenging India’s dominance along China’s southwestern border: Beijing has larger economic and diplomatic aims. At the same time, as with Pakistan, the motives of the small states are complex, and they go beyond regional balancing. China is a vital trade and investment partner. It provides developmental and technical assistance. It sells arms to their militaries. It potentially

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provides diplomatic cover in the UN and other multilateral forums where these governments might be under pressure from, say, Western countries. Not surprisingly, the dynamics in the triangle are complicated. As Constantino Xavier argues, China and India certainly compete and come into conflict in these countries, but they also cooperate and coexist. While South Asia has seen China increasingly move into the region, at least in part acting as a balancer against India, in Southeast Asia the shoe is on the other foot. Here, India has moved into the region, and part of the explanation for its interest in doing so and the interests of Southeast Asian countries in encouraging India’s return to the region is the desire to balance Chinese influence. While India’s Look East policy, instituted in 1991 and most clearly articulated in Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s speech in Singapore in 1994, was not just about countering China, a good part of its energy has come from that motive. However, Southeast Asian countries, individually and collectively, have been leery of India’s commitments in the region since many aspects of the “Look East” policy failed to materialize, a fact that led India to reboot its approach to an “Act East” policy. The problem for Delhi, as Sheryn Lee in her contribution argues, is that it simply does not have the financial resources or military reach to match China. As much as China’s influence in South Asia is limited by geography, India’s influence in Southeast Asia remains constrained by its economic and strategic weaknesses. While China can challenge India on its own in South Asia, India’s balancing efforts in Southeast Asia are increasingly linked to Japanese and US moves in the region. This is evident in Delhi’s aligning with the Indo-Pacific strategies of Japan and the US (and Australia) as well as in the resurrection of the so-called Quad. Three other strategic triangles feature in our volume: the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Clearly, the triangular relationships with the US, Russia, and Japan, with Pakistan and the smaller South Asian states, with Southeast Asia, and with the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America do not exhaust the third-party environments where China and India eye each other, sometimes warily and sometimes more cordially. Our volume does not include chapters on Europe including Eastern Europe and the Baltics, Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Korean Peninsula, Australia and New Zealand, Central America, Mexico and Canada, and various island chains—the South Pacific and the Caribbean, in particular. Europe is an unfortunate omission because it is a strategic zone of great significance for world politics—unfortunately, our commissioned authors were unable in the end to join the volume. Afghanistan is partially covered in the chapters by Jacob and Lin. The Korean Peninsula too is a critical area, for Asia, and both China and India have stakes and influence, though India is no match for China in the peninsula. Indeed, we would suggest that in all these third areas India does not match China in terms of the intensity of interests or the degree of engagement. There is not, therefore, a perception in these countries that China and India are alternatives and competitors. On the other side, while China and India are aware of each other’s diplomatic and economic presence in these third places, Delhi does not harbor a strong feeling of being “cut out” of the action by Beijing given India’s lack of “skin in the game.” The Middle East, Africa, and Latin America are different. These are regions where India does have deeper interests and engagement, and there is a degree of competition. China and India have a range of interests here—natural resources (energy, above all), commodities (e.g. food and other agricultural products), investments, and

Introduction  11

diaspora remittances, among others. The countries in these regions also comprise the old “non-aligned-developing countries-Third World-Global South” bloc which both China and India have engaged deeply since the early years of the Cold War and which they claim to lead. Again, China has two advantages: its economic heft and its diplomatic clout as a veto-bearing member of the UN Security Council. Rising India has brought some economic heft to the table, but there is no prospect of it becoming a permanent veto member of the Security Council. This and other asymmetries are attested to in the chapters by Nicholas Blarel, Wu Fuzuo, and Adriana Abdenur. The three regions each have their own importance for China and India. First, Africa is the region where both China and India seem most deeply engaged across a wide range of issues including economics (trade, FDI investment, connectivity, and infrastructure projects), development (ODA, health), and security (peacekeeping). The African continent comprises the largest number of countries among the three regions (fifty-four countries) and has the greatest diplomatic and political importance. Second, the Middle East is the most salient from the point of view of China and India’s own internal security and politics given its geographic proximity to the two Asian powers and given the religious and cultural connections to China and India’s large Muslim populations. The Middle East (including the Gulf ) is vital also for the energy security of China and India: forty-five to sixty-five percent of their oil imports, respectively, come from this region.10 Third, Latin America is potentially the greatest source of food and agricultural products for both China and India, particularly China but perhaps India as well in the future. India’s population is set to surpass China’s by 2027 (Hurworth 2019). While India has more arable land than China, its productivity is much lower, and with population growth it is likely to be back in the world market for food and other agricultural products.11 In sum, all three regions are going to matter to both China and India. As Blarel, Wu, and Abdenur indicate, though, the two countries will not necessarily be in competition. They can also, as Xavier argues in his chapter on South Asia, cooperate and coexist in third areas.

The thinking on global order The final section of the Handbook is focused on China and India in the global order. How China and India conceive of global order, how their responses to global challenges compare, and how these responses affect the bilateral relationship are increasingly important questions. Scholarship on China’s conception of global order and its responses to various global challenges is now quite substantial.12 Much less has been written on India13 —understandably, given China’s much greater power, influence, and activism.14 Yet to understand China–India relations more fully, particularly looking ahead, it is necessary to think about their approach to global order. As rising powers, conscious of their status, both powers have made it clear that while they are not interested in overthrowing the prevailing order, they want to shape the norms, institutions, and practices within which they and other countries operate. Both have stated that they support multipolarity—perhaps they really mean multilateralism— and a greater say in global institutions. Both are also quite Westphalian in their approach to global order: they have often held conservative notions of sovereignty and are suspicious of norms, institutions, and practices that impinge on domestic standards and choices. Despite these (and other areas of agreement), they do have differences. Some have argued that Chinese conceptions of order are pre-colonial (in that China often

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cites its traditional notions of order, the tianxia system, while thinking about present notions of order) while India’s are very much post-colonial (in that India often looks to concepts formulated during or after the British colonial era).15 However, rather than evaluate their overall conceptions of international order, we extricate their perceptions on core issue areas that are particularly salient in the current international order. What are their policies, thus, on nuclear weapons proliferation, the military (and other) uses of outer space, intervention and peacekeeping, international climate change accords, and global health governance? Are their policies compatible or not, and do the similarities and differences affect their mutual relations? With respect to nuclear weapons, Nicola Leveringhaus and Kate Sullivan de Estrada argue that while China and India have shown restraint—in terms of the number of weapons and doctrine—they constantly attempt to outbid each other. Both claim that they are more restrained than the other and question the other’s nuclear restraint credentials. This has had somewhat contradictory consequences: it has prevented an arms race, but it has also prevented a nuclear dialogue between them. Julie Klinger, in her contribution, suggests that while the Anglo-American powers and analysts (including the media) portray China–India outer space policies almost exclusively as part of an intensifying geopolitical competition, in fact the two Asian powers have a record of cooperation with each other and with the international community. China has been more successful in harnessing outer space technology for military-security purposes, but both countries have tried to honor their responsibility to more cosmopolitan uses of outer space. If China and India are competitive in nuclear politics as also to some degree in outer space, their interests seem to converge far more on international peacekeeping and responsibility to protect (R2P). Courtney Fung’s chapter argues that their roles here are complementary. China is now one of the leading funders of UN peacekeeping operations, and among the P5 in the Security Council, has the biggest number of troops in the field. India is less a funder of peacekeeping but instead historically has contributed the largest number of troops. Fung shows that China has done less in peacekeeping but has derived much greater diplomatic capital out of its support. Also, after initially showing its opposition to intervention, it has come around to a more positive view whereas India remains skeptical. While China and India are not particularly in conflict here, this could change if Chinese peacekeepers are deployed in more missions (e.g. at the expense of Indian troops) and Beijing supports more interventions. So also on climate change, China and India are not in conflict, and indeed have cooperated in international negotiations, as Lydia Powell shows in her comparison of Chinese and Indian climate change policies. The two countries have moved in tandem for some time, right up to the Paris Accords (PA) which now leaves every country to determine its own carbon emissions limits and to monitor its own progress toward those limits. Ironically, after Paris, the two countries do not face the same pressure to work together since mitigation is now mostly a voluntary commitment. In large part, both countries have come around to the preferred Western norm of universal obligations toward carbon mitigation and have moved away from the developing country insistence on Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CDR) which would have allowed China and India more leeway in carbon mitigation. Similarly, as Huang Yanzhong shows, even as both China and India have expanded their global health governance roles, they hold largely parallel views. Both insist that health is largely a state-led process, and both remain skeptical of civil society participation and some international

Introduction  13

standards and interventions. Neither country has advanced any very innovative ideas in global health governance due to their own domestic health challenges, which take up considerable resources and policy space, and due to their domestic institutional capacities, which remain relatively weak. In sum, the five chapters indicate a mixed picture of cooperative and competitive behavior with regard to the dominant norms of international order. On the one hand, China and India are more competitive than cooperative in the case of nuclear weapons and, to somewhat lesser degree, outer space. On the other hand, they are more cooperative or convergent on peacekeeping and R2P, combatting climate change, and global health governance. The first two areas relate to high politics and national security while the latter three pertain less directly to security concerns. Unsurprisingly, therefore, their policies in the latter issue areas are not competitively framed, at least not vis-à-vis each other.

Conclusion We do not propose a grand conclusion on the past, present, and future of China–India relations, except to suggest that on the evidence of our authors’ perceptive essays, relations have entered a phase of intertwining intensity and complexity as never before: even if differences over the border and Tibet were removed, a range of geopolitical, economic, cultural, and normative challenges would remain. Cooperation is an ever-present possibility, but it will take leadership and creativity over a length of time to ensure that strategic stability is maintained and the two powers collaborate more often than not. The Routledge Handbooks are intended to make available original and stimulating essays on a subject of scholarly and policy importance. In an effort to deliver on that ambition, we were determined that our authors would come from various intellectual backgrounds. We are very pleased to have assembled a range of experts: China specialists, India specialists, comparativists, “relationalists” (who focus primarily on the interactions between the two countries), historians, political scientists, economists, and journalists. We have diversity in terms of nationality too. We are very encouraged by the gender balance in the volume: it is a testimony to the importance of acknowledging the presence of women scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and we hope that our volume plays a part in encouraging editors and publishing houses to make every effort at balance. Speaking of balance, it was our hope to produce a volume that would provide a measured view of China–India relations across as wide a range of topics as was practical within the limits of time, expertise, and publishing practicality. Quite a lot of China– India writing is of the “breaking news” kind: this has its place but must be supplemented by analysis at some remove from day-to-day developments. If we have provided that balanced, measured supplement, the volume will have achieved its aim.

Notes 1 Maxwell (2013), Gupta (1974, 1982), Woodman (1969), Lamb (1964, 1966, 1975), Hoffman (1990), Lall (1989), Mehra (1974, 1979–1980, 2007), Fisher, Rose, and Huttenback (1963), Van Eekelen (1964), Chakravarti (1962), Jetly (1979), Rao (1968), Vertzberger (1984), Murty (1983, 1987). On the military campaign, largely from the Indian side, Dalvi (1969), Palit (1991), Kaul (1967), Prasad (1981), Saigal (1979). 2 Garver (2001), Kalha (2014), Holslag (2010), Miller (2013), Malik (2012), Pant (2010), Smith (2014), Acharya (2008), Ranganathan and Khanna (2000), Liu (1994), Meredith (2008),

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Ramesh (2005), Sidhu and Yuan (2003), Ali (2018), Fang (2014), Gilboy and Heginbotham (2012), and Lintner (2018). An exception is Amit R. Das Gupta and Lorenz M. Luthi (2017). This edited volume brings together a range of international scholars who, based on archival materials in India and elsewhere, focus entirely on the border war of 1962. Frankel and Harding (2004), Banerjee and Jacob (2013), Bateman and Ho (2010), Bajpai, Huang, and Mahbubani (2016), Cheru and Obi (2010). See Ho (2019a). See Miller (2013) for on an explanation based on the idea of a post-imperial ideology of victimhood that both harbored after Western rule and occupation. See Vertzberger (1984) who attributes the problem to misperceptions and Hoffmann (1990) on the psychological setting in which Indian decision making operated that caused them to misinterpret Chinese interests and approaches. Chauhan draws the term “armed coexistence” from Kapur (2015). See the many writings on India’s water challenges by Brahma Chellaney featured on his website, “Strategy and Statecraft” going back to 2011: https://chellaney.net/. See Ho (2019b). China gets about forty-five percent of its total oil imports from this region (Lelyveld 2019), and India gets about sixty-four percent (PTI 2017). South China Morning Post (2017) on arable land figures and Daniyal (2015) on Indian and Chinese land purchases abroad. On the reasons why China is more productive, see Kishor (2015). Foot and Walter (2011), Ikenberry, Wang, and Zhu (2015), Mazarr, Heath, and Cevallos (2018), Maçães (2019). A few scholars have worked explicitly on Indian conceptions of order. See Kanti Bajpai (2003) for post-independence views of international order and Rahul Sagar (2015) and Bajpai and Mallavarapu (2019) on pre-independence conceptions. On India and order, see the collection of essays in Sidhu, Mehta, and Jones (2013). See Miller (2018) for an analysis of this difference. Another of the few works that explicitly compares China’s and India’s approaches to various global order challenges is Tellis and Mirski (2013).

Bibliography ACA (Arms Control Association) (2019) “Nuclear Weapons: Who Has What at a Glance” ( July), available online at www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat (accessed 26 September 2019). Acharya, A. (2008) China and India: Politics of Incremental Engagement (New Delhi: Har-Anand). Ali, S. M. (2018) Cold War in the High Himalayas: The USA, China, and South Asia in the 1950s (New York: Routledge). Ayres, A. and Mohan, C. R. (eds.) (2009) Power Realignments in Asia: China, India, and the United States (London: Sage). Bajpai, K. P. (2003) “Indian Conceptions of Order and Justice: Nehruvian, Gandhian, Hindutva, and Neo-Liberal,” in R. Foot, J. Gaddis and A. Hurrell, eds., Order and Justice in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 236–261. Bajpai, K. P., Huang, J. and Mahbubani, K. (eds.) (2016) China-India Relations: Cooperation and Conflict (New York: Routledge). Bajpai, K. P. and Mallavarapu, S. (eds.) (2019) India, the West and International Order (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan). Banerjee, D. and Jacob, J. T. (eds.) (2013) Military Confidence-Building and India-China Relations: Fighting Distrust (New Delhi: Pentagon Press). Bateman, S. and Ho, J. (eds.) (2010) Southeast Asia and the Rise of Chinese and Indian Naval Power: Between Rising Naval Powers (New York: Routledge). Chakravarti, P. C. (1962) India’s China Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Introduction  15 Cheru, F. and Obi, C. I. (eds.) (2010) The Rise of China and India in Africa: Challenges, Opportunities and Critical Interventions (London: Zed). Dalvi, J. P. (1969) Himalayan Blunder (New Delhi: Thacker). Das Gupta, A.R. and Luthi, L.M. (eds.) (2017) The Sino-Indian War of 1962: New Perspectives (New Delhi: Routledge). Daniyal, S. (2015) “One Map That Shows Indians Are Buying Large Farmlands Abroad—As We Debate Land Acquisition at Home,” Scroll.in (28 May), available online at https://scroll. in/article/729328/one-map-that-shows-indians-are-buying-large-farmlands-abroad-as-wedebate-land-acquisition-at-home. Fanell, J. E. (2019) “China’s Global Naval Strategy and Expanding Force Structure,” Naval War College Review 72(1): 17–61. Fang, T.-S. (2014) Asymmetrical Threat Perceptions in India-China Relations (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Fisher, M. W., Rose, L. E. and Huttenback, R. A. (1963) Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh (New York: Praeger). Foot, R. and Walter, A. (2011) China, the United States, and Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Frankel, F. R. and Harding, H. (eds.) (2004) The India-China Relationship: What the United States Needs to Know (New York: Columbia University Press). Friedman, E. and Gilley, B. (eds.) (2005) Asia’s Giants: Comparing China and India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Garver, J. W. (2001) Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Gilboy, G. J. and Heginbotham, E. (2012) Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior: Growing Power and Alarm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gupta, K. (1974) The Hidden History of the Sino-Indian Frontier (Calcutta: Minerva Associates). Gupta, K. (1982) Spotlight on Sino-Indian Frontiers (Calcutta: New Book Centre).Ho, S. (2019a) Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ho, S. (2019b) “The Role of Ideas in the China-India Water Dispute,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 12(2): 263–294. Hoffmann, S. A. (1990) India and the China Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press). Holslag, J. (2010) China and India: Prospects for Peace (New York: Columbia University Press). Hurworth, E. (2019) “India to Overtake China as the World’s Most Populous Country: UN,” CNN (20 June), available online at https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/19/health/india- chinaworld-population-intl-hnk/index.html. IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies) (2019) The Military Balance, vol. 119 (London: Routledge). Ikenberry, G. J., Wang, J. and Zhu, F. (eds.) (2015) America, China, and the Struggle for World Order: Ideas, Traditions, Historical Legacies, and Global Visions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). IMF (International Monetary Fund) (2019) “IMF DataMapper,” available online at www.imf. org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/IND/CHN/USA (accessed 30 September 2019). Jetly, N. (1979) India-China Relations, 1947–1977 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press). Kalha, R.S. (2014) India-China Boundary Issues: Quest for Settlement (New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs and Pentagon Press). Kapur, A. (2015) India’s Strategic Problems (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers and Distributors). Kaul, B. M. (1967) The Untold Story (New Delhi: Allied Publishers). Kazmin, A. (2018) “India Orders Officials to Stay Away from Dalai Lama Rally,” Financial Times (7 March), available online at www.ft.com/content/1aa2876c-2149-11e8-a895-1ba1f 72c2c11. Kelly, D. A., Rajan, R. S. and Goh, G. H. L. (eds.) (2006) Managing Globalization: Lessons from China and India: Inaugural Conference of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (Singapore: World Scientific).

16  Kanti Bajpai et al. Kishor, R. (2015) “What India Can Learn from Chinese Agriculture,” Livemint (9 June), available online at www.livemint.com/Opinion/bORKeOM7iNCRvi4nNse8gO/What-Indiacan-learn-from-Chinese-agriculture.html. Kuronuma, Y. (2018) “India Uses Rumor of Dalai Lama’s Ill Health to Mend China Ties,” Nikkei Asian Review (7 August), available online at https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/ International-relations/India-uses-rumor-of-Dalai-Lama-s-ill-health-to-mend-China-ties. Lall, J. (1989) Aksai China and Sino-Indian Conflict (New Delhi: Allies Publishers). Lamb, A. (1964) The China-India Border: The Origins of the Disputed Boundaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lamb, A. (1966) The McMahon Line (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Lamb, A. (1975) The Sino-Indian Border in Ladakh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press). Lelyveld, M. (2019) “China’s Risks Rise with Threats to Gulf Oil,” Radio Free Asia (1 July), available online at www.rfa.org/english/commentaries/energy_watch/chinas-risks-rise-withthreats-to-gulf-oil-07012019100926.html. Lintner, B. (2018) China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Liu, X. (1994) The Sino-Indian Border Dispute and Sino-Indian Relations (Lanham, MD: University Press of America). Lowry Institute (2019) “Asia Power Index 2019,” available online at https://power.lowyinstitute. org/downloads/Lowy-Institute-Asia-Power-Index-2019-Pocket-Book.pdf. Maçães, B. (2019) Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (London: Hurst & Company). Malik, J. M. (2012) China and Indi: Great Power Rivals (New Delhi: Viva Books). Maxwell, N. (2013) India’s China War (Dehradun: Natraj Publishers). Mazarr, M. J., Heath, T. R. and Cevallos, A. S. (2018) “China and the International Order,” RAND, available online at www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/ RR2400/RR2423/RAND_RR2423.pdf. Mehra, P. (1974) The McMahon Line and After (Delhi: Macmillan). Mehra, P. (1979–1980) The North-Eastern Frontier, 2 vols (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Mehra, P. (2007) Essays in Frontier History: India, China, and the Disputed Border (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Meredith, R. (2008) The Elephant and the Dragon (Mumbai: Viva Books). Miller, M. C. (2013) Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Miller, M. C. (2018) “China, India, and Their Differing Conceptions of International Order,” in T. V. Paul, ed., The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press): 75–93. Murty, T. S. (1983) Paths of Peace: Studies on Sino-Indian Border Dispute (New Delhi: ABC Publishing House). Murty, T. S. (1987) India-China Boundary: India’s Options (New Delhi: ABC Publishing House). Noorani, A. G. (2011) India-China Boundary Problem, 1946–1947: History and Diplomacy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Palit, D. K. (1991) War in High Himalayas: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962 (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers). Panda, J. P. (2019) India and China in Asia: Between Equilibrium and Equations (London: Routledge). Pande, I. (ed.) (2010) India China: Neighbours Strangers (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India). Pant, H. V. (2010) China Syndrome: Grappling with an Uneasy Relationship (New Delhi: HarperCollins). Paul, T. V. (ed.) (2018) The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press). Prasad, N. (1981) The Fall of Towang (New Delhi: Palit and Palit).

Introduction  17 Pollock, S. I. and Elman, B. A. (eds.) (2018) What China and India Once Were: The Pasts That May Shape the Global Future (New York: Columbia University Press). PTI (Press Trust of India) (2017) “Iraq Replaces Saudi Arabia as India’s Lead Oil Supplier,” available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/ iraq-replaces-saudi-arabia-as-indias-lead-oil-supplier/articleshow/62120071.cms?from=mdr. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2018) “Indian Navy Aiming at 200-Ship Fleet by 2027,” The Economic Times (14 July), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/ indian-navy-aiming-at-200-ship-fleet-by-2027/articleshow/48072917.cms?from=mdr. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2019) “India-China Trade Set to Cross USD 100 Billion This Year: Senior Indian Diplomat,” The Economic Times (31 May), available online at https:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/india-china-trade-set-tocross-usd-100-billion-this-year-senior-indian-diplomat/articleshow/69597769.cms. Ramesh, J. (2005) Making Sense of Chindia: Reflections on China and India (New Delhi: India Research Press). Ranganathan, C. V. and Khanna, V. C. (2000) India and China: The Way Ahead after “Mao’s India War” (New Delhi: Har-Anand). Rao, G. N. (1968) The India-China Border: A Reappraisal (New York: Asia Publishing House). Sagar, R. (2015) “Before Midnight: Views on International Relations, 1857–1947” in David Malone, C. Raja Mohan, and Srinath Raghavan, eds., Oxford Handbook on Indian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 65–79. Sagar, R. and Panda, A. (2015) “Pledges and Pious Wishes: The Constituent Assembly Debates and the Myth of a ‘Nehruvian Consensus’,” India Review 14(2): 203–220. Saigal, J. R. (1979) The Unfought War of 1962 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers). Sidhu, W. P. S., Mehta, P. B. and Jones, B. (eds.) (2013) Shaping the Emerging World: India and the Multilateral Order (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press). Sidhu, W. P. S. and Yuan, J.-D. (2003) China and India: Cooperation or Conflict? (New Delhi: India Research Press). Singh, S. (2005) “China-India Bilateral Trade: Strong Fundamentals, Bright Future,” China Perspectives 62, available online at https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/2853. Smith, J. M. (2014) Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). South China Morning Post (2017) “World Has More Farmland with India, US and China Ranked as the Top Three Globally” (15 November), available online at www.scmp.com/news/world/ article/2119936/world-has-more-farmland-india-us-and-china-ranked-top-three-globally. Tan. C. (1998) (ed.) Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House). Tellis, A. J. and Mirski, S. (eds.) (2013) Crux of Asia: China, India, and the Emerging Global Order (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Thampi, M. (2018) India and China in the Colonial World (New York: Routledge). The World Bank (2019) “GDP (Current US$)—China, India, United States, World,” available online at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CNIN-US-1W (accessed 30 September 2019). Van Eekelen, W. F. (1964) India’s Foreign Policy and the Border Dispute with China (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ). Vertzberger, Y. (1984) Misperceptions in Foreign Policymaking: The Sino-Indian Conflict 1959–1962 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). Whiting, A. S. (2001) “China’s Use of Force, 1950–96, and Taiwan,” International Security 26(2): 103–131. Woodman, D. (1969) Himalayan Frontiers: A Political Review of British, Chinese, Indian, and Russian Rivalries (New York: Praeger).

1

Reflections on comparing China and India1 Tarun Khanna

It’s a privilege to have the opportunity in this essay to reflect on two decades of comparative scholarship on the trajectories of modern China and India, with a lens that emphasizes the actions of individual entrepreneurs in these very different milieus. I began this comparative exercise in the mid-1990s when I first began to travel to China. Of course, India was always familiar to me as the country of my birth and adolescence. In 2003, I published my first piece comparing the two countries, with my colleague Huang Yasheng (now at MIT). That beginning propelled me to explore the comparison in the years to come, a saga that remains ongoing (Huang and Khanna 2003). Harvard University, and Harvard Business School (HBS) in particular, has provided a salubrious platform through which to indulge in this comparison. Fortunately for me, the university has come to respect a variety of forms of intellectual inquiry, as practiced by those steeped in its myriad scholarly traditions. This open-mindedness is, ultimately, the precondition needed to achieve a full understanding of complex phenomena. Comparisons of China and India have become something of a cottage industry these days, though when I began, I was aware of but a few works. Harold Isaacs’ book, Scratches on my Mind, exploring why Americans knew so much more about China than they did about India, was particularly instructive to me (Isaacs 1958). The economist Angus Maddison’s estimates of the contribution of the two countries to world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) were in the academic air, so to speak. Of course, even outside the academy, individuals were prone to compare China and India. Think also of John F. Kennedy’s determination, as far back as 1959, to ensure that India won what he characterized as a “race” with China (Kennedy 1959). Of course, if one wants to go further back, one must at least mention Max Weber’s (1951, 1958) explorations of religion in China and India in his celebrated work The Protestant Ethic to stress-test the boundary conditions of his thesis on Protestantism and the emergence of proto capitalism in the US.2 In recent years, there have been many new efforts. In 2012, the political economist Pranab Bardhan (2012) wrote his own comparative study, Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay, four years after I published my book, Billions of Entrepreneurs (Khanna 2008). The last year alone has seen two edited volumes, one by Prasenjit Duara and Elizabeth Perry (2018), scholars of Chinese history, and another by a historian of China, Benjamin Elman, and a scholar of Sanskrit, Sheldon Pollock (2018). Indeed, as I write this, my colleague Michael Szonyi, also a historian of China, and I are editing an interdisciplinary volume on meritocracy as an organizing principle of Chinese and Indian societies (see The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute 2018b). But my task here is not to add to this comparison. Rather it is to reflect on what I’ve learned over more than two decades by the act of comparing. I do this by first

Reflections on comparing China and India  19

asking, “Why compare?” I then share my own emergent approach to this comparison, emphasizing my rather non-traditional immersion in the world of practice alongside my scholarly endeavors, as a way of honing insights. After all, as the preeminent social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1951) said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Finally, I reflect on what I feel has, or has not, changed in the past two decades, including things that I think I got right and those that I did not. So, onward, without further ado.

Why compare? In all forms of science, we run controlled experiments, typically guided by theory. So, what does one do when one is interested in the evolution of a society, writ large, where controlled experiments of the sort one encounters in laboratories are infeasible? Of course, we can study aspects of society’s evolution and aggregate insights over time from such narrower-but-precise studies of different parts thereof. But what of the society as an ensemble? It seemed to me, when I became interested in the role that entrepreneurs played in the process of economic and social development in the mid-to-late 1990s, that it would be expedient, and perhaps necessary, to find a geographic setting to anchor my scholarship. India seemed logical as my country of origin and one with which I remained intimately familiar—but I would need to find one or more comparisons. Without counterfactuals—the “what-if ” generators—the descriptive study of entrepreneurs in India appeared to me to risk becoming unmoored.3 I picked contemporary China by reasoning that it, along with India, constituted two large, populous, proximate Asian countries with civilizational histories that had suffered the depredations of European powers. They had emerged in their modern nation-state forms roughly contemporaneously—1949 in the case of the People’s Republic of China and 1947 in the case of India—and yet had embarked on quite radically different development paths reasonably soon thereafter. The comparison seemed intriguing enough to me. Of course, at a practical level, it didn’t hurt that Harvard Business School had started running an executive education program—Managing Global Opportunities— which took executives interested in both China and India to those countries and then met for a synthetic experience in Singapore, affording them a means to begin to engage with these countries. It turns out that our teaching program wasn’t particularly salient in the long run, but it did provide a fillip to my nascent effort. Another aspect of scholarship in the pure sciences is the value placed on description. Yet, several social sciences—certainly economics, the social science with which I am most familiar—place much less value on description than on formal hypotheses formulation and their attempted refutation.4 In fact, description is sometimes a bit of a stepchild of several forms of scholarship. I cannot imagine a more intellectually retrograde position for the academy to embrace. How can theory be informed by anything other than rich description? I’ve always resisted this theory-first “wisdom” in my field, choosing instead to present description as a way to generate hypotheses (so as not to appear wantonly contrary). So, my immersion-via-much-travel into China and India was, for me, a latecomer to this area of research, a common-sense way to start. Perhaps reminiscing about my colleagues’ reactions when I started is also appropriate, not to highlight any individuals, but rather as a summary statistic, perhaps, of the mainstream response, with no ostensibly direct path-to-publication in my field! Other than some risk-embracing academics fairly well-advanced in their fields, most folks

20  Tarun Khanna

advised me, in their perception of my best interest, not to embark on this folly, but instead to stay true to my preexisting and what they characterized as promising program of research (game theoretic models applied to understand competition between technologies). Some of them explicitly thought that studying China and India was a colossal waste of time and articulated this view without mincing words. After all, these weren’t exactly cutting-edge societies in the vanguard of advance. They were poorer societies trying to make up for lost time, or so the thinking went; sooner or later, they’d understand that institutional imitation of the “advanced” West was the way to go, a process which the charitable West would help catalyze. So why study something that is, per that worldview, an anachronism? They thought my project was at best misguided and at worst downright silly. It must also be said that special skepticism was reserved for studying India, which was seen as a true backwater. At least China, by the mid-1990s, had begun to emerge as economically vibrant, and some scholarship in the social sciences had attempted to put forward an internal logic for its underlying reform process. One evening, after a member of the club of the great-and-good had delivered such a sobering response to me, I remember now recalling Ozymandias, the Shelley sonnet published in 1818, which describes a traveler encountering a statue in the desert (remember Ozymandias was the Greek name for an Egyptian pharaoh). The inscription in the time-ravaged statue reads: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! The obvious decline of a probably once-grand symbol of a once-grand king is a parable on the kind of hubris I felt was displayed by some of my well-intentioned but discouraging colleagues. I was also reminded of a scholar’s characterization of the transition from the predominance of Rome to the disorder that came after: “Un grand destin commence, un grand destin s’acheve.” If, in fact, Asia—of which China and India were no small part—were to emerge, it would, to my mind, count as the transition from one destiny to another.5 So, I determined that I too would transition, leaving behind my game-theoretic, applied mathematical past and embracing an empirical study of China and India for which I had no formal training.

How to compare? My comparison of the roles that entrepreneurs played in shaping modern China and India emerged through a series of overlapping efforts, unfolding over the years. I think of this a bit like painting on a canvas, one brush stroke at a time. The first project on which I embarked was an inquiry into an empirical anomaly that I encountered while teaching in India. Among empirical economists, and in business schools, there was much credence given to homilies directed at managers and entrepreneurs like “stick to your knitting” and value the “core competence of the corporation,”—that is, an admonition not to be excessively spread out in the range of enterprises with which one is engaged. This was of course based on some decades of empirical work, largely set in the US and a bit in other OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, which argued that whatever efficiency one could achieve via diversifying into different areas could usually

Reflections on comparing China and India  21

be achieved more effectively by investing through the market in multiple entities, each focused on one sharply delimited area of activity. Of course, this presumed the existence of a market. In India, my colleague Krishna Palepu and I observed that the ability to deploy capital thus was compromised by the rudimentary state of the financial markets—we coined the term “institutional void” to describe the paucity of specialized intermediary services that are the fundamentals of any organized market—and that this inability to “allocate to focused entities” applied as much to the allocation of talent and other factors of production as it did to capital. In other words, the homily “stick to your knitting” would not only be ill-advised, it would be explicitly counter-productive in the developing environment that was India (Khanna and Palepu 1997).6 We then conjectured that this observation might explain why the most reputable private sector entities in India were actually extensively diversified, unlike those in the US. The premium on focus, much celebrated and actively taught in classrooms in the West but also in developing countries imitating Western curricula, was not borne out. Here, if ever, was a case study of an idea taken out of the context from which it emanated.7 This finding and its underlying conceptual rationale was, in a departure from normal scholarly practice, first laid out in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and only subsequently (three years later) published in the Journal of Finance, a reputed mainstream scholarly outlet (Khanna and Palepu 2000). The reason for this sequence-reversal in publishing was also straightforward and premeditated, if controversial. The HBR publication served to generate a conversation about our reasoning and findings among businesspeople around the developing world who would not otherwise be reached through the likes of the Journal of Finance and its ilk. The idea was to source grist for our scholarly mill. Had we confined ourselves to preexisting data from Western organizations, we’d likely have been condemned to replicating existing findings. As it turned out, our publishing strategy worked. Our finding was subsequently explored and validated in a range of developing country settings and with a range of co-authors8 and further developed by many of my doctoral students,9 all reported in mainstream scholarly publications. The work was presented at seminars in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore as well as in several settings in India. While I did not develop an appropriate Chinese dataset myself for this research, I did encounter the work of the sociologist, Lisa Keister, now at Ohio State University, on Chinese business groups (Keister 2000). Much of her work resonated with what we had found in as many as fourteen developing countries over the years.10 It’s fair to say that research comparing diversified business groups in India with those in China occurred more in the larger academic circuit rather than being done exclusively by my co-authors or me. What did emerge was one coherent framework for thinking about the structure of emerging markets, anchored in the core construct—institutional voids—that Palepu and I conceptualized in 1997. Our submission was that one could characterize an economy by its “voids”—for which we provided a conceptually grounded and practically actionable taxonomic categorization—and that the identification of voids provided both policy and practical direction for action that would lead to societal development. Like any “model,” this taxonomy was a simplification. I believe its utility has stood the test of time, at least thus far, in that it has guided scholarly work in economics and management and has been the basis of policy design in numerous developing countries.

22  Tarun Khanna

The exercise taught me an important lesson about doing comparative work that has stayed with me through my career. Immersion in social phenomena is vital, regardless of mainstream scholarly skepticism—or even disdain in uninformed circles—about its value. Descriptive work is complementary to formal model-building, statistical inquiry, etcetera, on par with these as scholarly endeavors. In fact, I would even go further and suggest that descriptive work is the key to saying something new about issues that have often been trawled over for decades. I now reflect on other comparative work I have undertaken. I was led to these subsequent efforts by my work on family controlled business groups. The groups I had studied were almost always the result of the efforts of intrepid entrepreneurs’ creative insights on building enterprises and the initiatives of their descendants to augment the scale and scope of the original enterprise. My work in the past decade has evolved beyond inquiries about the structure of business groups into the study, more generally, of entrepreneurship in the developing world. This, in turn, has shaped my comparative understanding of the Chinese and Indian development trajectories. First, I continued my analyses of specific cases, sometimes tracking an organization for over a decade, revisiting it over and over again. That longitudinal look at organizations has paid off intellectually. Here are some of the sites in China and India from which I learned a great deal. Each of the ones singled out is set in a single country and is therefore not explicitly comparative, but the overall tapestry of multiple studies in many settings and over time, I believe, forces a scholar to compare and contrast, implicitly and explicitly. In China, I co-wrote a case study on Haier, the white goods manufacturer, almost fifteen years ago, when the founder Zhang Ruimin, a celebrity subsequently, had begun to achieve critical acclaim for the work he’d done revitalizing a moribund enterprise in Qingdao in Shandong Province (see Khanna, Palepu and Andrews 2011). That case study was updated a few years ago, and I visited Haier on more than one occasion in the interim. But equally, other colleagues from HBS and elsewhere had begun to explore aspects of Haier that informed my research and was useful in our classrooms.11 In China, I also frequently visited the technology centers in the country and the once-fledgling-now-storied-behemoths—Tencent in Shenzhen and Alibaba in Hangzhou—and formally translated their histories into detailed case studies only after a period of (lengthy) relationship building (Khanna, Dai and Lin 2017; Khanna et al. 2019). Similarly, I cultivated a link with the Tata Group in India, perhaps the country’s most reputable group, now over 150 years old. It has evolved smartly since my first formal look at it in 1995 in the context of the diversification work. That initial study was also followed up a decade later (Khanna, Palepu and Wu 1998; Khanna, Palepu and Bullock 2008). As with Haier, several other colleagues analyzed other aspects of the group, sometimes particular member companies or particular issues confronting the group. Equally formative for my research ideas was my studying—and then befriending—a surgeon-entrepreneur who was building a low-cost tertiary care hospital in Bengaluru. Bringing his story to the West prompted much initial scorn at Harvard and elsewhere. How, the skeptics seemed to aver, could a technically complex procedure be done dramatically more efficiently in the Indian backwaters than in the sophisticated West? But the intrepid surgeon’s efforts—and, I suppose, my persistence in studying them—have since been vindicated, I’m gratified to say (particularly for the surgeon). Devi Shetty’s Narayana Health, which I followed almost from inception, is currently a publicly traded

Reflections on comparing China and India  23

entity and by far the lowest cost provider of tertiary cardiac care in the world, at quality levels exceeding those in the US (by low cost, think considerably under $2,000/ procedure when the comparable procedure in the US is ~$75,000; you’ll have to read the case and numerous articles to see how!) (Khanna, Rangan and Manocaran 2005).12 Here again, exposure to Dr Shetty and Narayana Health, and following them as an observer to their overseas facility in the Cayman Islands in their quest to cure the poor of the world for less than $1/day, has been a gratifying and educational experience, not to mention intensely productive in terms of academic research.13 For the last several years, the HBS MBA program has started with the entrepreneurial saga of Dr Shetty and Narayana Health as the very first case study our 900 entering students encounter.14 In parallel with these sequential deep-dives into organizations, my colleagues, students, and I engaged in several (within-country) large-sample econometric exercises. I’ve generally adopted the view that it’s better to immerse oneself in a dataset from one country—eschewing the cross-country analyses that have been fashionable in the economics profession in recent decades but which so often have to compromise on data issues—to understand it well, and thereafter to allow comparisons to emerge over time in a series of papers. For example, I am interested in governance in general (corporate and otherwise). With a former student, and his student, I published a finance paper on the gains from privatization in India (exploiting a particular quirk in the institutional realities of that reform process) (Dastidar, Fisman and Khanna 2008). A few years later, another student from Nanjing investigated how Chinese state-owned enterprises ended up being (partly) privatized and allowed to list on the Chinese exchanges (Ma 2019). Anyone reading these papers comparatively would immediately find that the pair seem more informative than the simple “sum of the parts,” as it were. With former students from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and INSEAD, I have also recently completed an econometric study of improved governance in the forty-two state-owned laboratories collected under India’s Center for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and a study of some of the limitations of governance on the boards of publicly traded Chinese companies (Ma and Khanna 2016; Choudhury, Khanna and Makridis 2019). Similarly, some two decades ago, with a doctoral student at MIT, I wrote an applied economics paper on the role of the Indian diaspora in helping start software enterprises in tier-2 cities in India (Nanda and Khanna 2010). A decade later, one of my Harvard PhD students picked up where our initial paper had left off and wrote an entire dissertation—since published—on the role of diaspora networks within large global firms, allowing us once again to compare the Chinese and Indian diasporas. Case writing is oftentimes a (near) solo effort. Therefore, one research mode of operation I have adopted from large-scale science collaborations, which I feel we engage in very infrequently in the social sciences and humanities, is large-scale interdisciplinary projects. At the Mittal Institute (Harvard’s university-wide effort to focus attention on South Asia—from Afghanistan to Myanmar), I have the privilege of being the first director of what is now a robust institute with a presence in Cambridge but also in Lahore and New Delhi. We first engaged in a fifty-faculty-and-doctoral-student study of the annual Hindu religious gathering, the Maha Kumbh Mela, the largest gathering of humanity on the planet. Our research effort, which went on for over three years (September 2012 onward, with the actual Mela running for fifty-five days from mid-January to mid-March 2013 in Allahabad, the year that our research team

24  Tarun Khanna

attended), brought together religion scholars, urban planners, lawyers, economists, political scientists, statisticians, doctors, and public health professionals, you name it, each interested in their own scholarly angle. Our colleagues produced many research papers in the top academic journals of their respective fields. To take a personal example, I teamed up with some biostatisticians to develop statistical techniques to estimate, for the first time (we believe), a lower bound on the cumulative and peak daily attendance at the Kumbh Mela, often the subject of wild speculation and exaggeration.15 Our team also produced a compendium volume (in English and Hindi) that acts as a repository of insight and a guide for the Government of India officials who must plan this annual event.16 That effort taught us the value of interdisciplinary work. If I may be impolite, we often pay lip-service to such work and little more. The Maha Kumbh Mela project taught us that the payoff that comes with genuine coordination across scholarly silos is massive.17 The Mittal Institute is now in the midst of an equally ambitious project initiated to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Partition of British India (this one involves several dozen faculty from Harvard, other US schools, and in the region, though most of the scholars are resident in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the countries born or reborn from the cataclysmic severing of ties in 1947 on the sub-continent) (see The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute 2018a). And we’ve taken the same insight over the past years to an interdisciplinary project on “Meritocracy in China and India,” which the Mittal Institute is coordinating with Harvard’s much older analog institution for China studies, the Fairbank Center (see The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute 2018b). Here scholars from across the US, China, and India have participated in a half-dozen workshops (spread across these three countries) and are now working on a volume that my colleague Michael Szonyi, a historian of China, and I are co-editing. To conclude, I should mention two books I’ve written that feature strong China–India comparisons. Both arose as “taking stock” exercises, and both are written in a “travelogue” style, describing encounters, often off the beaten path, hopefully in a way that communicates some general insight. The first was initiated in 2003 when I was collaborating with the political scientist Huang Yasheng on a paper titled “Can India Overtake China?” that was eventually published in Foreign Policy. The article laid out what Huang and I saw as the key pros and cons of each country’s emergent model (though the editor evidently chose a more provocative title!). I followed that paper with my book manuscript, Billions of Entrepreneurs, some years later (2008). In another stock-taking exercise a decade later, I have just published Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries, in which half the content is from one or the other of China or India (Khanna 2018). I have tried in this section to describe a variety of efforts I have undertaken to triangulate insight by embracing diverse perspectives and myriad collaborations, all of which I celebrate and cherish. Also worth noting is that, for me, each of these efforts builds upon and embellishes the idea of “institutional voids,” so that these seemingly disparate efforts end up cumulating. I intend to continue this until I find a better anchor or have exhausted the utility of that one.

The role of “practice” Central to the act of immersion is the possibility of occupying a ringside seat in the phenomenon of interest. This access is particularly important in emerging markets, where data sources have historically not been as freely available as in the mature economies.18

Reflections on comparing China and India  25

I have operationalized such immersion in three ways: by sitting on the boards of corporate entities and non-profits (in India and the US); being a co-founder of entrepreneurial ventures typically targeted at the masses in the developing world; and serving as an advisor to the Government of India. Though only a small part of this immersion in “practice” has explicitly unfolded in China, the ringside view has helped me interpret and study phenomena in several emerging markets. I have come to see the academic work and the immersion in practice as two sides of the coin of comparative scholarship. I certainly would not go so far as to say that the method is for everyone. Nor is it lost on me that being at a leading university affords advantages not immediately accessible to all scholars. Further, like most choices, it comes with tradeoffs. Other than the time it took to do a good job, there was the necessity of objectivity, which implied that I could not work on entities with which I had any one of these affiliations. But the affiliations came with a connection to the community—often tightly knit in the developing world—that led to other opportunities for intellectual inquiry and, in any case, to opportunities that could be farmed out to other scholars. For example, several of my doctoral students obtained access to research settings in this fashion. Finally, this participation dramatically increased my ability to interpret the results of more mainstream research findings with an expanded sense of what might be going on behind the scenes. Let me illustrate the kinds of insight that comes from these engagements. With some former students, I co-founded an entity called Chaipoint, initially imagined as a lowpriced alternative for tea (“chai”) to Starbucks. Over time, Chaipoint has moved somewhat upmarket, but still is much more affordable than a Starbucks equivalent offering. More significantly, it has developed a strong intellectual property (IP) portfolio with its “chai robots,” dispensers that are on the “cloud” and allow the user to customize her chai offering, centralized billing, and so on. What we have learned is that the local market for risk capital is not adequately developed in India, even with its vibrant entrepreneurship, to adequately value IP or, for that matter, any kind of intangible asset. Economists would say that there is limited price discovery except in the valuation of assets that are more tangible. In the context of the venture, it is a sobering realization, but once one has diagnosed the issue, it is clear that the venture can adapt to that reality. It is also transparent that there is a very interesting academic issue with which to engage. In my formal language, one can ask how entrepreneurs go about filling the insidious institutional voids in the market for risk capital. In fact, some professors of entrepreneurial finance at Harvard learned of this and wrote a teaching case on it that’s now used at HBS and elsewhere where the “decision issue” is about changing the company’s course toward a more IP-centric business model, along with the issue of coaxing along the investors in the company, who had not explicitly signed on for that model (Ghosh, Nanda and Tahilyani 2017; see also Chaipoint n.d.). These insights about IP informed a subsequent venture that I co-founded, Jana Care, a medical device company seeking to do the science and engineering to render feasible cheap and effective diagnostics for all manner of chronic diseases endemic across the developing world, starting with diabetes. Jana Care is now developing IP to detect signals of cardiac failure, renal failure, cancer, and other afflictions. Our devices were first developed in Bengaluru but once again, as we outstripped the ability of the ecosystem to support our research needs, we moved our laboratories to Boston, with engineering staying in Bengaluru, and research trials and clinical testing underway in Boston, Bengaluru, Beijing, and Singapore (see Jana Care n.d.). These ventures also reminded me of an exhortation I had put out there in my 2008 book, Billions of Entrepreneurs, that entrepreneurs and multinationals could (and should)

26  Tarun Khanna

leverage the respective strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese and Indian ecosystems. Chaipoint’s robots and some of Jana Care’s medical devices are designed and made with extensive involvement of Shenzhen’s manufacturing ecosystem. Nor are the insights from China limited to accessing its manufacturing prowess. Chaipoint learns from large-scale retail chains competing with Starbucks in China—for example, HeyTea out of Shanghai, and Luckin coffee—and Jana Care devices are tested in Beijing’s major hospitals.19 I also derive visceral satisfaction from seeing ideas being implemented. In 2015, I was fortunate to be tasked by the Indian Prime Minister’s office to oversee a commission to recommend a framework for catalyzing entrepreneurship across the country. That has resulted in a new body approved by the government called the Atal Innovation Mission, within a strategic planning entity called NITI Aayog. If one reads the commission’s public report, academics will immediately see that the entire design is but an implementation of the idea of institutional voids at the country scale (NITI Aayog 2015).20

What’s changed over the past decades? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, … (Dickens 1859) Roughly fifteen years ago, I began thinking about the comparative essays that were published as my first-person narrative, Billions of Entrepreneurs, contrasting the emergent paths of contemporary China and India. The centerpiece of the analysis then was my observation that there were fundamentally distinct choices made by the societies that emerged post 1949 in the People’s Republic and post 1947 in India. As in Charles Dickens’ literary contrast of London and Paris during the French Revolution, each choice embodied the “best of [some] times … the worst of [other times].” Economic exchange is predicated on information flows and the sanctity of property rights. On each of these two dimensions, China and India chose opposite paths. Apropos information, in an essay titled “Bias and Noise,” I concluded that information in China was noise-free but biased (in a direction favored by the Party), so that observers perceived a clear narrative, but were not sure whose reality was being portrayed. India, in contrast, was noisy (cacophonous) but unbiased (not deliberately stacked one way or another). You could get to the truth, but it took some effort. Apropos property rights, in an essay titled “Fiat and Fairness,” I argued that China privileged public interest even if it involved trampling over private rights, whereas India erred on the side of private property rights even to the detriment of society. Now, these are obviously abstractions, but I find them parsimonious and powerful enough to help organize often chaotic situations. Thus, and contrary to the title chosen by the publisher of the essay I mentioned earlier—“Can India overtake China?”—implying the superiority of one model over the other, I concluded that the different tradeoffs made the systems non-rankable in some axiomatic sense. So, has this changed? I’d aver not, even as economic growth continues apace in both countries. If anything, infrastructure construction in China continues apace, unperturbed by local interests that might question the way it’s playing out, and the Party continues to control information flows, arguably even more tightly than a decade ago,

Reflections on comparing China and India  27

using the more ubiquitous availability of technology to its advantage.21 India retains its chaotic ferment, with the media more cacophonous than before, if that were possible, and the polity has checked and balanced itself into semi-(institutional)-paralysis.22 So, the “Bias and Noise” and “Fiat and Fairness” axioms seem to me to continue to hold. In Billions of Entrepreneurs, I had imagined that what I referred to as “mutualism” would thus emerge, in response to the recognition that the strengths of China were the weaknesses of India, and vice versa. That is, astute entrepreneurs would recognize how to leverage each country’s strengths, much as my colleagues and I have tried to do with the Chaipoint venture described earlier. However, that has not happened to the extent I imagined, despite there being much greater presence of Chinese in Indian cities and Indians in Chinese cities than a decade or two ago. Perhaps sufficient time has not elapsed, or perhaps the political tensions between the countries constrain the realization of further economic gains-from-trade.23 Other things have changed. Even if the nature of the development trajectories has not changed, the Western world’s awareness of these has. In a quick exercise, first done in 2008, I re-tabulated three graphs below. Figure 1.1 depicts the extent to which China or India features in the New York Times over the 170 years for which data were accessible. One can see the secular drift upward using this measure (admittedly more of the recent twenty-year spike is caused by China than by India). Figures 1.2 and 1.3 show a comparable measure over the four decades for which it can be constructed for a broader set of mainstream newspapers (in the US and UK, respectively), both of which also show a rise in interest in the West in China and India. (Interestingly, if one plots the graph for Singapore’s Strait Times, there is no change in the measure over the past forty years.) But even this rise in interest appears modest when calibrated against the fact that, in purchasing power parity terms, China and India are already the world’s largest and third-largest economies in 2019, respectively.24 3.00%

As % of all Articles

2.50%

2.00%

1.50%

1.00%

0.50%

0.00%

Figure 1.1 Percentage of articles in New York Times with keywords China or India in headline or abstract, 1851–2018. Source: Figures for 1851–2014, retrieved from Proquest database; for 2016–2018, retrieved from Factiva database (accessed 11 November 2019).

8%

7%

6%

% of all stories

5%

4%

3%

2%

1%

0% 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018

Figure 1.2 New York Times and Wall Street Journal stories with key words in headline or lead paragraph, 1980–2018. Source: Figures for 1980–2014, retrieved from Proquest database; for 2016–2018, retrieved from Factiva database (accessed 11 November 2019). 6%

5%

% of all stories

4%

3%

2%

1%

0% 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017

Figure 1.3 Financial Times, Guardian, The Times stories with key words in headline or lead paragraph, 1981–2018. Source: Figures for 1981–2014, retrieved from Proquest database; for 2016–2018, retrieved from Factiva database (accessed 11 November 2019).

Reflections on comparing China and India  29

I had begun Billions of Entrepreneurs by quoting the distress of then Yale President Rick Levin, expressed in his 2001 commencement speech, wherein he bemoaned how little graduates of elite American universities knew of Asia. Consistent with the greater interest suggested by the graphs earlier, I’m pleased to say that it’s at least far easier— indeed, far more mainstream—for college kids to be exposed to both China and India. Speaking personally, though I realize they’re not the median American children, both my teenagers speak Mandarin and Hindi reasonably fluently. Presaging Levin, the celebrated journalist Harold Isaacs had bemoaned in his evocatively titled book, Scratches on our Minds, that China had much more of a lock on the contemporary American imagination than did India; whereas that remains true, at least there is more opportunity to engage with both countries, through in-class learning, and experientially through travel opportunities. This is no small change in just a decade. But perhaps the most significant change is in the mindset of everyday Chinese and Indians. It would not be inaccurate to describe this as a swagger born of confidence, and I do not mean this in an unseemly sense. If, as Harrison (1985) informed us, “underdevelopment is a state of mind,” then so is development, and Chinese and Indian minds now appear firmly focused on surging ahead.

Notes

30  Tarun Khanna

ु









Bibliography Axilor (n.d.) available online at www.axilor.com. Bardhan, P. K. (2012) Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Reflections on comparing China and India  31 Barnett, I., Khanna, T. and Onnela, J.-P. (2016) “Social and Spatial Clustering of People at Humanity’s Largest Gathering,” PLoS ONE 11 (6) ( June): 1–12. Campbell, D., Meyer, M. and Li, S. X. (2015) “Haier: Zero Distance to the Customer (A, B, C),” Harvard Business School Case 115-006, 115-056, 115-057 (April) (revised June 2015). Chaipoint (n.d.) available online at https://chaipoint.com/. Choudhury, P. (2010) “Innovation in Emerging Markets,” Harvard Business School Dissertation. Choudhury, P., Khanna, T. and Makridis, C.A. (2019) “Do Managers Matter? A Natural Experiment from 42 R&D Labs in India,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, ewz019. Dastidar, S. G., Fisman, R. and Khanna, T. (2008) “Testing Limits to Policy Reversal: Evidence from Indian Privatizations,” Journal of Financial Economics 89(3): 513–526. Dickens, C. (1859) A Tale of Two Cities (London: Chapman & Hall). Duara, P. and Perry, E. (eds.) (2018) Beyond Regimes, China and India Compared (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center). Elman, B. and Pollock, S. (eds.) (2018) What China and India Once Were: The Past that May Shape the Global Future (New York: Columbia University Press). Friedman, R. and Felski, S. S. (eds.) (2013) Comparisons: Theories, Approaches, Uses. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books). Ghosh, A. (2017) “Before 1962: The Case for 1950s China-India History,” The Journal of Asian Studies 76(3) (August): 697–727. Ghosh, S., Nanda, R. and Tahilyani, R. (2017) “Chai Point: Disrupting Chai,” Harvard Business School Case 818-020 (September) (revised March 2018). Gupta, B. and Khanna, T. (2019) “A Recombination-Based Internationalization Model: Evidence from Narayana Health’s Journey from India to the Cayman Islands,” Organization Science 30(2): 405–425. Harrison, L. E. (1985) Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case (Lanham, MD: Madison Books). Huang, Y. and Khanna, T. (2003) “Can India Overtake China?” Foreign Policy 137 ( July– August): 74–81. Isaacs, H. R. (1958) Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India (New York: The John Day Company). Jana Care (n.d.) available online at www.janacare.com. Keister, L. A. (2000) Chinese Business Groups: The Structure and Impact of Interfirm Relations During Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press). Kennedy, J. F. (1959) Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, Conference on India and the United States, Washington D.C. (4 May), John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, available online at www.jf klibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/indiaand-the-us-conference-washington-dc-19590504 (accessed 7 April 2019). Khanna, T. (2008) Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures, and Yours (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press). Khanna, T. (2014) “Contextual Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review 92(9) (September): 58–68. Khanna, T. (2018) Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers). Khanna, T., Banerji, R., Bawri, B. K., Bhansali, V., Bhasin, P., Chandru, V., Chatter, M., Dhawan, A., Piramal, S., Sabharwal, M., Mehta, G., Khakhar, D., Nanda, A., Khullar, S., Kumar, C.M. (2015) “Report of the Expert Committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship” (August). New Delhi: NITI Aayog: Government of India. http://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/ document_publication/report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf. Khanna, T., Allen, R., Frost, A. and Koo, W. (2019) “Rural Taobao: Alibaba’s Expansion into Rural E-Commerce,” Harvard Business School Case 719-433 ( January) (revised February 2019). Khanna, T., Dai, N. H. and Lin, S. (2017) “Talent@Tencent,” Harvard Business School Case 717-500 (May) (revised November 2018).

32  Tarun Khanna Khanna, T. and Gupta, B. (2014) “Health City Cayman Islands,” Harvard Business School Case 714-510 (May) (revised March 2016). Khanna, T. and Gupta, B. (2017) “The Private Provision of Missing Public Goods: Evidence from Narayana Health in India,” in H. Singh, A. Padmanabhan and E. Emanuel, eds., India as a Pioneer of Innovation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press): 37–54. Khanna, T. and Palepu, K. G. (1997) “Why Focused Strategies May Be Wrong for Emerging Markets,” Harvard Business Review 75(4) ( July–August): 41–51. Khanna, T. and Palepu, K. G. (2000) “Is Group Affiliation Profitable in Emerging Markets? An Analysis of Diversified Indian Business Groups,” Journal of Finance 55(2) (April): 867–891. Khanna, T., Palepu, K. G. and Andrews, P. (2011) “Haier: Taking a Chinese Company Global in 2011,” Harvard Business School Case 712-408 (revised May 2012). Khanna, T., Palepu, K. G. and Bullock R. (2008) “House of Tata: Acquiring a Global Footprint,” Harvard Business School Case 708-446 (May) (revised June 2009). Khanna, T., Palepu, K. G. and Bullock R. (2010) Winning in Emerging Markets (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press). Khanna, T., Palepu, K. G. and Wu, D. M. (1998) “House of Tata, 1995: The Next Generation (A),” Harvard Business School Case 798-037 (February) (revised August 2006). Khanna, T., Rangan, V. K. and Manocaran, M. (2005) “Narayana Hrudayalaya Heart Hospital: Cardiac Care for the Poor (A),” Harvard Business School Case 505-078 ( June) (revised August 2011). Khanna, T. and Rivkin, J. W. (2001) “Estimating the Performance Effects of Business Groups in Emerging Markets,” Strategic Management Journal 22(1) ( January): 45–74. King, G., Pan, J. and Roberts, M. (2013) “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism But Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review 107(2): 326–343. Lewin, K. (1951) Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers, edited by D. Cartwright (New York: Harper & Row). Ma, J. (2019) “How do Business Government Ties Help (or Hurt)? Evidence from Government Approvals in China,” Chapter in DBA Dissertation, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, 2016. Ma, J. and Khanna, T. (2016) “Independent Directors’ Dissent on Boards: Evidence from Listed Companies in China,” Strategic Management Journal 37(8): 1547–1557. Mehrotra, R. and Vera, F. (eds.) (2015) Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz). Nanda, R. and Khanna, T. (2010) “Diasporas and Domestic Entrepreneurs: Evidence from the Indian Software Industry,” Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 19(4): 991–1012. NITI Aayog (2015) “Report of the Expert Committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship” (August), available online at https://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/ report%20of%20the%20expert%20committee.pdf (accessed 26 May 2019). Paine, L. S. and Crawford, R. J. (1998) “Haier Group, The (A, B, C),” Harvard Business School Case 398-101, 398-102, 398-162 (March) (revised July 2001). The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (2018a) “Partition Project,” Harvard University, available online at https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/partition-of-british-india/. The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (2018b) “Talent and Meritocracy in China and India,” Harvard University, available online at https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/ talent-meritocracy-india-china/. Weber, M. (1951) The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press). Weber, M. (1958) The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press).

Part 1

Historical overviews

2

China and India pre-1939 Rudolf G. Wagner

At no time in history, for either South Asia (“India”) or mainland East Asia (“China”), were direct transcultural exchanges with each other a dominant factor. That the history of their supposedly intertwined relationship has attracted so much attention and scholarship especially from scholars with South Asian background can be ascribed to three causes. The first has to do with recent political agendas, especially the Hindi Chini bhai bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers) political line advocated by Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai during the early 1950s (Bagchi 1981). The second relates to a historiography that is connected to the modern Indian nation state or the British colonial enterprise with its Eurocentric perspective (Thampi 2017). Third, the prospect of both India and China becoming big powers also prompted efforts at comparative mappings of their historical backgrounds and their ensuing path dependency (Pollock and Elman 2018). Explorations of the connected history of South, Southeast, and East Asia before the European powers were not influenced by these three perspectives; yet they too suggested a rich and diverse history of the cultural and commercial contacts across the eastern half of Eurasia, with both land and maritime routes as linkages but the principal agency in these linkages originating neither in East nor in South Asia (Sen 2003, 2017). China and India in the titles of these kinds of studies are misleading. The states in either territory never established intense and continuous bilateral relations, and many of the principal actors involved in the transcultural interaction within eastern Eurasia were neither “Indian” nor “Chinese.” The focus in these historical studies on the connectedness between the two territorial and socio-political domains tends to sideline the substantial and effective Chinese efforts to give things from abroad—be it bronze casting, Buddhism, sweet potatoes, Marxism, string instruments, key words, or drama— Chinese characteristics authentic enough to obviate any notion that their use depended on continued foreign guidance. With the massive Western commercial, colonial, and military forays since the nineteenth century, the weak tendency in both domains to join hands to oppose these forays failed to gain ground. For Chinese reformers, India became the model of a polity that had failed to secure its integrity and independence to the point that Buddhist teachings originating in India were held responsible for weaknesses in China’s modernization drive and efforts to fight the Japanese occupation. Eventually, after a very short honeymoon, the now modern states of India and China ended up competing for the support of the Soviet Union and went to war. Primarily looking at the Chinese-language record, the present study will focus on the place of South Asia in its imaginary and real-life dimensions in the Chinese universe before the beginning of World War II. Drawing on the rich exploration of sources by earlier studies on China and India as well a new research, it will try to offer a terse

36  Rudolf G. Wagner

analysis of the dynamics of the transcultural exchanges, the location of the agency involved in bringing them about, the asymmetries prevailing within them, and the agency released by their perception. It will locate the place of China–India interactions in these exchanges in different time periods and areas and identify the principal— including European—actors.

Stage 1: silent interaction China had been involved in transcultural exchanges with areas further west ever since humans moved to the Far East. These exchanges involved human beings, domesticated plants and animals, technologies such as bronze casting and mining, other objects deemed worthy of the effort imposed by long distances and arduous terrain that had to be crossed, as well as stories, myths, and philosophical ideas. In these early transcultural flows, the Chinese-Indian engagement was a sideshow because both South Asia and Mainland East Asia primarily drew on new developments in the Middle East. The interaction of both with the Middle East was highly asymmetrical at least in the areas for which we have solid data. A notable exception is the use of Cowrie shells from the Maldives west of India in Shang and Zhou China since the fourteenth century BCE as part of a gift economy. This signals a developed maritime network, perhaps going back to Neolithic times, that was connected to land routes leading from the Southeast Asian coast via today’s Yunnan province to the Shang capital in Anyang in China’s north (Peng and Zhu 1995; Yang 2011). These shells were not simply objects of intrinsic worth. The idea of using them in gift exchanges or as a form of money was already silently inscribed into them before they reached the Shang capital, because these shells were already in use for the same purpose in South Asia. We are already dealing with the migration of both ideas and objects. The second connection between the Far Eastern mainland and the West was a network of land routes later dubbed the “Silk Road.” While not a dedicated path from and to India, it offered a path between East and South Asia. The silent language of structures embedded in objects, texts, and institutions found in China signals that this pathway was open and used long before the Han dynasty’s forays to the West. In the realm of myth and folktale, the similarities between the early Chinese myth of the world being made out of the body of Pangu and the Rig Veda tale about Purusha have led historians of religion to assume an actual transcultural connection (Takagi 1904; Wagner 2019b: 462). The reforms and innovations of the Qin dynasty are another case in point. By the time the Qin assumed hegemony and eventually brought mainland East Asia under unified control late in the third century BCE, great changes had happened further West, and there is a high probability that they had become known in China. The First Qin Emperor had an elaborate mausoleum built for himself. There is no Chinese precedent, but from ancient Egypt to the states set up by Alexander’s successors, a mausoleum was a must for a ruler of standing. The famous realistic, individualized, and full-size terracotta warriors around this mausoleum that accompanied and guarded the First Emperor’s body have no Chinese precedent, but the Greek temples in Afghanistan were full of realistic full-size statues. The nineteen giant bronze statues the First Emperor had cast from the weapons used in the civil war that brought him to power, which were then installed in public places, were another first. They were inspired by a report that “nineteen giants” had been seen in the West: gigantic statues in public places were no rarity in the realm on China’s western border that was controlled by Alexander and his

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successors (Nickel 2013). The small copper coins introduced by the Qin, which replaced the dysfunctionally heavy and clumsy earlier cast-iron money, again follow the form of Western coins without emulating their authentication by having the local king’s head engraved. The First Emperor marked the territory under his control by having hymns inscribed on stones erected on prominent border points (Kern 2000). Again, there is no Chinese precedent, but the same had been done earlier by kings in faraway Egypt, Darius I in Persia, and King A śoka in India. Finally, I would even venture to suggest that the development of the Qin administrative system for its gigantic new territorial state with centrally appointed bureaucrats as well as elaborate laws and controls, a system which did not claim to emulate the hallowed forms of Chinese antiquity when sages had ruled the land, was well informed about the administrative practices in the big territorial states in the West, namely, Persia and its successor Seleucid state after Alexander’s death, and King A śoka’s Maurya Empire.

Stage 2: massive, visible, and asymmetrical interaction: Buddhism and trade These transcultural interactions were far-reaching and highly asymmetrical, but the origins of various new objects, texts, and institutions were never publicly acknowledged even though there may not have been a conscious effort to suppress the fact of their external provenance. As a consequence, foreign imports were absorbed into the Chinese cultural fabric without ending up requiring a change in its basic features. The quick, deep, and broad insertion of Buddhist elements into the fabric of the East Asian mainland, however, was of an altogether different kind, order of magnitude, and visibility. While here again the source is Western, the principal agency in implanting Buddhism in China is in the willingness of the Chinese side, with missionaries from Central and South Asia acting as cultural brokers without the power to impose anything. There never was a “Buddhist Conquest of China,” the brilliant contribution of the work by this title notwithstanding (Zuercher 1959). One might say that in commerce, Chinese silks, pottery, medical ingredients, and other luxury items secured a more or less balanced exchange with foreign goods in pre-modern times. China’s knowledge about India was superior to Indian knowledge about China due to the continued presence of accessible written records. In diplomacy, the Chinese side reported some tributary relationships with Indian states, but there is no record of the inverse. In technology, China had long absorbed and adapted innovations from further West before making its own contribution with paper, printing, gunpowder, porcelain, and silk manufacture, but in this respect interaction either way with South Asia was marginal. The massive Chinese absorption, however, of basic Buddhist ideas and concepts, social institutions, and ritual practices was not to be accommodated within the existing system. It came with basic changes in China’s cultural fabric by essentially installing in its very heart two alternative narratives. Against the traditional Chinese world of heaven and earth, Buddhism situated the world in a gigantic multi-layered universe without a clear divide between the human and the divine realms. To a China that considered itself the center of civilization, Buddhism assigned it a place as a “land at margin”—biandi—as the India pilgrim Faxian (fl. 399–414) called it in desperation—of a Buddhist realm centered on an imaginary India around Mount Meru, where the Buddha had lived (Faxian T2085.51: 0864c02, Forte 1985; Sen 2003: ch. 2; Chen 2017).

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The Chinese lands, with their rich cultural load of historical associations of hallowed sites, became a barren desert in terms of its numinous load compared to India where the Buddha and his disciples had walked. In the midst of a culture devoted to long life and prosperity, followed by a peaceful post-mortem existence at the Yellow Springs honored by the living through the ancestor cult, grew an alternative culture that defined life as suffering. It was followed by post-mortem educative punishment for harming sentient beings and slandering the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha in various layers of hell in a mechanical process of karmic retribution. Eventually, they would be released to another life of suffering until their attachment to the body and material goods was finally overcome. The living, who had hitherto done their occasional ritual obeisance before the ancestor tablets, were now required to deal with the alternative fate of their deceased parents in hell by doing virtuous deeds and transferring the ensuing merit to them so as to ease their suffering, an effort that might mean prayer and sacrifices, but no sex or meat for well over a hundred days of the year. Next to a history where the sages of old had laid the foundations and had left the classics as guidance for the later-born who would never again qualify as sages but would at least try to secure order for the polity, a new historical narrative was offered. Anchored on the Buddha, this narrative saw an ever-deteriorating level of understanding among human beings the greater the distance between their time and that of the Buddha, until the mofa, the “end of the dharma,” was reached, a deterioration exacerbated by geographical distance. This history itself was embedded into a long rhythm of kalpa, world ages lasting over four billion years each, at the end of which the world would burn in a great conflagration and another kalpa would begin. According to some Chinese calculations, the end of the dharma and the end of the present kalpa would come in the same cataclysm, and they would come soon (Ledderose 2004). In the middle of a society that required young people to be productive, take care of their elders, and have children in order to continue the ancestor cult, the Buddhist institution of the monastery spread to accommodate people who “left their family,” vowed to live in celibacy, and lived from donations. These alternative scenarios continued to exist side by side in continuous tension. In other domains such as the analysis of the cognitive apparatus, the psychology of attachment, temple buildings, and the religious art to adorn them, Buddhism filled a Chinese void. While the agency in accepting these Buddhist elements in China was all on the Chinese side, it was very clear that this was a highly asymmetrical exchange mostly managed by cultural brokers from Central Asia with close to nothing in the domain of philosophy, religion, language, world view, or social institution moving to Central Asia or South Asia from China. The perception of this asymmetry in transcultural interaction on the Chinese side, with its implied challenge to Chinese cultural identity and hegemony, led to a broad spectrum of efforts to deal with it by either developing a Buddhist narrative for China that would take care of these concerns or by overcoming the asymmetry by sidelining Buddhism (Wagner 2019). As Buddhism developed deep roots in the country, the notion that the only center of the Buddhist world was in India and that China was only at the “margins” of the Buddhist world, which had prompted many Chinese pilgrims to undertake the arduous journey to the fountainhead of truth, mobilized energies to achieve balance in the religious load between the Buddha’s land and China. Gradually, the faithful and their patrons transformed China into sanctified soil where one would find stupas with Buddhist characteristics, even with the Buddha’s own relics, traces of the Buddha’s face and figure in landscape configurations, where not only many of the

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highest Buddhist bodhisattvas had their spiritual residence, but also where even Manjusri, the Buddha of the future, dwelled. To make this credible, the Chinese translation of the Avatarpsaka sutra has an interpolation which mentioned that Manjusri resided at Qingliang shan, Cold and Clear mountain, “in the northwest.” Qingliang shan is an alternative name for Wutai shan in China’s northwest, where a gigantic Buddhist sanctuary grew around this depiction which continues to attract pilgrims to the present day (Lamotte 1960). As a consequence of this gradual transformation, pilgrims eventually came from India, Central Asia, Korea, and Japan to visit these places (Sen 2003: 79). New Buddhist schools such as Chan and Tiantai that had no equivalent in India had by now formed in China, and this sinified Buddhism, in turn, spread to other parts of East Asia. Tantrism, introduced in China by Amoghavajra (705–774), was the last Indian Buddhist school to spread in China. Polemics against the new religion started to come from adherents of the new Daoist church during the fifth and sixth centuries. This church itself was in many respects a response to the growth of the Buddhist monastic and lay communities, the quick growth of canonical Buddhist texts in translation, and the lavish patronage the new dispensation was receiving from elites and the courts. The new church emulated many features of the new religion, but it also mounted, from early on, heavy-handed polemics. The most notorious among them, Laozi’s Conversion of the Barbarians, claimed that Buddhism had nothing good to contribute because Laozi had succinctly expressed in 5,000 words all that had been written in the endless Buddhist writings. In fact, seeing the uncouth nature of the Western barbarians, Laozi had gone West as recorded in earlier writings, and there he had assumed the figure of an ascetic who became widely known and respected under the name of Buddha. Armed with the prestige of a saintly man, he had developed a strategy to make an end of these barbarians altogether by preaching celibacy for them all (Zuercher 1959: ch. 6). The state response as well as that from the non-Buddhist elite was slower in coming. The struggle for patronage had led to court-organized competitions between Daoists and Buddhists, both of which claimed to be able to produce miracles capable of protecting the state and the court. The focus of these competitions was on philosophical matters or on the capacity to make miracles on order. The “foreignness” of the Buddhist creed was not yet an issue because most of the Northern Chinese rulers would qualify as foreigners, being Tibetans, Xiongnu, or Tuoba (a confederation of mixed Türk and Mongolian composition). Even the rulers and many elite families of the Sui and Tang dynasties, which unified the realm again, had mixed ethnic backgrounds that showed up in their combining cultural and religious preferences for Central and South Asia with the use of Chinese as their language and a gradual shift toward Confucian statecraft and Daoism. Empress Wu (ruled 690–703) still continued the emulation by some rulers of the northern dynasties of the fifth and sixth centuries of the ideal Buddhist “wheel-turning emperor,” Cakravartinraja, who would create the political and social conditions for the spread of Buddhism, and she elevated Buddhism to something akin to a state religion. Already the first Tang Emperor, however, had suggested balancing the transcultural exchanges with India by having the Buddhist monk Xuanzang translate, after his return from his journey to the Buddha’s homeland in 645, Chinese works such as the Laozi into Sanskrit (Sen 2003: 213 n. 131). While nothing came of these efforts, they are indicative of the energies released in the state, the perception of asymmetrical exchange and the broadening efforts to limit and marginalize Buddhism’s impact. These energies found

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full expression and impact a century after Wu Zetian’s death, when, in 819, the essayist Han Yu, whom the men who were reviving Confucianism in the eleventh and twelfth century from its long slumber would later invoke as their forbear, wrote to the throne a toxic memorial against Buddhism. It criticized the emperor’s support for Buddhism as symbolized by the lavish ritual with which he had personally welcomed a relic of the Buddha’s finger in the capital and his palace. The memorial came with bluntly xenophobic language, denouncing the Buddha as a dead foreigner who did not know how to speak Chinese, did not worship the Chinese sages of antiquity, and deluded the ignorant people. A wise emperor would show the people how to disavow this delusion by having this dead man’s bone burned together with the rubbish and proceeding to a full-scale persecution of his teachings (Dubs 1946). Han Yu presented himself as a lone voice in the desert and he cursed the other officials who, he claimed, did not dare remonstrate with the emperor. His memorial, however, was indicative of an incipient shift among the recovering Confucian elite. Beginning in 842, Emperor Wuzong, who had espoused Daoism as a truly Chinese faith, proceeded to a systematic suppression and expropriation of all “foreign” religions with the side-motive of refilling his war-depleted state coffers. His successor, Emperor Xuanzong (ruled 846–859), accepted the credibility of a dream that his clan, the Li who ruled China, descended from none other but the Laozi himself who by then had risen to be the highest god in the Daoist pantheon (Duyvendak 1947). This came with a boost to Daoism and secured it imperial patronage. At the same time, the spread of Islam in northern India and the eventual establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 came with an increasingly severe suppression of Buddhist monastic and educational institutions. Finally, the inland routes between India and China via the Silk Road and Tibet were blocked or made insecure through incessant fighting. The entombment in a cave of all available writing in existence in the oasis of Dunhuang at the Chinese end of the Silk Road early in the eleventh century, before a threatened attack, may be seen as the symbolic end of the vital role the Silk Road had played for many centuries as a contact zone in transcultural exchange. The Dunhuang manuscript hoard in its great variety of languages and scripts that was rediscovered only in 1900 has become the archive of this contact zone. Already before the Sui–Tang unification, some states had begun to set up state institutions to control religious entities. Following the further strengthening of these institutions, the state ended up for the duration of Imperial China and beyond to be in full control of not only the financial and legal aspects but also many spiritual aspects of religion (selection and publication of canonical works, the licensing of temples, and the ranks of gods in the heavenly hierarchy of popular religion). Buddhism now was a Chinese religion that shared the numinous space with Daoism and a revived Confucianism. In the popular view, the three had a division of labor, with Buddhism specializing on death, Daoism on life (longevity and procreation), and Confucianism on the state.

Stage 3: a Chinese public political installation moves west The Muslim Arab traders (as well as the few Brahmin traders) already settled in Tang China were not interested in Buddhism, but in the institutions of the Chinese state because it dominated and controlled their trade under the umbrella notion of tribute. While these foreign traders were allowed to have their own institutions to settle conflicts among themselves, what would happen if they had a conflict with a high Chinese

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official? As foreigners, their legal and social position was weak. One case of such a conflict brought to light a particular Chinese institution to handle such crisis situations, and an Arab report from Chang’an in 851 about it contained in a compilation by Abu Zayd al-Sirafi (tenth century) (S īrāf ī 1733: 69–73) made it into the Arab world geographies. From there, it spread across Eurasia and led to emulations in India, the Turkish empires, and Europe (Kracke 1976). This institution was a drum or bell (of a set of bells) established in the public domain outside the palace of the Emperor, but close enough to be heard by him. When all avenues to overcome a maladministration of justice, a misinformed government policy, or a local crisis such as famine had been exhausted, even a commoner woman was entitled to seek direct access to the ruler with the help of the drum or bell to lodge her complaint. The institution was said to go back to the sage rulers of antiquity, and many Chinese dynasties actually emulated the idea of direct access to the ruler or high officials by setting up this or similar institutions. In the early ninth century, a trader from Khorasan in today’s Uzbekistan, then a center of Persianate Islamic culture, tested the effectiveness of this institution. Moving not by the overland but rather by the sea route, he had come to Canton. A high-ranking eunuch from the imperial household in the capital had gone to Canton to buy goods for his master. As they could not come to an agreement about the price, the eunuch simply had the goods taken away. Given his rank, there was no hope that local officials would be of help. Already having heard about the institution of the drum in the capital as a remedy of last resort, the Chorassian went to Chang’an with his translator and made himself heard. Received in audience by the emperor, he told his story. Four independent teams were set up to check, and all found his report credible. The emperor then restored his property and demoted the eunuch with a harangue which shows his keen awareness of a competition among different rulers for securing trade: He [the Chorassian] hath been in the Country of the Arabs, whence he came into the Kingdoms of the Indies, and at last to my City, seeking his Advantage by Trade; and thou wouldst have had him return, cross those Kingdoms, and have said to all the People in his way, I have been abused in China, where they have stript me of my Substance. (Sīrāf ī 1733: 73) The Arab report was accompanied with glowing praise to the effect that “The Chinese were wonderfully regular in their Government, before the last Revolution (859) entirely destroyed and reduced it to the State it is in at present.” Inserted from here into Arab geographies from Al-Masudi’s The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (947) and Al-Idrisi (1154), it spread throughout South and West Eurasia.1 The report had already reduced the function of this installation to the provision of justice, which ranked highest among the Muslim virtues ascribed to a ruler. We find the story (without a word about its Chinese origin) in a “mirror for the king” written by Nizam al-Mulk (1018–1092) for the Turko-Persian Seljuq Empire in 1091. Nizam al-Mulk ascribes the installation not to the Chinese sages of antiquity but instead to Khosrau I (Anurshiwan) (501–579), the pre-Islamic ruler held up in the Persian-speaking world as a model for his commitment to justice (Nizam Oul-Moulk 1893: 42–53). In 1148, Kalhana describes in his very flowery Sanskrit Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir that King Har șa, under whom his father had been a minister, actually had set up such an installation between 1089 and 1101

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(Kalhāna’s Râjatarangi ṇ î 1892: 336). A century later, Liu Yu, who had been ordered by the Mongol ruler of the Yuan dynasty in 1252 to mount a campaign to conquer Persia at the head of a large Mongol army, reports in the surviving non-military part of his diary, the Xishi ji (Record of a westward mission), for the year 1258, the installation of bells outside local offices in northern India combined with a system of collecting these local complaints in writing to submit them to the ruler at court. In the Indian states are suspended great bells. People who have an accusation to make strike them, and the official in charge of the bell makes a record of his case. When the time has come [for the audience with the ruler] the ruler and the officials also record the name of the [official] to prevent deception and falsification. (Liu 1935: 3–4) Another century later, in 1334, Ibn Battutta (1304–1377) reported that the bell had been installed under Sultan Iltutmish, the founder of the Delhi Sultanate who ruled from 1211 to 1236 (Voyages 1855: 164–65). The Mughal rulers Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and finally Muhammad Shah in 1721 all are reported in Indian and foreign sources to actually have set up such installations (The Akbarnama of Abu-L-Fazl 1897–1918: end of ch. 1; Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri 1909–1914: 7). Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European descriptions of the Indies all contain similar descriptions. Here we have the Chinese state, which had eagerly adopted the Buddhist notion of the Cakravartinraja providing, in an inverse asymmetry of exchange without exercising any agency of its own, a powerful and easily understandable very “Confucian” symbol for a ruler’s commitment to justice. The stories told about the use of this installation all focus on the fact that it secured justice even for the most powerless against the highest officials. Without any push from China, the installation spread through the pull of its suitability as a public performance of enlightened rulership. It was localized both in terms of the story about its origin and in the function it was to serve. In China, it had been, at least in theory, a channel of communication between high and low about many issues, among which maladministration of justice was supposed to be only one. In the Muslim world (as well as in Europe), the latter was the only feature to be adopted and anchored in local tradition. Still, the condition for its adoption further West must have been a shared understanding about at least one principle of good governance, namely justice, and about one problem that came with the administration of large territorial states, namely abuses of power by centrally appointed officials. Without at this stage being able to leave the realm of speculation, it may be hypothesized that this notion of justice (rather than military might) as the mainstay of a ruler’s legitimacy had already become established in antiquity in a silent process of transcultural exchange among relatively stable large territorial states with centrally appointed bureaucracies such as Persia and its successor Seleucid state after Alexander’s death, King Asoka’s Maurya Empire, and Qin China.

Stage 4: maritime commercial interaction With the steep decrease in the importance of Buddhism-inspired foreign Chinese trade and cultural contact with India via the Silk Road came a shift to a strictly commercial orientation of the exchanges. It came with a move from light-weight luxury goods such

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as silk and precious stones for the adornment of Buddhist sites (Liu 1996) to bulkier commercial goods such as Chinese stoneware and the new porcelain or Indian cottons for which the maritime route west from Quanzhou and Guangzhou in China’s south was more suitable (Sen 2017: 178). The (Türk) Delhi Sultanate suppression of monastic Buddhism, which was continued by the (Mongol) Mughal dynasty, ended Buddhism’s role in India for the time being. The Mongol conquest of China by another Mongol confederacy in 1279 did not lead to a suppression of Buddhism there, but rather to a competition with Islam and the spread of Tibetan-inspired Lamaism to which many of the new tribes in China’s northwest had converted. The shift to a more strictly commercial orientation had been completed by the eleventh century. Characterized by a symmetry of exchanges, it connected all maritime parts of Eurasia and North Africa into an international maritime trade route with three overlapping trade networks. Their centers were in East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, and North Africa as well as the Middle East, respectively, from where land routes would also lead to Europe. Trade along this route was dominated by Arab and Persian traders (“the Indians are not a trading nation”), and we see them settling in great numbers already during the Tang dynasty both in the capital Chang’an at the end of the overland route and in Canton and Quanzhou at the end of the maritime route. Brahmanic astronomers in the imperial administration and a Brahmanic temple in Quanzhou also signal the presence of Indian men of letters and traders, the latter probably Tamils from the Chola Kingdom in South India, which had become an important entrepot on the maritime East/West trade route. This situation remained stable until the sixteenth century (Guy 1993–1994). The seven Ming dynasty Chinese maritime expeditions to the West under the Muslim eunuch Zheng He (1371–1435) reached Calicut in India and the African East coast and projected the Ming dynasty’s power, prestige, and interest in trade. Because of the exorbitant expenses of the fleet and the fleet’s inability to recover the cost through its trading activities, the Chinese court withdrew its support so that these expeditions did not result in long-term changes in the political and economic patterns of trade along the southern route. As silk was produced in large quantities in India since the fifteenth century, and Chinese porcelain had no market among the nonMuslim population of India because of a religious taboo on reusing dishes, and, as on the other side, production of Indian cotton had been greatly promoted by the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China, the trade volume between India and China was greatly reduced.

Stage 5: a new broker for India–China interaction: England With the arrival of European military and commercial vessels in the Indian Ocean since the late fifteenth century, the dynamics of transcultural interaction (a term that does not only include trade, language, religion, the arts, and technology, but also military conflict) changed for both India and China since the primary focus of their exchanges as well as the primary source of knowledge about each other gradually shifted to Europe. Only after India had become a British colony and the United Kingdom had become a dominating force in the Chinese Treaty Ports did the fate of India became a topic in Chinese discussions about a possible fate for China. First-hand writings by Chinese or Indian authors of the present-day situation of the other country were rare or absent until well after 1900. China and India now mostly knew about each other through the writings and oral communications of foreigners. The early Chinese world geographies from the 1840s tried to integrate information

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from earlier Chinese records with the new world geographies such as Murray’s Encyclopedia of Geography, which was introduced to them by missionaries (no written translation was made), but the latter clearly was used as the most reliable source (Murray 1834). Murray was drawing on a very vast array of reports and presented the Western communis opinio at the time with an effort to maintain a critical distance. His description of India was as blunt in its critique of the Indian national character as of the rapacious activities of the East India Company which had reduced a prosperous region such as Bengal to destitution. The tropes of his India narrative are to a small extent repeated in his much more positive China narrative, but it seems that the India narrative established a comparative framework that informed the thinking of late Qing reformers. As Murray reflects a Western communis opinio at the time, his views will be summarized. Murray’s sketch of the colonization of India represented shared Western assessments at the time by focusing on the internal causes that made this colonization possible given the comparatively small numbers of foreigners who brought it about. This absolute sway of an island [England] comparatively so small, over an empire of 100,000,000 inhabitants, situated nearly at its antipodes, and accessible only by so vast a circuit of ocean, presents one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the world. Yet the subjection is complete, and almost universally peaceable; and the presages of its short continuance, which some entertain, are perhaps chimerical. (Murray 1837, II: 343) Going back to Alexander’s forays into India, he writes: “The narratives of this expedition are precious, in so far as they show that the Hindoos were then precisely the same people as now; divided into castes, addicted to ascetic superstition, religious suicide, and abstruse philosophy” (Murray 1837, II: 340). The trope of the unchanging Indian national character that was unable and unwilling to adapt to changing circumstances was already well established in the West by this time and became firmly established in the Chinese discussion. The life horizon of the majority of the population is the village with collectively owned land that is managed by a chief as the only authority. The consequence is a disinterest in anything beyond the village and a habit to subordinate oneself to a dictatorial authority. He writes: The classes now enumerated belong all to the Hindoo population, and, so long as they are permitted to move unmolested in this circle, they quietly behold all the high places occupied by any people, however strange or foreign, with whom rests the power of the sword. They have no idea of political rights or privileges, of a country or nation of their own, and in whose glory and prosperity they are interested; they never converse on such subjects, and can scarcely be made to comprehend what they mean. Their only political bond is to a chief who possesses popular qualities, and attaches them by pay and promotion: to him they often manifest signal fidelity, but are strangers to every other public feeling. Despotism is not only established by long precedent, but is rooted in the very habits and minds of the community. Such habits naturally predispose the people of a fertile region, bordered by poor and warlike tribes, to fall into a state of regular and constant subjection to a foreign yoke. (Murray 1837, II: 342)

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The British “foreign yoke” is thus the natural continuation of the “foreign” TurkoPersian Delhi Sultanate and the “foreign” Mongol Mughal dynasty. The trope of the Indian lack of any “idea of political rights or privileges, of a country or nation of their own, and in whose glory and prosperity they are interested” comes with a willingness to serve under foreign command to be “an instrument for holding his own country in subjection” (the sepoys outnumbered soldiers from the United Kingdom by a factor of over twenty). This would become a Chinese trope for India as well as China, which already shows up in Xu Jiyu’s world geography of 1848. Finally, the subordination to despotic rule has created a culture where servility and disregard for truth have become common: That outward politeness, it is said, soon resolves itself into the smooth and interested servility which men acquire in courts and under despotic governments, by habitual intercourse with those on whom they are dependent It is entirely prompted, therefore, by self-interest, which forms the basis of the Hindoo character, and is cherished without regard to any feelings of honour and dignity. These are entirely broken down by the influence of that despotism which, according to Mr. Grant, ‘is not only the principle of the government of Hindostan, but an original, irreversible, and fundamental principle in the very frame of society.’ In such a government, where men are excluded from the pursuits of ambition, and checked at least in any public or lively amusements, selfishness turns almost entirely into avarice; and this is described as quite the ruling passion in the breast of the Hindoo. It appears to be indulged with an almost total disregard of the principles of honour or honesty; the grossest breaches of which are so common, as to cause no surprise, and scarcely any indignation, even in those who suffer by them. In the same light do they regard that deliberate and systematic violation of truth, which seems rooted in the Indian character. (Murray 1837, II: 350) This connection of despotic rule to servility and disregard for truth is also made for China. While emphasizing the renown for honesty acquired by the Hong merchants in Canton, who had the monopoly of Chinese foreign trade with the West and Japan, Murray is less generous with the official class: The want of all independent place and power, the abject submission required, and the application of the rod to all classes alike, produces a general degradation of character, and the vices which are its natural consequences. The highest officers of state showed an entire disregard of truth, and hesitated not to utter the most glaring falsehoods, whenever a political purpose was to be served. (Murray 1837, II: 417) Explicit comparisons between Indians and Chinese were common in missionary writings as well as the new field of anthropology. When Guetzlaff began publishing a Chinese-language journal in 1833, the English language “Prospectus” had this to say: While civilization is making rapid progress over ignorance and error in almost all other portions of the globe—even the bigoted Hindoos having commenced the publication of several periodicals in their own languages—the Chinese alone

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remain stationary, as they have been for ages past. Notwithstanding our long intercourse with them, they still profess to be first among the nations of the earth, and regard all others as ‘barbarians’”. (Gutzlaff 1833: 187) Here India and China share an immutable national character and ignorance about the world, but on the Chinese side an unfounded feeling of superiority is added over all others. According to Murray’s narrative, the Mughal rulers in their turn had a commitment to their own power but not to “India” and by the early eighteenth century, the Mughal princes had begun to regard their enfeoffed territory as their own and went on to fight among each other. They were not only oblivious of the real danger lurking along the coastline but also willing to make alliances with these foreigners. In the end, they became kept men without power who were living in style from funding provided by the British. This critical assessment of the later Mughal rulers established the framework for radical Chinese assessments toward the end of the century of the Manchu interaction with the foreign powers. It described them as rather willing to become subservient to the powers than defend “Chinese” interests so that China was a colony of the powers in all but name. Since the far-away Crimean War (1853–1856), the fate of India and China became part of the discussion of global geostrategy. After its efforts to gain a warm-water port in the Mediterranean were frustrated by France’s and England’s coming out in support of the Ottoman Empire during this war, Russia started building the Trans-Siberian Railway to attain its goal. In British eyes, it was not clear whether the main Russian push would be south to the Indian Ocean or east to the East China Sea, but it was clear that Russia was the main threat because its conquest of either India or China would fundamentally upset the existing frail balance of power. The 1857 mutiny of the British-trained Sepoy troops, which were crucial for maintaining British control over India, had taught the British government that even locals, who had been “westernized” by having been trained by them and being in their employ, could not be trusted. India proved such a financial and administrative burden that British taste for another huge Asian colony disappeared. So did its taste for the imminent demolition of the “Tartar” Manchu dynasty in China by the Christian-inspired Taiping rebels and the establishment of a Taiping Christian theocracy even if the Taipings continuously advocated good relations with their “overseas brothers and sisters” and had support from revivalist missionaries. During the Chinese-British negotiations after the Arrow War or Second Opium War in 1860, which ended with the British occupation of the Chinese capital, the British could, in their own assessment, have demanded anything they wanted. Instead, in view of their Indian experience and the growing Russian threat, they opted for the “maintenance of the [Manchu] Imperial authority,” by demanding very low reparations (“striking with a gloved hand”) and by beginning to support the Qing government against the Taipings (Wagner 2017: 67). Fearing that the Sepoy Mutiny had been fostered by the new vernacular papers which were edited by Englishmen in India who were often very critical of their home government, the London government became wary of such papers, and the Viceroy’s office began to closely monitor them. Years later, in 1876, the British Ambassador in Tokyo was only too happy to come out with an edict banning British subjects from publishing vernacular papers in Japan and the Consulate General

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in Shanghai seemed equally willing to follow up on such a request from the Chinese government had it ever materialized. British control over papers such as the Shenbao and its publisher and editor Ernest Major was even less than that of the London government over papers in England, but this was not believed by the Chinese side. If it felt a Shenbao article offended Chinese official sensibilities, it would inevitably ask the Shanghai consulate or the Peking embassy to intervene (Wagner 1999: 109). After a steady stream of articles in the English-language Chinese press about the Russian threat during the Ili crisis, the geopolitical discussion about the India–China link via a Russian threat entered the Chinese-reading world especially through the influential Chinese translation in 1880 by the American missionary journalist Young Allen of MacColl’s book, Three Years of the Eastern Question (Maigaoer 1880). According to MacColl, It is the settled belief of a large segment of Englishmen that Russia is pursuing her conquests in Central Asia for the purpose of pushing her frontier to some convenient point from which she may be able to invade India. (MacColl 1878: 237–238) Huang Zunxian, an advisor to He Ruzhang, the Chinese ambassador to Japan, developed in talks with the Korean envoy in 1880 a “Strategy for Korea.” Unique for its time in its sophisticated and informed understanding of Korea’s international environment, it seems aware of the information provided by MacColl, but defined the primary Russian target as the Far East. Huang predicted that the Korean refusal to open its ports for trade and its court for international relations would lead to the country’s altogether being “swallowed up” by Russia in the same way that Burma or India had been by England, the Philippines by Spain, and Indonesia by Holland. Should the other powers not tolerate such a disturbance of the “balance of powers,” Korea would be partitioned among them. Huang Zunxian’s “Strategy for Korea” can be read as also being a model for China. Huang later remembered saying to the ambassador at the time: China will inevitably change and follow the Western methods. I do not know whether this change will be like Japan’s self-strengthening, like Egypt’s being subjected, like India’s coming under [foreign] administration, or like Poland being partitioned, but the essential thing is that change will inevitably come. (Wagner 2017: 29–43) His understanding of the causes of Korea’s problem combined external pressure from Russia with internal weakness due to an unwillingness to reform and isolationism. The way out again combined internal reforms with a proactive foreign policy to make especially the United States a stakeholder in Korea’s sovereignty. In 1894, Timothy Richard, a British missionary journalist, whose newspaper Wanguo gongbao had published for many years already a steady stream of mostly commercial and political news items on India in Chinese, published a summary description of the ways in which different contemporary states had managed to develop and prosper (Li 1894). The purpose, laid out in the introduction, was to introduce these different options to Chinese elite readers who were ignorant about the great changes going on in the world. The examples included Russia since Peter, the Meiji reforms, India, and others. Focusing on the benefits of widespread literacy and education as well as of a developed infrastructure, these sketches disregard less attractive aspects such as the Russian partition

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of Poland or Great Britain’s colonial rule. As to the latter, Richard suggests that when the crown took over from the East India Company in 1858 after the Sepoy mutiny, it instituted a wide range of beneficial reforms by greatly enhancing literacy and general educational levels and developing modern infrastructure in India (Li 1894: 38–40). A few months after Richard’s work was published, the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Directly after China’s defeat, Richard followed the request of Weng Tonghe, the tutor of the Guangxu Emperor, to sketch Policies for a Reform of Governance, xin zheng ce, a text that eventually became the blueprint for the Chinese reforms in 1898 and their resumption in 1901 (Li 1895). Without explicitly referring to his previous work, it is clear that many of the ideas in the Policies for a Reform of Governance were developed out of his earlier comparative study. The India section in the translation of MacKenzie’s The Nineteenth Century in 1895, a book that was made mandatory reading for all Chinese officials in 1898, contained the familiar narrative (Maikenqi 1895: ch. 11). The East India Company was stumbling, against its will and commercial interest, into the conquest of South Asia to overcome the prevailing chaos, but as a business enterprise it was structurally incapable to govern it effectively and to the satisfaction of the inhabitants. After the crown had taken over following a brutal suppression of the Sepoy mutiny, however, a success story developed. MacKenzie concludes his section on India with the following comment: England has undertaken to rescue from the debasement of ages that enormous multitude of human beings. No enterprise of equal greatness was ever engaged in by any people. Generations will pass away while it is still in progress, but its final success cannot be frustrated. We who watch it in its early stage see mainly imperfections. Posterity will look only upon the majestic picture of a vast and utterly barbaric population, numbering well-nigh one-fourth of the human family, subdued, governed, educated, Christianized, and led up to the dignity of a free and self-governing nation by a handful of strangers who came from an inconsiderable island fifteen thousand miles away. (MacKenzie 1882: 248) Richard and Allen were both in close personal contact with the young men of letters who made their voice heard after China’s humiliating defeat and began clamoring for fundamental reforms to ward off what they claimed was a threatening partition of China among the powers. This option was much discussed by Western papers and diplomats as a possible outcome of the defeat. Russian and French voices expressed interest, while British and American voices were wary of the consequences. To make their case publicly, these young men, led by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and his student Liang Qichao (1873–1929), set up reform newspapers, formed provincial associations for the protection of the fatherland, and with this backing tried to push the government to agree to reforms. Their papers were the ancestors of the Chinese advocacy press that eventually, after 1949, came to monopolize the Chinese press altogether as organs of Party propaganda.

Stage 6: India in the Chinese-language reform advocacy press The tactical use of facts to support the advocacy of the moment is evident from the outset. After the Chinese defeat, Japan asked for huge reparations as well as the Liaodong Peninsula, but very quickly the other powers, especially Great Britain and the United

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States, intervened and forced it to abandon the territorial claim. This presaged a policy formalized a few years later when the United States pushed through a policy of preserving the territorial integrity of China while securing an “open door” for merchants from all countries. The new Chinese advocacy papers as well as the memorials written by the reformers to the throne emphasized the threat of partition as a tactically more useful argument for their reform plans. They offered two scenarios for China’s future, successful reform such as had happened in Japan, Russia, and Germany (colonized India did not make the cut), or refusal to reform with ensuing partition, colonization, or demise as in Poland, Egypt, India, or Vietnam next door (Wagner 2017). The young reformers after 1896 were not interested in the “inevitability” of Chinese reforms along Western lines mentioned by Huang Zunxian; they were trying to bring these reforms about. For the states that had, in their catchy formula, “gone under,” wangguo, they again selectively drew on foreign narratives available in Chinese, uniformly ascribing the demise of these countries to internal causes. The foreign powers involved were only using the occasion generated by the weakness resulting from stubborn adherence to old traditions, lack of patriotic commitment of the citizens, and divisions among the leadership. The tactical element in this narrative is that the reformers had no way to change the foreign powers, but they might be able to bring about internal reforms, and in fact the prospect of such reforms was strongly supported by the dominant powers, Great Britain and the United States. At this stage, they were hoping to gain traction with the court and the young Emperor himself and therefore did not include accusations of a collusion of the rulers of the states that had gone under with the foreign powers. Translations of Western works and writings in Chinese by authors with English as their mother tongue already enabled the young reformers between 1896 and 1898 to be very specific in their narratives about the demise of Poland, but for India no such handy sources were available to go beyond the general reference and Richard’s sketch of a development under colonial auspices that did not offer an attractive prospect. However, in an angry 1897 article in which he was trying to rouse “young China” to action and which was unusual in also beginning to take on the foreigners, Liang Qichao made it clear why China would never share the fate of India (Wagner 2017: 57–60). According to Liang Qichao, The Westerners’ ridiculing of China is really going too far. When they want to wipe out a state belonging to others, they inevitably bring this up in their parliament and publicize it in the newspapers, talking every day about the abysmal quality of its governance, the chaos in its social order, and the officials’ wanton abuse of power. When “going for the annihilation of a race,” the Westerners denounce its “ferociousness,” the “abomination of its culture,” and the “absurd restrictions of its customs,” so that the gentry and people in their own as well as their neighbouring countries hear about this. Then the kind ones among them are concerned and think of ways of reforming the polity in order to deliver it from these flaws, while the vicious ones come up with tricks, thinking of benefitting from these flaws for their own purposes. Consequently and because the masses [i.e. in these Western states] demand it time and again, they tear down this state and enslave its race while self-confidently looking on as if they had been guided by humaneness and justice.

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This had happened to India, just happened to Turkey, and was now happening to China. In short, “the recklessness with which we are marginalized, humbled, treated as savages, slaves, or animals, and are considered lazy has reached an extreme” (Liang 1897: 414). True, the schools and academies [in China] stubbornly keep to their dry wells, there is empty babble and formality while old habits have not been reformed, [but] there are up-and coming talents who have yet to enter adulthood with their exceptional qualities, great ambition, and heroic plans. Aya! If one says that heaven will not let China go under, then [the fact is that] the prospect of a partitioning of China is just five years away and the situation of internal strife is desperate. Even if we avoid saying the country will go under, can we say things are good? But if one says that heaven will let China go under, why then did it give her so many talents, only to have them treated like slaves and cattle? (Liang 1897: 413) Why should China be spared this abysmal fate? Because “Only [as shown by present-day Japan] between the yellow and the white races the difference [with regard to brains,] is not great, whatever the white man can do, the yellow man can do as well.” Evidently the brown, black, and red races cannot match this. The proof? He must have read in Richard’s paper a note about a comparison between the grades of Indian and British students in the new schools. Even over hundred years after the British had set up schools in India, he writes, “only the most accomplished [Indian] talents are a match for the people coming from England” (Liang 1897: 414). As I have shown elsewhere, the partition and wangguo narratives remained largely confined to the advocacy press (Wagner 2017: 120). However, in one editorial, the Shenbao, the most important Chinese-language commercial paper at the time, engaged with it. After emphatically denying Liang’s basic claim with its title “Partitioning China is NOT the Ultimate Aim of the Different Western States,” it indirectly sides with Liang’s national pride about the superiority of the Chinese. Even with the Trans-Siberian Railway nearing completion and the Russian threat increasing in a major way, it proclaimed, China would not go under. Poland and India “probably brought about this disaster upon themselves by being weak in power and short in wisdom.” China, the Shenbao editorial assured its readers, was different. “With its spiritual inheritance, vast territory and rich resources, it had great potential,” but it could only avoid “becoming meat for others on the butcher’s block” if it “got itself to bounce back.” This, it lamely added, would have to rely on the “commitment of people of good will and valor” to the nation over many years (Shenbao 1898: 1). After their short moment in the sun in 1898, when their narratives about Poland, Japan, and Russia caught the eye of the Emperor, the Empress Dowager’s coup after some three months of reform efforts had sent Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao running, with foreign help, for their lives to Hong Kong (Kang) and Japan (Liang). Their story about the impending partition of China now took a turn. The threesome of culprits for China’s weakness, the foreign powers with their devious propaganda, the Chinese conservatives with their attachment to the dysfunctional examination system, and the backward population was now replaced by the court, which was accused of conniving with the powers rather than defending Chinese interests, the conservatives, and the common folk with their primitive slave mentality and lack of patriotic commitment, a model taken straight from Murray’s description of India. The foreign powers were now exempt from criticism and the question why they still had not proceeded to the

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partition of China after the reforms were aborted was now, as Liang claimed, one of the “greatest riddles of the world” (Aishi ke (Liang Qichao) 1899: 2). For Liang Qichao, coming to Japan opened a vast window to the world. Japanese authors were pouring out histories of individual polities that went far beyond Okamoto’s outline, and finally the reformers were able to flesh out their thin stories about places such as India and Egypt. As neither of them read foreign languages, and Japanese could be deciphered because of the use of Chinese characters (if the works were not written in Chinese from the outset), Japanese works now replaced translations from English as the main source of information about the world. Already in 1895, Tamotsu Shibue, who had also written about the demise of Poland, published his 380-page Military History of the Encroachment on India, Indo sanshoku senshi (Shibue 1895). India’s demise here begins not with the Delhi Sultanate or the Mughal Empire, but instead with the Portuguese coming into the Indian Ocean, and it ends with the English crown taking full control after the Sepoy mutiny. In 1901, a Chinese translation was serialized. This was only the beginning of a long string of articles in the Chinese reform advocacy press that stressed the internal causes for India’s demise with constant cross references to China. Also in 1901, the Chinese translation of Ōhashi Otowa’s 1896 Japanese political novel about India’s demise, The Threatened Pacific, was published in Tokyo and Shanghai. The Chinese translator noted in a postface that he had written thirty to forty percent himself, and this insertion into the Chinese discussion is evident in the focus (Otowa 1901) As Catherine Yeh writes, this Chinese version “deals with India under British rule, but the focus is on the internal causes that brought on this situation, not on the role of Britain or the struggle against colonialism” (Yeh 2015: 118). The narrative, the implied object of which, at least for the translator, is China, has been unfolded during the following years in many long articles in the reform press. In the meantime, the parallels between India’s demise and China’s future became a point of fierce contention among the reformers. With Kang Youwei taking up residence in Darjeeling, there was a man who claimed first-hand knowledge of the country and had at the same time much to say about reform policies to pursue. After the Boxer upheaval and the foreign invasion to put it down in 1900, the court which had stopped the reform effort in 1898 and then sided with the Boxers was on the run. Despairing of the chances to move the entire country to reform, people in Guangdong province were planning a revolutionary move to have the province declare independence and pursue reform as an opening gambit for other provinces to follow with the ultimate aim to topple the Manchu dynasty. Kang Youwei, who thought China was not ripe for a revolution and that court-managed reforms for the entire country would be the way to go, intervened with a long letter to Liang Qichao which was widely reprinted at the time. He argued that the relative independence with which the Mughal princes had managed their fiefs had then led to their incessant internecine fighting. This separation into different fiefs was the very reason why India was conquered by Britain with such comparative ease. A strategy to first set up separate states in the provinces would inevitably lead to a foreign domination of the country as it had in India (Wagner 2019). (As this discussion went on, history took its own path. The Qing court proclaimed a “Reform of governance” in 1901 in which many of the 1898 initiatives such as the abolishment of the examination system and the preparations for a constitution were taken up again—without, however, rehabilitating Kang Youwei or Liang Qichao. Eventually, the provinces did exactly what had been proposed by the Guangdong revolutionaries, namely seceding from the Manchu court. This led to the resignation of the Manchu

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dynasty and the establishment of the Republic inheriting the largest territory “China” had ever encompassed.) This was not the end of the India debate. With the Trans-Siberian Railway having reached the Far East, the fears about a dismemberment of China were rekindled and the question what it would take to keep the country intact remained as relevant as ever. India was an important—if by far but not the only—historical example of an old cultured country going under, and the reform press was full of extensive descriptions of its demise. To give just one example, in 1903, the Zhejiang Tide, Zhejiang chao, a journal published by Chinese students in Japan, ran a serialized highly emotional piece entitled “The Causes for the Demise of India” by someone signing as Yegong (1903). The author drew his detailed knowledge about India from the extensive and detailed Japanese publications on this subject at the time, which, in turn, were not based on first-hand research, but summarized depictions in mostly English-language books. The communication between China and India continued to be mediated through cultural brokers from either side. If we go through the history of the East, the national territories there have unlimited resources of wealth, their races have the highest ideals, and as to being the first to be enlightened, and having the earliest civilization, everyone will mention but China and India. However, the so-called Indian empire from early on already early had 5.5 million square miles and a population of 256 million, but they are servile and submitted to the Anglo-Saxon race and now the word “India” is in fact nothing but a name from history. Aya! Their land is all smashed to pieces, their lot is all uncertain, this brown race will be forever enslaved as work animals and even in thousand generations they will not be restored. Woe! The old palace and the millet fields full of brambles, the bronze camels exuding a feeling of a state in demise. I truly can hardly bear talking about this! But how will the fate of this big empire north of the Himalaya [China] turn out? How really will it turn out? Looking at China today, it is like India in the past, looking at India today, it is the future China. [In the original it says the opposite, but this must be an error --RW]. Why should the policies pursued today by these whites in China be different from those they pursued earlier in India? Why should the history through which India went in the past be different from that experience by China in the present? Whenever I read a history of India, I have the feeling of foul smells filling the pages. Tears of blood and getting into my eyes and touch my heart and I truly do not know whether I am in India or China. Woe! China! China! Are you ending up going the way of India? As a matter of principle, it were the Indians [themselves] who brought about the demise of India, all the knowledge and power of the whites could not have achieved this. The character of the [Indian] race is chaotic, their languages topsy turvy, their religions all separate from each other. For the formation of a people of the entire state there is no unified spirit, no patriotic thinking, the elites are drowning themselves in song and dance, and know nothing of great purposes. Those below throw themselves wholeheartedly into debauchery and are unaware that enemies of their state are around. After having thrown the state into a situation between life and death they still do not even realize that it already had gone under! Only when it comes to hundred oppressive government measures [by the foreigners] and tyrannical restrictions of their freedom to the point of them not being allowed to speak even to the maids of the whites, then for the first time they feel some pain, but when

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they try to get rid of their fetters, unfortunately these [whites] have already sucked their flesh and blood dry and choked their throttle and even had they the courage of a Bai-ti-er-ye-li [a Mughal general] or the resolve of a Di-po-qi-bu [?], no arts will manage to restore them. Alas, India is lost! Those who are about to become [like] India [i.e. China] might as well quote this [Indian experience] as a warning precedent. As a general principle, idly speculating about a future fate is not as good as documenting past history. This “India” [i.e. China] is already playing out this tragedy, it leaps to our eyes. Even if heaven particularly wished to preserve this “India” [as Liang Qichao had claimed], which has not yet gone under, and would provide it with some emotions and some enthusiasm, and had made it unwilling to follow the path of India, how can we then not carefully read its history, and all together study the causes that led to its demise, so as to with all our strength avoid it … The author then goes on to offer a detailed sketch of six of these causes. As the essay remained incomplete, there might have been more. The Introduction had made it clear that the history of India’s demise was supposed to be a warning for a China that was going the way of India. Even though the text itself does not spell out in each case the Chinese parallel, we can do so (instead of the implied Chinese reader of 1903). A rich land with a conservative population devoted to agriculture and a comfortable life and with no martial spirit becomes the target of foreign pastoralists from the northwest. The Mongol, Caucasian, and Aryan invaders of northern India match the Shang, Zhou, and Qin in early China, all of which moved into the North China plain and established themselves there. The soft environment and sedentary life mellowed their warlike and innovative spirit, and in the end the Indian Aryans were quite different from the other Aryans (such as those later coming to India from Europe). “People living on fat soil do not go for talent,” as the saying goes. In the early phase, the Aryans developed a high culture that survives in the canonical Vedas. These were studied by the Brahmans, and the broad learning associated with this study in the early phase qualified them for leading positions in government and education in a clear parallel to the Chinese classics and the pre-imperial literate elite associated with its study. (The author forgot to make the point that Brahman learning became ever more ossified and dissociated from any capacity to address actual problems of the polity.) To protect their special status and power, the Aryans established a four-tiered caste system, rendered here as a “class system,” in which they occupied the highest rank as the Brahmans. They refused interaction with the lower orders. The lack of communication between high and low, and the ossification of classical learning to the point of becoming an obstacle to the elite’s capacity to deal with the problems of the present, were issues addressed in critical analyses of the actual Chinese polity since the 1870s. The Indian caste system only brings out the essence of the actual Chinese social hierarchies. As neither high nor low have a commitment to the country, there is no unifying spirit that would be needed for defense. After a long history of invasions from northwestern invaders in historical time, with its echo in the partial or complete control over the far eastern mainland by powers from Central and Northwest Asia down to the Manchu dynasty ruling China at the time, the Westerners in India appear as a new force. Initially focused on trade, they establish— mostly with the consent of local rulers—commercial outposts on the Indian coastline that look very much like the Treaty Ports in China. Pioneered by the Frenchman Joseph Dupleix (1697–1763), the commercial enterprises set up by Portugal, the Netherlands,

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France, and England moved from aiming at commercial control to securing political control by using military force to eliminate their Western competitors as well as gaining control over Indian lands with their tax income. India became the site of the fights between various foreign powers for control, with the local Indian population not looking beyond their villages and the Mughal princes focused on their struggle with other princes. Eventually the most powerful among them, England, won out, and the cooperative local Indian rulers were either made into British satraps or ended up wallowing in the luxury of the apanages provided for them by the British. The earlier stage described in this analysis echoes the competition between the Powers for economic control over parts of China; the second stage anticipates their coming to blows with each other on Chinese soil, something that was just beginning to happen in the Russo-Japanese War in China’s north. The process also suggests that the local rulers would rather connive with the British than stand up for the country, a charge leveled at the time against the Manchu rulers in China. The lack of patriotic commitment among the populace explains the capacity of the British to recruit, train, and command local troops to control the population in their new colony, defend it against threats by competitors such as Russia, and even provide the bulk of the common soldiers for military conflicts England had with other countries such as the Opium War with China. In this manner, a few thousand foreigners were able to run a country with a population of several hundred million. The vast majority of the Manchu troops in China were Han Chinese, but in 1903 the use of such troops by the Western powers was only an anticipation of a future development. All the key points in the Chinese reformers rhetoric are touched, the lack of patriotic commitment among the population with its “slave” mentality, the absence of national unity in defense of the nation, exacerbated by the “foreign” origins of the Manchu dynasty, and the connivance of the local rulers with the cunning foreigners. If no dramatic change happens, China’s future can be seen in India today. Like in India, the Chinese themselves will have brought about the demise of their country. One point not made in this but instead in other outlines of the demise of India is the role of Buddhism in mentally disarming the populace and focusing it on metaphysical matters while their country was going down the drain. For China, this implied a connection between the spread of Buddhism since the second century CE and the sharp increase in the foreign domination of parts or all of China since the fourth century CE to the present. Among the Chinese reformers quite a few—Liang Qichao among others—had developed strong Buddhist inclinations, translating the ideal of the boddhisattva sacrificing his own blissful extinction in nirvana for a commitment to save all sentient beings into the model for the social reformer. This opened the way to denounce the common folk as “deluded,” but also signaled a commitment to non-violent change. For writers who thought a willingness to fight for independence through violent confrontation was vital, the Buddhist ideal meant mentally disarming the people and opening the door to warlike outsiders. With all its factual wealth of presenting Indian history, the article shares with others of its kind the strong advocacy features that became the hallmark of political and historical writing since Liang Qichao. While the article recognizes that some of the foreign rulers in India actually got popular support—as had happened in China with for example the Kangxi Emperor—the advocacy shows up most clearly in the streamlining of Indian history with regard to England, the power that was dominant among the foreign powers when the article was written. In depicting the ruthlessness of the British East India Company in the exploitation of India, the text follows the precedents

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already set by McKenzie’s and Richard’s narrative but is silent about the efforts of the Crown after 1858 to actually improve material conditions in India, develop the legal and educational institutions that eventually formed the Indian nation, and defend it against foreign threats. Even Karl Marx acknowledged the great contribution England had made toward “the development of productive forces in India.” The role the United States and Great Britain had played around 1900 to actually defend the territorial integrity of China, even as the Manchu government was making secret treaties with Russia to cede large tracts of territory, did not fit the narrative of the foreigners’ “dividing up the Chinese melon” (Wagner 2017: 110). To get a quantitative idea of the development of the presence of India in China between 1850 and 1950, I suggest to draw, for the period between 1872 and 1938, on the titles of news and editorials in the most important Chinese-language commercial newspaper, the Shenbao, as well as the titles of periodical articles held by the Shanghai Municipal Library, which has the most extensive holdings because a very large part of the Chinese periodical press for this period came out in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Between 1872 and 1938, Shenbao carried altogether 1629 news and leading articles with “India” in the title. In the first eight years, up to a third could be editorial articles, but from then onward they were nearly all news releases, in large part from Reuters. In substance, the early news releases mostly dealt with the economy while some of the early editorial articles dealt with the quality of the British management of India and Indian attitudes toward British governance. The total number of articles before 1900 was 116, which is just over five a year. The paper then added pages for more advertisement and coverage, and for the next twenty years the numbers went up steeply, reaching 296 items, corresponding to about fifteen a year. Coverage expanded in substance by including political issues such as the activities of Indian anarchists and the activities of the Indian National Congress. An exceptional case is the translation of an article from an English paper one year after the Republic of China had been set up worrying that China might end up becoming “the India of Japan.” Another steep increase came in 1921. From then to 1938, on an average, 71 articles per year had India in the title. Of course, some of them dealt not with India, but rather with Tagore’s visit to China or activities of Indians in China. Coverage included the non-cooperation movement against the British authorities and for Indian independence as well as efforts to stop Indian opium from coming into China. Altogether, Indian developments had a substantial and markedly increasing presence in the Shenbao, with great efforts being made to cover Indian-British interaction. This general picture is confirmed by a look at the Chinese-language periodical press. A total of 9,363 articles had “India” in the title. This is about half the number of the articles with “France” in the title. Until 1896, the articles were carried in periodicals managed by missionaries, although the majority did not have a religious focus. From then on, the advocacy journals pioneered by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao dominated the coverage of India. By 1897, to give an example, thirteen of the fifteen periodicals with such articles were associated with the reformers, and they carried fifty of the ninety-five articles published in that year. The situation gradually changed with the development of periodicals with a commercial orientation, and by 1908 their number for the first time exceeded that of the advocacy journals (13 as against 10) as did the number of relevant articles (60 as against 55). This trend persisted. The advocacy press focused on India as a “state that had gone under” and, once agency reports and some first-hand reports

56  Rudolf G. Wagner

became available, on the struggle for Indian independence. The commercial papers would have regular news reports about earthquakes or the volume of tea production that were not carried in the advocacy press, but once the news agencies began to carry articles on the political movements in India, they would be carried. In quantitative terms, India coverage slowly crept up from an average of about thirty dedicated items per year between 1872 and 1900. The explosive development of the Chinese-language press after 1900 provided more space for the coverage of India. Between 1900 and the establishment of the Nanjing government in 1928, an average of about 120 dedicated articles appeared per year. This was followed by another steep increase to 540 articles a year on average. This is about half the articles with “France” in the title for this period. The numbers indicate that India had a comparatively important place in the Chinese public media, with its domestic politics relations with England and Russia, economy, customs, and modernization extensively covered, while it served as a constant reminder of the internal causes that would be decisive for the demise of a nation. Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to China in 1924 was the first public event in China with an Indian who had a public voice because he had received the highest literary honor from the West, the Nobel Prize for Literature. There were Sikh policemen on the streets of Shanghai, and Parsee and Sephardic Jewish merchants were greatly invested in the opium trade and real estate in the city, but none among them had a public voice. Chinese knowledge about India had nearly exclusively been culled from Western books in translation and from wire services. No Chinese newspaper had a correspondent abroad. There were a few Chinese travelogues, beginning with Kang Youwei’s, but even the very critical descriptions of Indian customs in the press never drew on them. Tagore was greeted with tactical enthusiasm by Liang Qichao as an emissary from China’s “older brother” India from where China had received Buddhism without being able to give anything back. The Indian himself insisted on his just being a poet, but he also articulated his own spiritual cosmopolitanism with Bengali roots and saw the rising nationalism with its agenda of modernization and urbanization with horror. He had been inspired by voices in the West such as Graf Keyserling in Germany, Richard Wilhelm in Peking, or Romain Rolland in Switzerland who felt that the butchery of World War I had shown that the West had lost the way and now needed light from the Orient. Tagore thus joined a small group of men from the East who were articulate in English and willing to show that the Orient indeed had this light to offer. For China, this would be Ku Hung-ming, a man from the Straits Settlement with an Edinburgh law degree who reinvented himself as the true heir of Confucius and proved this by espousing everything the young Chinese generation of the 1910s and 1920s despised. This also put Tagore into the camp of those upholding tradition, although he insisted that his parents had been utterly “modern” and that much of the scorn he received in India was directed at his “modernity.” He was not the advocate of non-cooperation with England because he felt one should adopt the best from wherever it might come (Hay 1970; Tagore 2002: 1–39). Happily enough, he also was impolite enough to speak his mind. His visit to Japan had started with an enthusiastic reception when he came and hardly a note when he left. The same was true for his China visit. Tagore set up a China Institute at the school he had founded, and the Guomindang, eager to find an ally against Japan, had financed it, but even this effort at reconnecting India and China had little impact, either politically or culturally. The notion that non-cooperation and non-violent resistance might be a powerful strategy that would even put the mighty British army and government onto the

China and India pre-1939  57

defensive had been introduced in China, but the ideal of heroic and violent struggle for national independence had too much traction in East Asia and was fueled by Komintern propaganda to become attractive. Even Liang Qichao, who had invited Tagore in the first place, had been committed to it since his early days, and the leaflets distributed by Communist students during Tagore’s talks drove home the point by associating the visitor’s attitude with the weak-willed and weak-boned mindset of a people which had been colonized without much resistance. The increasingly rich and diverse knowledge about India available in China in articles as well as books was not able to undo the basic narrative of India being a country for the demise of which its own people were responsible (Yuan 1931). It had become a trope already by 1900, and it was revived time and again ever since. Liang Qichao had adopted for himself the cloak of the secular bodhisattva committed to save his countrymen from the hell of the present, but he was Buddhist enough not to advocate violence. At the same time, he had been instrumental in establishing a trope that the Chinese people lacked patriotic commitment and the willingness to sacrifice themselves for the public good while reformers like him were shouting themselves hoarse with warnings about the lurking crisis. This narrative eventually prompted Hu Shi, a student of Dewey’s and the Guomindang ambassador in the United States, to offer an explanation that linked the “slave” mentality of his compatriots bemoaned by Liang Qichao with the Buddhism he has espoused. In what must be reckoned as one of his silliest articles, Hu Shi pronounced in a talk for the 300th anniversary of Harvard University that the cause for the weak popular resistance against the Japanese advance in China was the “Indianization of China” (Hu 1937) To make his case, he created an original Chinese peasant who was the embodiment of Dewey’s pragmatism, hard-working, pragmatic, goal-oriented. This pragmatic fellow had then been confronted with the phantasy world of Buddhism, which imprisoned him with its law of Karma, its gods and hells, and its promise of the Western Paradise for the simple believers. This Indianization of the pragmatic Chinese peasant’s mind, he claimed, was the ultimate cause for the demise of China at the hands of Japan which the world was just witnessing. All the markers of advocacy and tactical thinking are present in this article, down to the absence of reliable evidence and the blind claim to the Deweyan essence of the Chinese peasant. Ironically, he wrote this article as a high Guomindang official at the same time when the Guomindang was trying to establish links with India as a possible ally against Japan. By the late 1930s, the tropes of India being committed to “non-violent resistance” to attain its national sovereignty, while in China revolutionaries advocating armed struggle against the local governments and foreign invaders were gaining the upper hand, had become internationally established in both text and image. The Swiss journalist, Walter Bosshard (1895–1975), a pioneer in the development of photojournalism, was perhaps instrumental in juxtaposing these tropes. In 1930, he published extensive photoreportages on Mahatma Gandhi and the non-violent resistance he advocated (Bosshard 1930a, 1930b, 1931). Between 1933 and 1938, he covered the civil war in China and eventually produced a photoreportage about the Communist base in Yan’an in 1938 with a portrait of Mao Zedong (Bosshard 1938a, 1938b, 1938c; Pfrunder 2018).2 Bosshard’s portraits of Gandhi and Mao are shown in Figure 2.1a and b. Both leaders were very conscious of the role their international image would play for their struggle and therefore gave access to journalists sympathetic to their cause.

58  Rudolf G. Wagner

Figure 2.1 (a and b) Portraits of Mao Zedong before the entrance of the Red Academy in Yan’an on 26 April 1938, and Mahatma Gandhi studying “war reports” on 7 April 1930. This image of Gandhi was on the cover of the issue of Münchner Illustrierte Presse 18 May 1930, which contained Bosshard’s photoreportage “Mahatma Gandhi privat!” Source: Portrait of Mao Zedong from Bosshard (1938a). Portrait of Mahatma Gandhi from Bosshard (1930b). Reprinted with permission from Fotostiftung Schweiz/Archiv für Zeitgeschichte.

Conclusions Judging primarily from the Chinese record, the sunny pre-history of Hindi Chini bhai bhai is an invention of the early 1950s with some actually marginal antecedents. Both sides acted in both historical and the modern period in a culturally introvert manner and were not interested in exploring the other. It follows that if people from either side were talking about the other, they were actually talking about themselves. Writing in Chinese about Buddhist India was writing about a China that should become sanctified land like India, and writing about modern India in Chinese since the middle of the nineteenth century was writing about a China that should at all cost avoid following in the sad tracks of India. Tagore’s speeches in China repeated the pattern. His interest in China did not go beyond a tourist’s: he was essentially talking about himself and his concerns, but did not notice that even when Liang Qichao introduced him with his great embrace, he had left Tagore’s main political and spiritual concerns unmentioned. This introvert approach from both sides involved a rigorous selection of the aspects of the other that were considered relevant with as rigorous an excision of those not meeting this standard.

China and India pre-1939  59

Hu Shi’s tunnel vision of China’s enfeeblement through “Indianization” not only excised the very important role the Buddhist variant of a social gospel since the late nineteenth century had played in offering Chinese reformers an authentic “Chinese” framework for their activism but also the option of Buddhism as a mental armor for the Japanese samurai class of warriors. Many observers and critics had pointed to the culturally and geographically narrow range of interest on both sides for the other, not only among the large majority of the village population but also among the local and national elites. Visits from each side to understand the actual conditions of the other without a preset agenda are not to be found. This has been different for the outside powers (Mongols, Manchu, British, Japanese, to name just a few) who had been gaining control over either the South Asian or the East Asian mainland realms. Their much more international horizon of political, military, and religious knowledge and interest, however, did not percolate down to their local subjects. While the ultimate agency in the India–China interactions was with the people on the two sides, it was exercised only in deciding whether to accept or reject objects, ideas, or information about the other from the other side, not in actually creating the options for this interaction. The agency in this domain was exercised by two groups. The first were outside brokers whether these were Soghdian merchants, Kuchean Buddhist missionaries, Arab and Persian traders, the mostly Anglo-American Westerners (sometimes via Japanese mediation), or the Swiss photo-journalist Walter Bosshard. The second consisted of a very small number of individuals from each side who acquired the skills of translators. Neither of the two groups had the wherewithal to force acceptance of their offerings. Altogether, the involvement of people from South Asia or the East Asian mainland in creating these options of interaction was marginal, with some momentous exceptions mostly from the Chinese side such as Xuanzang and Zheng He’s fleet. The lack of direct links is highlighted by the lack of investment on either side into learning any of the languages of the other. The number of known Chinese Sanskrit readers (not to mention speakers of Indian spoken languages) is totally disproportionate to the number of highly educated Chinese Buddhist monks and can probably be calculated with the fingers of both hands. The number of people from South Asia with the capacity to read Chinese, Mongol, or Manchu or communicate in any of these languages was even lower. In sum, the very selective local appropriation of the offerings of cultural brokers shows how little was the influence of the instrument that has been so widely used in post-colonial research to explain transcultural interaction: power.

Notes 1 I am about to finish a detailed study on this installation. 2 These photographs were also showcased as part of an exhibition in Heidelberg, Germany. See Envisioning Asia: Gandhi and Mao in the Photographs of Walter Bosshard (2019).

Bibliography Aishi ke (Liang Qichao) (1899) “Guafen weiyan,” Qingyi bao 15 (May): 1–4. The Akbarnama of Abu-L-Fazl (1897–1918) Translated by H. Beveridge, Bibliotheca Indica, New Series 1(910) (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal). Bagchi, P. C. (1981) China and India: A Thousand Years of Cultural Relations (Rev. ed. Bombay: Hind Kitabs Ltd).

60  Rudolf G. Wagner Bayly, C. A. (2004) The Birth of the Modern World 1718–1940: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell). Bosshard, W. (1930a) “Gandhi marschiert,” Münchner Illustrierte Presse (13 April) (Munich: Knorr & Hirth GmbH). Bosshard, W. (1930b) “Mahatma Gandhi privat!” Münchner Illustrierte Presse (18 May) (Munich: Knorr & Hirth GmbH). Bosshard, W. (1931) Indien kämpft (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder). Bosshard, W. (1938a) “Portrait of Mao Zedong before the Entrance of the Red Academy in Yan’an” (26 April), Fotostiftung Schweiz/Archiv für Zeitgeschichte. Bosshard, W. (1938b) “China’s Blue-Clad Reds Harry Japan: From Far-Away Yan’an They Rule North China,” Life (8 August) (New York: Henry Luce). Bosshard, W. (1938c) “Yan’an 1938,” 16 mm film, 22 minutes (silent), Archive ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Chen, J. (2017) “The Borderland Complex and the Construction of Sacred Sites and Lineages in East Asian Buddhism,” in V. Mair, ed., Buddhist Transformations and Interactions. Essays in Honor of Antonino Forte (Amherst: Cambria Press): 65–106. Dubs, H. H. (1946) “Han Yu and the Buddha’s Relic: An Episode in Medieval Chinese Religion,” Review of Religion 11: 5–17. Duyvendak, J. J. L. (1947) “The Dreams of the Emperor Hsuan-Tsung,” in Kern Institute, ed., India Antiqua (Leiden: Brill): 102–108. Eckel, M. D. (1992) To See the Buddha: A Philosopher’s Quest for the Meaning of Emptiness (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco). Envisioning Asia: Gandhi and Mao in the Photographs of Walter Bosshard (2019) Exhibition curated by Gayatri Sinha and Peter Pfrunder, Völkerkundemuseum VPST, Heidelberg, Germany, 28 April–10 June. Faxian. “Gaoseng Faxian zhuan,” Dazheng Xinxiu Da Cangjing T2085.51: 857a3–866c6. Forte, A. (1985) “Hui-chih (fl. 676–703 A.D.), A Brahman Born in China,” Estratto da Annali dell‘Istituto Universitario Orientale 45: 106–134. Gutzlaff, C. (1833) “Prospectus,” appended to “A Monthly Periodical in the Chinese Language,” Chinese Repository 2 (1 June): 186–187. Guy, J. (1993–1994) “The Lost Temples of Nagapattinam and Quanzhou: A Study in SinoIndian Relations,” Journal of the Institute of Silk Road Studies 3: 291–310. Hay, S. N. (1970) Asian Ideas of East and West. Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hu, S. (1937) “The Indianization of China: A Case Study in Cultural Borrowing,” in Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences, ed. Independence, Convergence, and Borrowing in Institutions, Thought, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press): 219–247. Kalhāna’s Râjatarangi ṇ î (Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir) (1892) Translated by M. A. Stein (Bombay: Education Society’s Press). Kern, M. (2000) The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society). Kracke, E. A. Jr. (1976) “Early Visions of Justice for the Humble in East and West,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 96(4) (October–December): 492–498. Lamotte, E. (1960) “Manjušr ī,” T’oung Pao 48(1): 1–96. Ledderose, L. (2004) “Carving Sutras into Stone before the Catastrophe: The Inscription of 1118 at Cloud Dwelling Monastery near Beijing,” Proceedings of the British Academy 125: 381–454. Li, T. (1894) “Yindu biantong xingsheng ji,” in Lieguo biantong xingsheng ji (Shanghai: Guangxuehui). Li, T. (1895) Xinzheng ce (Shanghai: Zhixue hui). Liang, Q. (1897) “Lun Zhongguo zhi jiang qiang,” Shiwu bao 31: 413–420. ———See also Aishi ke.

China and India pre-1939  61 Liu, X. (1996) Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Liu, Y. (1935) “Xi shi ji,” in Y. W. Wang, ed., Congshu jicheng chubian, vol. 3911 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan).MacColl, M. (1878) Three Years of the Eastern Question (London: Chatto and Windus). ———See also Maigaoer. Maigaoer (Malcolm MacColl) (1880) Ouzhou dong fang jiaoshe ji, translated by Y. Lin (Young J. Allen) and A. Qu (Shanghai: Shanghai zhizaoju). Maikenqi (Robert MacKenzie) (1895) Taixi xinshi lanyao (Shanghai: Mei Hua shuguan). Translation of the Nineteenth Century. A History (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1882). Murray, H. (1834) An Encyclopaedia of Geography, 3 vols (Philadelphia, PA: Carey, Lee, and Blanchard, 1837). Nickel, L. (2013) “The First Emperor and Sculpture in China,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 76(3) (October): 413–447. Nizam Oul-Moulk (1893) Siasset Namèh: Traité du Gouvernement. Composé pour le Sultan Melik-Châh par le Vezir, translated by C. Schefer (Paris: Ernest Leroux). Otowa, S. (Ōhashi Otowa) (1901). Leiluan Dongyang (Tokyo: Taihō gentarō). Peng, K. and Zhu, Y. (1995) “New Research on the Origins of Cowries Used in Ancient China,” Sino-Platonic Papers 68: 1–21. Pfrunder, P. (2018) “Facing Conflict,” in University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) and Fotostiftung Schweiz (ed.) Bosshard in China: Documenting Social Change in the 1930s (Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong, University Museum and Art Gallery): 11–21. Pollock, S. and Elman, B. (ed.) (2018) What China and India Once Were. The Pasts that May Shape the Global Future (New York: Columbia University Press). Richard, Timothy, see Li Timotai. Sen, T. (2003) Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Re-Alignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Sen, T. (2017) China, India, and the World: A Connected History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). Shenbao (1898) “Lun guafen Zhongguo fei Taixi geguo zhi benxin” (16 September) (Shanghai: Major Company Ltd). Shibue, T. (1895) Indo sanshoku senshi (Tokyo: Habubunkan). S ī r ā f ī, A. Z. Ḥ. I. Y. (1733) Silsilat al-taw ār īkh. Ancient Accounts of India and China, by Two Mohammedan Travellers, Who Went to Those Parts in the 9th Century, translated by E. Renaudot (London: S. Harding). Tagore, R. (2002) “Autobiographical,” in R. Rachanavali, ed., Talks in China. Lectures Delivered in March and April 1924 (New Delhi: Rupa Publication): 1–38. Takagi, T. (1904) Hikaku shinwagaku (Comparative Mythology) (Tokyo: Hakubunkan). Thampi, M. (ed.) (2017) India and China in the Colonial World (Abingdon: Routledge). Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri; or, Memoirs of Jahangir: From the First to the Twelfth Year of His Reign (1909– 1914) Translated by A. Rogers and edited by H. Beveridge (London: Royal Asiatic Society). Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah, texte arabe et accompagné d’une Tradition (1855) Translated by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimérie Imperiale). Wagner, R. G. (1999) “The Shenbao in Crisis: The International Environment and the Conflict between Guo Songtao and the Shenhao,” Late Imperial China 20(1): 107–138. Wagner, R. G. (2017) “’Dividing Up the [Chinese] Melon, guafen’: The Fate of a Transcultural Metaphor in the Formation of National Myth,” The Journal of Transcultural Studies 1: 9–122. Wagner, R. G. (2019a) “Asymmetry in Transcultural Interaction,” in L. Abu-Er-Rub, C. Brosius, S. Meurer, D. Panagiotopoulos and S. Richter, eds., Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies (Abingdon: Routledge): 15–38. Wagner, R. G. (2019b) “The Global Context of a Modern Chinese Quandary: Doubting or Trusting the Records of Antiquity,” Monumenta Serica 67(2): 441–504.

62  Rudolf G. Wagner Wagner, R. G. (in press) “Facing the Modernity of the Others: Chinese Eschatological Fears for the Nation and the Race, 1895–1910.” Yang, B. (2011) “The Rise and Fall of Cowrie Shells: The Asian Story,” Journal of World History 22(1): 1–25. Yegong (1903) “Yindu miewang zhi yuanyin,” Zhejiang chao 1: 68–77, and 5: 11–17. Yeh, C. V. (2015) The Chinese Political Novel. Migration of a World Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Yuan X. (1931) Indu duli yundong shil űe (Shanghai: Shenzhou guoguang she). Zuercher, E. (1959) The Buddhist Conquest of China (Leiden: Brill).

3

Relations between the Republic of China and India, 1937–1949 Tansen Sen

The early twentieth century was one of the most vibrant phases in China–India interactions. The introduction of steamships, the global trade in cotton and wool, and the formation of migrant networks fostered connections between the two regions. The fall of the Qing Empire in 1911, the discourse on Tibet among the British, Chinese, and Tibetan representatives in 1913–1914, and the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to China in 1924 catalyzed these connections. Diplomatic exchanges took place not only between the Guomindang (GMD) and the British Indian government, but also between GMD representatives and the leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC). Tagore’s visit led to the creation of educational networks that nurtured interactions among Indian and Chinese intellectuals, students, and artists. The period witnessed brisk commercial dealings, albeit beset with vicissitudes, that ranged from border trade to long-distance maritime commerce. At the same time, migrant communities tried to carve out new livelihoods for themselves in foreign lands, some of whom actively engaged in the political developments that were taking place in their ancestral homelands. This chapter focuses on four facets of China–India relations from the beginning of the full-fledged Japanese military expansion into East and Southeast Asia in 1937 to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, covering the political, cultural, and economic aspects, as well as the experiences of the migrant populations. It demonstrates the multifaceted and intricate nature of the China–India relationship during this brief yet critical period, which set the stage for their more complicated relationship in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, several areas of contention between the Republic of India (ROI) and the PRC, including with regard to the status of Tibet, emerged during this period. Similarly, some of the cultural exchanges that took place in the 1950s had precedents in the contacts established during the 1930s and 1940s. In other words, the decade or so leading up to the formation of a new regime in China and the Indian independence is essential for understanding the bilateral relationship that ensued during the 1950s and beyond.

The political sphere The Republic of China (ROC) and British India both faced a series of domestic challenges and encountered external turmoil during the second half of the 1930s. The expansion of fascism in Europe, the launch of a Japanese military offensive in East Asia, the civil war in China, and disagreements within the INC influenced and shaped relations between China and India.1 Multiple networks of political consultation and collaboration emerged during this period of uncertainty that centered specifically on

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joint responses to the Japanese military threat and the issue of Indian independence. The GMD and British government officials in India, members of the INC, and leaders of the Muslim League took part in such exchanges in the 1930s and the early 1940s. The visit of Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) to China in 1939 and Chiang Kai-shek’s ( Jiang Jieshi, 1887–1975) tour of British India in 1942 highlighted these political interactions, in addition to other official visits and goodwill missions also promoting anti-Japanese solidarity. Furthermore, issues related to the setting up of educational and cultural exchange programs and the promotion of trade formed part of the agenda for some of these visits and exchanges. The end of World War II and the British decision shortly thereafter to grant independence to India led to a significant shift in the political discourse between the Indian and Chinese leaders. This is evident from the differences between the GMD and the provisional Indian government with regard to the status of Tibet that surfaced at the Asian Relations Conference held in Delhi in March–April 1947. This event and the exchange of official communications between the GMD and Indian officials from 1947 to 1949 indicate the existence of potent fissures in the relationship between China and India that remained unresolved at the time of the founding of the PRC and continued to define China–India relations thereafter. In the October 1937 issue of The Modern Review, Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945), who a few months later became the president of the INC and then, in 1943, led an anti-British movement with the support of the Japanese, wrote an insightful essay detailing the impact of Japan’s invasion of China. He concluded the piece by expressing his sympathies for China. Japan should be credited for putting “the Western imperialist powers on the defensive—not only in the military but also in the economic sphere,” but he argued that with our admiration for Japan, where such admiration is due, our whole heart goes to China in her hour of trial. China must still live—for her own sake and for humanity. Out of the ashes of this conflict she will once again rise phoenix-like as she has so often done in the past. (Bose 1937: 376) Such sympathies, which were expressed by all the top INC leaders, characterized the political relationship between the INC and the ROC until the end of World War II. These considerations led to the dispatch of a medical mission from India to China to aid in the Chinese war effort and the declaration of a “China Day” in support of the Chinese struggle against the Japanese. For its part the GMD funded the establishment of the first major institution dedicated to China Studies in India, which was actively engaged in educational and diplomatic exchanges between China and India (see below). However, there was more to war-time politics than the mutual expression of sympathies and support. Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army’s (INA) collaboration with the Japanese in the war, China’s frustrations with Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), Nehru, and other INC leaders over their refusal to support the British in their war efforts, and British suspicion of the GMD espionage network in India were among the facets that made the triangular relationship between the GMD,2 Indian political leaders, and the British government extremely complex. Only three aspects of these multilayered connections in the political sphere are outlined here in order to demonstrate the changing nature of the relationship in the brief twelve-year period examined in this chapter. The first relates to the interactions between the GMD and the INC leadership;

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the second focuses on the emergence of Tibet as a major bone of contention between China and India; and the third recounts the events leading up to the eventual recognition of the PRC by the Indian government. The leadership networks The political interactions between the INC and the GMD in the 1930s and 1940s were entangled with two key personal relationships, one between Jawaharlal Nehru and Soong Ching-ling (Song Qingling, 1893–1981), the wife of the late Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan, 1866–1925), the other between Nehru and Chiang Kai-shek. While the former relationship resulted in multiple forms of cultural initiatives between China and India that continued even after the establishment of the PRC, the latter was marked by mutual admiration and shared concerns—at least until the Asian Relations Conference in 1947.3 In addition, Nehru established contacts with the Chinese Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhu De (1886–1976). The GMD, at the urging of the British, similarly made certain that it included members of the Muslim League, especially Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), when reaching out to the Indian leadership. There were also frequent interactions between British officials in India and the GMD. The objective of many of these interactions between 1937 and 1945 concentrated on ways of opposing Japanese expansion into East and Southeast Asia. Nehru’s first direct encounter with Chinese officials took place at the Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism organized by the World Anti-Imperialist League in Brussels in 1927.4 In the report he submitted to the INC after his return to India, Nehru indicated his admiration for the “energy and enthusiasm” of the Chinese delegates. The Indian and Chinese delegations jointly drafted a declaration criticizing British imperialism and blaming the British for disrupting the exchanges between China and India. It demanded the prevention of “Indian money and man-power from being used for the enslavement of the Chinese people” (Nehru 1927: 156). Nehru and Soong Ching-ling, the latter in absentia, were among the five members appointed as the honorary presidents of the General Council of the League. It was not until later the same year that Nehru and Soong met for the first time in the Soviet Union. Although Nehru invited Soong to visit India, the British refused her a visa on two occasions. The contacts between Nehru and Soong Ching-ling thus took place primarily through an exchange of letters, which, in the late 1930s, were focused on providing medical supplies and other support to the China Defence League (later called the China Welfare Institute), an organization Soong had founded in Hong Kong in 1938.5 A request for medical help also came from the Chinese Communist general Zhu De in November 1936. In his letter to Nehru, Zhu De thanked the INC leader for organizing events and expressing support for China’s war against the Japanese, and requested financial, military, and medical help, including medical supplies, doctors, and nurses (Nehru [1958] 1988: 260–263). At Nehru’s urging, within a year the INC had organized a group of five doctors, who reached China in September 1938 with two ambulances, medical equipment, and medicines (Yang 1974: 39). The medical mission, under the leadership of Dr Madanlal Atal, worked in several regions of China, moving from Hankou to Sichuan, Chongqing, and eventually to the Communist base in Yan’an. Although the mission encountered financial and health issues, the rigors of war, and infighting among its members, it has remained one of the most enduring legacies of China–India collaboration, one that transcended political rivalries between the GMD

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and the Communists in China, as well as the later border dispute between the ROI and the PRC.6 Meeting members of this medical mission may have been one of Nehru’s objectives when he visited China in 1939 (Nehru 1940: 22). Nehru was steadfast in his desire to make the trip despite concerns expressed by his associates and even his daughter Indira (Samarani 2005: 11). Letters to V. K. Menon written on 10 July 1939 and to the Chinese Consul-General in Calcutta dated 5 August 1939 suggest that Nehru even drafted his own itinerary, which initially included a meeting with Soong Ching-ling in Hong Kong (Nehru 1972: 10.73–74). On 6 August, Nehru wrote to Mao Zedong expressing his desire to meet the Communist leader during his planned trip. When his trip was confirmed, Nehru explained, “I go to China because China is the symbol today of magnificent courage in the struggle for freedom, of a determination which has survived untold misery and unparalleled disaster, of unity before a common foe” (Nehru 1940: 18). He also underscored the shared history and the prospect of the two countries working together in the future “for their own good and the good of the world.” Departing from Calcutta (now Kolkata), Nehru reached Kunming on 22 August 1939 via Bangkok, Saigon, and Hanoi. After a one-night stay in the city, Nehru arrived at the ROC war-time capital of Chongqing, where he met Chiang Kai-shek, several high-ranking GMD officials, the Communist general Ye Jianying (1897–1986), and one of the doctors representing the Indian medical mission. He also experienced five air raids, went into the war “dug-outs,” and visited local refugee camps, orphanages, schools, factories, and universities.7 However, he expressed regret at being unable to travel to Yan’an and see the other members of the Indian medical mission and the Chinese Communist leaders due to his “rapid return to India” (Nehru 1972: 10.112– 113). In Chongqing, he broadcast a message in Hindi that offered support and sympathies to the Chinese people on behalf of the Indians. Nehru emphasized that the Chinese war against the Japanese would affect “our country and the world.” He added, “With this war is associated our independence” (Nehru 1972: 10.101). Nehru also drafted “A Note on the Development of Contacts between China and India” in Chongqing (Nehru 1972: 10.102–108). Outlining comparable historical experiences and the prospects of a shared future, Nehru proposed seven avenues of cooperation between India and China: (1) initiating “an efficient and regular service of information between the two countries”; (2) promoting the exchange of experts in the areas of cottage industries, cooperatives, and agrarian problem; (3) establishing cultural contacts between universities in the two countries; (4) setting up direct mailing services; (5) admitting Chinese representatives to the annual meeting of the INC; (6) drafting a “common policy vis-à-vis big European and world changes”; and (7) creating specialized organizations that would foster “direct contact with each other in China and India” (Nehru 1972: 10.106–108). Although Nehru’s visit to China was cut short due to the outbreak of war in Europe, his connections with the GMD leadership were now firmly established. Keen on fostering these connections, the GMD had prepared several documents outlining the war-time situation in China. These were translated into English for Nehru. The above-mentioned note written by Nehru was also rendered into Chinese for the GMD officials (AH 00208010600071001). Contacts between the Chinese and Indian leadership accelerated over the next few months, with visits to India by Dai Jitao (1891–1949), the head of the Examination Yuan, and Buddhist and Islamic goodwill missions led, respectively, by the monk Taixu (1890–1947) and Ma Tianying (1900–1982).8 The main objective of these Chinese visits was to seek the support of the Indian leaders in the war against the Japanese.

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However, Mohandas Gandhi’s and Jawaharlal Nehru’s persistent refusal to support the British in their war plans frustrated the GMD leadership. In 1942, Chiang Kai-shek made one final attempt to persuade Gandhi and Nehru when he visited India (Yang 2015: 131). Chiang’s arrival in Delhi on 9 February 1942 triggered a three-way discourse between the British, the INC leadership, and the GMD official on the Indians’ refusal to cooperate with the British in the war against Germany and Japan, as well as the issue of Indian independence. Chiang met various British officials, including the Viceroy of India and the Governor of Bengal, INC leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru, and Maulana Azad, and Jinnah. Chiang found that the INC leaders were still adamantly opposed to cooperating with the British, while the latter were unwilling to discuss the plans for Indian independence. Chiang’s efforts to mediate between the Indian leaders and the British did not yield any results. However, after the visit, Chiang and his wife Soong Mei-ling became adherent supporters of Indian independence. In his “Letter of Farewell,” Chiang wrote: “I firmly believe that our ally Britain will promptly grant Indian people substantive political power” (Yang 2015: 135). Although Chiang was disappointed with Nehru’s and Gandhi’s positions with regard to non-cooperation with the British, he continued to press for Indian freedom with British officials and even Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States. For her part, Soong Mei-ling advocated Indian independence among civil-society organizations in China and the United States, often drawing contempt from British officials.9 In August 1942, both Chiang Kai-shek and his wife called for Nehru’s and Gandhi’s immediate release when the British government in India arrested the pair. Their support for Indian independence continued through to the end of World War II. Eventually in 1946, when the British allowed the formation of an Indian provisional government, the GMD quickly recognized it and appointed its first ambassador to Delhi. The war-time political collaboration between the GMD and British officials did not mitigate the disagreements the two regimes had with regard to Tibet. Although shortly after Chiang’s visit to India the British tried to convince the Tibetan Cabinet (Kashag) to facilitate transportation of goods between India and China through their territory, “mutual mistrust,” as Hsiao-Ting Lin (2006: 126–132) points out, prevented any productive relationship between the GMD and the British when it came to Tibet. During the post-war period, Tibet was a key part of the GMD’s plans to consolidate its frontier territories but the negotiations between the Tibetan representatives and senior GMD officials in the late 1945 and 1946 failed to yield any concrete results. For Chiang and other GMD officials the formation of the Indian provisional government might have seemed like an opportunity to make inroads with the Tibetans without any interference from a third party. If so, such expectations quickly dissipated. The issue of Tibet Luo Jialun (Lo Chia-lun, 1897–1969) was the first ROC ambassador to India. Arriving in Delhi in early 1947, he soon had to address one of the thorniest issues affecting relations between the ROC and the emerging independent Indian state. The British Indian government had bequeathed the problem of Tibet with regard to its status vis-à-vis the Chinese state and the borders that separated it from the Indian state. The British had been involved in border negotiations with Tibetan and Chinese representatives since the early twentieth century and had recognized Chinese suzerainty over Tibet but not Chinese sovereignty. Neither the INC nor the Muslim League was part of these

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discussions until plans for the Asian Relations Conference were communicated to the Tibetans and Chinese in 1946. The idea of organizing a conference highlighting Asian solidarity originated in an op-ed entitled “Colonialism Must Go,” which Nehru (1946) wrote for the New York Times on 3 March 1946. In the op-ed, Nehru called for closer links among Asian countries, including those in the Indian Ocean region. The Indian Council for World Affairs (ICWA) was tasked with planning the event. An organizing committee led by Mrs Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) drafted the agenda for the conference and sent out invitations to all Asian countries, as well as to Egypt. Tibet and the ROC received separate invitations, which triggered debates within the GMD leadership over Nehru’s intentions and India’s policy toward Tibet. Some in the GMD believed that Nehru had “ulterior motives in mind” (Yang 1974: 408), including wanting to continue British policies on Tibet, while others saw the conference as Nehru’s attempt to “promote his personal prestige” in Asia (Dai [1946] 1971).10 When Tibet accepted the invitation, the ROC government launched an official protest with the provisional Indian government. Some within the GMD government wanted to boycott the conference altogether. Through K. P. S. Menon,11 Nehru indicated to GMD officials that the conference was not intended as a political event but would deal “principally with cultural and economic matters and will not consider the internal situation in any country” (IOR L/PS/371/63541: 155–156). Chiang reluctantly agreed to send a delegation to the conference in Delhi, members of which were primarily intellectuals and low-ranking officials. However, when the Chinese delegation arrived at the venue they were furious to find that the map of Asia displayed on the conference podium separated Tibet from the rest of China. The delegation insisted that if the map were not rectified, they would withdraw from the conference. Eventually, one of the members of the Chinese delegation resolved the issue by painting over “the Tibetan region in the same colour as that used for China” (Yang 1974: 408–409). However, the conference was marked by several other disagreements between the Chinese delegates and those representing the host country. This included the location of a permanent “center for Inter-Asian relations,” which the latter wanted to set up in India, while the Chinese argued that, “if a center of inter-Asian relations were to be set up, it should be located in China” (Platov 1947: 95). The personal relationship between Nehru and Chiang Kai-shek seems to have soured after the Asian Relations Conference. In July 1947, Chiang Kai-shek, writing in his diary, expressed his displeasure with India’s attempt to “consolidate control over Tibet.” There were no further communications between Nehru and Chiang subsequent to the conference (Yang 2015: 140). Shortly after the fall of the GMD regime in China, Luo Jialun, who was told about the impending recognition of the PRC by the Indian government, warned Chiang that Nehru, in order to deny Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, might attempt to recognize the Communist government in China in exchange for their acceptance of the 1914 Simla Agreement. In one of his telegrams to Chiang, Luo quoted Nehru as saying that, “In a vague sense we have accepted the fact of Chinese suzerainty [over Tibet], [but] how far it goes one does not know” (AH 002000000453A).12 The Communists in China were equally suspicious about Nehru’s position over the status of Tibet, calling him a “stooge” and a “running dog” of the British and American imperialists. This name-calling continued into the mid-1950s ( Jain 1981: 17–19). Chiang, on the occasion of India’s recognition of the PRC, became completely resentful of Nehru and started using a homonym for the Indian prime minister’s name in his diary that literary meant “Mud Black-roadist” (“Niheilu”) (Lin 2017: 197).

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Recognition of the PRC On 22 November 1948, K. M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador to the ROC, wrote a memorandum called “When China goes Communist,” in which he predicted that “within the course of the next twelve months the unity of China proper will be reestablished under a Communist regime” (IOR L/PS/371/75798: 37). Panikkar outlined the possible impact within China and projected the implications of this political transition for India. Panikkar expected Tibet to declare its independence shortly after the collapse of the GMD regime. If the British, American, and Indian governments recognized this claim for independence, then, Panikkar speculated, “there may be some hope of keeping the new Chinese Communist State away from the Indian border” (IOR L/PS/371/75798: 41). Nehru had his own predictions and strategies regarding the imminent establishment of a Communist government in China. In a note dated 5 December 1948, written in response to one of Panikkar’s communications from China, Nehru emphasized the necessity of forming an independent policy toward the new regime. “We have to be wide awake,” he wrote, “and not merely hang on to Chiang Kai-Shek and his fading authority. Nor should we just follow what the U.K. or U.S.A. might do in China.” Nehru suggested a possible outreach to the Communist leaders using the “slight reputation” he has with them so that they are not “hostile to us.” Nehru also explained that India could not ignore the Communist government in China, but “we shall not of course immediately recognize it” (NMML JN 16-I: 104). Despite his earlier close relationship with Chiang Kai-shek and other GMD leaders, Nehru was critical of the ROC government during the final few months of its rule. In a letter dated 1 July 1949 to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the Indian ambassador to the United States and Mexico, Nehru sharply criticized the GMD for failing to address the needs of the Chinese people: “[w]ith all my friendship for Chiang,” Nehru remarked, “I cannot as Prime Minster or Foreign Minister shut my eyes to facts and to my conviction” (NMML JN 26-I: 22; Nehru 1991: 12.408). After the establishment of the PRC, Nehru noted, “It was clear that recognition has to be given. The only question that arises is that of timing” (NMML JN 31-I: 72). In this note, written on 17 November 1949, Nehru suggested the third week of December as the tentative “time” for the recognition of the PRC (NMML JN 31-1: 73). A little over ten days later, in a letter to Tan Yunshan, the Director of the GMD-funded Cheena Bhavana (see below), who had cautioned him against recognizing the PRC in haste, Nehru explained that it was not a matter of if but when: “To do it too late,” he added, “means that it has been taken under compulsion” (NAI MEA/7(1)P/1952/). The discussions between Nehru, his key ministers, and foreign leaders in the aftermath of the establishment of the PRC indicate that a timeframe for India’s recognition of the Communist regime in China was determined fairly quickly: it had to be before the United Kingdom did so. It was initially decided that the recognition would take place between 15 and 25 December but was eventually fixed for 30 December. This decision was communicated to the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and the leaders of other Commonwealth countries. The United Kingdom then decided that it would recognize the Communist government on 6 January 1950 (NMML JN 33: 60). In a letter to the leaders of various Indian states dated 31 December 1949, Nehru pointed out that, “after full thought and frequent consultation with other countries, we have decided to recognize this new Government of China, as from today” (NMML JN 33: 224). A few days after India officially recognized the Communist regime in China, Nehru wrote an introspective letter about contemporary world affairs to the Burmese Prime

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Minister U Nu. The establishment of a new regime in China, Nehru observed, “is obviously of the greatest significance to Asia and the world. It is indeed a world event of the first magnitude.” Explaining India’s relations with China at this watershed moment, Nehru pointed out, If we recognized China, then we should do it in as a normal and friendly a way as possible and not mar that recognition with unfriendliness. Friendliness of course does not mean weakness…. There is not much danger of any Chinese aggression across the Indian border. But I want to make it quite clear if occasion arises, that the slightest attempt at such aggression whether in India or Nepal would be stoutly resisted by us. (NMML JN 34: 123)13 By the time the ROI had formally recognized the PRC, political relations between India and China had transited through three key phases: from 1937 to 1945, when the interactions were dominated by concerns about Japanese expansion and Indian independence; from 1945 to 1947, when the issue of Indian independence remained an important focus, but new avenues of economic and cultural connections were being discussed (see below); and from 1947 to 1949, when the status of Tibet and the need to forge a new relationship with the Communist regime in China emerged as the main concerns in their bilateral relations. By the end of 1949, the personal relationships between the INC and GMD leaderships that defined their war-time interactions were becoming overshadowed by concerns over Tibet and other territorial issues, both of which remained the primary issues in the political relationship between the two countries during the subsequent decades.

The cultural sphere Between 1937 and 1949 several facets of China–India interactions in the political sphere were closely intertwined with cultural exchanges. This was especially true, as outlined below, for the war-time period, when the GMD, the INC leadership, and the British government in India attempted to promote people-to-people connections in order to foster mutual understanding and sympathies. The fact that a few leading Chinese artists and intellectual took refuge in India due to the rapid expansion of Japanese forces also nurtured the cultural interactions between China and India. It was, however, Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to China in 1924 that had inaugurated a period of intense educational and cultural exchanges, which extended through to the 1950s.14 Shantiniketan, where Tagore founded an educational institution called Visva-Bharati, became the main hub for these interactions. In the same way, the Maha Bodhi Society in Calcutta developed into a place for cooperation between the Buddhist communities of the two countries. Furthermore, exchanges of students and scholars were also initiated during the 1930s and the 1940s, resulting in broader exchanges and a vibrant circulation of knowledge. Visva-Bharati was established in 1921 with the money Tagore received as part of his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Tagore’s vision was to create a place where intellectuals and scholars from around the world would congregate in pursuit of knowledge, a place, as the official slogan advertised, “where the world makes a home in a single nest.” The study of Asia and the promotion of interactions among Asian intellectuals and artists was one of the major initiatives at this newly founded institution of learning.15 In 1927

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Tagore met a person called Tan Yunshan in Singapore and invited him to Visva-Bharati. Tan arrived in 1928 with the aim of raising funds and setting up an institute dedicated to the study of China. However, neither Tagore’s nor Tan’s contacts were able to provide the required funds for such an institute (Sen 2017: 308). In 1930, Tan, who had by then re-located to Burma, was entrusted by the local Chinese Consul-General to accompany a GMD official to Tibet through Calcutta and K alimpong. When this GMD official died on his way to Lhasa, Tan replaced him, met the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in Tibet, and returned to China to report formally on his trip (Zhu 2016). This unexpected mission brought Tan into direct contact with high-level GMD officials, including Dai Jitao, the then president of the Examination Yuan, who became instrumental in raising funds for the proposed institute at Visva-Bharati. In 1933, Tan initiated the Sino-Indian Cultural Society in Nanjing and invited Dai Jitao to be the organization’s “chief supervisor.” A year later, an Indian chapter of the society was founded in India with Rabindranath Tagore as the “founder-president” and Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Chiang Kai-shek, and Soong Mei-ling as “honorary presidents.” It was also in 1934 that Tagore drafted a concept note for building a “Chinese Hall” in Shantiniketan, in which he offered “hospitality” to the Indian chapter of the Sino-Indian Cultural Society.16 In 1935 Chiang Kai-shek allocated seed money to establish the “Chinese Hall” (i.e. Cheena Bhavana) at Visva-Bharati; individual funds came from Dai Jitao, H. H. Hung, and a Singaporean banker called Chen Yen-chien (Tan Ean Kiam). This “Chinese Hall” was called “Cheena Bhavana” and was formally established in 1937. It received additional funds from the GMD in 1942, 1945, and 1946. The government of China also contributed by sponsoring five “Chinese Culture Fellowships,” and the Chinese Ministry of Education offered “special” three-year grants to Cheena Bhavana. According to Tan (1998: 128), who became its founding director, Cheena Bhavana was a gift of the Chinese people to Gurudva (i.e., Rabindranath Tagore) in response to his appeal and in appreciation of his ideals for reviving the ancient Sino-Indian cultural relationship on one hand and to create new relations between the two countries on the other, and lastly to work together for world peace and fraternity mainly through cultural exchange. Over the next two decades, Cheena Bhavana embarked on a rigorous examination and translation of Chinese Buddhist literature, set up Chinese and Tibetan language programs, and built one of the best Chinese-language libraries in India. Cheena Bhavana also attracted several leading Chinese intellectuals and artists, drawn by Tagore’s allure, Tan’s persuasion, or the perils of the war. The famous Chinese painter Xu Beihong (1895–1953) and the renowned scholar Wu Xiaoling (1914–1995) were two such residents of Cheena Bhavana in the 1940s. Xu Fancheng (1909–2000), who became a leading scholar of Indian philosophy, taught at the institution from 1946 to 1950. P. C. Bagchi (1898–1956) and Kalidas Nag (1892–1966) were two Indian Sinologists who worked at the institution. Cheena Bhavana was also a site for diplomacy between the representatives of the GMD and the Indian leaders. Dai Jitao visited Shantiniketan in 1940 and met Tagore, while Chiang Kai-shek and his wife traveled to Shantiniketan with Nehru and toured Cheena Bhavana in 1942. A majority of publications initiated by Tan in the 1940s promoted and publicized these connections between the GMD and INC. Kala Bhavana (Institute of Fine Arts) at Visva-Bharati also attracted Chinese

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students and teachers. While a person named Chang Xiufeng (1915–2010) studied painting under the renowned Indian artist Nandalal Bose (1882–1966) in 1949–1950, You Yunshan (1912–2004), a disciple of the Chinese painter Gao Jianfu (1879–1951), taught Chinese arts in the late 1940s and early 1950s.17 Indian artists including Y. K. Shukla, Nihar Ranjan Chaudhury, and Beohar Rammanohar Sinha, studied in China during these two decades. The interactions between the Chinese and Indian artistic communities involved mutual learning and the exchange of paintings. On 4 June 1948, for instance, when a Sino-Indian painting exhibition was held at Peking University, where Shukla’s and Chaudhury’s paintings were displayed, leading Chinese artists and writers, including Xu Beihong, Shen Congwen, Ye Qianyu, Wu Xiaoling, and Wang Qingfang, attended and expressed their admiration for paintings done by the two Indian artists (Shen 2013: 59–64). Mutual influences can be discerned not only in the motifs employed by some of these painters but also in the stylistic features that emerged as a result of these encounters (Bhattacharya 2014). The Maha Bodhi Society was similarly involved in promoting cultural connections between India and China. Established in Calcutta in 1892 by the Sri Lankan Buddhist leader, Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), the Maha Bodhi Society attempted to revive Buddhism and Buddhist sites in India.18 Buddhist communities from across Asia supported this endeavor. The Japanese invasion of China resulted in deep divisions among the Buddhists in China and Japan, with each country sending “goodwill” missions to various regions of Asia in order to promote their respective causes. In 1940, the GMD dispatched a Buddhist mission to South and Southeast Asia with the aim of establishing a unified front against the Japanese invasion of China. This mission was led by a famous Chinese monk called Taixu, who had been an overseas member of the Maha Bodhi Society since 1928. The mission arrived in Calcutta in early January 1940 to tour sacred Buddhist sites and met with various Indian leaders and personalities, including Tagore, Nehru, and Subhas Chandra Bose. One of the key outcomes of Taixu’s visit was the strengthening of Buddhist interactions between India and China, with the Maha Bodhi Society as the center of such activities. After World War II, in 1947, Taixu promised to raise funds to build an International Cultural Religious Center within the premises of the Maha Bodhi Society’s headquarters in Calcutta specifically for Chinese monks visiting India. A donation of Rs. 10,000 received from China later that year was used to build an apex building called “China Block.” It was eventually dedicated to Taixu, who had died before the building was completed. The Chinese Consul-General, who was at the ceremony to lay the foundation stone, expressed the hope that the building would “serve as a meeting place of Chinese and Indian scholars whereby the bond of friendship and cordiality existing between China and India will be further strengthened” (The Maha-Bodhi 1947: 219).19 Cultural interactions received a boost in 1943, when a formal agreement was signed between the British Indian government and the ROC to initiate a bilateral student and scholar exchange program. This idea was initially proposed in 1933 by H. N. Davy, Professor of English literature at the Central University in Nanjing. Davy was sent to Nanjing by the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation under the League of Nations, where he was placed in charge of the Advisory Committee for Overseas Study. It was in this capacity that Davy wrote to Miles W. Lampson, the British Minister in Beijing, suggesting the possibility of Chinese students going to Indian colleges to study “agricultural institutions and village experiments” (IOR L/PS/12/70: 26). The British government consulted the Vice-Chancellor of Hong Kong University, who dismissed Davy as a “foolish young man” and his idea of sending Chinese students to India

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“a monstrous one” (IOR L/PS/12/70: 16). The proposal was consequently shelved by the British Indian government. However, almost a decade later, the recommendations of John Sargent, the educational advisor to the Government of India, received a positive response and resulted in a different outcome. After concluding his visit to China in May 1942, Sargent wrote a report in which he explained that the primary objective of his trip was to explore practical methods by which educational relations between China and India could be strengthened with special reference to the possibility of arranging exchanges of teachers and students between Indian and Chinese educational institutions and of finding ways of helping China in regard to the temporary difficulties with which her educational system is faced at the moment. (IOR L/PS/12/2318: 189) Sargent proposed that these educational exchanges could take place through the visits of prominent “educationalists” and the exchange of graduate and other students. He also listed some of the topics these educationalists and students might pursue in India and the ways in which the British government in India could pay for the expenses thus incurred. Sargent’s suggestions seem to have emerged from his discussions with Chen Li-fu (1900–2001), the Minister of Education, who was also involved in setting up Cheena Bhavana. The British Foreign Office and the British Council strongly supported Sargent’s proposal and communicated their endorsement to the British ambassador in Chungking. Moreover, Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, personally sent a letter to Chiang Kai-shek indicating that he had tasked Sargent to organize a visit of Chinese educationists to India to discuss how the proposed educational exchanges could be implemented (IOR L/PS/12/2318: 182). Sargent followed this up by writing to Chen Li-fu, referring him to Lord Linlithgow’s letter, and recommended the places and institutions that the recommended Chinese educational delegation might visit in India (IOR L/PS/12/2318: 182–184). Although the plans were quickly drafted, the visit was delayed due to the criticisms levied against the British government by Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ting-fu (T. F. Tsiang, 1895–1965), the appointed leader of the Chinese delegation, and the Chinese press in general about the arrests of Gandhi and Nehru (IOR L/PS/12/2318: 152–163). The “Chinese Educational Mission” eventually arrived in India in March 1943. Prior to this, the British government of India had already announced that it would offer “ten free scholarships for Chinese research workers at such universities or research institutions as the Chinese Minister of Education may select” (IOR L/PS/12/2318: 136). The visit of the educational mission resulted in an agreement to exchange ten students from each side, who would study and engage in research at different universities in India and China. By October of the same year, ten Chinese students were already in India, five of whom started studying politics, law, philosophy, and culture, three industry, one agronomy, and one mechanical engineering. Three of the ten Indian students who reached China at almost the same time were enrolled at the National Central University in Xishuangbanna, two at the South West Associated University in Kunming, two at the Chekiang University of Zunji, and one each at the University of Nanking in Chengdu, the National Western University in Leshan, and the Academia Sinica. These students studied a variety of subjects, including Chinese history, philosophy, archaeology, mathematics, agriculture, botany, and soil chemistry (IOR L/PS/12/2648: 17–19).

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After Indian independence, a new group of Indian students arrived in China, among them Amitendranath Tagore, Satiranjan Sen, K. Ventakaramanan, and V. V. Paranjpe. While the first three emerged as the leading Indian scholars of China in subsequent years, Paranjpe became a diplomat and a famous “China hand” in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). These students arrived in China in mid-1947 and remained there until mid-1950. Although some of them wished to stay on in China after the establishment of the Communist government, the MEA denied their request, noting that “their further stay in China is inadvisable” and that they “should return to India immediately by first available boat” (NAI/MEA/680-C.J.K/49: 55–56). Despite the disruptions caused by warfare and the politics of post-war nationbuilding, cultural and educational interactions between India and China continued uninterrupted. Buddhist monks, renowned intellectuals, artists, and students traveled between the two countries in pursuit of knowledge and artistic skills. Noteworthy in these exchanges is the support of various government officials, the INC leaders, the GMD, and even India’s British rulers. Also remarkable was the diversity of these exchanges, which included visits by philosophers, scientists, and agriculturalists.20 The artwork created by Xu Beihong, Xu Fancheng, You Yunshan, and Chang Xiufeng in India, and those by Y. K. Shukla and Nihar Ranjan Chaudhury in China are enduring products of this vibrant period of cultural exchanges.21 Moreover, Cheena Bhavana and the Maha Bodhi Society, the two hubs of interactions during this period, continued to foster cultural exchanges between India and China during much of the 1950s.

The economic sphere The signing of the Nanking Treaty by the Qing government in 1842 led to the opening of a number of Chinese ports to the European colonial powers and resulted in the establishment of several Indian commercial firms at these sites. Parsis, Sindhis, and Baghdadi Jews from India operated their business networks and real estate ventures in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Traders from India were also present in Tibet and Xinjiang areas in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, merchants from Yunnan, Shandong, and other places in China established their own commercial ventures at Indian ports and towns, including Calcutta, Darjeeling, and Kalimpong. After World War II maritime connections between Shanghai and Bombay resumed, and new routes, such as the Kalimpong– Yatung–Lhasa and the Burma–Yunnan Ledo Road, were added to the list of conduits for economic interactions. In addition, there were various remittance linkages, either through banks or the Chinese diaspora networks that facilitated the movement of capital between China and India. Changing global conditions dictated and influenced commercial interactions between British India and China during the 1930s and 1940s in a variety of ways. The downturn in the world economy in the 1930s known as the “Great Depression” was one such aspect. At the same time, Japanese industrialization and its imperial expansion into East and Southeast Asia exerted a significant impact on maritime commercial exchanges between China and the Indian Ocean region. In addition, the presence of the Russian empire in Central Asia affected the trade in Indian goods in Chinese Turkestan. Despite these factors, economic exchanges and the movement of commercial specialists between India and China endured throughout the two decades. Official data on commercial exchanges between India and China in the 1930s and 1940s pertain mostly to the maritime trade, being collected by the Chinese Maritime Customs

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office. These data indicate that in the early 1930s Chinese exports of cotton yarn, piece goods, and raw silk to British India increased from 1.8 to 5.19 percent (Akita 2010: 26). China’s position in the global cotton industry and trade continued to strengthen in the mid-1930s. While imports declined, the export of cotton products increased noticeably, resulting in a favorable balance of trade for China in the commodity even during the first two years (1937–1939) of the Japanese occupation (Cheng 1956: 137). In 1939 occupied China’s import surplus in relation to India stood at $3,536,7000, accounting for ten percent of the total import value for that year. Gunny bags and raw cotton were the two main Indian commodities entering China during this period. Sustained transportation facilities were important reasons for these continued trading relations with British India. Unoccupied regions of China also maintained commercial contacts with British India between 1939 and 1941, with cotton yarn as the top import item from India (Cheng 1956: 129). Occupied China’s foreign trade with British India was significantly disrupted between 1942 and 1945 due to Japanese expansion into southern China and Southeast Asia. However, overland commercial activities between free China and British India continued. In 1944 Indian imports from and exports to the latter region amounted to nine percent of the total value of the region’s foreign trade. In the first eight months of 1945 there was a sudden upsurge in the percentage of imported goods from India, reaching 54.6 percent of the total foreign imports. This significant increase, as Cheng (1956: 148) points out, was due to the inclusion of items from the United States that were delivered to China through India. In the same way, Chinese exports to the United States during this period were first transported by air to India (Cheng 1956: 150–151). The figures for trade between China and India from January to August 1945 therefore reflect this substantial transit trade. Even without the transit trade, in the post-war period, British India remained one of China’s top trading partners. However, due to the disruptions caused by the war, a large stock of “short staple” cotton paid for by the Chinese had remained unshipped. In order to discuss the issue of this undelivered stock of cotton, the prospects for cotton exports in general, and to probe other trading opportunities, the British Indian government proposed sending a “small official delegation” to China (AH 0200119040004). This delegation, known as the “Indian Trade Mission,” arrived in Hong Kong on 22 February and returned to India on 29 March 1946 after visiting Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, and Chongqing. The delegation was led by K. K. Chettur, Joint Secretary in the Commerce Department of the Government of India, and included Tulsidas Kilachand, a representative of the Indian cotton trade. The members of the delegation met a number of GMD officials, including Dr. T. V. Soong, the President of the Executive Yuan, and the representatives of various ministries. In Chongqing, they were received by Chiang Kai-shek. Describing the meetings that the delegation had in China, K. P. S. Menon, then the Agent General for India in China, noted that, “[t]here was a general anxiety for the resumption of trade between India and China, for the enlargement of existing contacts and for the exploration of new avenues of trade and commerce.” He added, “In effect what started as a trade mission turned out to be a goodwill mission and as goodwill is the basis of trade the time spent on such demonstrations of friendship cannot be regarded as having been wasted” (IOR L/PS/12/2648: 12–13). Chettur’s report predicted good potential for Indian cotton and tobacco in Chinese markets and stressed that “there is no need for pessimism with regard to the revival and development of our trade with China” (The Times of India 1946). Commercial exchanges between British India and the so-called “Chinese Turkestan” region or with Tibet do not seem to have been on the agenda of the Chettur-led

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delegation. The trade between British India and “Chinese Turkestan” or the Xinjiang region passed through three distinct sites: Leh, Gilgit, and Chitral. Trade along these routes endured from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s, despite significant obstacles and its own steady decline. An overview of this trade was provided by the British Consul-General in Kashgar in his annual report for 1937. The report pointed out that, after peaking in 1895–1896, trade between British India and Xinjiang had declined due primarily to competition from cheap Russian goods. The Russian Revolution resulted in the revival of the trade, which continued until 1926–1927. Thereafter, trade persistently declined through to the 1930s (IOR L/PS/12/2354). In his next annual report, the Consul-General pointed to local rebellions and the “strict anti-British boycott,” which had led to “universal decline in both imports and exports.” He added: “Prospects for the future of Indo-Sinkiang trade are exceedingly gloomy” (IOR L/PS/12/2354). This assessment was confirmed in the subsequent annual reports from Kashgar, as local unrest, the adverse policies of the provincial government, and competition from Russian suppliers undermined the trade between British India and the Xinjiang region after the mid-1940s. The route connecting northern Bengal to Tibet and extending into Yunnan province seems to have been the only sector of the British India–China trade that witnessed vibrant economic activity in the mid-to-late 1940s. The main commodity traded along this route was Tibetan wool, which was transported to Kalimpong and from there to Calcutta and onward to the United States, the main global market for the item. Except for 1943–1944, when World War II interrupted the shipping lanes from Calcutta to the United States, the trade in Tibetan wool flourished along this route (IOR L/PS/12/4209: 18, 103). Traded in the other direction was Chinese tea, especially brick tea from the present-day Yunnan–Sichuan region, which entered Calcutta through Burma and was transported overland through Kalimpong to Lhasa (IOR L/PS/12/4209: 18). This growing commercial activity on the Kalimpong–Lhasa route drew the attention of the British intelligence network in India. Captain A. R. Allen, who worked for the British government’s Chinese Intelligence Wing in India, composed a report in 1944 outlining the commercial exchanges and security concerns associated with the movement of goods and people between Kalimpong and Tibet. In his nine-page, single-spaced report entitled “Notes of Kalimpong’s Trade with China” (WBSA 955-44/234: 41–33) and another equally long document called “Exports Overland to China” (WBSA 955-44/234: 32–24), Allen focused on exports through Kalimpong to Tibet and Yunnan. He noted that, while “gold, stationery, medical preparations, leather and other merchandise figure from time to time as exports, there seems to be no doubt that piece goods and cotton yarn are the principle exports” (WBSA 955-44/234: 32). The volume of piece goods and cotton yarn exported amounted to an average of three tons a day in 1943–1944. The significance of the trade through Kalimpong, according to Allen, was reflected in the presence of ten Chinese firms in the town, twenty-six individual traders, and a hundred Chinese traders based in Calcutta who focused on commercial activity along this route. The presence of a branch of the Bank of China in Kalimpong was also indicative of the site’s commercial importance. Allen also argued that the Chinese government’s interest in this route was associated with its aim of developing trade in the western regions of China, “rather than [being] a merely wartime phenomenon. It accords with, even if it is not certainly a product of, the Chinese policy of penetration in Tibet” (WBSA 955-44/234: 35). India’s independence did not bring about any significant changes to the economic exchanges between India and China. This is reflected in a letter sent to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Indian Embassy in China in January 1949

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(AH  0200119040004) asking the Ministry to distinguish China’s trade between the “two Dominions of India and Pakistan” and to record the commercial exchanges separately in government publications. The letter provided a list of ports in Indian, including French Indian, states and summarized the trade between India and China from 1939 to 1948, listing the commodities traded between the two countries and its corresponding value (see Appendix, Figs.1 and 2). The letter also expressed a hope for the future development of commercial exchanges, noting: There is no immediate prospect of improvement in trade between India and China, mainly due to prevailing controls and restrictions in both the countries. With the return of normal conditions, however, trade is bound to prosper for the mutual benefit of both the nations…. India and China will do well to promote business relations between the two countries and thus strengthen the centuries’ old bonds of friendship for which the trade has to contribute its due share. (AH 0200119040004: 31) Not until after the founding of the PRC would commercial prospects once again be discussed in detail. Unlike the cultural sphere, commercial exchanges between India and China were most acutely influenced by events taking place elsewhere in the world. World War II, competition from Russia, and the Chinese civil war all prevented full realization of the  commercial potential. Except for the traders plying the Kalimpong–Tibet route, general conditions for commerce and itinerant merchants between 1937 and 1949 remained depressed. Although efforts were made by both governments to explore ways to promote commercial exchanges, not much seems to have been accomplished in this period of turmoil and uncertainty.

The “subaltern” sphere22 Often overlooked in accounts of relations between India and China are the experiences of migrant communities, of Indians in China and of Chinese in India. The end of the Opium War created several new networks of connections and “contact zones,” which facilitated interactions between Chinese and Indians who were neither government officials nor intellectuals, but traders, soldiers, laborers, and also smugglers. Calcutta, Bombay, and Kalimpong became the main destinations for Chinese migrants seeking new livelihoods. In China, Indians traveled to and settled in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kashgar, and Lhasa.23 However, it was not only in India and China that these itinerants met: Chinese and Indians also encountered each other at several other colonial port cities, such as Singapore and Port Louis, brought together as indentured laborers (Sen 2017: 279–284). These migrant groups created their own distinct spaces and dynamics for cross-cultural interactions, introduced new practices and tastes, and triggered complex questions of identity and belonging. The latter issue became pertinent, both legally and culturally, in the late 1940s and early 1950s after citizenship rules were enacted by the independent Indian state and peripheral regions were incorporated into the Chinese state by the PRC. By the early twentieth century, the Chinese in India had established Chinatowns in Calcutta and Bombay, as well as smaller settlements in Kalimpong, Darjeeling, and at several towns in Assam.24 Chinese temples, restaurants, shoe stores, and carpentry warehouses became ubiquitous in many of these places. There were also GMD

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offices, newspaper outlets, and schools that sustained Chinese migrants’ connections with their ancestral homeland. The late 1930s witnessed an influx of Chinese refugees from Southeast Asia and a large number of GMD soldiers who received training from American and British military personnel to fight the Japanese. Consequently, the population of ethnic Chinese in India in the mid-1940s exceeded 25,000 (NAI MEA/612(3)CJK/49: 1).25 However, the Chinese in India were never a unified group, as there were divisions based on speech groups, especially between Hakka and Cantonese speakers, between wealthy classes and laborers, between older migrants and the newcomers, and, in the late 1940s, between those who supported the GMD and those who preferred the emerging Communists in China (Zhang 2015). There was also professional diversity among the Chinese: the Hakka Chinese in Calcutta worked in the tanneries and made leather shoes, the Cantonese engaged in carpentry, the Hubenese were dentists, and those from Shandong traded in silks and other textiles (Liang 2007). Itinerant traders from Yunnan traversed the Lhasa–Kalimpong route and used the Chinese banking facilities in Calcutta to remit money home. The Chinese in Darjeeling and Assam labored in the tea gardens, and others in Calcutta and Bombay were employed by the British in the docks. The wealthy Chinese in Calcutta and elsewhere were active in the political and cultural exchanges, often organizing receptions for visiting dignitaries from China and also contributing funds to support the Chinese war against the Japanese. In the Calcutta Chinatowns there were opium dens and rampant illegal activities such as gambling and the smuggling of contraband goods.26 There were also agents of the GMD who collected and transmitted confidential information on British policies concerning Tibet, as well as the political activities of Tibetans in India. The most famous case of GMD espionage in British India was that of Pandatsang Rapga, a member of the wealthy Tibetan Pandatsang family settled in Kalimpong. Rapga obtained an official GMD passport and founded the Tibetan Revolutionary Party in India to promote the overthrow of the existing regime in Tibet. In 1946, the British government discovered that Rapga was planning a large-scale recruitment drive in India. This led to security searches of various sites associated with Rapga and his collaborators in Calcutta and Kalimpong, and Rapga’s eventual deportation.27 After the establishment of the PRC, the intelligence and police agencies, especially those in West Bengal, became concerned with Communist propaganda among the Chinese living in India, which eventually resulted in the arrests and deportation of a large number of ethnic Chinese in the late 1950s and early 1960s.28 This resulted in the rapid decline of the Chinese communities in India, with no more than five thousand living across the country at present. The Indian community in China was equally diverse with respect to its ethnic composition, professions, and political leanings. The Parsis and Sindhis were among the earliest traders to settle at the Chinese treaty ports; Sikh soldiers and policemen were brought to these cities by the British; Kashmiri and Marwari traders set up their bases in Xinjiang and Tibet; and there were also agriculturalists and laborers belonging to different ethnic groups across several regions of China. Unlike the Chinese in India, the Indian communities did not carve out special spatial areas for themselves, although there were a few gurdwaras and mansions belonging to rich Indian traders in Shanghai.29 Like the Chinese in India, the Indians started leaving China soon after the end of World War II. Some 1200 of the 2500 Indians living in Shanghai opted to leave China, as did 23 out of 123 in Hankou (in Wuhan). For those who decided to continue living in China, the office of the Indian Agent General provided “monetary relief and warm

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clothing.” A special attaché was appointed to help the large number of Indians who remained in Shanghai. There were other Indians in Manchuria, Tianjin, and Beijing who were reported to be “fairly well off.” In Xinjiang, however, Indians engaged in agriculture, mostly living in the southern region of Xinjiang in places such as Yarkand, Khotan, and Keria, were in dire straits. The half-dozen Indian merchants in Kashgar were noted as having been affected by the decline of trade between Xinjiang and India. The Indian Agent General in China, in addition to addressing the needs of some of these migrants, also had to deal with the trials of Indians charged with collaborating with the Japanese, including that of Nanak Chand, the Chairman of the Indian Independence League in Shanghai (IOR L/PS/12/2648; Sharma 2018). Within four years of this initial exodus, a new wave of repatriation of Indians in China started when the PRC was established. Many of the Indians who left China in the second half of the 1940s resettled in Hong Kong. Only a few Indian families remained in Shanghai when India and China went to war in 1962. Indian independence and the founding of the PRC made the issues of national identity and belonging key concerns for the Chinese, many of whom had lived in India for several generations. Only a few were able to acquire Indian citizenship; some decided to take PRC passports once they were offered by the Chinese embassy and consulates in the 1950s; a majority, however, remained designated as “stateless.” Culturally, many Chinese in India continued their ancestral practices, lunar New Year celebrations, and mortuary tradition of burying the dead. In Calcutta they continued to study in Chinese schools and retained their Cantonese or Hakka heritage. The Chinese who lived outside Calcutta often married locally, later generations losing their Chinese language skills. Nonetheless, they were all categorized as “Chinese” by the Indian state. Their internment and deportation, mentioned earlier, resulted from this categorization and the suspicion that they were Chinese agents and therefore a risk to the Indian state. Some of the Indians who settled in Xinjiang and Tibet faced similar dilemmas. In Xinjiang, for example, the agriculturalists had married locally and, as the Indian Agent General K. P. S. Menon (IOR L/PS/12/2648) points out, had “lost touch with India.” These people were “compelled” to sell their lands “at ridiculously low prices” between 1937 and 1942, reducing them to the status of “landless paupers.” The Indian Agent General made representation on behalf of these people in Urumchi, assigning, either intentionally or unintentionally, an Indian identity to them. The Indian state also intervened in the early 1950s, when the Khache, descendants of the Kashmiri Muslim traders residing in Tibet, asserted their Indian identity and demanded that they be allowed to “return” to India (Atwill 2018). After establishing alternative networks of connections from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, these subaltern Chinese and Indians found themselves caught up in the politics of nation states, where the interests and concerns of migrant groups were eclipsed by concerns about territorial demarcation, restrictions imposed on cross-border movement, and the implementation of laws on citizenship. The interactions between India and China were no longer as free-flowing as they had been in the 1930s and 1940s.

Conclusion Although a timespan of a mere twelve years, the period between 1937 and 1949 witnessed global turmoil and momentous transformations in several regions of the world. World War II, the beginnings of decolonization in Asia and Africa, India’s independence, and

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the founding of the PRC all happened within this brief period. Affected by these events, interactions between India and China went through their own changes and transformations. For instance, the political connections between the GMD and INC leaderships were strengthened due to mutual concerns about imperialism but weakened after the war due to the narrower interests in asserting territorial claims. While economic exchanges between the two countries were influenced by global upheavals in the 1930s and 1940s, the cultural sphere transcended these uncertainties and forged multifaceted connections centered around educational interactions. The experiences of the migrant communities added another dimension to this relationship that reflected the diversity of connections between India and China. These twelve years shaped the world views, professional careers, and livelihoods of political leaders, intellectuals, artists, and itinerants, as well as the “landless paupers” in Xinjiang and the stateless Chinese in India. The future of the bilateral relationship became uncertain in December 1949, when the ROI decided to recognize the PRC. However, some of the key strands in the impending relationship had already appeared between 1937 and 1949. These included aspects that were conducive to furthering mutual bonds between the two nations, as in the case of the cultural and educational exchanges; those that had the potential to expand and develop, as with the economic interactions; and the strains that clearly foreboded significant discord in the long-term bilateral political relationship, as with the issues of Tibet and the status of the respective migrant communities. It would therefore not be going too far to conclude that these twelve years laid the foundations for a complicated relationship between the ROI and the PRC in the decades that followed.

Appendix Figure 1 List of commodities traded between China and India, 1939–1948

Imports into China from India Cotton piece goods, Raw Cotton, Cotton Waste, Cotton Thread, Jute, Hemp, Hessian Cloth, Gunnybags, Woolen Carpets, Socks and Stockings. Iron and Steel—Pig, Kentledge and Scrap. Fish Products, Bicho de mar, Shark fins, Prawns and Shrimps, Foodstuffs, Coffee, Sauce, Tea, Rice, Beans, Medicinal substances, Spice, Pepper, Medicines, Aniline Dyes, Tans and Tanning Materials; Shellac, Gum, Oils and Constituents of Synthetic perfumes, Linseed Oil, Turpentine, Paraffin Wax, Hides and Leathers, Palmyra fiber, Sandalwood and Seeds.

Exports to India from China Egg Albumen (dried), Egg Yolks, moist and frozen, Beef, Mutton, Pork, Bristles; Skins, Hare, Rabbits; Human Hair, Goatskin Mats and Rugs, Skin Clothing. Beans, Broad beans, Green beans, Yellow beans, White Peas, Bran, Wheat flour, Rice, Wheat, Cereal Products, Dried and Fresh Fruits, Medicinal substances, Wood oil, Seeds, Beer, Wines and Spirits Black Tea, Green Tea, Potatoes, Fresh, Canned and Dried vegetables. Rattan, Plywood, Wooden furniture, Paper Boards, Raw Silk, Silk waste, Cocoon Strippings, Silk Yarn, Waste, Wadding Silk, Cotton Socks and Stockings, Cotton

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Yarn, Drawn thread-work, Embroideries, lace and trimmings, Cotton and Silk thread, Cotton and Silk Piece goods, Blankets, counterpanes, Towels, Woolen Carpets and Floor Rugs, Boots and Shoes, Hosiery, Brassware, Gold and Silverware, Iron and Steel and manufactures thereof, Tools, Copper and Metallic products, Aluminum ingots, sheets, Glass and Glassware, Glass beads, Vitrified ware, Chinaware, Enamelware, Stone and Stoneware, Chinese Ink, Soda, Medicinal Preparations, Perfumery and Cosmetics, Chemicals & Chemical Compounds, Candles, Straw hats. Confectionery and Preserves, Preserve Containers and Packing requirements, Curios and Antiques, Firecrackers and Fireworks, Kittysols, Matches, Lacquerware, Mats, Dunnage, Electric Lamps and Bulbs, Electrical fittings, Insulated Wire, Cord, Flex and Covered Cable, Batteries and Accumulators, Radios and Parts, Gramophones, Records, Organs and Pianos, Jewelry, Leather Trunks, Machinery and Parts, Toilet Requisites, Tooth Brushes, Toys and Games, India Rubber goods, Boneware, Hornware, Umbrellas, Clocks, Watches and Parts thereof, Scientific Instruments. Figure 2 Approximate value of goods exchanged between India and China, 1939–1948 Year

Value of imports into China (Rs.)

Value of exports to India (Rs.)

1939* 1940* 1941 1942 1943 1944–1945** 1945–1946** 1946–1947**

1,200,443,366 1,312,418,090 (Figures not available) — — 300,077 22,063,263 112,766,453

335,460,929 911,724,032 (Figures not available) — — 151,814 473,694 42,033,143

*Figures taken from Trade Returns of China. **Figures supplied by the Department of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics, India. Source: AH 0200119040004, Waijiaobu (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), “ZhongYin maoyi” (Sino-Indian Trade).

Notes

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10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25

She also criticized Gandhi for being “somewhat cloudy in his thinking” and having “no world vision because he was overcome by his restricted obsession for India’s freedom regardless of world conditions” (IOR L/PS 12/2315:19). Additional details on the Asian Relations Conference and its implications for China–India relations can be found in Sen (2017: 337–347). During British rule, K. P. S. Menon was the Agent General for India in the ROC and was based in Chongqing. After Indian independence he was appointed the ROI’s foreign secretary. On his experiences in China, see Menon (1972). Luo sent two telegrams on the Indian government’s decision to recognize the Communist regime in China, one dated 18 November 1949, the other 23 December 1949. Burma had recognized the new regime in China on 16 December, becoming the first non-Communist state to do so. The following day, the Burmese Foreign Minister, U. E. Maung, explained to Nehru that the “disturbing” situation in the border regions between Burma and China with regard to territorial claims and Chinese migrant settlements had “forced” the Burmese government’s hand in recognizing the new regime. See NMML JN 32-II: 387. Hay (1970) and Das ([1993] 2005) have examined Tagore’s visit to China and the controversies surrounding it. On Tagore and his ideas of Pan-Asianism, including the role of Visva-Bharati, see Frost (2010) and Stolte and Fischer-Tiné (2012). On the establishment and the functioning of the Sino-Indian Cultural Society, see Lin (1993: 234–239; 412–419). For an overview of Cheena Bhavana and its role in fostering intellectual and diplomatic interactions between India and China, see Sen (2017: 306–320). See also Tsui (2010 and forthcoming) for a critical analysis of the role of Tan Yunshan in these connections. The contributions of Xu Fancheng, who lived at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry from 1951 to 1978, and You Yunshan have been less explored. On these two figures, see Sun (2009). You Yunshan later became a nun and is better known by her Buddhist name, Rev. Yaoyun, and as the founder of Huafan University in Taiwan. For a recent study of Anagarika Dharmapala and his connections across the Buddhist world, see Kemper (2015). Taixu’s goodwill mission to India and his meetings with Nehru and other political and religious leaders are detailed in Sen (2017: 322–337). This included a visit by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in May 1944, whose lectures, according to Menon, left his audiences “at once awestruck and befuddled” (IOR L/ PS/12/2648). After Indian independence, P. C. Bagchi was appointed to the Chair of Indian History at Peking National University (now Peking University). For a report Bagchi submitted in 1948 to the Indian embassy in Beijing about ways to develop educational interactions between India and China, see NAI/MEA/728-C.J.K/50. Chen Hansheng and Chang Renxia were two important Chinese scholars who were active in India during the 1940s. While Chen went to India in 1944, Chang arrived a year later. For an outline of Chinese scholars and students present in India during this period, see Lin (1993: 412–422). Xu Fancheng, in addition to being a philosopher, also painted. He may have been influenced by You Yunshan. Three hundred of his paintings are housed at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Chang Xiufeng was a student of the renowned artist Nandalal Bose and drew inspiration from the Bengal School of Art. On artistic exchanges between India and China in the 1930s and 1940s, see Bhattacharya (2014). I use the term “subaltern” here for the non-elite people, who did not have any national identities, and those who are usually neglected in the historiography of China–India relations. On the Indian communities in China, see Markovits (2000) and Thampi (2005). For an outline of the history of Chinese communities in South Asia, see Zhang and Sen (2013). A detailed examination of the cultural practices and institutions of the Chinese in Calcutta is by Zhang (2015). The number of Chinese almost halved by 1948, when a report from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs gave their numbers as 12,911 (NAI MEA/612(3)-C.J.K/49: 1).

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Bibliography Archival documents AH: Academia Historica, Taipei, Taiwan ———. 002000000453A, Jiang Zhongzheng zongtong wenwu (President Chiang Kai-shek Collection), “Geming wenxian: dui Ying, Yin waijiao” (Revolution Documents: Diplomacy with England and India). ———. 0020801600071001, Jiang Zhongzheng zongtong wenwu, “Fangwen Yindu” (Visit to India). ———. 0200119040004, Waijiaobu (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), “ZhongYin maoyi” (Sino-Indian Trade). IOR: India Office Records, British Library, London, UK ———. L/PS/12/70, “Facilities for Chinese students to study in India, British colonies and United Kingdom.” ———. L/PS/12/2315, “Chiang Kai-shek—Visit to India in Feb. 1942.” ———. L/PS/12/2318, “Cultural relations between China and Great Britain.” ———. L/PS/12/2354, “Chinese Turkestan: Trade Reports, 1928–.” ———. L/PS/12/2648, “China: Exchange of Chinese and Indian Representatives: Confidential Reports of Indian Agent General.” ———. L/PS/12/4209, “Tibet: Wool Trade.” ———. L/PS/371/63541, “Inter-Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March-April 1947.” ———. L/PS/371/75798, “Memorandum by Sardar Panikkar on developments in the border areas of China and repercussions upon India of a communist regime in China.” NAI: National Archives of India, New Delhi, India ———. MEA/7 (1) P /1952/, “Correspondence between Tan Yunshan and Jawaharlal Nehru.” ———. MEA/612(3)-C.J.K/49, “Review of the Chinese Activities in India from July 1948 to June 1949.” ———. MEA/680-C.J.K/49, “Indian cultural scholars in China: Extension of scholarship period for another four months.” ———. MEA/728-C.J.K/50, “A tour in China of Dr. Bagchi and Mr. Shukla and report by Dr. Bagchi on the Lanchow University and Tunhuang caves.” NMML JN: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru Papers ———. 16-I, “From Prime Minister for Bajpai.” ———. 26-1, “Secret & Personal” (Nehru’s letter to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit). ———. 31-I, “Prime Minister’s Secretariat.” ———. 32-II, “Note of an interview by Prime Minister with U E. Maung, Foreign Minister of Burma.” ———. 33, “Telegram, From The Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, London.” ———. 33, “Secret” (Nehru’s letter to Provincial Premiers, Chief Ministers, and Prime Minister of Jammu & Kashmir). ———. 34, Letter to Thakin Nu.

84  Tansen Sen WBSA: West Bengal State Archives, Calcutta ———. File No. 955/44, Serial No. 234, “Foreigners: Chinese Nationals. Chinese Activities in Kalimpong, Darjeeling.”

Secondary sources Akita, S. (2010) “British Economic Interests and the International Order of Asia in the 1930s,” in S. Akita and N. J. White, eds., The International Order of Asia in the 1930s and 1950s (London: Routledge): 17–48. Atwill, D. G. (2018) Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600–1960 (Oakland: University of California Press). Basu, B. K. (1986) Call of Yanan: Story of the Indian Medical Mission to China, 1938–43 (Bombay: All India Kotnis Memorial Committee). Bhattacharya, A. (2014) Survey of Sino-Indian Artistic Discourse: A 20th Century Framework (Kolkata: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies and Towards Freedom). Bose, S. C. (1937) “Japan’s Role in the Far East,” The Modern Review 62(1): 368–376. Cao, Y. (2017) From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885–1945 (Leiden: Brill). Cheng, Y.-K. (1956) Foreign Trade and Industrial Development of China: An Historical and Integrated Analysis through 1948 (Washington: University of Washington Press). Cohen, J. A. and Leng, S.-C. (1972) “The Sino-Indian Dispute over the Internment and Detention of Chinese in India,” in J. A. Cohen, ed., China’s Practice of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 268–320. Dai, J. [1946] (1971) “Dui Yindu Nihelu faqi zhaoji fan Yazhou huiyi zhi ganxiang” (Thoughts on the Pan-Asian Relations Conference convened by Nehru), in J. Dai and T. Chen, eds., Dai Jitao xiansheng wencun (Extant Writings of Dai Jitao) (Taipei: Zhongguo Guomindang zhongyang weiyuanhui): 386–397. Das, S. K. [1993] (2005) “The Controversial Guest: Tagore in China,” in M. Thampi, ed., India and China in the Colonial World. Reprint (New Delhi: Social Science Press): 85–125. Frost, M. R. (2012) “Beyond the Limits of Nation and Geography: Rabindranath Tagore and the Cosmopolitan Moment, 1916–1920,” Cultural Dynamics 24(2–3): 143–158. Hay, S. N. (1970) Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Jackson, I. (2012) “The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh Policemen in Treaty-Port Shanghai,” Modern Asian Studies 46(6) (November): 1672–1704. Jain, R. K. (ed.) (1981) China-South Asia Relations, 1947–1980, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers). Jeong, J. H. (Forthcoming) “Mecca between China and India: Wartime Chinese Islamic Diplomatic Missions across the Indian Ocean,” in T. Sen and B. Tsui, eds., Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s–1960s (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Kemper, S. (2015) Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Liang, J. (2007) “Migration Patterns and Occupational Specialisations of Kolkata Chinese: An Insider’s History,” China Report 43(4): 397–410. Lin, C. (1993) ZhongYin renmin youhao guanxi shi (History of the friendly relations between the peoples of China and India) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe). Lin, H.-T. (2006) Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928–49 (Vancouver: UBC Press). Lin, X. (2017) Kunshou yu fangong: Lengzhan zhong de Taiwan xuanze (Defense and the Counterattack: The Options for Taiwan during the Cold War) (Beijing: Jiuzhou chubanshe). Louro, M. L. (2018) Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

China–India Relations, 1937–1949  85 Mamlok, R. (2018) The International Medical Relief Corps in Wartime China, 1937–1945 ( Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers). Markovits, C. (2000) “Indian Communities in China,” in R. Bickers and C. Henriot, eds., New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press): 55–74. Marsh, Y. (2012) Doing Time with Nehru: A Memoir of Yin Marsh (Crockett: Sugartown Publishing). McGranahan, C. (2005) “In Rapga’s Library: The Texts and Times of a Rebel Tibetan Intellectual,” Cahiers d’Extrême–Asie 15: 253–274. McGranahan, C. (2017) “Imperial but not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the ‘Naughty’ Tibetans,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(1): 68–95. Menon, K. P. S. (1972) Twilight in China (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan). Nehru, J. (1927) “India in the Brussels Congress,” Indian Quarterly Register 1–2: 152–159. Nehru, J. (1940) China, Spain, and the War: Essays and Writings (Allahabad: Kitabistan). Nehru, J. (1946) “Colonialism Must Go,” The New York Times (3 March): 5. Nehru, J. (1972) Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Volume 10 (New Delhi: Orient Longman). Nehru, J. [1958] (1988) A Bunch of Old Letters, Written Mostly to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him. Reprint (London: Asia Publishing House). Nehru, J. (1991) Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Volume Twelve (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund). Platov, I. (1947) “The Results of the Inter-Asian Conference,” Soviet Press Translations II (15 September): 95. Raghavan, S. (2016) India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945 (New Delhi: Penguin). Samarani, G. (2005) “Shaping the Future of Asia: Chiang Kai-shek, Nehru and China-India Relations During the Second World War Period,” Working Paper No. 11, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, available online at https://portal. research.lu.se/ws/files/4571404/3128707.pdf. Saran, M. and Zhang, K. (eds.) (2018) Stray Birds on the Huangpu: A History of Indians in Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing Company). Sen, T. (2017) India, China, and the World: A Connected History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield). Sen, T. (Forthcoming) “The Chinese Intrigue in Kalimpong: Intelligence Gathering and the ‘Spies’ in a Contact Zone,” in T. Sen and B. Tsui, eds., Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s–1960s (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Sharma, N. (2018) “The Indian National Army and the Indian Independence League in China (1942–1945),” PhD Dissertation, Delhi University, India. Shen Ning (2013) Xianhua Xu Beihong (Casual Talks on Xu Beihong) (Taipei: Showwe Information Co., Ltd.). Sheng, X., Lu, J. and Zhang, C. (1983) An Indian Freedom Fighter in China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press). Stolte, C. and Fischer-Tiné, H. (2012) “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (c. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44(1): 62–92. Sun, B. (2009) Xu Fancheng zhuan (Biography of Xu Fancheng) (Beijing: Shehui kexue chubanshe). Tan, Y. (1998) Sino-Indian Culture (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati). Thampi, M. (2005) Indians in China, 1800–1949 (New Delhi: Manohar). The Maha-Bodhi (1947) “Notes and News,” The Maha-Bodhi: Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 55(9–10): 219–220. The Times of India (1946) “Good Market for Indian Cotton and Tobacco, Trade with China, Chettur Mission’s Report” (10 August). Tsui, B. (2010) “The Plea for Asia: Tan Yunshan, Pan-Asianism and Sino-Indian Relations,” China Report: A Journal of East Asian Studies 46(4): 353–370.

86  Tansen Sen Tsui, B. (Forthcoming) “When Culture Meets State Diplomacy: The Case of Cheena Bhavana,” in T. Sen and B. Tsui, eds., Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s–1960s (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). van de Ven, H. (2003) War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London: Routledge Curzon). Yang, T. (2015) “Chiang Kai-shek and Jawaharlal Nehru,” in H. van de Ven, D. Lary, and S. R. MacKinnon (eds.), Negotiating China’s Destiny in World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press): 127–140. Yang, Y.-Y. (1974) “Nehru and China, 1927–1949,” PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia, USA. Zhang, X. (2015) The Chinese Community in Calcutta: Preservation and Change (Halle: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg). Zhang, X. and Sen, T. (2013) “The Chinese in South Asia,” in C.-B. Tan, ed., Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora (London and New York: Routledge): 205–226. Zhu, L. (2016) Minguo zheng fu de Xizang zhuanshi (1912–1949) (Republic of China’s special envoys to Tibet, 1912–1949) (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press).

4

The 1950s in China–India relations Hu Xiaowen1

The 1950s is a vital period for China–India relations. Over the ten years, Sino-Indian relations deteriorated after a short honeymoon period, and several major events that would affect China–India relations in the future occurred during this time. Cooperation between China and India in the mid-to-late 1950s covered up the profound differences and contrasts between the two sides. As new nation-states, they stood together for the idea of peaceful development and proposed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the “first joint political contribution” of India and China to the foreign policy vocabulary of the time (Acharya 2015: 358). However, the contradictions between the two sides on the border and the status of Tibet, the differences in their political systems, the nature of the international and domestic environment they faced, and the world outlook of their leaders eventually led to conflict and, in 1962, to war. The differences and suspicions from that period have not been resolved even now. The 1950s saw the development and intensification of conflict and is of great significance for an understanding of contemporary Sino-Indian relations. This paper will review the development of China–India relations in the 1950s tracing through the development and deterioration of bilateral relations. It is organized in the following sections. First, it will review the short-lived golden time and examine the background and motivations of the proposal of peaceful coexistence. This part also reviews the temporary solution of the Tibet problem. The second part summarizes the main achievements in the golden period. The third part presents another version of China–India relations in the 1950s and reveals the deepening differences on the border issue. It explores the facts beneath the surface, which include the implicit competition over Asian leadership, the changes at home and abroad for both countries, and attitudinal changes at the leadership level.

The short-lived golden time The period from 1950 to 1958 can be regarded as a golden time for Sino-Indian relations, marked by the jointly propagated Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (also known as Panchsheel) and the Agreement between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India.2 The former was a framework for maintaining the sovereignty and stability of the two countries as they emerged on the world stage. The latter was the compromise, after years of negotiation, reflecting a balancing of their respective core interests in Tibet. The two agreements helped maintain a superficial peace. Symbolic of the desire for peace and friendship was the slogan “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers) that was in currency at the time.

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Peaceful coexistence: the background and the motivation The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence reflected a strategic choice made by the two countries in the context of the international and domestic environments in which they operated. In the 1950s, China was beset with difficulties at home and abroad. On its eastern front, it had to counter the United States in the Korean War and Taiwan’s counterattack plans. In order to break the US’ military encirclement, diplomatic containment, and economic blockade and to ensure the security of its western border, China actively developed friendly relations with India. At the time, China’s foreign policy experienced a shift from “Leaning to One Side” (Yibiandao) to “Intermediate Zones” (zhongjian didai). From the independence of China to around 1954, Mao formulated three diplomatic principles: “Leaning to One Side,” “Setting up Another Kitchen” (lingqi luzao), and “Cleaning up the House First Before having Guests” (dasao ganjing wuzi zai qingke) (Zhang 2013: 20–23). The first foreign principle in effect translated into strategic reliance on the Soviet Union. The “Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance Mutual Assistance” (1950) institutionalized the “Leaning to One Side” principle. The Korean War strengthened the alliance between China and the Soviet Union (Mao 1991: 1473, 1475). China received economic assistance from the Soviets, and this assistance played a crucial role in the establishment of China’s industrial base. The principle of it being necessary to “Clean up the House First Before Having Guests” related to eliminating the influence of imperialism in China. In respect of the China–India relationship, the principle of cleaning house meant taking aim at “the privilege of the British government in Tibet” and India’s inherited privilege in Tibet. The “Setting up Another Kitchen” principle was intended to replace the diplomacy between the Kuomintang (KMT) government and other countries with diplomacy on a new basis (Zhou 1952b). It is worth noting that on the Tibet issue, though, the positions of the KMT government and the Communist Party were aligned: they did not recognize the British Empire’s privilege in Tibet, nor did they accept India’s inherited rights. During this period, China faced a difficult external and internal environment, and its foreign policy was distinctly “introverted,” with an emphasis on maintaining the stability of the new regime and national security. Its external policy was based on the principle of independence and autonomy and the idea of an international united front against imperialism (Niu 2010: 110). The “Leaning to One Side” stance deepened the isolation of China from the West. After diplomatic relations between China and India were established, “Chinese leaders began to reconsider their political attitudes toward the developing countries, and then adjusted their foreign policy” (Chen 2013: 85). Thus, Zhou Enlai argued in his article “Our Foreign Policies and Our Tasks” (women de waijiao fangzhen he renwu) in 1952 that: [w]e carry out the policy of ‘leaning to one side’ in our relations with the Soviet Union and the other people’s democracies. Meanwhile, in order to help consolidate and develop the strength of the international forces for peace and to extend the influence of New China, we should unite with and win over the former colonial and semi-colonial states and also the people of capitalist and imperialist countries. (Zhou 1952a/1989: 97) So, from 1952 to 1954, Chinese diplomacy began to change, and a new foreign policy called the “peaceful united front” was formed. The two important goals of this policy,

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“Expanding the Trend of Peace and Neutrality” and “Promoting the Peaceful Neutral Zone,” were first implemented in the surrounding areas of China. China’s Asian influence was rapidly expanded and reached a peak at the Bandung Conference in 1955 (Niu 2010: 112). China’s gradual shift from the “one-sided” policy to the “Promoting the Peaceful Neutral Zone” policy was a realistic choice based on its internal situation and the prevailing international circumstances. Mao noted in 1951: “India, China, the Soviet Union and all other peace-loving countries and people, should be united to work for peace in the Far East and for peace in the world” (Mao 1951). The neutral zone idea constituted the cognitive basis of China’s policy toward India in the 1950s: India was not the “other side”; rather, it was a peace-loving middle force with which China should unite. This, then, was the background of China’s interest in the adoption and advocacy of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. India, like China, confronted a challenging international environment. Soon after independence in August 1947, it found itself in conflict with Pakistan due to the partition of the subcontinent and the Kashmir dispute. The two South Asian states quickly came to regard each other as the main threat to their security. For its own strategic reasons, Pakistan chose to ally with the US-led Western camp. It joined the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as well as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). Pakistan’s alliance with the United States and its Western partners threatened the security interests of India (Singh 2019: 133). It was in this context that India sought to develop friendly relations with China, primarily to ensure the security of its northern border at a time when it faced challenges elsewhere. At independence, Nehru proposed to follow a policy of “non-alignment” between the United States and Soviet Union so that “the country would have a better chance of preserving its precious political freedom and promoting its economic development by maintaining friendly relations with both blocs” (Saran 2017: 32). As Andrew Kennedy argues, “[b]y adopting a non-aligned stance, however, India could diversify its international relationships and thus its dependence on any single power or bloc … [n]onalignment also helped India to diversify its economic relationships” (Kennedy 2015: 97). Under non-alignment, India successfully received considerable assistance from both the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States believed that India, as a new democracy, should naturally stand with it and the Western states. India was the last domino in Asia in Washington’s “domino theory” (Ogden 2014: 141). As a bulwark against communism, India became a regular recipient of US aid and material assistance. American funds were largely spent toward food aid as well as fuel for India’s nuclear reactors and assistance for her space program. This was designed to counter the influence of the Soviet Union in South Asia (Ogden 2014: 141). For New Delhi, India’s non-alignment was not intended to be passive neutrality. Rather, the objective was to garner international support as widely as possible. In addition, Nehru believed that non-alignment did not preclude India from having preferential partnerships. He emphasized that “it [i.e. non-alignment] does not mean that we should not be closer in our relations with some countries than with others … in order to gain something worthwhile” (Tellis 2015: 483). It was from this perspective that India actively developed relations with the Soviet Union. In December 1953, the two countries signed the first trade agreement. Economic and cultural exchanges between the two countries began to take off. The subsequent Pakistan–US alliance pushed India even closer to the Soviet Union. In January 1955, as trumpeted at the 60th annual meeting of the Congress Party, Nehru’s India

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decided to build a “socialist pattern of society” (Mohan 1975: 190).3 Nikita Khrushchev strongly supported India as a model for countries transiting from capitalism to socialism. In doing this, Khrushchev hoped to tilt the balance in the Soviet Union’s confrontation with the US-led camp (Zhang 2002: 42). What was derived from non-alignment was the “area of peace” concept formulated by Defense Minister Krishna Menon and Nehru as a means to “confront [the] new security threats and challenges in Asia” (Singh 2019: 59–60). The peace area formulation did not imply the formation of a “third force,” as Nehru clarified: it simply meant “trying to create another force to counter the forces or as a balancing factor” (quoted in Singh 2019: 61). Elsewhere, Nehru argued that it is “an area which—let us put it negatively first—does not want war, works for peace in a positive way and believes in cooperation” (quoted in Singh 2019: 61). India thus found strategic space outside the US–Soviet confrontation to create external conditions for the development of India and to encourage a zone of non-contention and peace between the two superpowers. India’s China policy and its support of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence developed from the view that peace with its powerful northern neighbor was vital if India was to maintain external peace and to pursue its socialist development agenda. As Zhou Enlai reminded Nehru: “Our two peoples’ common interests in their struggle against imperialism outweigh by far all the differences between our two countries. We have a major responsibility for Sino-Indian friendship, Asian-African solidarity and Asian peace” (quoted in Malone and Mukherjee 2010: 139). In sum, maintaining a peaceful surrounding environment and safeguarding their economic development were the common concerns of China and India in the 1950s and the basis of their interest in the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. A temporary solution for the Tibet problem In 1954, the two countries signed the Agreement between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India (1954). The agreement temporarily resolved a major contradiction and paved the way for a short-lived golden period. With the end of World War II, British colonial rule in India came to an end. In quitting, the British government decided to hand over all its privileges in Tibet to the Indian government. The United Kingdom believed that Tibet, as a buffer between China and India, was of great strategic importance. In the Chinese view, the new government of India wanted to inherit the legacy of the British colonial empire including in Tibet. As far as China was concerned, both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were in agreement on Beijing’s legitimate control over Tibet. Chiang Kai-shek believed that the Chinese government “should negotiate with India to stop all irrational actions and reclaim the land that was invaded by them at the beginning of India’s autonomy” (Chiang 1947). At the end of 1944, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the National Government of China proposed to put Sino-Tibetan relations on a new track and issued the “Opinions on the Proposed Adjustment on Tibetan Affairs (guanyu ni tiaozheng zang wu zhi yijian)” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the National Government of China 1944). On 26 September 1947, the Mongolian-Tibetan Affairs Commission held a meeting to discuss the issue. Zhang Qun, the premier of the National Government, wrote a paper entitled “Plan for Dealing with the Tibet Issue (Chuli xizang wenti zhi fangzhen),” which became the guiding document for the post-war policy toward Tibet

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(Chen 2002: 206–207). However, the outbreak of the Chinese civil war prevented the National Government from resolving the Tibet issue. After the coming to power of the Communist Party, China clearly stated its desire to liberate Tibet. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) marched into Tibet in 1950. India thought that China’s behavior in Tibet “impinged directly on India’s strategic space” (Saran 2017: 37). In 1950, the Indian government held a meeting to discuss India’s military actions to prevent the PLA from marching into Tibet. In a speech, then Indian Ambassador to China, K. M. Panikkar, argued that recognizing China’s “suzerainty over Tibet” was “no more than acknowledging the titular overlordship of China but did not in any way interfere with the practical independence and internal autonomy of Tibet.”4 Also in 1950, Commander-in-Chief General Cariappa argued that the Indian army would face severe disadvantages against the Chinese given that they were neither adequately equipped not trained to operate at such altitudes. Moreover, the Chinese army had experience fighting in the harsh weather and was better armed, thanks to American supplies which had been meant for the defeated KMT (Mullik 1971: 80–81). China communicated with India through several diplomatic notes and consultations, and after several rounds of negotiations, India finally adjusted its policy on Tibet. Panikkar argued that since these rights had been obtained through coercion by the British, it would be wrong for India to demand its continuation. Moreover, since there was no way to compel China to accept its continuation “the best policy would be to give up gracefully all that was untenable” (Mullik 1971: 147). In Zorawar Daulet Singh’s view, the Agreement between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India was not merely to resolve bilateral issues but rather to stabilize the security dilemma in India’s extended neighbourhood and inculcate similar strategic choices in other non-aligned Asian states. Nehru envisioned the Sino-Indian agreement as an example of co-existence and an alternative to the alliance-based approach of the US-Pakistan pact. (Singh 2019: 137) The signing of the China–India agreement brought positive responses from China. India as a friendly neighbor was getting close to the Chinese people psychologically, and Nehru became well-known in China. Chinese feelings were on view when he visited China in October 1954. More than 500,000 Beijing citizens stood on the sides of the road from the airport to the hotel for several tens of kilometers, waving flags to welcome him. However, the way Nehru handled the Tibet issue caused great dissatisfaction in India. The negativity became even more pronounced as Sino-Indian border differences intensified. The signing of the agreement on Tibet had not really solved the problem between China and India. Rather, it was a short-term diplomatic band-aid on an increasingly troubled wound. It promoted a few years of closeness, papering over real contradictions between the two countries.

Achievements in the golden period During this period, New Delhi took an active role in promoting Sino-Indian relations. India was the second non-socialist country to recognize the communist government in

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China and the first non-socialist country to establish diplomatic relations with it. India supported new China’s membership in the United Nations (UN), made efforts to mediate in the Korean War, and invited China to participate in the Bandung Conference, introducing Premier Zhou Enlai to the leaders from other Afro-Asian countries. China reciprocated and attached great importance to developing relations with India. Mao attended the National Day Reception of the Indian Embassy in China in 1951. Zhou Enlai visited India in 1954 and was warmly welcomed during his visit. The two countries jointly promoted the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in the joint statement, which challenged the unequal international order after World War II. Nehru paid a return visit to China later in 1954 and met Mao four times. Mao even spoke of Nehru as his “new bosom friend” (xin xiangzhi) (Mao 1954). At the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in 1955, the participating countries announced their full support for the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” and agreed to take this principle as the basis of their relations with all countries. Sino-Indian relations thus reached a climax. In the next few years, the leaders of the two countries paid frequent bilateral visits, and cultural exchanges between the two countries flourished, becoming a highlight of Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s. In 1951, Dr Madan Mohanlal Atal, an Indian and a member of the World Peace Council, visited China in an unofficial capacity. Atal had led the medical team to China during the anti-Japanese war and was held in high regard by the Chinese people. His visit to China served as a prelude to the start of cultural exchanges between China and India (Wang 2009: 103). On 16 May 1952, the China–India Friendship Association (CIFA Zhong yin youhao xiehui) was founded in Beijing. On 12 February 1951, the first branch of the India–China Friendship Association (ICFA Yin zhong youhao xiehui) was founded in Calcutta (Ghosh 2017: 705). By May 1952, forty-five branches of ICFA were established all over India (Wang 2009: 104). And by early 1958, there had been approximately thirty CIFA delegations from China and forty ICFA visits from India (Ghosh 2017: 709). These two non-official organizations played an important role in promoting SinoIndian cultural and people-to-people exchanges, and especially on sensitive issues they played a mediating role. For example, at the Third National Conference held in Mumbai from 31 January to 2 February 1958, ICFA condemned the idea of “two Chinas” being propagated by some countries and adopted a plan to expand cultural exchanges (Huang 1998: 489). Later in April 1959, ICFA declared it would not allow China’s internal affairs to influence Sino-Indian friendship ( Joint Center for History and Economics 2019). As noted by Sen, These two organizations also planned various cultural events, rallies, exhibitions, and lectures and held annual meetings. In fact, these events facilitated the circulation of knowledge about respective countries and were instrumental in propagating the message of ‘Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’ at the grassroots level. (Sen 2017: 396) In addition, the number of delegations between China and India increased. The delegations consisted of mostly well-known figures from both sides. For instance, after returning to China, Chinese participants played a positive role in enhancing popular interest in the other country. The number of Chinese students who studied Indian languages at the Eastern Language Department of Peking University increased. Delhi University

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and other institutions of higher education in India began to teach Chinese. After the exchange visits between the two prime ministers in 1954, the slogan of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” was widely circulated in both countries. In the wake of the Bandung Conference, cultural exchanges between the two countries further intensified. The two sides expanded their plans to include the exchange of students. During the Indian film festival in China, it was reported that more than three million Chinese watched the Indian film “Awaara” and “Do Bigha Zamin” (Wang 2009: 105). The theme song of “Awaara” is still well-known among Chinese born in the 1950s and 1960s. This trend of cultural exchanges between China and India continued till 1959 and was the highlight of the period. It was not all cultural exchanges. During this period, trade between China and India also developed. Throughout the 1950s, the leaders of the two countries actively promoted trade exchanges and recognized the importance of foreign trade. In June 1952, ICFA held its first annual meeting in Mumbai, and India–China economic and trade cooperation was placed on the agenda (Ghosh 2017: 712). Although the volume of trade was not large, it continued uninterrupted throughout the 1950s and was positively related to the development of Sino-Indian relations. After the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1950, total bilateral trade increased sharply in the following year, amounting to nearly $42 million in 1951 After the signing of the treaty on Tibet in 1954, total trade increased to $19.7 million in 1955 and then $25.5 million in 1956 after there had been a dramatic decline to $4.4 million in 1953 and $6.9 million in 1954. Trade fell again dramatically after Sino-Indian relations deteriorated in 1960 (IMF 2019). In sum, the Sino-Indian relationship in the 1950s was a period of friendship and mutual benefit. However, the contradictions under the surface simmered and deepened. To these contradictions we now turn.

Another version of China–India relations in the 1950s Notwithstanding India’s acquiescence in China’s actions in 1950 and the agreement of 1954 between the two countries, Tibet remained a difficult issue. So also, despite the adoption of the Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and expressions of friendship (Hindi-China bhai bhai), differences over the delineation of the border remained unresolved. Ultimately, it was both these issues that led to war, and they have remained the cause of instability in Sino-Indian relations up to the present. India’s calculations behind the China–India agreement on Tibet What were India’s calculations in signing the 1954 agreement? As Mullik argues, a unilateral renunciation of [the] rights inherited from a foreign imperialist ruler was the only way of convincing China and Russia that India had no hostile designs or feelings against those countries. It was only thus that the Chinese could be induced to follow a moderate path with respect to Tibet. (Mullik 1971: 84) Nehru believed that if India abandoned its privileges inherited from Britain, China could, in turn, be made more comfortable with the idea of Tibetan autonomy and

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control over its religious affairs. In addition, he felt that Tibet could play a special “buffering” role, blocking the spread and influence of China’s political system and communist ideology to India and other Himalaya countries (Lv and Sun 2013: 98). India faced separatism in its northern and north-eastern periphery, and it worried about the stability and independence of the Himalayan kingdoms of Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim. In this context, it was necessary for India to isolate external influences and block internal separatist forces (Lv and Sun 2013: 97). Despite China’s military presence in Tibet after 1950, the region could still act as a political and ideological buffer that would help India contain Chinese influences. However, as noted earlier, many domestic forces in India were dissatisfied with the way that Nehru had handled Tibet. The consequences of the Tibet settlement with China, on the one hand, exerted pressures on Nehru to take a tougher approach to the border quarrel and, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for the Tibetan rebellion and the Dalai’s escape to India in the late 1950s. As former Foreign Secretary Muchkund Dubey argued, “[t]he presence and activities of the Dalai Lama and his followers in India became a permanent source of [bilateral] tension simmering under the surface” (Dubey 2013: 284). Indeed, its negative influence has continued. Deepening differences on the border issue After the PLA entered Tibet in 1950, Nehru and the government faced a barrage of criticism. This, in turn, made Nehru at first more combative, and, later, more reluctant to oppose them (Maxwell 2013: 67). Many in India came to believe that given the compromises Nehru had made on Tibet, India should be tougher on the border quarrel. Under pressure, Nehru continued to implement a friendly policy toward China and recognized its sovereignty over Tibet while, at the same time, attempting to extend the administrative jurisdiction of India on the Sino-Indian border. Until June 1954, India’s northern and eastern borders were not clearly defined on its own maps (Gupta 1974: 765). However, India occupied Dawang (Tawang) in the eastern sector and Tshong-sa (Cong sha) and Sang in the western sector of the China–India border in 1951 (Wang 2009: 115). In the central sector, new check-posts were established by the Indo-Tibetan Border Force in the previously disputed areas. This was supposedly ordered by Nehru in a secret memorandum issued in July 1954 (Gupta 1974: 765). The North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) was also established. In 1955, India occupied Pulam Sumda (Bo lin san duo), which is one of the ten trade markets that the Chinese government had agreed to open in the Ngari Prefecture of Tibet in accordance with the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement. In 1957, India occupied Shipki La (Shi pu qi shankou) in the central sector which is one of the four important passageways from India to Tibet in the central sector. In view of the fact that China was busy with the Korean War in the early 1950s, and considering the blossoming of China–India friendship, Beijing protested over these various Indian actions but maintained the peace. The Chinese side reiterated China’s position on different occasions, namely, that the border had never been formally demarcated.5 However, there continued to be a cognitive gap between China and India on this issue. In the 1953 talks on Tibet leading up to the 1954 agreement, the Indian side felt that “The Chinese attitude during the negotiations showed that unlike the Indian side which considered the Agreement to be complete leaving no issues pending” (Mullik 1971: 156). The implication seemed to be that in New Delhi’s eyes there was no border issue

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left to negotiate: all problems between China and India had been resolved. The Chinese side’s view was rather different, namely, that it only deals with “issues that are potentially solvable” (Wang 2009: 89). The Chinese believed the time for border negotiations had not arrived. When signing the Sino-Indian Tibet Agreement in 1954, the two sides had kept quiet on the border issue. The Chinese side meant to solve the Tibet issue first and then move on to discuss the border. India’s interpretation of this episode was that China had no objections to the existing delineation of the border.6 After Nehru’s visit to China in 1954, the official Indian map suddenly changed the border between China and India and showed the McMahon Line as a firm boundary (Noorani 2012).7 In 1956, during the visit of Chinese Premier Zhou to India, after detailed discussion between him and Nehru, the Indian prime minister wrote in the Minutes of the meeting: Premier Chou referred to the McMahon Line and again said that he had never heard of this before though of course the then Chinese Government had dealt with this matter and had not accepted that line … [a]lthough he thought this line, established by British Imperialism, was not fair, nevertheless, because it was an accomplished fact and because of the friendly relations which existed between China and the countries concerned, namely, India and Burma, the Chinese Government were of the opinion that they should give recognition to the McMahon Line. (Mullik 1971: 161) In the years ahead, the Indian side repeatedly drew attention to Zhou’s reply, pointing out that China had already recognized the McMahon Line. In response to Nehru’s Minutes, Zhou Enlai explained China’s position: As you are aware, the ‘MacMahon [sic] Line’ was a product of the British policy of aggression against the Tibet Region of China and has aroused the great indignation of the Chinese people. Juridically, too, it cannot be considered legal … the Tibet local authorities were in fact dissatisfied with this unilaterally drawn line … the Chinese government, on the one hand, finds it necessary to take a more or less realistic attitude towards the MacMahon Line and, on the other hand, cannot but act with prudence and needs time to deal with this matter. (Zhou Enlai 1959: 53) Zhou Enlai hinted that China was likely to accept the McMahon Line, but the two sides needed to negotiate and make some compromises and concessions. In China’s view, this was a reasonable and feasible way to proceed. However, the Indian government did not get the point. It concluded that the Chinese government had rejected the McMahon Line in a roundabout way and wanted to recover and occupy the 90,000-square-kilometer territory between the McMahon Line and the traditional line. Chinese scholar Wang Hongwei commented: “This unconventional misunderstanding of the other side’s diplomatic language can be said to be one of the reasons for the tragedy that could have been avoided later” (Wang 2009: 119). China insisted that the border was controversial and needed to be resolved through negotiation. However, China was looking for a more favorable time to open discussions. The Indian side wanted to bypass formal negotiations and occupy the disputed areas. As Nehru stated on 20 November 1950: “Our maps show that the McMahon

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Line is our boundary and that is our boundary—map or no map” (quoted in Maxwell 2013: 71). The approach Nehru adopted—of making it clear, on the ground and in official statements, that India regarded the McMahon Line as the boundary, while making no direct communication to China on that score—was challenged within the Indian government. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, then Home Minister of India, wrote a letter to Nehru on 7 November 1950 saying: “The undefined state of the frontier and the existence on our side of a population with its affinities to the Tibetans or Chinese have all the elements of a potential trouble between China and ourselves” (quoted in Garver 2001: 28). This implies that the Indian government knew that the border was undefined. Indeed, questions about the demarcation of the Indo-Tibetan frontier continued to be asked in Parliament. In December 1953, during a debate on foreign affairs, Lanka Sundaram, an Independent member of Parliament, raised his concerns over a note in the External Affairs Ministry which had “mentioned that China was disinclined to accept the McMahon Line.” He urged “for steps to be taken to properly define that line” ( Jetly 1979: 32). However, Nehru denied that China had at any time raised any question about the frontier: “the McMahon Line is there. We have nothing to discuss with anybody, with the Chinese Government or any other Government about it” (quoted in Jetly 1979: 33). In December 1958, Nehru formally discussed the border issue with Zhou Enlai in his letter to Zhou. According to Chinese scholar Wang Hongwei, this was the first letter between them on the border (Wang 2009: 117). However, the positions of the two sides were by now difficult to change, and it was too late to conduct a positive official discussion. After the Longju incident and China’s completion of the Aksai Chin road, Nehru was once again strongly criticized and attacked in parliament. His prestige has also been undermined, and his political status had been weakened. He therefore took a rigid attitude on India’s claims in the Kashmir sector after November 1959. Overall, by this stage, Nehru had seemingly given up on his friendly attitude. In 1959, Zhou Enlai’s visit to New Delhi to negotiate on the border failed, Nehru adopted the “forward policy,” and three years later China and India were at war.

Beneath the surface: wider differences In addition to differences over Tibet and the border, China and India had many disagreements in other areas such as their roles in Asia, their relations with other big powers, and the view their leaders had of each other in response to events at home and abroad. These differences help explain the ups and downs of Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s. Asian leadership: an implicit competition During the early 1950s, both China and India played “a leading role in the Asian resurgence and represented two different politico-economic models for the newly independent Asian and African countries” (Acharya 2015: 357). Since independence, Nehru had adopted a non-aligned policy and emphasized the importance of the Asian region and the potential role of India in it. He believed that a non-aligned foreign policy would enable India to pursue its destiny as a great power (Saran 2017: 35). According to Andrew B. Kennedy, non-alignment was “not only to save the world from ‘disaster’, but also to bolster Indian autonomy, avoid entrapment in great power conflicts, and maximize India’s influence” (Kennedy 2015: 101).

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According to Zorawar Daulet Singh, “In Nehru’s geopolitical image, sub-continental matters were not an isolated phenomenon but part of a larger defined regional picture” (Singh 2019: 133). Thus, the Indian prime minister organized the Asian Relations Conference in March 1947 and made positive contributions in the 1955 Bandung Conference. Not only did he fight against both anti-Soviet and anti-communist forces, but he also introduced Zhou Enlai to the leaders of the Afro-Asian states and promoted the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. In addition, India tried to play the role of peacemaker in the Sino-US conflict. As Zorawar Daulet Singh has commented: “India could be a credible bridge builder in the tension reduction process” (Singh 2019: 149). Nehru also saw the UN as an opportunity to reshape the international system in ways that were both morally desirable and consistent with India’s interests in particular. By safeguarding India’s sovereignty and promoting international peace, it offered a foundation on which India could establish itself and commence its rise to greatness. (Kennedy 2015: 95) Nehru’s non-aligned concept and the concept of a peace area were effective in confronting the United States and Soviet Union and in building his reputation on the world stage. In 1956, the New York Times raved: “Jawaharlal Nehru is one of the great figures of our times—and it is a time of giants” (quoted in Kennedy 2015: 92). Under his leadership, it was predicted India could rise from poverty and realize rapid economic growth. The world saw India as a model for the planned economy of non-communist and underdeveloped countries. All of these enhanced the confidence of Nehru and lent strong support to his hopes of making India a great power and an Asian leader. In contrast, China’s power status in Asia was gradually emerging. In 1949, Mao and Joseph Stalin reached a consensus that China should focus its attention on Asian issues (Yan 2009: 17). Stalin proposed that China should lead the communist parties in Asia. On 25 May 1957, Mao told Kliment Voroshilov that China is an Asian country and its first interest is Asia. By the beginning of 1951, when the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the CCP was established, Beijing had become the center for Communist Party representatives from Asian countries. The communist parties that were not in power had resident representatives in Beijing. After China sent troops to North Korea, Stalin had completely handed over leadership of the Asian revolutions to the CCP. In May 1951, when Stalin met Wang Jiaxiang, the head of the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the CCP, he proposed the idea of establishing a socialist alliance based in China (Shen and Xia 2014: 207–208). As China intervened in the Korean War, Moscow further recognized and respected China’s right to speak on the North Korean issue. As for the Vietnamese revolution, Stalin was never terribly interested. Until the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union always regarded the Vietnam issue as a matter that China would look after. Thus, after the founding of the People’s Republic, Asian communist parties basically linked themselves to the CCP and accepted its guidance and help (Shen 2011: 36). During the International Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties, the Chinese Communist delegation once again proposed seizing power by “violent means and revolutionary struggle” and had a disagreement with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) (Shen and Xia 2009: 91–94). Mao now insisted not just on leading the Asian revolutions, but also on how to lead the world revolution (Shen 2011: 37).

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In sum, China and India not only had different conceptions of Asian leadership, but they also differed completely on how they wanted to position themselves. India wanted to establish itself as a leader of the third world which was different from the United States and the Soviet Union, whereas China wanted to become the successor of the Soviet Union. This difference affected the two countries’ perceptions of each other. The other side of Nehru’s policy was to guard against China and to block the influence of the Chinese revolution through friendship. In September 1954, Nehru told Parliament that there could be “no settlement in the Far East or South East Asia” until the People’s Republic had been recognized. The best “assurance of security” was recognition of China by regional countries and its acceptance by the UN rather than erecting military alliances (Nehru 1961: 91). As Mullik argued, [t]he presence of a strong Communist Government on India’s border was no doubt inconvenient from many points of view and posed danger in several ways; but this danger could in no way be lessened by pretending that it did not exist; and nonrecognition of the new Government of China would have amounted to just that. (Mullik 1971: 82) The Chinese scholar Wang Hongwei points out that the reason for India’s friendliness was to make China involved in the peace process (under Nehru’s ‘leadership’), and let the Chinese leaders understand the reality of the international environment, and make the Asian and African countries that have never had contact with communist China understand the actual attitude of the Beijing leaders so that the policies of China would have a flavour of ‘Asia’ rather than ‘Communist’. (Wang 2009: 99) Underneath it all, the two countries had a subtly competitive mentality. American scholar J. Mohan Malik has commented: India relied mainly on the USSR and its leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to counterbalance China … for New Delhi, China has been rising since the 1950s whereas the West took notice of China’s rise only during the last decade of the 20th century. (Malik 2009: 182) During his visit to China in 1954, Nehru met Mao and is said to have come away from the encounter feeling as if he had been “ushered into a presence, as someone coming from a tributary or vassal state of the Chinese empire” (Burleigh 2013: 320). In 1955, Nehru invited Zhou and introduced him to other leaders at the Bandung Conference. This approach was not well received by Zhou or other Chinese leaders, who felt that India was acting as if it was a “public mentor and introducer of China into the group of developing nations” (Miller 2009: 228). The implicit confrontation objectively deepened the psychological distance between the leaders of the two countries. Especially after the breakdown of Sino-Soviet friendship, the Soviet Union supported India or evaded and ignored China’s demands, which made a negative impact on Chinese leaders and to a certain extent hardened Mao’s determination to fight back against India on the border issue.

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The impact of the breakdown of Sino-Soviet relations on the Sino-Indian conflict From 1956 to 1959, Sino-Soviet relations gradually deteriorated. In 1958, China and the Soviet Union disagreed on the Long Wave Broadcasting Station and the Joint Fleet. Military cooperation between the two sides was negatively affected. After the PLA bombarded Jinmen, the Soviet Union believed that China’s military actions had intensified tensions in East Asia and damaged relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Mutual trust between the two sides was further weakened. In 1959, in order to avoid being disadvantaged in negotiations with the United States on banning nuclear tests, the Soviet Union unilaterally stopped its nuclear technology support for China. This move damaged China’s emerging national defense strategy. What was more serious was that it indicated that mutual compromise between the United States and the Soviet Union could harm China’s interests (Niu 2010: 127). It was in this context that the Sino-Indian border conflict became increasingly severe. The Soviet Union believed that China’s actions on the border were not conducive to Moscow’s more moderate approach to world politics. The Soviets not only exerted pressure on China over Beijing’s attitude to the Sino-Indian border quarrel, but also indicated disapproval of China’s position in the form of a public statement carried by the Soviet agency, TASS.8 The reaction of Mao and other Chinese leaders to this statement was strong. They pointed out that it was Khrushchev’s “gift to Eisenhower for the purpose of pleasing US imperialism” (People’s Daily and the Journal of the Red Flag 1965: 71). In effect, China at this time wanted to convince the Soviet Union that India’s non-alignment was a myth and that New Delhi was actually a follower of the Western camp (Ranganathan and Khanna 2000: 51–52). According to the Chinese view, the policy of friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the non-aligned countries was misguided.9 This difference over non-alignment also, to some extent, caused Mao to adopt a harder line against India on the border dispute. The situation changes at home and abroad, and attitude changes in leaders From 1949 to the middle of 1950s, China’s foreign policy was in transition. There were two important changes. One was that the CCP was changing from being a revolutionary party to becoming the ruling party. This factor accounted for why Chinese leaders in the early days of People’s Republic continued to consider relations with Asian countries from the perspective of revolution: from a position of domestic political consolidation, they could look abroad to promote revolution. The second change was that the leaders of the CCP were changing their role from heading a revolutionary movement to heading a state (Niu 2010: 89). This shift made Chinese leaders realize that, in addition to ideology, it was necessary to establish ties with the rest of the world, especially developing countries, at the level of international relations, and from a “one-sided” approach to the establishment of a “middle zone.” The impact of the shift was however transitory. In the summer of 1957, China’s domestic and international situation changed. Domestically, the CCP began to shift further left and the class struggle was re-emphasized to a prominent position, replacing the focus on the development of a socialist economy. As a result, the peaceful coexistence policy articulated by Moscow lost its appeal for Beijing. Externally, first, the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United

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States had eased. When there appeared a rift in Sino-Soviet relations, any signs of relaxation in the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States were considered by Mao to be “revisionism” within the international communist movement. Second, there was a change in Sino-US relations. The US’s tough attitude and uncompromising policy toward China changed Mao’s vision of seeking peaceful coexistence with the United States, which, in turn, affected China’s views on war and peace (Chen 2013: 87). Mao now intensified the class struggle and fundamentally changed his judgment of the international situation: he sought to create class divisions and support communist revolutions (Garver 2001: 121–122). The increasingly “left-leaning” foreign policy of China emphasized world revolution (Yan 2013: 42). The Chinese leadership began to feel that at this historical moment war in the service of revolution could not be avoided. At a time when Sino-US relations were strained and the rift in Sino-Soviet relations was deepening, the foreign policy of peaceful coexistence no longer made sense (Chen 2013: 87). With this kind of thinking gaining ground and in the face of India’s forward policy, China chose to be more aggressive over the border. Nehru has been seen by some as an idealistic leader, one that “sought to transform international norms and institutions on the basis of moral principles” (Kennedy 2015: 93). At the same time, he sought to protect India’s national interests. In this sense, his idealism often had the color of realism. “Nehru’s peace area concept was intrinsically linked with and could only be sustained if there were stable patterns of interaction and a modicum of East–West stability in the extended neighbourhood” (Singh 2019: 149). With the worsening of the Sino-Indian border dispute, especially after the confrontation between India and China on the Tibet issue in 1959 and the bloody clashes between the soldiers of the two sides in Longju and Kongka La, Nehru felt that the Chinese side did not reciprocate India’s friendship. Worse, its leaders repeatedly damaged India’s political influence and geopolitical security (Ma and Niu 2010: 13). Not surprisingly, Nehru faced increasing pressure from his party, the opposition, and domestic public opinion, raising serious questions about his authority. In 1959, when the rebellion in Tibet occurred, Nehru and the Indian government showed sympathy for the Dalai Lama and granted him asylum. This, coupled with loud criticisms from the Indian press, convinced Beijing of the need to counter “India’s anti-China activities” and was the beginning of a fundamental reversal in the direction of Sino-Indian relations (Chen 2006: 84–87). In early November 1959, a secret memorandum from Nehru to his key overseas ambassadors showed how he was convinced now that China in the present dispute is only after territorial gains from India and not interested in a settlement based on traditional frontiers, therefore he does not see much chance of a reasonable negotiated settlement of the dispute.10 In addition, the integration of Goa in 1961 stirred strong nationalist feelings in India. Nehru and his colleagues seemed to want to use the same method to deal with the Sino-Indian border dispute. Minister of Home Affairs Lal Bahadur Shastri stated that China would suffer the same “fate as Goa.” In this atmosphere, “the restraint shown by China on the border was interpreted as a sign of weakness” (Zachariah 2004: 245). Nehru ordered the “forward policy” and the two countries eventually went to war.

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Conclusion This paper does not intend to review every facet of the Sino-Indian relationship in the 1950s. Rather, it attempts to explain the changes that occurred between the two countries. The explanation goes beyond the purely bilateral diplomatic interactions to include domestic factors in both countries and the nature of world politics at the time as it affected them. The domestic and international factors operating on China and India impacted their handling of the differences over Tibet and the border. In essence, the deterioration in relations resulted from mutual misunderstandings and misjudgments. The Sino-Indian relationship in the 1950s is a crucial period. Its importance lies not in the short-lived golden time experienced by the two countries, but instead in the way that two countries dealt with the contradictions below the peaceful surface and in the context of domestic and international change. At the time, China and India did not regard each other as the most significant rivals. The contradictions over Tibet and the border were exacerbated by their responses to domestic and international factors and the result was war. The two Asian giants have been at peace since 1962, but the lessons of the 1950s deserve deep thought.

Notes

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The 1950s in China–India relations  103 IMF (International Monetary Fund) (2019) IMF Data, available online at https://data.imf.org (accessed 21 August 2019). Jetly, N. (1979) India-China Relations, 1947–1977 (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers). Joint Center for History and Economics (2019) “1950s China-India Chronology,” China-India Relations in the 1950s, available online at https://chinaindia1950.github.io/timeline/. Kennedy, A. B. (2015) “Nehru’s Foreign Policy: Realism and Idealism Conjoined,” in D. Malone, C. R. Mohan and S. Raghavan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 92–103. Ling, W. (2008) Research on Sino-Indian Relations after the Cold War (Beijing: China University of Political Science and Law Press). Lok Sabha (1950) Parliamentary Debates (20 November) vol. V, no. 4 cols. 155–156. Lv, Z. and Sun, J. (2013) Zhongyin bianjie wenti, yin ba ling tu jiu fen yan jiu (Sino-Indian Border Issues, India-Pakistan Territorial Disputes) (Beijing: People’s Publishing House). Ma, R. and Niu, J. (2010) “Ni he lu zheng fu de dui hua bianjie zhengce: Fenxi kuangjia (Nehru Government’s Border Policy with China: An Analytical Framework),” South Asian Studies 2: 10–20. Malik, M. (2009) “India and China: As China Rises, India Stirs,” in H. V. Pant, ed., Indian Foreign Policy in a Unipolar World (Abingdon: Routledge): 163–191. Malone, D. M. and Mukherjee, R. (2010) “India and China: Conflict and Cooperation,” Survival 52(1): 137–158. Mao, Z. (1951) “Congratulatory Speech at the Indian Embassy on India’s Independence,” dated 26 January, MZDthought.com (6 September 2005), available online at www.mzdthought.com/ html/mxzz/mzdwjwx/2005/0906/5273.html. Mao, Z. (1954) “Tong yindu zongli ni he lu de si ci tanhua (Four Conversations with Indian Prime Minister Nehru),” people.com.cn, available online at www.people.com.cn/GB/shizh eng/8198/30446/30452/2196143.html. Mao, Z. (1991) Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. IV (Beijing: People Publishing House). Mao, Z. (1994) Selected Works of Mao Zedong on Diplomacy (Beijing: CCCPC Party Literature Publishing House, World Affairs Press). Maxwell, N. (2013) India’s China War (New Delhi: Natraj Publishers). Miller, M. C. (2009) “Re-Collecting Empire: ‘Victimhood’ and the 1962 Sino-Indian War,” Asian Security 5(3): 216–241. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the National Government of China (1944) Opinions on the Proposed Adjustment on Tibetan Affairs, Taiwan Archives No. 17-1/002/019/8. Mohan, J. (1975) “Jawaharlal Nehru and His Socialism,” India International Centre Quarterly 2(3): 183–192. Mullik, B. N. (1971) My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal (New Delhi: Allied Publishers). Nehru, J. (1961) India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India). Niu, J. (ed.) (2010) Zhong hua ren min gong he guo dui wai guan xi shi gai lun (Introduction to History of Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (1949–2000) (Beijing: Peking University Press). Noorani, A. G. (2012) “The Truth about 1962,” Frontline 29(23) (17–30 November), available online at https://frontline.thehindu.com/static/html/fl2923/stories/20121130292300400. htm. Ogden, C. (2014) Indian Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Polity Press). People’s Daily and the Journal of the Red Flag (1965) “Su gong ling dao tong wo men fen qi de you lai he fa zhan (The Origin and Development of the Differences between the Leaders of the CPSU and Us),” in Guan yu guo ji gong chan zhu yi yun dong zong lu xian de lun zhan (The Debate on the General Line of the International Communist Movement) (Beijing: People’s Publishing House): 51–95. Ranganathan, C. V. and Khanna, V. C. (2000) India and China: The Way Ahead after Mao’s India War (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications).

104  Hu Xiaowen Rao, V. V. (1987) “Socialist Thought of Jawaharlal Nehru,” Indian Journal of Political Science 48(2): 195–211. Saran, S. (2017) How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books). Sen, T. (2017) India, China, and the World: A Connected History (London: Rowman & Littlefield). Shen, Z. (2011) “Maozedong yu dong fang qingbao ju: Yazhou geming lingdao quan de zhuanyi (Mao Zedong and the Eastern Information Bureau: The Transfer of Leadership in Asian Revolution),” Journal of East China Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 6: 27–37. Shen, Z. and Xia, Y. (2009) “Hidden Currents During the Honeymoon: Mao, Khrushchev, and the 1957 Moscow Conference,” Journal of Cold War Studies 11(4): 74–117. Shen, Z. and Xia, Y. (2014) “Leadership Transfer in the Asian Revolution: Mao Zedong and the Asian Cominform,” Cold War History 14(2): 195–213. Singh, Z. D. (2019) Power & Diplomacy: India’s Foreign Policies During the Cold War (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Tellis, A. J. (2015) “US-India Relations: The Struggle for an Enduring Partnership,” in D. Malone, C. R. Mohan and S. Raghavan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 481–494. The New York Times (1956) “A Red Carpet for Nehru” (16 December). Wang, H. (2009) Dang dai Zhong Yin guan xi shu ping (A Critical Review of the Sino-Indian Relations of the Present Age) (Beijing: China Tibetan Studies Publishing House). Wang, H. and Singh, B. (2011) Ni he lu jia zu yu yin du zheng zhi (Nehru Family and Indian Politics) (Beijing: Peking University Press).Yan, M. (2009) “1957 nian xingshi yu fu luo xi luo fu fang hua (The Situation in 1957 and Voroshilov’s Visit to China)” Bai Nian Chao 2: 12–20. Yan, Y. (2013) “Xin zhongguo ‘liangmian chuji’ waijiao zhanlue pingxi (An Analysis of the Diplomatic Strategy of ‘Attacks on Both Sides’ of China),” Party History Research & Teaching 3: 38–46. Zachariah, B. (2004) Nehru (London: Routledge). Zhang, C. (2013) “Historical Changes in Relations between China and Neighboring Countries,” Institute for Security and Development Policy (March), available online at http://isdp.eu/ content/uploads/images/stories/isdp-main-pdf/2013-chi-historical-changes-in-relationsbetween-china-and-neighboring-countries.pdf. Zhang, Z. (2002) “Lue lun ni he lu shiqi de yin su teshu guanx (On Special Relations Between India and the Soviet Union in the Nehru Period),” Journal of Zhejiang Normal University (Social Sciences) 27(4): 41–44. Zhou, E. (1952a) “Our Foreign Policies and Our Tasks” (30 April), reprinted in Selected Works of Zhou Enlai Volume II (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989): 94–102, available online at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zhou-enlai/selected-works/volume-two.pdf. Zhou, E. (1952b) “Women de waijiao fangzhen he renwu,” Excerpt from an Address at a Meeting of China’s Diplomatic Envoys to Foreign Countries on 30 April, Marxists.org, available online at www.marxists.org/chinese/zhouenlai/110.htm. Zhou, E. (1959) “Letter from Prime Minister of China to the Prime Minister of India, 23 January 1959,” History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Woodrow Wilson Center (23  January), available online at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/175951. Zhou, W. (2006) One Hundred Years of Sino-Indian Relations (Beijing: World Affairs Press).

Part 2

Culture and strategic culture

5

The new Indian communities in China Pallavi Aiyar

In four decades, China has metamorphosed from a poor, agrarian society into the world’s second largest economy. Its rise has sent ripples across the globe, exerting a magnetic pull for peoples desirous of hitching their future to the country’s ascending star. Yet as recently as the turn of the last century Indians were notable in China mainly for their absence amongst this crush of fortune-seeking foreigners. I lived in Beijing between 2002 and 2009, a period of epochal change. China had just joined the World Trade Organization and Beijing had won the bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games. There was a visceral energy palpable across the country in those years. Beijing seemed to spit up entire new neighborhoods in what felt like weeks. China’s rise was not limited to export-oriented factories and shiny new physical infrastructure either. Indicating one of the more startling shifts in power relations, Beijing began to emerge as the globe’s chief creditor, accumulating the world’s largest foreign currency reserves and financing the spending sprees of Western nations, in particular the United States. Yet this was also a time when Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of “hiding strength and biding time” remained a guiding principle of China’s foreign policy. The President–Prime Minister duo of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao (2002–2012) worked toward consolidating the nation’s new ascendancy, taking pains to avoid ruffling too many feathers in the region and beyond. The catchphrase of the era, “peaceful rise,” was meant to allay fears about China’s intentions, as it grew into an engine of global growth. Economic diplomacy was at the fore and overt efforts were made to downplay the many historical and contemporary political tensions that plagued China’s relationship with its neighbors and trading partners. The cumulative impact of these developments had significant outcomes for the bilateral India–China relationship, and, concomitantly, for the Indian presence in China. When I first moved to Beijing, the rarity of Indian faces on the streets was surprising. From Kenya to Fiji, I had always assumed that Indians were everywhere. However, it soon became apparent that few had made it across the Great Wall. This absence was particularly remarkable given the thousands of years of historical interaction and crossfertilization between the two cultures that had followed the spread of Buddhism from India to China, from the first century AD on. More recently, the British Raj provided the aegis for further cross-border movements of goods and peoples, leading ultimately to the establishment of substantial Indian communities in Chinese cities like Shanghai. With the Communist accession in 1949, however, the Indian communities in mainland China all but vanished. Political relations between the countries took a turn for the worse with a war over a border dispute breaking out in 1962, resulting in a decades-long deep freeze in ties.

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I moved to Beijing in early 2002 to teach at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. I journeyed on an Ethiopian Airlines flight, the only direct air link between the two countries at the time, since the plane stopped in New Delhi en route to Beijing from Addis Ababa. I arrived to teach newswriting in a media landscape characterized by a single Indian journalist. The two countries might have had a combined population equal to a third of all humanity, but the Press Trust of India’s Beijing-based scribe labored alone to cover the seismic transformations of the Chinese mainland. The most common associations that average Chinese people had with India were either negative ones like poverty and overpopulation, or anachronistic ones like Buddhism and old Hindi movies from the 1950s and 1960s. In the years that followed, significant shifts occurred along a range of bilateral fronts. The border dispute remained intractable, but it appeared to have been put on the back burner as high-level political summits became the norm, trade grew exponentially, tourism picked up, and new communities of Indians, from medical students to yoga teachers, began to make their homes in China. This was a period when China was focused on domestic growth, choosing to tamp down on the draining distractions of foreign adventurism. Better relations with India were part of a broader charm offensive in the region, which saw Beijing smooth historically difficult ties with regional players from Taiwan to South Korea. Consequently, despite the unresolved border with India, a number of confidencebuilding mechanisms were instituted. In 2007, the armies of both countries conducted their first joint exercises since the 1962 war. China’s enormous appetite for raw materials (it had begun consuming about half of the world’s output of cement, iron ore, and coal) led to a surge in bilateral trade, which zoomed up from $4.95 billion in 2002 to almost $52 billion in 2008 (data compiled from Department of Commerce 2019). Moreover, Indian investments in China grew and diversified to include manufacturing facilities, research and development centers, and banks. The number of Indian faces on the streets of Chinese cities spiked, while Indian restaurants serving kebabs and curries multiplied. Direct flights operated by several airlines began to connect the big cities in both countries, tourism grew, and new communities of Indians took nascent root, not only in Beijing and Shanghai but also in the smaller cities of economic hubs like the Yangtze River Delta. In the decade since I left China, the Sino-Indian relationship has plateaued on the political and economic fronts. Bilateral trade and Indian investments in China did not continue their exponential growth for reasons that will be addressed later on. There is still no resolution in sight on the border dispute and occasional stand-offs on the border have raised tensions to uncomfortably high levels. Yet, people-to-people contact continues apace. By 2016 there were more Indian students in China than in the United Kingdom (Chhapia 2018). China was among the top five destinations for Indian tourists who traveled abroad in 2017 (PTI 2018b). Indian food and traditions like yoga are increasing in popularity, with restaurants and yoga teachers from India making an appearance in smaller Chinese cities. Perhaps the most notable change is the renaissance of Hindi movies in China, where, in particular, Amir Khan films have begun setting box office records. In a related development, the Chinese film, “Dying to Survive,” which detailed the smuggling of illegal but affordable cancer drugs from India, became the summer hit of 2018. According to long-term Indian residents in China, these new cinematic representations of India and Indians are formidable conveyors of soft power.

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Take off: 2002–2009 The period that I lived in China was bookended by the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization and Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games. Both events characterized the mainland’s heightened integration with the rest of the world to a position where its rise had become impossible for any country—big or small—to ignore. Following years of vertiginous, double-digit economic growth, in 2009 China went on to overtake established heavyweight Germany as the world’s third largest economy. As one of only two Indian journalists based in China (until we became three in 2005) during a time of huge and growing curiosity about the mainland, “The Average Zhou on India” piece became a trope I trotted out every time a visiting dignitary from New Delhi visited Beijing or vice versa. I would walk around a bustling neighborhood in Beijing and waylay passersby to ask them what associations they had with neighboring India. It was quickly apparent from the head scratching the question often elicited that India figured on the minds of the average Chinese person a lot less than the other way around. It wasn’t difficult to explain why. Countries tend to benchmark themselves against those they perceive as more powerful. In China, India was still perceived by the general public as a largely poor, developing country, with which their own, increasingly powerful nation had little in common. “Poor country,” was a standard response. “Too many children. You need a one child policy,” was another. Amidst the negatives of poverty, power cuts, and overpopulation, the closest associations Chinese people had with India were both anachronistic—one by a few decades, the other by hundreds of years. The Chinese people I spoke to, from school children to migrant laborers, seemed familiar with the fact that Buddhism, a religion central to the development of Chinese civilization, had journeyed across the Himalayas from India. They were less knowledgeable about the fact that Buddhism had died out in its birthplace over a thousand years earlier. Amongst a certain demographic—the middle-aged and elderly—the other frequent response was a burst of sepia-tinted song. A toothless man taking a caged bird out for a walk sang Indian superstar Raj Kapoor’s famous 1951 tune, Awara Hoon. A freelance maid who cleaned expatriate homes in Beijing brandished a vacuum cleaner in one hand and launched into a passable rendition of Piya tu ab to aa ja from the 1971 movie, Caravan. China’s love affair with Indian films and music stretches back to the period just after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when the country began its “reform and opening up” process under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Indian movies were amongst the first foreign films to be shown in Chinese theaters, their socialist themes deemed suitable. Movies from the Raj Kapoor era such as Awara and Do Bigha Zameen became instant classics, acquiring a massive fan following, despite being shown some two decades later in China than in India. By 2006, I was inured to the clichés of movies, religion, and poverty, but was called on to write up yet another version of the “perceptions” story on the occasion of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to India. I encountered all the standard answers before wandering into a tiny hutong alley, adjacent to the one I lived in. I spotted Old Yang, the neighborhood bicycle repairman, and approached him with my notebook. Initially, Old Yang was reluctant to answer, saying he was an ordinary man whose opinions were of no consequence. After assurances that I was very interested in his answer, he cleared his throat and said, “Well, I don’t know much about India, but I do know its telecom policy is very advanced; much ahead of China. You have such cheap phone rates and much more choice in service provider than we do.”

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It was a wakeup call to me that something had at long last shifted in the India–China dynamic. The reason was India’s rising reputation globally as a leader in information technology. India and IT were the new association, even in mainland China. I began to notice large advertisements for familiar names like NIIT and Aptech go up all over the city. By 2006, when I visited Aptech’s headquarters in Beijing, the company had already established over 200 training schools in fifty-seven different Chinese cities. Its joint venture with Peking University had maintained the number one slot in the IT training market in China for four consecutive years. At the training center I visited in Beijing, more than 2,000 students from across China were enrolled in study toward degrees that would qualify them as either software engineers or network administrators (Aiyar 2006a). Major Indian IT companies, including TCS, Infosys, Satyam, and Wipro, all set up shop in China one by one, joined by a slew of smaller, specialized firms like iGate Global Solutions, Newgen Software, and Zenzar Technology. By the middle of the millennium’s first decade, auto component majors like Sundaram Fasteners and Bharat Forge had entered the mainland. Mahindra and Mahindra set up a joint venture to make trucks; the wind energy firm Suzlon established a $60 million factory to manufacture wind turbines in the eastern city of Tianjin. Half a dozen Indian banks opened up representative offices, and in 2006 the State Bank of India got a license to begin commercial banking operations. Later in the same year, the first Indian law firm, Remfry & Sagar, set up office in Beijing. Pharma companies like Dr Reddy’s Laboratories and water treatment companies like VA Tech Wabag established a presence, while cosmetic tube manufacturer Essel Propack found success. Manufacturing facilities, research and development centers, banks and even legal services—the economic engagement across the Himalayas was certainly thickening, and this was a phenomenon visible to the naked eye. The numbers of Indian faces on the streets grew. In 2004, 390,000 Indians visited China, up forty-four percent from 2003, the largest increase of visitors to the mainland from any country according to the China National Tourism Administration. By 2004, there were close to ten Indian restaurants in Beijing serving up aromatic rogan josh and butter-thick dal makhani. This was almost double the number of such restaurants that had existed when I first arrived in Beijing, in late 2002. One restaurateur I profiled in 2006, Antony Munuswami, had established an empire of twenty-two Indian restaurants in ten different Chinese provinces. Called India Kitchen, his restaurants employed about 260 Indians as cooks and managers, in addition to 1,500 Chinese staff (Aiyar 2006d). The gravitational pull of China’s growth meant that the Beijing I lived in had a frontier feel to it. People from around the world came here to start afresh and find a better life. On weekend nights, the city’s bars were like the Tower of Babel. Africans, Americans, Australians, Japanese, and a small, but growing, band of Indians found, in the China of the time, a chance to expand their horizons and fortunes. The Indian communities forming in China comprised managers for global companies, representatives for Indian firms, cooks, hotel doormen, yoga teachers, and anything-for-a-buck free-spirited adventurers. The most numerous, however, were aspiring doctors. From 2004 on, over twenty medical universities across China began to aggressively recruit students from India. Tuition fees ranged on average from $2,000 to $3,000 a year, so that hundreds of Indians unable to either find, or afford, a place at medical colleges back home were converging on the mainland’s shores in a bid to get a coveted MBBS degree. Scenic Hangzhou, bustling Chongqing, remote Dali, cities few Indians had

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ever heard of, were suddenly teeming with youngsters from small-town India. Across China, universities were realising how lucrative tapping into the vein of aspirant Indian doctors could be. In early 2006, I visited Tianjin Medical University (TMU) on a reporting assignment. There were 250-odd Indian students studying there at the time (Aiyar 2006b). According to the Director of TMU’s International Exchange Department, Professor Gao Feng Lin, the number of applicants from India far exceeded the available places at the university. Of the 600-plus applications that TMU received in 2005 from India, only 180 could be accepted. I spoke with Vishwajit Sagar, an agent with the Nagpur-based South East Asia Educational Services who had recruited 107 Indian students to study medicine at Suzhou University in 2004. By 2005, the number of new students at Suzhou had risen to 200. Sagar had gone on to place another 100 students at Nantong and Jiangsu universities in 2005, which, given neighboring Suzhou’s success, decided to throw open their doors to Indians as well. “This is a win-win situation for all,” Sagar claimed. He explained that in the Indian state of Maharashtra alone, 45,000 students sat the medical entrance exam every year, competing for only 3,000 places. Studying in China, suggested Sagar, offered a chance to some of the leftover “thousands of deserving students” to pursue their medical dreams. “In India it’s 20–30 Lakhs ($50,000–$75,000 in the 2006 exchange rate) just for initial fees to get into a private medical college. This is much more affordable,” explained Aishwarya Babu from Chennai, a second-year medical student at TMU. For the Chinese universities, the demand from Indian students added to their international reputation, something the government was actively trying to promote. Primarily, however, the students from India were an important source of extra revenue. Consequently, entry requirements were lax. Contrary to the claims of university officials, almost any student that applied was accepted as long as they could pay. There were no cut-off percentages and little quality control. The classes, which were supposed to be taught in English by internationally qualified professors, were often substandard and barely understandable. Only a small percentage of professors held international degrees. The students I spoke with worried about being able to pass the screening test required by the Medical Council of India, a necessity if they were to be able to practice back home. The past experiences of Indian medical students in Russia and Eastern Europe, many of whom failed to pass the test, weighed on them. Several students said they were preparing for the exam in their spare time, but worried that they had little time to spare given the mandatory Chinese classes on top of their standard course-load. Despite the language coaching, most found it tough going to communicate in their new environs. As a result, they tended to congregate together, eating in separate dining halls and living in segregated dormitories. The list of complaints among the students was long; yet everyone I talked to wanted to see the degree through. It wasn’t perfect here, admitted Manpreet Kaur, a t wenty-year old from Chandigarh at TMU, but it was better than in India. Back home everything was so corrupt that all the places at medical colleges were bought up even before the entrance exams, she said bitterly. At least in China, they had a chance. Other than these “Made in China, Indian Doctors,” the second most numerous guild of Indians to emerge in China was that of yoga teachers. I first met Mohan Bhandari in 2003, when he had just moved to Beijing at the behest of a Chinese woman, Yin Yan, who had attended one of his yoga workshops in the Himalayan town of Rishikesh. Yin Yan, the editor of a fashion magazine, was convinced that Beijing was ready for an

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“authentic” yoga boutique. She had noticed a steady increase in interest in yoga amongst her social circle of wealthy, stressed-out friends, people who exercised regularly to keep fit while also yearning for a vaguely defined spirituality, to give their lives meaning beyond the material excess they were surrounded by. Over the next three years, Mohan and Yin Yan established a countrywide franchise empire of over fifty yoga schools and 50,000 enrolled students. To meet the growing demand, Mohan brought across twenty-nine other yogis from India to join his staff. “Rishikesh is empty now,” he said smiling. “I am bringing people from Bombay, Rajasthan, Jammu, everywhere.” Mohan paid these teachers $750–$2,000 a month depending on their qualifications, three to four times the money that they made back in India (Aiyar 2007a). As I traveled across the country, I often bumped into Indian yoga teachers in the unlikeliest of places. An instance was in the southern city of Wenzhou, where the hotel I stayed in also housed Sanjay and Rohit, two yoga teachers from Mumbai. They were lonely and starved for entertainment, but they said that every evening they could catch installments of the ZEE TV soap opera “Koshish Ek Asha” dubbed in Chinese. I discovered that the serial has been playing on fifteen provincial TV stations since 2005. According to Xiao Baohua, the Director of Nu Er Hong Telefilms—the company responsible for importing the serial into China—“Koshish …” (or “Yin Mo Hunli” as it was known in Mandarin) was the first Hindi soap to have been shown on Chinese TV. It achieved viewership levels usually associated with hugely popular Korean dramas (Aiyar 2006c). In retrospect, serials like this were the precursors of the enormous success that Indian movies are enjoying of late in China. Other than the medical students and yoga teachers, more typical communities of Indian expatriates were also forming in the mainland’s large cities. By 2007, the Indian population in Beijing was estimated at close to 1,000 and in Shanghai almost double that number. This segment of the Indian community in China comprised managers, lawyers, factory bosses, and bank officials. Their aspirations and challenges were akin to expats of other nationalities in similar positions. They were here to grow their company’s China operations and turn a profit. They usually struggled to break through into the fabled Chinese domestic market of 1.3 billion customers. They complained of opaque regulations, language problems, and a limited human resource pool. Large groups of traders had also taken up residence in the wholesale market towns of the Yangtze River Delta, like Yiwu, where they sourced everything from Ganesha statues to made-to-order sarees (Aiyar 2005). Most were transient, but some more settled populations were also emerging. In the textile-trading hub of Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, for example, 1,670 Indians were registered with the authorities as permanently residing in the city and 200 Indian trading companies were issued with business licenses in 2007. Informal estimates put the number of Indian traders who spent at least part of the year in the city as high as 10,000 (Aiyar 2007b). In 2006, the trade volume between India and Shaoxing was worth $145 million. Much of this effervescence in people-to-people contact across the Himalayas was linked to the giddy pace at which bilateral trade was growing. By the end of 2003, trade had touched $7.6 billion; in 2004 it zoomed by seventy-nine percent to $13.6 billion; by 2005 it was at $18.7 billion and in 2006 it reached $25 billion. By the time I left China, the mainland had emerged as India’s largest trading partner, with trade in 2008 having more than doubled to $51.8 billion (data compiled from National Bureau of Statistics of China).

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However, the seeds of the trade friction that emerged in later years were already evident in the composition of the trade basket. India’s growing exports to China were dominated by low-value, primary products, with an outsized reliance on iron ore. Ores, slag and ash, and cotton yarn comprised more than fifty percent of India’s exports to the mainland for most of this period, a trend that continues today (Aiyar 2007c). Imports from China, on the other hand, largely comprised manufactured and value-added products like electrical, and other types of, machinery. The economic boom was also helped by, and, in turn, helped foster, a political détente, wherein both New Delhi and Beijing appeared to put the border on the backburner, to focus on positives like trade and investment. Special representatives were appointed in 2003 to discuss the boundary issue from a political perspective and met regularly. A set of “political parameters and guiding principles” announced during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2005 visit to India created a flare of hope for some light at the end of the boundary dispute-tunnel. An indication that this increased bilateral engagement went beyond political platitudes was a concomitant increase in air connectivity. I had arrived in China at a time when the only direct air link between the two countries was on an occasional Ethiopian Airlines flight. By the time I left in 2009, over thirty weekly bilateral connections were operational, linking New Delhi to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Kolkata to Kunming, and Mumbai to Shanghai (Aiyar 2008). Tourism was also on the up. In 2004, 390,000 Indians visited China, a forty-four percent increase from 2003. By 2010, Indian visitors numbered about 550,000 (Travel China Guide 2018). But despite the range of new and potentially exciting linkages that this increased people-to-people contact engendered, the fundamentals of the Sino-Indian relationship remained problematic. In the coming years, China’s growing clout emboldened it to stake its territorial claims more vociferously. Bilateral trade, once a positive, became increasingly skewed in China’s favor. Indian manufacturers and service providers struggled to deepen their foothold in the Chinese market. The once vaunted hardware– software collaboration that “Chindia”-boosters had talked up did not materialize. The result has been an across-the-board plateauing of the relationship, where the potential remains under-realized.

Plateau: 2009–2018 In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s growth slowed from galloping double digits to a seven percent canter. This was partly the result of changed global conditions and partly the consequence of diminishing benefits from the price liberalization and low value-added labor-intensive exports that had accounted for much of the mainland’s post-reforms boom. India–China trade stagnated, staying at about $70 billion for the most part, and failed to reach the $100 billion target that had been set for 2015. By 2017, bilateral trade was only at $84.4 billion (PTI 2018a). The trade deficit worsened, increasing more than two-fold, from $16 billion in 2007–2008 to $51 billion in 2016–2017 (data compiled from Department of Commerce 2019). The political rapprochement of the early part of the millennium was derailed by renewed tensions along the border. The most inflammatory episode occurred in the summer of 2017 over the Chinese construction of a road in Doklam, a territory claimed by both China as well as India’s ally Bhutan. A seventy-three-day standoff between Indian and Chinese troops ensued. Yet, despite spells of political tension, Indian investments in

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China continued to diversify during this period. A February 2018 survey of fifty-four Indian firms in China revealed thirty-seven percent to be in manufacturing, nineteen percent in the healthcare space, seventeen percent in financial services, eleven percent in IT and BPO, nine percent in telecommunications, and seven percent in logistics (CII and Evalueserve 2018). However, obstacles to market access including customs rules, certifications, and confusing procurement procedures acted as constraints. Some operations struggled to stay afloat and eventually shut down, including the majority of Indian banks. Auto component manufacturer Bharat Forge exited the market in 2014, having failed to make profits. Jet Airways terminated its Mumbai–Shanghai flight within seven months of starting it, in 2008. Adequate numbers of passengers simply did not materialize. The cumulative result of China’s economic slowdown has been a leveling off of the growth of the Indian business community there. Mehernosh Pastakia, a long-term Beijing-based Indian restaurateur, is a core committee member of the social group the Indian Community in Beijing (ICB) (Embassy of India in Beijing, China 2017–2018). He says the number of professionals and businesspeople in China has grown only modestly over the last decade. ICB membership is currently at between 350 and 400, up from between 250 and 300 a decade ago. Pastakia points out that this number does not include medical, and other, students; this cohort of Indians continues to witness exponential growth. Were these included, he puts the numbers of Indians in the Chinese capital at over 1,000 (personal communication, 22 October 2018). The financial center of Shanghai, where the majority of international businesses are headquartered, has a substantially larger Indian community. Madhav Sharma, the chief representative in China for the Confederation of Indian Industry, estimates there to be about 5,000 Indians in Shanghai (personal communication, 10 February 2019). Indian medical students in China number in the thousands. According to research by the education website, World Education News and Reviews, the number of Indian students in China rose to 16,694 in 2015, up from 765 a decade earlier. Eighty percent of these are enrolled in MBBS programs (Creaders 2017; Zheng 2018). The Medical Council of India website lists 45 universities in China that are certified to provide medical students with English language instruction and a further 214 that provide bilingual courses (MCI 2017). Mayank Chadda is currently a medical intern at TMU. He completed his MBBS from TMU in 2017, only to fail the Indian Foreign Medical Graduates Examination (FMGE). Passing the FMGE is a necessity for anyone who has studied for a medical degree abroad but wants to practice in India. Undeterred, he returned to TMU in 2018, in the hope that gaining practical experience as an intern will help him in his second attempt at the exam. Approximately 12,000 students appeared for the FMGE in 2018, he says, of which only 1,200 passed. Teaching methods and standards in India and abroad are different, a fact Mayank is well cognizant of. “Our Chinese teachers try their best to teach us, but the standard of English here is different. It’s difficult for us to gain practical knowledge because of language problems.” And yet, like Manpreet Kaur, the TMU student I spoke to over a decade earlier, Mayank does not regret coming to China, because at the very least it gives him a shot at achieving his goal. “Madam, you know there is a reservation system or quota system in India,” he says. “And private universities demand a very high donation. It’s impossible for a middle class family.” In 2018, there were about 500 medical students at TMU, including postgraduates and interns. Apart from medicine, Indians have also begun to look to China for engineering degrees

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and postgraduate work in a range of science-related subjects. ICB’s Pastakia estimates there to be about fifty PhD students from India at universities in Beijing alone (personal communication, 22 October 2018). Mayank says that interaction with Chinese students tends to be limited because of language constraints. And although most locals he has encountered are friendly and helpful, racism on campus is a reality too. “There are a few (Chinese) who are scared of us and if you tell them where you are from, the only thing that comes to their mind is India is not safe. That it’s a rape capital.” According to him the major alleviating factor to the negative perceptions of India is the Hindi movie. “They start singing songs the moment they see an Indian. It’s the major topic of conversation between us (Indian and Chinese students).” During the years I lived in China, I’d become used to everyone, from stern-faced neighborhood watch committee ladies to cigarette-sellers at hutong corner shops, bursting into renditions of Awara Hoon, mouthing La Zi (Raj Kapoor’s Chinese name) while flashing me a thumbs-up sign. In the summer of 2018, I visited Beijing after a seven-year gap to find that the hoary tune my Indian face used to bring to everyone’s lips had changed. This time round it was “Hey Sexy Baliye” and the name accompanying the thumbs-up sign was Mi Shu (Amir Khan). China’s enthusiasm for Amir Khan dates to the release of Three Idiots in 2011. The movie became a cult hit and is ranked as China’s twelfth favorite film of all time to this day on the film review site, Douban.com. The Amir Khan craze reached fever pitch in 2017, when the wrestling movie Dangal chalked up nearly RMB 1.3 billion ($190 million) in mainland ticket sales. Another Khan starrer, Secret Superstar, released in January 2018, took in over RMB 700 million. Other non-Mi Shu Hindi movies have also met with box office success, including Bajrangi Bhaijaan (RMB 283 million) and Hindi Medium (RMB 208 million) (Yau 2018). Tianjin-based consultant Harpreet Puri has lived in China since 1999. He says the impact that these movies have had on the “Chinese psyche” is “extraordinary.” When he went to watch the dubbed version of Dangal at a cinema hall in Tianjin, he said that, “People were laughing out aloud. They were crying. Expressing their emotions openly. I have never seen something like this in China before.” For Puri, the fact that Indian movies have touched such a chord across the Himalayas is proof that “in matters of heart and culture Chinese and Indians are very close.” Saibal Dasgupta, the China correspondent for the Times of India newspaper who has lived in Beijing since 2005, agrees. “To watch the Chinese hanging on to every word of a Hindu movie in the cinema is amazing,” he says. But for him it is the success of the 2018, low-budget, Chinese movie, Dying to Survive, that is the most remarkable. The movie is about a leukemia patient who turns to smuggling affordable cancer drugs from India. It raked in $390 million in its two-week run. “It was clearly stated in the movie that Indian medicines are our life line,” Dasgupta says. Soon after, the Chinese government announced a huge relaxation in its cancer drugs policy, including seventeen cancer drugs manufactured by foreign companies, in its national basic insurance program (Dasgupta 2019; see also Tian 2018). The journalist believes the new policy could prove to be a boon to Indian pharma companies whose China ambitions have thus far failed to materialize. The yoga boom is also continuing apace. Puri, the Tianjin business consultant, says he now encounters two or three Indian yoga teachers in almost every small town he travels to in China, a trend I had begun to notice even during my time in the country. At the end of 2018, the China–India Yoga college in Kunming’s Yunnan Minzu University, a college dedicated to yoga established in 2015, announced that it would

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open fifty more branches across the country (Xinhua 2018b). According to an article by Sutritho Patranobis (2019), the China-based correspondent for the Hindustan Times newspaper, a government-sponsored research report in 2017 revealed that China has 10,800 registered yoga centers. Some estimates put the number of yoga teachers from India in China at over 1,500 (Misra 2017). The last decade has also seen greater air connectivity across the Himalayas. According to a report co-authored by CII’s Madhav Sharma and Sandeep Bahal, chief airline adviser for a China-based consulting group, Chinese carriers now offer a combined forty-two weekly flights between three Indian cities (Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi) and four Chinese cities (Beijing, Kunming, Shanghai, and Guangdong) (Bahl and Sharma 2018). There is, however, only one Indian carrier, Air India, which operates between New Delhi and Shanghai. Perhaps not surprising, tourism is up. About 800,000 Indians now visit China yearly (Xinhua 2018a). The mainland is among the top five tourist destinations for Indians, according to a report by VFS Global, an outsourcing company that processes visa application for fifty-nine governments worldwide (PTI 2018b).

Conclusion The India–China relationship is a roller coaster ride, with troughs and crests. A case in point: the tension of the 2017 Doklam military standoff that was followed by the bonhomie of the 2018 Wuhan summit. Against the backdrop of these fluctuating highs and lows, one consistent trend has been the transformation of the absence that used to characterize Indians in China into a diverse and exciting presence. The community extends beyond white collar professionals working for either the Chinese operations of multinationals or the representative offices of Indian companies and includes a more atypical breed of Indians comprising yoga teachers, medical and engineering students, and cooks. After a half-century gap following the coming to power of the Communist government in 1949, China’s Indian communities are back, re-establishing the histories that have a lineage stretching almost 2,000 years into the past, to the monks and scholars that played a pivotal role in introducing Buddhism to the erstwhile Middle Kingdom. These contemporary Indian communities are a dynamic, post-reform and opening up constellation of fortune seekers who see in China’s rise a horizon brimming with opportunities.

Bibliography Aiyar, P. (2005) “Santa’s Chinese Elves,” Banderas News (December), available online at www. banderasnews.com/0512/nw-santaselves.htm. Aiyar, P. (2006a) “Changing Lives in China,” The Hindu (7 May), available online at www. thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/changing-lives-in-china/ article3232077.ece. Aiyar, P. (2006b) “Made in China Indian Doctors,” The Hindu (17 May), available online at www. thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/made-in-china-indian-doctors/article18441405.ece. Aiyar, P. (2006c) “India beyond the Great Wall,” The Hindu (6 August), available online at www. thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/india-beyond-the-great-wall/ article3232392.ece. Aiyar, P. (2006d) “Breaking Food Barriers,” The Hindu (27 August), available online at www. thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/breaking-food-barriers/article3232501.ece.

The new Indian communities in China  117 Aiyar, P. (2007a) “Live the China Dream,” The Hindu (8 April), available online at www. thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/live-the-china-dream/article2275123.ece. Aiyar, P. (2007b) “Shaoxing Little India in China,” The Hindu (17 April), available online at www. thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/Shaoxing-little-India-in-China/article14750564.ece. Aiyar, P. (2007c) “Sino-Indian Trade: Growing Concern,” The Hindu (28 August), available online at www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/Sino-Indian-trade-growing-concern/ article14824289.ece. Aiyar, P. (2008) “Jet Makes a ‘Major Coup’,” The Hindu (21 July), available online at www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-business/Jet-makes-a-lsquomajor-couprsquo/article15410375.ece. Bahl, S. and Sharma, M. (2018) “Unlocking India’s Tourism Potential,” China Daily (10 September), available online at www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/46/109/151/1536560455097.html. Chhapia, H. (2018) “China Gets More Indian Students than Britain,” The Times of India (7  January), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/china-gets-moreindian-students-than-britain/articleshow/62398336.cms. CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) and Evaluserve (2018) “Growing Footprints of Indian Companies in China: Survey-Based Report” (February), available online at www.evalueserve.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Final-Evalueserve-Report-for-CII-GrowingFootprints-of-Indian-Companies-in-China-Feb-2018.pdf. Creaders (2017) “Weisheme Zhongguo de Yixue Yuan li you Nameduo Yinduren?” (Why Are There So Many Indians in Chinese Medical Schools?) (22 June), available online at http:// news.creaders.net/china/2017/06/22/1838630.html. Dasgupta, S. (2019) “Indian Firms Can Now Access China’s Cancer Drug Market,” The Times of India (12 January), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/ indian-firms-can-now-access-chinas-cancer-drug-market/articleshow/67494315.cms. Department of Commerce (2019) “Export Import Data Bank,” Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India (last updated 30 April), available online at https://commerce-app.gov.in/ eidb/default.asp. Embassy of India in Beijing, China (2017–2018) “Indian Community in Beijing,” available online at www.eoibeijing.gov.in/indian-community-beijing.php. MCI (Medical Council of India) (2017) “List of Foreign Medical Institutions/Universities for MBBS or Equivalent Course,” available online at www.mciindia.org/CMS/informationdesk/for-students-to-study-in-abroad (accessed on 11 January 2019). Misra, R. R. (2017) “Rishikesh Yoga Gurus Have China in a Twist,” The Times of India (7  March), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/rishikesh-yogagurus-have-china-in-a-twist/articleshow/57504303.cms. National Bureau of Statistics of China, “China Statistical Yearbook” 2004–2009, available online at www.stats.gov.cn/english/statisticaldata/annualdata/. Patranobis, S. (2019) “Sino-India Yoga College Takes in First Master’s Students, Expands in China,” Hindustan Times (7 January), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/worldnews/sino-india-yoga-college-takes-in-f irst-master-s-students-expands-in-china/storyeVlbtQ4HgSkLupoDovGTPI.html. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2018a) “India-China Trade Hits a Record $84.4 billion,” The Hindu (7 March), available online at www.thehindu.com/business/india-china-trade-hits-a-record844-billion/article22970857.ece. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2018b) “4.7 Million Indian Tourists Went Abroad in 2017; US, UK, China Most Preferred,” News18 (22 July), available online at www.news18.com/news/ india/4-7-million-indian-tourists-went-abroad-in-2017-us-uk-china-top-list-1819785.html. Tian, G. (2018) “It’s Time for Indian Pharmaceutical Companies to Embrace the Chinese Market,” Global Times (10 June), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/1106384.shtml. Travel China Guide (2018) China Inbound Tourism in 2010 (last updated 16 August), available online at www.travelchinaguide.com/tourism/2010statistics/inbound.htm.

118  Pallavi Aiyar Xinhua (2018a) “Interview: Cooperation in India-China Tourism on the Rise” (12 May), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-05/12/c_137173790.htm. Xinhua (2018b) “China-India Yoga College to Expand Training across China” (24 December), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-12/24/c_137695300.htm. Yau, E. (2018) “Why Indian Films Like Dangal and Toilet Are So Popular in China: Similar Problems,” South China Morning Post (11 December), available online at www.scmp.com/culture/ film-tv/article/2177193/why-indian-films-dangal-and-toilet-are-so-popular-china-similar. Zheng, C. M. (2018) “Indian Students Seeking an MBBS: Why China?” World Education News + Reviews (WENR) (6 March), available online at https://wenr.wes.org/2018/03/indian-studentsseeking-a-mbbs-why-china.

6

The alien next door Media images in China and India Simon Shen and Debasish Roy Chowdhury1

Separated by geography, culture, and geopolitics, there are few examples of two countries in such close proximity and yet with so little understanding of the other, with so much reason to get along but with so few meeting points, as China and India. As the educationist Nitin Pai (2018) puts it, India’s “knowledge of China is dangerously inverse to the country’s importance to us,” pointing out that many educated Indians are knowledgeable about the American political system and can identify key American leaders. By contrast, few, however well-informed, would have comparable knowledge of China. Instead, what takes the place of rudimentary knowledge about China is a set of historically conditioned stereotypes—remnants of a short period of acquaintanceship between the two as independent nation-states that ended on a traumatic note. The average Indians’ attitude toward China is almost wholly informed by the brief border war in 1962, in which India suffered a humiliating defeat. As the war came after a prolonged period of supposed bonding between the two Asian giants in which India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared friendship with China to be the cornerstone of the country’s foreign policy, the conflict lingers in popular memory as an act of treachery. Even though a whole range of issues coalesced to trigger the war—from internal power struggles in the two countries and the Tibetan resistance to Cold War geopolitics and the Sino-Soviet split—the fuse of war was lit by conflicting territorial claims and continues to be remembered thus. India’s own role in that conflict finds little mention in Indian popular discourse. The original problem—of inheriting a muddled boundary arrangement from the colonial masters—has been all but erased from public memory. The residual memory of the 1962 war is thus one of a sudden and unprovoked attack on India’s territorial integrity by a country considered a friend. The sense of betrayal and the resultant animosity has festered, with the two powers finding themselves in rival geopolitical camps over the years, and China’s proximity to India’s arch-rival Pakistan—and increasingly other neighbors—fueling Indian fears of encirclement. China’s rise and its increasingly assertive stance on territorial claims elsewhere in Asia have only added to this anxiety. For Indians, therefore, 1962 remains an open wound desperate for closure. From warmongering television anchors and alarmist newspaper headlines to bloodthirsty Twitter warriors, the craving for revenge is widespread. As Indian editor and author Shekhar Gupta (2012) succinctly notes in a column on the fiftieth anniversary of the war, “for generations, the loser wishes he could fight the same battle, the same war, again, this time with different results of course.” Not just in India, but also in China, there is little understanding or debate over the complex mesh of factors that whorled into the war of 1962. Neither India nor China has

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been completely honest about the war and each state has templated a simplistic narrative blaming the other. These half-truths have over time crystallized into myths, providing the monochromatic, self-righteous prism through which the Chinese and the Indians see each other today. Any suggestion that their own actions may have contributed to the war verges on the blasphemous. (Roy Chowdhury 2017) For China, India until recently figured low in its geopolitical hierarchy, as its commercial and strategic interests were concentrated on its eastern shores. In recent decades, as China’s interests have diversified westward, with the energy routes from the Middle East through the Indian Ocean becoming vital to the growth of its landlocked west, China has found itself increasingly head-butting with India in a region that New Delhi traditionally considered its sphere of influence. With India and the United States courting each other as a hedge against a rising China, India has come to be seen by China as part of the forces invested in encircling it to contain its rise. While the Chinese and Indian perceptions of each other are adversarial, there is an important distinction. India’s view of China is defined by hostility and fear while China’s view of India is marked by hostility and condescension. This is in part a product of China’s confidence in its destiny as a global power that requires itself to be benchmarked against other global powers such as the United States, rather than be tied down by a country it has long seen as a regional irritant punching above its weight. As an extension of this belief in its superiority, reinforced by the economic miracle that has propelled its rise, China sees India as a potential source of problems when combined with other powers ranged against it. For India, however, China by itself is the problem. This chapter analyzes the role of the media, both legacy and new, in influencing mutual perceptions between China and India, in four main sections. The first section examines how hostile coverage in the mainstream media of both countries is mutually reinforcing. The next section describes Chinese social media activity during the Doklam crisis and the nature of public sentiment toward India at the time. This is followed in the third section by the Indian media’s coverage of bilateral economic relations which is largely positive but does show the increasingly asymmetric nature of the relationship due to the burgeoning trade deficit. The final section turns to the popularity of India’s “Bollywood” films in Chinese social media and its potential role in building cross-cultural bridges.

Mutually reinforcing hostile coverage in the mainstream media The popular media in both countries manifest the mutual antipathy between the two countries as well as play an important role in preserving and accentuating old and new tensions, echoing the respective establishment’s threat perceptions. The Indian media’s China reportage is, for the most part, marked by shrill jingoism and distrust, reflecting the paranoia at the heart of India’s elite perception of its neighbor. The Chinese media, until recently far less preoccupied with India, take this Indian media representation of China as emblematic of national policy and attitudes and mix in their own selfrighteous anxieties. This intertwining coverage has contributed to a poisoning of public opinion on both sides, further distancing the two and coloring Chinese and Indian views of each other.

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A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of China coverage in Indian newspapers, tracking the two most circulated English-language national dailies, the Hindustan Times and the Times of India, in the first six months of 2012, found the frames employed in China-related articles to be predominantly adversarial (Roy Chowdhury 2015). The study shows that these frames identify China as an aggressive power inimical to India’s interests and project arming and alliances as ways of resisting. The most common adversarial frames were: border tension/aggression, which deal with the long-running dispute on the tangled border; war preparation, which typically either report how India is arming itself or is required to do so for an imminent war; and geopolitical rivalry, which situates India and China in rival geopolitical camps striving to attain global dominance and/or meet individual strategic needs. The study discerns a pattern of editorial spins exaggerating the “China problem,” often by means of dubious news sourcing. Such editorial spins often originate from television channels, which increasingly set the agenda for competitive “breaking news” transmissions and the belligerent news analysis shows with experts drawn largely from the strategic studies and military community. In 2009, for example, India’s prime minister, army chief, and national security adviser had to launch a coordinated attempt to douse television speculation on alleged Chinese military intrusions in the disputed eastern border (Mehta 2015). As India’s top private television networks accused the government of trying to hush up Chinese aggression, all three Indian leaders as well as the Chinese government issued denials, but the channels were implacable. The media campaign generated so much political heat that National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan appeared on a private television channel to reiterate that there was no trouble on the border and warned that such reportage could lead to just the kind of confrontation with China that India sought to avoid. After decades of according low priority to India, the state-controlled Chinese media has begun to feature its southern neighbor more prominently as a result of what is seen as India’s open tilt toward the United States in recent years, with national awareness of an India threat rising concomitantly (Roy Chowdhury 2016b). A news report in the state-run newspaper Global Times during the seventy-three-day standoff between Indian and Chinese forces in 2017 in the China–India–Bhutan border tri-junction area of Doklam, headlined as “India’s intrusion into Chinese territory angers veterans of the 1962 battle,” is an example of this new-found stridency (Huang 2017). Quoting a researcher from the China Institute of Cyberspace Strategy who claims the 1962 war with India is “scarcely mentioned in the Chinese government statements, official news reports or textbooks, largely out of concerns that it might affect bilateral ties,” the report goes on to quote army veterans bristling at Indian intransigence and raring to teach India another lesson as they prepare to mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of the war. “We destroyed their elite troop decades ago, so can we now,” it quotes a veteran, in an outburst of militant jingoism the kind of which would once be aimed mostly at the United States and Japan but has increasingly begun to target India as well. A fallout of this adversarial portrayal on both sides is the media-aided reinforcing of mutual suspicion and animosity through a process of positive feedback triggered by media content. Many of these news items originating from the Indian media, with their deeply anti-China bias, acquire an added layer of venom by the time they have been processed by Chinese journalists who add to it their own nationalistic rhetoric and context. The resultant critical coverage of India is reported back in Indian media as if is a pronouncement of the Chinese government, setting in motion perennial loops of

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mutually hostile news content the likes of which are seldom seen between two states not at war. Reportage of India’s nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile Agni-V is a case in point. Neither the Indian government’s own press release on the successful test nor the first report by China’s own news agency Xinhua picks up on the fact that the missile can hit any target in China (Press Information Bureau 2018; Xinhua 2018). With a range of over 5,000 km, it can presumably also reach many other countries, but the China aspect is played up in both local and international media reports. Citing a report by the Associated Press, a South China Morning Post report even declares that “India can strike anywhere in China with new nuclear-capable missile, government says,” attributing the statement of purpose directly to the Indian government (Associated Press 2018a, 2018b). More such rounds of media chest-thumping bring about a Chinese reaction, with its foreign ministry spokeswoman saying the Chinese government noted India’s test and that “the UN Security Council has explicit regulations on whether India can develop ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons.” This leads to the Indian government reiterating that India’s “strategic capabilities are not targeted against any particular country”—which is reported in India with provocative headlines such as “After China’s Comment on Agni-V Missile Test, India’s Curt Response” (Roy 2016). A South China Morning Post column in 2016 delves into another instance of this process of interlocking news-looping: The dull China-India border—which hasn’t seen a single bullet fired in four decades— comes back to life, even if only on headline fonts. China warns India against BrahMos deployment, scream Indian papers. Politicians’ statements on how India has the right to deploy BrahMos keep the news cycle churning for the next couple of days. Then, when it begins to quieten down, someone decides to get creative, again. India’s missile deployment is none of China’s business, the Indian Army is reported as having said. Well, not the Army Army, but an unnamed source in the Army. (Roy Chowdhury 2016a) A supposed scoop in The Times of India on 3 August that year had quoted an unnamed army officer telling the paper that India was deploying the supersonic cruise missile BrahMos in its Arunachal Pradesh state, which China claims as its own territory (Pandit 2016a). Framed along “war preparation” lines, the Times of India report was followed by a Chinese editorial asking India to stay out of the South China Sea row and, instead, focus on the economy (Hu 2016). This, in turn, was spun in India with great relish as a sign of Beijing’s nervousness. Another Times of India story followed, declaring that India is building a “China wall” of tanks in the Ladakh region and jets in its northeast, with details of moves to activate landing facilities in high-altitude Arunachal Pradesh (Pandit 2016b). The story was sourced to an unnamed army officer. The Chinese media reacted again with their own predictable unease and reflexive jingoism, their anxiety heightened by the lack of information from the government, which reduces its news sourcing primarily to reports from the Indian media—which, in this case, were predicated on an unidentified Indian Army “source” and on nationalistic assertions by Chinese op-ed writers. The result was an article in the PLA Daily by an expert from the PLA Navy’s Engineering University, the People’s Liberation Army’s mouthpiece, who warned that the decision to deploy the BrahMos could trigger “counter-measures” by China (Cheng 2016).

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At every stage of this news loop, the sources to the key stories are all unidentified. The Indian government did not announce a deployment, the Chinese government did not threaten escalation, and the Indian Army never issued a press release telling the Chinese to mind their own business. But equating the voices of unnamed sources and inconsequential military experts to the stated intent of their respective states had the effect of keeping alive the well-established and easily understood news-frame of India– China animosity, with the concomitant hemorrhaging of public opinion. A 2013 poll on Indian attitudes by the Lowy Institute found that only nine percent of Indians believe China does not pose a threat, while eighty-three percent believe it does, and sixty percent identify it as a major threat (Medcalf 2013). Another study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that only twenty-three percent of Indians describe their country’s relationship with China as one of cooperation (Pew Research Center 2012: 12). Some forty-one percent of Indians said they dislike China while forty-four percent said China was a major threat, the third top threat after the Islamic State and climate change ( Jha 2017). Just twenty-six percent of the Indian public were found to hold a positive view of China. Only eleven percent of Indians see China as the world’s top economy, a sentiment that is virtually unchanged since 2016 (Stokes, Manevich, and Chwe 2017). According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in 2014, only thirty-one percent of respondents in India said they had a favorable view of China, and seventy-two percent said they were concerned about a possible military conflict with it (Pew Research Center 2014). In the 2014 survey in China, only thirty percent of Chinese respondents said they had a favorable view of India; in 2010, fifty-three percent had said they viewed their country’s relationship with the neighbor as one of cooperation. As with the Associated Press report on the missile test, many Indian news reports on China are drawn from the Western media, which come with their own anxieties about a rising China. Indian media houses spend little on foreign coverage, even in their neighborhood, and source most of their foreign news content from Western media outlets, unquestioningly importing their own inherent slant and anxieties about a rising China. India has over 400 news and current affairs television channels (Indian Television 2016) and over 100,000 newspapers/periodicals (RNI 2018: 11). But in the past few years, Indian media have on average had just four correspondents based in China. Since Western media outlets promote the narrative of India as China’s economic rival (even though the Chinese economy is five times the size of India’s) and of India as a democratic counterweight in the region to an autocratic China, the content sits easily with the confrontational orientation of the Indian media. Such reportage, even though merely reproduced by Indian media rather than generated by them, also considerably aggravate the Chinese. Take a Reuters report headlined “Modi tells billionaires ‘invest,’ says China’s pain is India’s gain” from September 2015 (Kumar 2015). It is based on a meeting at the Indian Prime Minister’s residence on the possible ramifications of China’s slowdown on India. A careful reading of the report reveals that Modi made no such comment: it was largely an exercise to soothe investors’ fears over India’s own economic woes that could be worsened by a slowing Chinese economy. But the headline—in all likelihood an effort to match a Bloomberg report two months earlier, “China’s Stock Market Pain Is India’s Financial Gain” (Chakraborty 2015)—is repeated by virtually every Indian media outlet and a host of media commentary (Aulbur 2014; Bagchi 2015), much to the anger of Chinese journalists. The Chinese media hit back at what it sees as distasteful schadenfreude, which the Indian media then report back (PTI 2015). A cursory look through the Chinese social media on China–India-related posts around the time—and

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long after—would reveal the extent of damage this one headline has had on the Chinese popular perception of India, with thousands of posts referring to this exact line as proof of India’s malevolence toward China. The impact of the determined anti-Chinese tirade in most of India’s mainstream media can be gauged from the online reaction to the reportage pertaining to China– India relations. Let us take the example of the news report headlined “Govt to construct 44 ‘strategically important’ roads along India-China border” from the Times of India website dated 13 January 2019 (PTI 2019a). The Press Trust of India cited an internal government document with the directive to build the roads “to ensure quick mobilization of troops in case of a conflict.” It is a dry story based on the inter-departmental document and is peppered with technical jargon such as “axial” and “lateral” roads, with no quotes from officials or security experts explaining the strategic importance of the roads. The news report informs the reader that the $3 billion project seeks to build “44 strategically important roads along the India-China Border spanning 5 states” (PTI 2019a). As of May 2019, this news report had drawn 272 comments, mostly lavishing praise on the government for its resolve to secure India’s borders, often referencing domestic politics. For example, the top comment, with 216 “upvotes,” says: Modi is the only person who can save India from two enemies—Pakistan and China. Unless Modi is elected again, do expect JIHADI Rahul Gandhi to seek Pakistan’s help, just like he is seeking their help right now to win elections … (Bazaz 2019) The second most popular comment, with 153 “upvotes,” expresses relief that finally India has a government that is preparing for “a future all out war”: Never before in the history of India, [sic] the nation went on massive preparation for a future all out war. It seems India is taking a future possible war extremely seriously. This preparation would have enormous effects [sic] on the development of [the] Himalayan region too. (Bandyopadhyay 2019) In contrast, a story in the Times of India such as “Bollywood Movies are Making Waves in China” gets only three comments (see Jain 2018). And, such is the lasting power of negative framing that one of the three commenters to this decidedly positive story is convinced that China will eventually copy Bollywood films and portray Indian culture poorly. It concludes that there’s “no need to [be] happy.” Still that story does better than another Times of India story headlined “Secret of Chinese Box Office lies in Hindi Cinema” (Shastri 2018) and an India Times report on a similar theme headlined “Aamir Khan Is Officially the Most Famous International Star In China, People Love & Adore Him” (Satija 2018). These headlines, which could ordinarily be expected to evoke some residual bhai-bhai goodwill, get zero comments.

Chinese social media and the Doklam crisis In the case of China, where media reportage has until recently been more controlled when it comes to India, a better gauge to judge popular sentiments is social media such as Sina Weibo. Here Chinese netizens get to express their views more or less freely on

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most issues, especially the ones not pertaining to governance or the Party.2 Weibo, which literally refers to “micro-blog” in Chinese, is an emerging, attractive, and still partially untapped research source that presents a pulse-reading of Chinese society on most issues. Partly because of the multiplicity of languages that automatically disperses the social media and the continuing dominance of legacy media in news and opinion generation, it is difficult to find any central, social media platform with Weibo’s reach and appeal in India. Hence this chapter, while focusing on legacy media framing and reaction to China on the Indian side, looks at social media constructs vis-à-vis India on the Chinese side as a way of understanding popular views. Chinese users are attracted to Weibo in part because the verification mechanism of the system ensures that the comments of celebrities, politicians, diplomats, professionals, and entrepreneurs appearing there are authentic. In 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi created a Weibo account to interact directly with the Chinese public (Kuo 2015). Even though there is media censorship on Weibo and its system is supervised by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese government, it had accumulated an estimated 100 million daily users (Martin 2011). Data from Sina Weibo are therefore a massive source for public opinion mining, topic extraction, and sentiment analysis. A recent study of Chinese perceptions of India on Weibo collected and examined the most popular postings on netizen reactions to the Doklam crisis through quantitative and qualitative content analysis.3 According to the study, the majority of posts and comments related to the Doklam crisis were hostile, some even racially charged. It also found that Indians are commonly referred to as “Ah San,” which is a derogatory term. It seems that racism and stereotyping still play a role in Chinese perception of Indians (Shen 2011). The most indicative words on Doklam were: “Confrontation” (duizhi), “Provocation” (tiaoxin), “Invasion” (ruqin), “Territory” (lingtu), “Robber” (qiangdao), “Vigilance” ( jingti), and “1962.” The majority of Weibo users thought that India’s behavior in Doklam was an act of provocation and invasion. They perceived India as a “robber” that intentionally provoked the confrontation at Doklam and invaded China’s territory. Some Weibo users also claimed that India’s hostility and vigilance toward the Chinese stemmed from the 1962 war between China and India: The situation at the Sino-India border would not be calm after the Doklam confrontation has been resolved. Indians are arrogant, inefficient, have been uncompromising on border negotiations, and filled with hatred and suspicion since the 1962 war. It is impossible to peacefully have a dialogue with India! If dialogue does not work, then we have to stand up and prepare for a war against India. (Dongshan Mutou 2017) Many Weibo postings and comments related to the Doklam crisis also carried strong confrontational sentiments toward India. There were even those who supported further military operations by China or even an outright war: India is so unscrupulous because it tested China in Doklam and feels that China can be bullied easily. China should show its authority and power to Ah San. Otherwise, it will bully us again in the future #India starts provoking a controversy again! #China firmly opposes! (Taoju Nanju 2019)

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While facing India, we should not just defend, but also make a strategic plan to dismember it. (Bu pingjing de 2018 2017) Evidently, those who shared extremely antagonistic postings were not only advocating reclaiming, or settling the confrontation in Doklam but also weakening or even destroying India. In this view, the Doklam confrontation was an opportunity to tackle the enduring historical issues between China and India. It is worth noticing that the aggressive postings including #Donglang shi zhongguo guyou de lingtu# (#Doklam is China’s territory), #Donglang diqu shuyu zhongguo# (#Doklam area belongs to China), # Yin jun jiang donglang duizhi zeren tui zhongguo# (#Indian Army shift the responsibility of Doklam confrontation onto China), and # Baowei donglang# (#Defend Doklam) were the top hashtags. Also, there was not much discussion on the Doklam postings, but those postings garnered hundreds and thousands of viewers. For instance, the hashtag #Baowei donglang# (#Defend Doklam) was discussed only eight times on Weibo, while it was viewed by 11,000 users. As against the overwhelmingly hostile voices on the Doklam crisis, some leaned toward peace and strategic patience: The Indian Army had invaded China’s Doklam area for several months. It is wise for China to not fight back at the end! This is no serious resentment between China and India. The scale of the battle in 1962 was not big and India suffered too. India came to Doklam and wanted to take advantages of it in order to save its face. China does not have to care about this. However, if they [the Indians] are going to stay at Doklam and do not plan to leave for a while, like a year, then it is a different story.  … Both China and India are large and developing countries. They need to support and not hurt each other. We should strengthen our ties with India in different aspects and become good friends … While facing the pressure from the economic and military alliance led by the US, China should not be in deep enmity with more countries. (Zhenxi6174614558 2017) The economic relation between China and India has been doing well. Hopefully both sides can comply with the agreement in terms of the border issue. Coexist peacefully and develop together. (Laizi beifang de paoxiao 2017) These postings demonstrate that even though the antagonistic comments are far more numerous, there are Weibo voices that advocate peace and strategic patience. The Weibo study also shows that netizens seem to link India to the United States when it comes to the Doklam conflict. They have strong feelings of disdain toward Indians and a perception that India is part of a containment strategy fashioned by the United States. The most indicative words around supposed India–US geopolitical cooperation are: “stirring up trouble” (Shanfeng dianhuo), “sowing dissension”(Tiaobo lijian), “US hegemon”(Baquan), “Indian Ocean”(Yinduyang), “South China Sea” (Nanhai), “Invasion” (Qinfan), “Meng Wanzhou,” “Donald Trump” (Te lang pu), and “Trade War” (Maoyi zhan). Chinese netizens on Weibo perceive the United States as a demagogic power that sows dissension and stirs up trouble internationally, including in the Doklam

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crisis. The Doklam crisis reminded them of other issues such as the South China Sea, the Meng Wanzhou incident, Trump’s foreign policy, and the Sino-US trade war: Uncle Sam is driving a wedge between China and India, and it desires to see the world plunged into chaos! (Dengzi sanliang 2018) It seems that the Indian robbers still want to mess with China by colluding with Japan and the US after the Doklam confrontation. (Geng cui fei jiang zhui jiao lu 2017) India is silly. Through the US bombers in Diego Garcia, the Indo-Pacific strategy has already told India that the Indian Ocean is not India’s Indian Ocean. The US solely uses India to restrain China and will eventually bury India together with China. From the South China Sea Crisis to the Doklam issue, from the Sino-US trade war to the Meng Wanzhou issue, the war between the US and China has begun. (Xiaopiqiu31 2019) Indians listen to whatever Captain America says. (Wuhuan2011 2018) Such confrontational hostility was accompanied by more racist and combative postings. Some Weibo users resort to unseemly language, describing America as “a country of white pigs and black ghosts” (Bai pi zhu, hei gui dangdao de gou ri guojia) (Feixiang di hailuoying 2018). There are even those who express an inclination for tougher actions against the United States: Sooner or later, the United States will disappear from the world map, sooner or later we have to massacre them. (Nigulasi xiang 2018) To a certain extent, this antagonism reflected the continuing confrontation between the two great powers. Clearly, many Weibo users consider the United States a competitor and troublemaker in the international community and as building an alliance with India against China.

Indian media coverage of bilateral economic relations The Indian media’s reflection of elite and popular attitudes toward China is also evident in their China-related business content. From minimal trading relations at the turn of the century, China is today India’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade touching nearly $90 billion in the year ending March 2018 and India emerging as the seventh largest export destination for Chinese products (Dasgupta and Bhardwaj 2018; Press Trust of India 2018). From providing cheap electronics and toys to high-end telecom gear and fintech financing, China has become ubiquitous in Indian economic life. Not surprisingly, Indian business leaders see China more as an opportunity and not the threat the country’s security establishment considers it. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of China coverage by Roy Chowdhury in the two most circulated English-language national dailies in the first six months of 2012

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finds most China-related articles to be predominantly adversarial. On the other hand, the English-language business press like The Economic Times and Business Standard are “noticeably balanced in their overall tone toward China.” Roy Chowdhury’s study also notes that “many of the stories under the non-adversarial partnership/interaction frame are economics-related but convey a sense of partnership rather than rivalry” (Roy Chowdhury 2015). A separate analysis of China-related editorials from five national English-language newspapers over three years from 2012 to 2014 found 42.5 percent of the articles were positively disposed toward China while 57.4 percent perceived China negatively. But it also notes “a major discursive shift” in 2014 when the growing thrust on bilateral trade and economic ties and a new framework of economic cooperation entailed a precedence over “the conflict and competition frameworks that had dominated the Indian media’s discourse on China till then” (Chatterji and Chaudhury 2016). While economic relations have indeed deepened, with China now supplying eighty percent of the antibiotics imported by India and the bulk of electronic products and components, India’s trade deficit has also widened nine-fold to $63.05 billion over the past decade in China’s favor (Sen 2018). In a new India, less encumbered by the memories of the past and more interested in the economic prospects ahead, this produces its own set of anxieties. China, for example, mainly exports manufactured goods to India while Indian exports are largely primary commodities, raising fears of a colonial pattern of trade relations and job losses in India (Dhar 2019). As of 28 January 2019, India had imposed anti-dumping duties on ninety-nine Chinese products to protect domestic companies from cheap imports (Press Trust of India 2019b), reflecting the rising fears stoked by calls for a boycott of Chinese goods (Poonam 2016). So far, attempts to politicize trade have been unsuccessful, but as India undergoes a deepening job crisis, the average Indian’s appreciation of China’s economic prowess could easily prove to be a double-edged sword if China also comes to be viewed as a job-slayer. On the other hand, China, coping with the inevitable slowing of the economy and the need to create jobs for the millions of youths joining the labor force every year, can be expected to react harshly to such defensive measures in India to narrow the deficit. An opinion piece headlined “‘996’ Overtime Schedule can Help India Catch up with China” (Hu 2019) in the Global Times in April 2019, for example, is reported back in India with a more combative headline of “Ban on Chinese Goods Will Fail, Work Harder if You Want to Catch Up: China’s Media Advises India” (The Economic Times 2019). These new commerce-driven tensions would add to existing political differences that, as the Doklam crisis showed, continue to lurk. In its latest report on India–China ties, the Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on External Affairs said India cannot continue with a “conventionally deferential foreign policy towards China” in its dealings with Taiwan and Tibet given that China does not reciprocate the gesture “while dealing with India’s sovereignty concerns, be it in the case of Arunachal Pradesh or that of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK)” (Hindustan Times 2018). As relations with China deepen, these growing perceptions of an asymmetric relationship are an additional challenge in managing bilateral relations already held hostage by the ghosts of history.

Chinese social media coverage of Bollywood Notwithstanding those challenges, Bollywood films seem to play a role in mutual perceptions in a trend that is becoming increasingly important. Our study conducted in

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2019 shows that many Chinese netizens linked Indian movies to political issues on Weibo: I watched Three Idiots today and actually think this movie is pretty good. However, the landscape of Tibet, Tibetan flags and stone heaps, as well as Tibetan faces that appeared at the end of the movie are disgusting and make people unconsciously think of the unresolved problems in the Southern Tibet area … Not sure if this is an emotion in the blood of Chinese. The plot of Three Idiots has become less important. Some names such as Doklam are all in my mind … When will our country get back all of our lands? (Youleyuan de huanghun 2018) I doubted if importing Indian movies to China is the solution for the Doklam problems. Dangal, Secret Superstar, Bajranggi Bhaijaan and Hindi Medium were showing in theatres in China. This is a typical Dollar Diplomacy. Awesome, my country, you finally became what I hate. Problems that can be solved by money are not problems at all! (X ye hei deng tianming L 2018) Recently, India starts going beyond China’s bounds. It provoked the Doklam confrontation last year. This year, an Indian film company filmed several anti-Chinese dramas, which show the audience how one Indian was able to kill 400 Chinese soldiers. The most exasperating issue is that the Indian media wrote an article (“Remembering the war we forgot: 51 years ago, how India gave China a bloody nose”), which was reposted by a lot of Western media. (Zui jiangnannan 2018) These Weibo users’ perceptions of India and Indian movies were deeply influenced by Doklam and Tibetan issues. Even though there were a group of netizens on Weibo that were hostile to Bollywood due to the Doklam crisis, Indian movies and actors have become more popular in China in recent years. The study shows that Weibo users’ perceptions of India are not only influenced by the political confrontation between China and India but also by Bollywood and India’s soft power. After watching the movie Hichki, I am now in awe of Indian film makers. Influenced by the media in China towards India and the Doklam crisis, I subjectively think that India is a weird country and I do not have a good impression of India. However, this movie is very touching. A country should not see the problem from one’s perspective … This movie is very educational and the way they tell the story is smooth. I cannot deny that recently Chinese movies seem to have a weird business model. They just think about the box office performance while they do not work on the quality of the movie at all. (Geluo630 2018) Some Weibo users emphasized the similarity between China and India and preferred Indian to Chinese movies: To be honest, I look down on India due to the Doklam crisis. I watched the movie Hindi Medium as it’s highly recommended! This movie is worth the admission

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cost and touching … it highlights many social and domestic similarities between China and India, such as common concerns over education … I think within China we have really only focused attention on action movies like Wolf Warrior so far. Is my country so great that it can ignore other issues? … A country despised by us can make us feel deeply. I think this demonstrates the soft power of a country!” (Han xiao tianxia leng 2018) Our study shows that postings about Bollywood rarely have racist themes. Aamir Khan and Indian movies were popular among netizens on Weibo. Khan, an Indian actor, filmmaker, and television talk-show host, is an icon of Bollywood and has gained a fan following in China. His official Weibo account has more than 1.25 million fans (see Khan 2019). When Khan traveled to Guangzhou to promote his new movie Thugs of Hindostan and updated his fans on his trip on Weibo in December 2018, the majority of the comments and response were positive and welcoming. One of Khan’s postings (2018) hit 123,334 Likes. The hashtag #Amierhan# (#Aamir Khan) has been discussed 121,000 times on Weibo. A “Chinese Official Fans Group of Aamir Khan” was also created on Weibo, with more than 185,000 viewers. Some netizens compared Aamir Khan with popular Chinese actors and thought Khan more talented. A Weibo search revealed a large group of users who expressed admiration for Khan and referred to him as “Yindu nanshen” (Indian Prince Charming).4 Khan seems to be held up as a representation of Bollywood and a largely positive one. The Weibo account of Three Idiots, which has Khan in the lead, has had more than 11 million viewers. Many Weibo netizens agreed that the film prompted them to re-evaluate related social problems. Another Indian movie that is popular in China, Dangal, has also drawn a lot of attention on Weibo. On its official Weibo page, the movie has been reviewed by over 1.7 million users, of which 91.7 percent gave it a full-score rating (Shuaijiao ba! Baba 2019). The hashtag # Shuaijiao ba baba# (#Dangal) has been viewed 480 million times. In the case of Dangal, it seems that the Doklam crisis did not influence Weibo users’ admiring view of the film and Khan. The majority of the posts and comments about Dangal during the Doklam crisis from June 2017 to August 2017 remained positive. Kung Fu Yoga, a movie that includes both Chinese and Indian actors, was released in January 2017. Compared to Dangal, it has been reviewed far less (about 950,000 times) on Weibo (Gongfu yujia 2019). Yet netizens’ review of the movie is a good indicator of the acceptability of cultural exchange with India, as below: The story starts with the history and culture of China and India. While it promotes Chinese culture and history, it also presents a lot of Indian culture. This kind of cultural exchange makes the movie better. (A tu tu ne 2017) Chinese public opinion on Weibo suggests that Aamir Khan and Indian movies are popular in China. Many Weibo users are sensitive to the similarities between the two societies and embrace cultural exchange between China and India despite the existing geopolitical confrontation. Popular culture, Bollywood, and iconic Indian actors like Aamir Khan might be the means of softening negative Chinese images of India and building bridges between the two countries.

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Conclusion The media of both China and India are often blamed for souring bilateral relations, with their corrosive impact on popular perceptions through alarmist reportage. The two governments have begun to organize media forums to help journalists from the two sides interact directly and learn more about each other’s countries as a way of improving coverage. At forums like these, Indian journalists justify their work as straight reporting of the relationship, which, being adversarial, makes Indian coverage of China negative. Chinese journalists, on the other hand, claim their work is guided by a responsibility to foster friendlier bilateral relations and so their reportage on India is relatively positive (Long 2015). It is simplistic to assume that the media, even in a well-entrenched democracy like India, operate as an entirely independent unit, especially when it comes to rarefied beats like defense and foreign policy where access to information is directly proportional to access to government and requires journalists to be highly “socialized.” During the Doklam crisis, as the two governments tried to disengage from the face-off that increasingly threatened to spin out of control, the Chinese and Indian media witnessed a veritable role reversal, clearly taking cues from their respective governments. On the brink of what briefly seemed like snowballing into a border war, setting off frantic attempts to seek a face-saving exit deal for both sides, Indian officials virtually stopped talking to the media. All updates on the crisis and many public statements came from the Chinese side, in tandem with fiery news and editorial pieces in the media. In contrast, the silence on the Indian side was deafening, as even the hyper-patriotic “commando-comic channels,” known for their primetime warmongering tactics to pump up ratings, withdrew into a shell (Gupta 2017). The Doklam crisis thus effectively destroyed the notion of a supposedly uncontrollable Indian media. It also marked an era of unabashed anti-India reportage in China not seen since the days of the 1962 war, a mood aptly captured in Chinese social media. In the case of China, internet nationalism and public opinion online play significant roles in shaping foreign policy toward India. Shen and Breslin showed that ideas first shared by netizens are adopted by policymaking elites in the conduct of foreign policy (Shen and Breslin 2010). In fact, Chinese netizens have a diverse set of interests and demands. It is not easy for the Chinese government to react to them all. As we can see in the case of Doklam, although the majority of postings on Weibo were hostile to India, there were voices that advocated peace and strategic patience. Most of the posts and comments about Indian movies during the crisis remained positive. Even among the hostile comments and postings, there were varying views on how China should respond to India and the United States. Some were rants: racist, combative, and violent; some counseled negotiations and stability. It would be misleading if the government reacted to online communities assuming a homogenous internet community. Internationally, as a great power that plays an important role in the global economy and global governance, it is crucial for China to strike a balance between manifesting its nationalism by responding to public demands and pursuing a more positive responsible role in the international community. The less knowledge that Indians and Chinese have of each other, the more stereotypical are their mutual views (Shen and Breslin 2010). Contrarily, the more knowledge the two publics have, the more varied and balanced are their views. To avoid unnecessary conflicts between Indians and Chinese on legacy and social media, it is vital for both sides to create more opportunities for their citizens to better understand each other.

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Our research indicates that when it comes to Bollywood and Indian popular culture more broadly, Chinese netizens perceive affinities and embrace the idea of cultural exchange despite geopolitical and diplomatic differences and the adversarial reportage of India in the Chinese media. The movie Dangal made Chinese audiences question the negative image of India promoted by the party-controlled media (J. Hu 2017). Even Chinese President Xi Jinping was moved to tell Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he enjoyed the movie and looked forward to further cultural cooperation with India. Bollywood has become an important element of soft power for India. Apart from organizing political forums and traditional media forums, encouraging more down-to-earth citizen diplomacy and cultural interchange would be a positive next step for both China and India.

Notes

Bibliography A tu tu ne (2017) “Gushi you yi duan zhongyin liang guojiao zhi de zhenshi lishiwenhua zhankai jiyou zhongguo lishiwenhua de shuchu dianying zhong ye yong le henda de pianfu chengxian yindu tesewenhua zhezhong wenhua de jiaoliu pengzhuang wei dianying neihan zengse bushao,” Weibo (13 August), available online at: www.weibo.com/2071416515/ FgVCcqdOa?type=comment#_rnd1562116230443. AP (Associated Press) (2018a) “India Test-Launches Nuclear-Capable Long-Range Missile” (18 January), available online at www.apnews.com/4154960215ab49aaacf9e95a954ed53f (accessed 6 May 2019). AP (Associated Press) (2018b) “India Can Strike Anywhere in China with New NuclearCapable Missile, Government Says,” South China Morning Post (18 January), available online at: www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/2129587/india-can-strike-anywhere- chinanew-nuclear-capable-missile#comments (accessed 6 May 2019).

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134  Simon Shen and Debasish Roy Chowdhury Geluo630 (2018) “Ge ge laoshi kan wan zhe bu dianying zhen de shi ling wo dui yindu de yingshi gongzuo zhemen suran qi jing. Zhiqian bei guonei meiti duiyu yindu de yixie baodao he dong lang shijian yingxiang, zhuguan shang renwei yindu shi yige hen qipa de guodu, zongti yinxiang bing bu hao, danshi zuotian na bu dianying zhen de rang wo shifen gandong, buneng zhi cong yige jiaodu kan wenti, geng hekuang shi yige guojia. Yijing hao chang shijian meiyou kan dao rang wo gandao ruci zou xin de dianyingle, hen you jiaoyu yiyi, erqie jiang gushi de jiqiao ye rang ren juede hen shufu. Bude bu chengren, jin duan shijian yilai zhongguo dianying sihu xianrule shangye yunying de guai mu shi, yixin zhi xiangzhe gao piaofang, que buzai dianying benshen shang xia gongfu. Huoxu shi renmen tai guoyu jiyu qiu chengle ba, haishi yao duo xie naixin jixu shengeng caineng you geng hao de zuopin. Women guojia lao yidai dianying ren haishi paile henduo jiaohao you jiaozuo de zuopin de, hai xiwang xianzai de yingshi gongzuo zhemen nenggou jie hao zhege ban, zhongguo ren dangran pai de chu hao dianying,” Weibo (15 October), available online at https://s.weibo.com/weibo/%23% E5%97%9D%E5%97%9D%E8%80%81%E5%B8%88%23. Geng cui fei jiang zhui jiao lu (2017) “Kan lai dong lang duizhi zhihou yindu qiangdao hai xiang gei zhongguo gao shi, goujie ri mei, lianhe duifu zhongguo. Women bixu yao jiaqiang zhong yin bianjing diqu de junbei, yi fang yindu qiangdao de zaici tiaoxin he ruqin,” Weibo (19 September), available online at https://s.weibo.com/weibo/%25E6%25B4%259E%25E6% 259C%2597?topnav=1&wvr=6. Gongfu yujia (2019) Weibo, available online at https://www.weibo.com/p/100120179188 (accessed 16 May 2019). Gupta, S. (2012) “National Interest: 1962, a Different Story,” The Indian Express (20 October), available online at http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/national-interest-1962-a-differentstory/1019401/ (accessed 6 May 2019). Gupta, S. (2017) “When You Cry Havoc, but Leash the Dogs of War,” The Print (1 September), available online at https://theprint.in/national-interest/when-you-cry-havoc-but-leash-thedogs-of-war/5558/ (accessed 6 May 2019). Han xiao tianxia leng (2018) “Shuo shihua dui yindu yinwei dong lang shijian, hai zhen bu ze me kan de shang zhege guojia. Kan dao jieshao shuo hen hao qu kan kan ba! Zhide zhege piao jia, ganchu liang duo, shouxian tianxia fumu dou yiyang, kelian tianxia fumu xin; di er zhe pianzi hen zou xin, qipaoxian he women guojia hen xiangsi, tebie fu baba na ju jiaoyu bushi shengyi, shen you tonggan! Di san qiongren bu ying bei boduo shou jiaoyu de quanli, nage jianmin baba dehua you lei ben de ganjue! Wo xiang muqian guonei dou shi zhan lang, lihaile wo de guo, nandao zhen de qiangda daole miaoshi yiqie de chengdule ma? Zuowei putong laobaixing wo xiang hai mei dao sheng tang shihou ba! Yige zai women yan li buxie yi gu de guojia, rang women waiguo ren gan tongxin shou, wo xiang zhe cai shi yige guojia de ruan shili,” Weibo (7 April), available online at https://www.weibo.com/ zjshiwei. Hindustan Times (2018) “China Not Reciprocating India’s Gestures, Says Parliamentary Panel” (19  December), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/china-notreciprocating-india-s-gestures-says-parliamentary-panel/story-yPiOsK6MDABzxe3UZajA1J. html (accessed 6 May 2019). Hu, J. (2017) “Bollywood Offers China Lessons on Soft Power,” South China Morning Post (1 July), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2100682/ bollywood-offers-china-lessons-soft-power (accessed 6 May 2019). Hu, W. (2016) “India Should Focus on Preserving Good Economic Ties with China, Rather than on the S. China Sea,” Global Times (8 August), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/ content/999240.shtml. Hu, W. (2019) “‘996’ Overtime Schedule Can Help India Catch up with China,” Global Times (17 April), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/1146378.shtml. Huang, J. (2017) “India’s Intrusion into Chinese Territory Angers Veterans of the 1962 Battle,” Global Times (26 July), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/1058178.shtml.

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138  Simon Shen and Debasish Roy Chowdhury Youleyuan de huanghun (2018) “Dao jintian cai kanle sanbao da nao bao lai wu, dianying shi ting haokan de, jiushi zuihou na leisì cang qu de fengjing, cang qu de jing qi he shi dui, he cang qu tongbao de miankong, zong hui youyi zhong ge ying de ganjue, bu zijue de jiu hui xiangdao wei jiejue de cang nan diqu. Bu zhidao zhe shi bushi yige zhongguo ren yu sheng ju lai de xuemai li yi zhong qingxu. Dianying qingjie dou bian de bu name zhongyaole, man naozi maozhe dong lang zhi lei di diyu mingcheng……he shi woguo lingtu caineng yicun bu shao de dou huilai ne,” Weibo (28 June), available online at www.weibo.com/u/2205712027. Zhenxi6174614558 (2017) “Yindu jundui ruqin zhongguo dong lang diqu ji ge yue, zhongguo zuizhong meiyou fanji, zhe shi hen mingzhi de a! Qi yi, zhong yin lishi shang meiyou tai da de suyuan, liu’er nian dale yi zhang, guimo ye bushi tai da, yindu chile kui, xialai zhan dian er xiao pianyi, zhao dian mianzi, zhongguo ye jiu bubi tai jijiaoliao, dan tamen yaoshi chang shijian laizhe bu zou, jiaru yi nian, na you ling dang bielun,” Weibo (18 September), available online at https://weibo.com/6174614558?refer_flag=1001030103_. Zui jiangnannan (2018) “Zuijin yiduan shijian, yindu you kaishi buan fen qilai, qunian nao chu ge dong lang duizhi, jinnian yindu dianying gongsi ye meiyou xianzhe, pai chu ji bu kang hua shen ju, yige yindu bing da si sibai duo ge zhongguo bing, zui qi ren de jiushi yindu meiti bu zhidao shei xiele yi pian wenzhang “1967, nai dui la dajie,” yinfa xifang meiti daliang zhuanzai, dayi shuo 1967 nian zhong yin er ci chongtu qijian, zhongguo ruqin xijin nai dui la quyu, jieguo zai yindu junren de wanqiang baowei xia, xiaomie daliang zhongguo jundui (zhongguo jundui sunshi 600 duo ren, yin jun jinjin sunshi 60 ren bu dao), rang xijī n baochile duli wanzheng,” Weibo (24 August), available online at www.weibo.com/u/2042267725.

7

India in China’s strategic thought Zhang Feng

India has long occupied a distinct place in China’s strategic thought. Although not considered as important as the United States or Japan, it affects all the major arenas of Chinese foreign policy, including China’s approaches to major powers, the neighborhood, the developing world, and global governance. China’s identification of India has shifted between seeing it as a friend, neighbor, rival, and partner as a result of changing contexts, affecting its policies in the process. Although Chinese analyses and official positions on Sino-Indian relations have generally exhibited a strong liberal and constructivist flavor, realist thinking is also present at times, especially during periods of tension. This chapter examines Chinese strategic thinking about India at both the official and intellectual levels. It divides official thinking into four periods, in accordance with leadership changes: Mao Zedong from the 1950s to the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, Jiang Zemin–Hu Jintao from the 1990s to the 2000s, and Xi Jinping after 2012. Mao’s attitudes toward India veered from that of friend to rival; Deng reversed this judgment and put friendship at the center; Jiang and Hu, custodians of Deng’s legacy, elevated the relationship to a partnership; and Xi has continued to exalt the partnership identification, although the perception of rivalry has been brewing, especially after the Doklam standoff in 2017. The final section of the chapter demarcates the intellectual thinking of Chinese analysts and scholars according to the constructivist–liberal–realist divide in mainstream international relations (IR) theory. All three theoretical strands have followers in China; the balance between them shifts depending on the international and domestic context. Scholars including Kanti Bajpai (2014) and Ian Hall (see chapter in this volume) have examined schools of thought in Indian strategic thinking and how they relate to China. My chapter makes a similar effort from the Chinese side.

Official thinking Mao: from friends to rivals In April 1950, India became the first non-socialist country to establish diplomatic ties with the new People’s Republic of China (PRC), which was founded in October 1949. This swift recognition generated considerable goodwill in Beijing. Mao’s friendly attitude toward India in the 1950s was based on his gratitude for India’s diplomatic stance, as well as his understanding of the two countries’ history and geography. The Chinese leadership actively courted India to cement the international standing of the new regime, break the Western-imposed sanctions, and ease tension with its other neighbors (Lan 2008: 232).

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As early as May 1950, Mao noted that as neighboring countries, China and India had a close historical and cultural relationship. In the modern world, both countries had engaged in long and brave struggles to fight for their destinies. There was, he said, a deep understanding, sympathy, and solicitude between the Chinese and Indian peoples. In 1954, Mao highlighted a common struggle to repel Western imperialism, seeking to convey the Chinese people’s “feeling” for India, while minimizing differences in values and social systems. As Sino-Indian bonhomie was at its height, Mao brushed aside any tension between the two sides or any need for them to guard against each other (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1994: 133, 164, 173). In 1957, he announced a theme that would be frequently reverted to in the post-Cold War era: “the Chinese and Indian nations are good friends and good neighbors since ancient times” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1994: 289). Mao held out the prospect of good relations even after the Tibetan revolt of March 1959. In May of that year, after Beijing’s haggling with New Delhi over the Dalai Lama’s exile to India, Mao instructed his foreign ministry: “on the whole, India is a friendly country of China. It has been so for more than one thousand years, and we believe it will remain so for one thousand years and ten thousand years into the future” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1994: 376). He played down recent disputes, dismissing them as a single episode in the long history of Sino-Indian friendship. One year later, in April 1960, Mao’s chief diplomat, Zhou Enlai, premier and foreign minister, would convey the same message in a press conference after his talks with Nehru in New Delhi: “The Chinese and Indian peoples have not only been friendly toward each other in the past, but will remain so for the next one thousand and ten thousand years” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1990: 282). On that occasion Zhou declared that the two countries had “no clash of fundamental interests”— even after two border clashes in 1959 and the collapse of his talks with Jawaharlal Nehru (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1990: 282). In his 9 May 1959 instruction, Mao also gave a strategic assessment of India’s place in Chinese strategy in order to downplay potential Sino-Indian rivalry. China’s enemy, he observed, was in the east: the military bases America had built in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines were all targeted at China. Thus, “China’s main attention and guideline of struggle lie in the east, in the Western Pacific region, in the ferocious and aggressive American imperialism, not in India or any other country of Southeast and South Asia.” India had not joined the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and so was a friend, not an adversary, of China. China appeared to be treading carefully so as not to make an enemy of America in the east and India in the west simultaneously. Mao especially wanted India to understand that China viewed East Asia (not Southwest Asia) as its strategic epicenter, in the hope of persuading India of its good intentions, even though he had begun to doubt Nehru’s reliability (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee 1994: 366–377). The 1962 border war dashed all hopes of a Sino-Indian rapprochement and froze the relationship well into the twilight years of the Cold War. In a meeting with his

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military commanders to discuss plans for the coming conflict, Mao lamented it as “truly a most unfortunate event.” But, he concluded, a victory was needed to “knock Nehru to the negotiating table” (Garver 2006: 116)—and a victory by Chinese troops was duly achieved. Instead of forcing India to negotiate, however, the war—which was seen by New Delhi as a humiliating defeat—resulted in prolonged hostility. Mao won India’s respect for Chinese power, but not its friendship. This rivalry with India helped to deepen China’s ties with Pakistan, further arousing Indian vigilance. India’s establishment of a quasi-alliance with the Soviet Union after 1971, which had by then become an implacable foe of China, led to a bipolar confrontation between China, the US, and Pakistan on one side, and India and the Soviet Union on the other side (Lan 2008: 235). Deng: friends When he came to power after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping wanted to patch up quarrels. Meeting with an Indian politician in 1981, Deng brought up Mao’s theme of Sino-Indian friendship but lamented the constraints imposed by the close relationship between India and the Soviet Union. India itself was not a threat—it had become one only by virtue of its support for “Soviet hegemonism” (Li 2009: 41). In the 1950s, Cold War constraints had not yet been powerful enough to determine Chinese policy toward India, which was largely focused on territorial disputes. But two decades of Indian-Soviet collaboration in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations during the same period, changed the rationale of Chinese policy. Rivalry with the Soviet Union had overtaken territorial disputes as the main concern, as Deng’s remarks showed. By 1982, however, Deng had reduced the prominence of the Soviet factor in the relationship. Speaking to a visiting Indian delegation in October of that year, he remarked that the problem between the two countries was not a big one: it was no more than a border issue, since neither side posed a threat to the other. Both sides, he said, should act to restore their friendship of the 1950s. As long as they took reasonable measures, the border issue should not be difficult to resolve. Deng hinted that his proposal of a “package deal” might work. Moreover, he suggested that border disputes could be shelved for some time to make way for improvement in trade, economic, and cultural relations (Deng 1993: 19). Deng’s remarks indicated a significant change in Chinese thinking toward India. No longer did Deng see India from the prism of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. Nor did he elevate territorial disputes to the level of an insurmountable obstacle to the improvement of the relationship. On the contrary, he was willing to shelve disputes so as to strive for practical cooperation in other areas. The timing and context of these remarks help to explain Deng’s new thinking. By October 1982, Deng had firmly transformed China’s grand strategy from Mao’s revolutionary struggle to one of economic reform and opening up. The twelfth national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, a pivotal political event of the Deng era, opened in September 1982. Deng addressed the conference by singling out three tasks for China in the 1980s: constructing socialist modernization, opposing hegemonism, and safeguarding world peace. He emphasized that economic development formed the core of the three tasks, seeing it as the basis for solving internal and external problems (Deng 1993: 3). General Secretary Hu Yaobang then explained that henceforth China would pursue an “independent and self-reliant foreign policy of peace,” and would follow the principle of non-alignment in its relations with the United States and the Soviet Union in order to exercise independent policy initiatives (Zhang 2012: 322).

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The subtle shift of Chinese strategy from a quasi-alliance with the United States to independence and non-alignment—even though Sino-US security collaboration remained close throughout the 1980s—created room to improve relations with the Soviet Union. China’s search for independent security initiatives produced a spillover effect on its India policy. The Sino-Indian relationship began to be seen as a trial ground for the new approach. Deng’s focus on economic development explains his broadening of the relationship from security and border issues to economic and trade relations. The new policy bore fruit when Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing in December 1988, the first visit by an Indian leader in thirty-four years. The two sides agreed that the development of bilateral relations should not be predicated on the resolution of the border dispute; they also set up two joint working groups for border negotiation and trade promotion (Li 2009: 60–61). Jiang and Hu: friends, neighbors, and partners The momentum in Sino-Indian relations following Rajiv Gandhi’s landmark visit carried on after the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union swept away a major obstacle to the countries’ earlier relationship. Deng had declared in 1981 that India by itself constituted no threat to China. President Jiang Zemin reiterated the same position during his 1996 visit to India. Although irritated by India’s 1998 nuclear tests, the Chinese leadership did not revise this assessment (Li 2009: 86–87). Meanwhile, China found a new impetus for improving relations with India. At the grand strategic level, Deng had transformed China’s foreign policy task to the search for a peaceful environment for economic development—an overarching goal that remained stable for two decades after the Cold War. This strategy required that China avoid confrontation in external relations, especially in its neighborhood. Improving relations with India thus appeared as a natural policy choice. It was also a necessary choice because, although Beijing did not see India as a threat, it did have security concerns given the border dispute, the Tibetan issue, and mutual mistrust accumulated over the years (Li 2009: 86). Tactically, in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 1989, Beijing found itself beset by the need to break the diplomatic isolation imposed by a coalition of Western countries led by the United States. While trying to improve relations with the West, Chinese leaders realized that its neighborhood presented an opportunity for diplomatic breakthroughs. Thus they made neighborhood diplomacy a priority of the 1990s (Zhang 2012: 324). India policy was envisaged within this broad framework of neighborhood policy. And India was no ordinary neighbor: it was the dominant power in South Asia, a relatively self-contained region with its own institutions and a common historical and cultural heritage (Lan 2009: 273–274). Progress on the South Asian front would necessitate good relations with India. Thus, during his 1996 visit to India, President Jiang stated that “to develop with India a long-term good neighborly friendship and a mutually beneficial and cooperative relationship is an essential part of China’s good neighborliness policy” (Li 2009: 86). The Hu Jintao administration (2003–2012) touted the same theme. During his visit to India in April 2005, Premier Wen Jiabao characterized the two countries as “friendly neighbors and partners instead of rivals or enemies,” and announced the establishment of “a partnership of strategic cooperation for peace and prosperity” (Lan 2009: 277). President Hu said much the same, calling China and India “true friends and partners” during his 2006 visit to India (Li 2009: 91). From the late 1990s to the end of the Hu

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period in 2012, China prioritized economic engagement with India, expecting this to anchor the relationship until the final resolution of the border dispute. Yet the Hu leadership also broadened its field of vision by assessing India beyond the confines of neighborhood policy. Hu’s foreign policy “layout,” which was first announced by Jiang in 2002, is often summarized as “major countries as the key, neighborhood as the priority, developing countries as the foundation, and multilateralism as an important platform” ( Jiang 2002; Wang 2017: 118). Remarkably, India can claim a place in each of the four categories. It is at once a major country, a dominant power in the South Asian region, a developing country, and an active participant in international institutions. Hu placed the Sino-Indian relationship within a regional and global setting, expanding it beyond the bilateral scope. During the Jiang–Hu era (1989–2012), then, China’s leaders reassessed India’s place in the country’s foreign policy and accorded it a certain significance. In their characterization of the Sino-Indian relationship, they picked up and elevated Mao’s old theme of friends and neighbors. Meanwhile, they pushed for practical cooperation in economic and other areas. This process of rapprochement, as we have seen, began with Deng in 1981. Xi: between partners and rivals Xi Jinping’s China has exhibited all previous attitudes toward India—friend, neighbor, rival, and partner—albeit with varying degrees of intensity. When Xi visited India in September 2014, Xi, like Mao in the 1950s, seemed infatuated with the potential of the Sino-Indian relationship and was nothing short of effusive in touting its merits. During his meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Xi provided a new definition to the commonalities between the two sides: “China and India are each other’s important neighbor, are both major developing countries and emerging economies, are two important forces in the multipolarization process of the world, and are both in the great historical process of national rejuvenation.” Seeing India as a “long-term strategic cooperation partner,” he pledged that China was determined to establish “a closer development partnership” with India by deepening cooperation at the bilateral, regional, and global levels. He suggested improving political trust, especially over the border dispute, developing synergy between the countries’ respective development strategies, collaborating over regional initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and strengthening international coordination (Du and Zou 2014). In a speech delivered at the Indian Council of World Affairs, Xi echoed Mao’s theme of the historical friendship between China and India while highlighting the new partnership the two countries had been building in the new century (Du and Lü 2014). The sense of rivalry was imperceptible from those lofty pronouncements. But it made a remarkable comeback in the seventy-three-day standoff between Indian and Chinese troops at Doklam in June–August 2017. The confrontation arose because of China’s road-building in a disputed region of the Doklam plateau near the Bhutan–China–India tri-junction and India’s swift deployment of its troops to halt Chinese construction. It ended when the Chinese ceased their activities without abandoning their claims to the disputed areas (Ganguly and Scobell 2018). During the standoff, tough talk from China accusing India of “invading” Chinese territory and news of Chinese military reinforcements appeared to be part of China’s coercive diplomacy to compel India to back down. On 2 August, the foreign ministry published a twelve-page position paper demonstrating India’s “invasion of Chinese territory.” From 3 August, within a twenty-four-hour period, six organizations—the People’s

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Liberation Army Daily, Xinhua News Agency, the foreign ministry (for a second time), the defense ministry, the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, and the People’s Daily—delivered a barrage of warnings to India about the dire consequences of underestimating Chinese resolve (Zhang 2017). Friendship had apparently given way to rivalry and confrontation. Thus, when Xi met with Modi during the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) summit on 5 September, one week after the resolution of the Doklam standoff, the key message Xi conveyed to Modi, after some ritual genuflection to the two countries’ common interests, was that “China and India must uphold the basic judgment that the two countries are each other’s development opportunity rather than threat.” The last time China felt the need to remind India of the gravity of this judgment was in 2002, when the relationship was recovering from the fallout of India’s 1998 nuclear tests (Lin 2017: 24–25). Xi also urged Modi to view China’s development “correctly and rationally.” Modi responded, according to Chinese reports, that the two sides should not view each other as rivals but should rather make cooperation the mainstay of their relationship (Du and Zou 2017). Rattled by the Doklam standoff, Beijing and New Delhi tried to repair relations through an informal summit meeting between Xi and Modi in the Chinese city of Wuhan in April 2018. From China’s standpoint, the most important achievement of the summit was a restoration of “neighbors, friends, and partners” in the definition of the relationship—and thus a curb on their rivalry (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China 2018). The Doklam confrontation was unsettling precisely because it induced confusion and uncertainty into the relationship: were the two countries still friends and partners, as China had long promoted since Deng’s time, or had they become rivals and adversaries as a result of Doklam and other border incidents? Such disturbing uncertainty underlay Xi’s 5 September message to Modi that the two countries must make a correct judgment about the nature of their relationship.

Intellectual divides Contemporary IR theory is dominated by the three mainstream approaches of constructivism, liberalism, and realism, flanked by a number of other approaches that claim their niches in the overall theoretical edifice. The mainstream divide between constructivism, liberalism, and realism is illuminating in regard to China’s intellectual and policy thinking about India, although it is not always possible to delineate one specific writing or the thought of one particular exponent in this way. Each of these theoretical approaches is broad churches containing a number of interrelated but not always identical premises and propositions. This section summarizes the approaches that are most relevant to Chinese thinking about India, and distinguish between attempts to use theories to explain Sino-Indian relations and policy proposals that draw on the implications of such theories. A caveat is in order: although any significant analysis must contain some conceptual perspective, it may not draw on IR theories in an explicit manner, especially for policy analyses from “think tankers.” In such cases I provide my own interpretation of their conceptual positions. Constructivism Constructivism highlights the importance of ideas in shaping international outcomes. Two kinds of ideas deserve special attention: identities and norms. Identities are selfimages, at the individual or collective level, about “particular repertoires of behavior

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or means to achieve goals” (Legro 2009: 40). Constructivists have long thought that “identities inform interests and, in turn, actions” (Reus-Smit 2009: 221). Recent research has proposed deploying the concept of “identifications” in lieu of identities, because “[s]o-called identities are really composites of multiple self-identifications that are labile in character and rise and fall in relative importance” (Lebow 2016: 8). Traditional approaches to identity are conceptually substantialist and methodologically individualistic; a shift to identification refocuses the analysis on acts of identification in a relational process of interactions (Bucher and Jasper 2017). Norms are “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a given identity” (Katzenstein 1996: 5). They can have “constitutive effects” when operating like rules that define the identity of an actor, or “regulative effects” when operating as standards that specify the proper enactment of an already defined identity. They may do both—define identities as well as prescribe behavior (Katzenstein 1996: 5). A norm’s conceptual structure may be thought of as consisting of three components: problem, value, and behavior. A norm presupposes a problem, which is the issue to be addressed. It includes a value, because the attainment of something “good” or the avoidance of something “bad” gives moral weight to the problem. And it enjoins a particular behavior: the action to be taken to address the given problem that allows the actor to better express or practice the value (Winston 2018: 640). An early application of constructivism by a Chinese scholar to analyze Sino-Indian relations is Li’s (2009) study of the evolution of the relationship since the Mao–Nehru era. Li, formerly based at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) and now at Tsinghua University in Beijing, is a leading expert on India. Drawing on Alexander Wendt’s work, she argues that perception structures relations and that Sino-Indian ties have been transformed from hostility to partnership in the post-Cold War era because the countries’ mutual perceptions have changed. Zhao Gancheng, of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, views current challenges in the relationship from a constructivist lens. Zhao argues that ideas shape behavior and stimulate strategies and policies. He highlights India’s changing identities as a major determinant of Chinese strategy. Referring to China’s strategic layout of “major countries as the key, neighborhood as the priority, developing countries as the foundation, and multilateralism as an important platform” ( Jiang 2002; Wang 2017: 118), as mentioned earlier, he notes that India’s composite identities give it a certain—but not decisive—place in each of the four arenas. India’s rise has produced changes in Chinese assessments of its role, raising the strategic question of whether a powerful India would be a rival, a partner, or something in between. Meanwhile, India’s self-perceptions, and perceptions of India by international society, especially by great powers such as the United States, are driving changes in its international roles and policies. Chinese strategy toward India must consider India’s multiple identities and the dynamic process of its development. Zhao thus poses the question: which Indian identities or areas of Sino-Indian relations are more important to China than others? His commitment to constructivism has led to the policy suggestion that the two countries enhance mutual trust and reduce animosity to establish a true partnership (Zhao 2014). Chinese leaders, one may contend, have applied a constructivist perspective ever since Mao used “friends and neighbors” to define the relationship in the 1950s in an attempt to construct compatible identities, derive common interests, and shape agreeable actions. Mao’s identification, as we have seen, was based on his understanding of the historical and cultural ties between China and India, as well as the material fact of their geography and the strategic judgment of not placing India at China’s strategic epicenter.

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Yet, as constructivists point out, identities are labile, subject to change as a result of context and priming (Lebow 2016). The 1962 border war cemented the definition of the Sino-Indian relationship as one of rivalry, by both sides. New strategic contexts in the 1980s prompted Deng to again broach the identity of friends and reduce threat perception. The Jiang–Hu leadership fully recovered the “friends and neighbors” approach while proposing and elevating a new one of partners, highlighting more than ever the common interests between the two countries. Xi broadened these identifications by characterizing China and India as simultaneously important neighbors, major developing countries and emerging markets, important global forces, and countries engaged in parallel historical processes of national rejuvenation. The 2017 Doklam confrontation and other recent incidents on the disputed border rekindled the perception of rivalry. The Wuhan summit between Xi and Modi in April 2018 was above all an attempt to manage tension by restoring the identification of “neighbors, friends, and partners.” Chinese leaders and analysts have also tried to use norms to regulate behavior and improve relations. The most well-known of the norms going back to the 1950s are the “five principles of peaceful coexistence,” specifying respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, non-interference in domestic affairs, equality and mutually beneficial cooperation, and peaceful coexistence. These are regulative norms meant to create a set of general standards for the conduct of bilateral relations. So is the more specific norm of mutual understanding and mutual accommodation (huliang hurang) for managing and resolving border disputes (Ma 2010: 9). The challenge with these norms is that the “five principles of peaceful coexistence,” while hugely useful for regulating interactions between China and India as newly independent states in the 1950s, are no longer adequate for an era characterized by the simultaneous rise of China and India. And, with their rising power, China and India seem to have become less enamored of the norm of mutual understanding and mutual accommodation. For this reason, China has been proposing new norms to manage the changing relationship under new conditions. Chinese analysts bewail the 2017 Doklam standoff. Hu Shisheng, Director of CICIR’s South Asia Institute and a contributor to this volume, fears that it may cost decades of efforts by both sides to stabilize the relationship. He suggests that both sides must maintain two basic principles—that they are each other’s development opportunity and that they do not constitute a threat to each other. These principles are constitutive norms. If internalized deep enough by both sides, they may shape the identities of China and India and place their relationship on a healthy and sustainable footing. Hu further counsels that the two countries firmly reject “zero-sum” thinking, while striving to build a “mutual sharing” order of “mutual respect and win-win cooperation” where their interests converge. These are regulative norms meant to pull the relationship away from competition. Hu’s norm-based policy suggestions for Sino-Indian cooperation are valuable in themselves and certainly worth trying, although he does not convey much faith in their effectiveness. Touched upon in one final paragraph out of an extended analysis of the Doklam crisis, they appear almost as tongue in cheek comments (Hu 2017). Liberalism Nevertheless, Chinese analysts continue to recommend cooperative ventures. Their advice and many policies pursued by the government since the late 1980s fall broadly in line with liberal thinking on international cooperation. Liberal IR theory encompasses three broad strands, each emphasizing different factors in fostering cooperation:

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neoliberal institutionalism stresses the role of international institutions, commercial liberalism highlights economic interdependence, and republican liberalism focuses on democratic politics (Russett and Oneal 2001). Since China is not a democracy, republican liberalism is irrelevant. But Beijing has invested heavily in institutions and trade to facilitate cooperation with New Delhi. Its liberal approach originated with Deng’s 1982 suggestion of promoting economic relations in spite of border disputes. Deng’s overture was natural since his reform and opening-up program was broadly a liberal effort for China to join the international economic order. This liberal dimension grew more pronounced during the Jiang–Hu leadership, again unsurprising given the liberal underpinning of Chinese foreign policy during those years. Xi is noted for his assertiveness in security policy. Nevertheless, he has continued to tout the merits of economic and institutional cooperation, highlighting the new areas of BRI and bilateral, regional, and global institution building (Du and Zou 2014, 2017). Chinese analysts, meanwhile, customarily end their analysis of Sino-Indian relations with a list of liberal policy proposals ranging from enhancing trust, deepening economic interdependence, building institutions, and strengthening societal ties (see, for example, Lou 2011, 2018; Lan 2015; Lin 2015; Ma 2017; Rong 2017). Realism What about realist thinking? Realism in IR highlights the conflictual nature of international politics and the temptation of states to use coercive power resources to achieve their competitive interests (Wohlforth 2008). Some scholars claim that China has a historical tradition of cultural realism ( Johnston 1995); in the post-Cold War era it resembles a “high church of realpolitik” (Christensen 1996: 37). It would be surprising, in the aftermath of tensions during the Xi years, if realism had vacated its place to liberalism and constructivism in Chinese thinking on India. As it turns out, realist thinking has been on the rise, especially since the 2017 Doklam crisis. A prominent article by Ye Hailin (2018), an analyst based at the National Institute for International Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is a striking example of a realist-rationalist take on Sino-Indian relations after Doklam. Ye considers South Asia, where India is the dominant power, as a “secondary strategic direction” for China’s rise, the Western Pacific being the primary direction. As we have seen, this assessment mirrors exactly Mao’s 1959 judgment of India’s place in Chinese strategy. Ye notes that a rising power may respond to a secondary strategic challenge in one of two ways: it may become passive due to a lack of strategic resolve or an exaggeration of risks; or it may pursue unnecessary accommodation due to an over-expectation of the benefits of cooperation. As a realist, Ye criticizes much Chinese research on India as being based on an expectation of future cooperation rather than on current reality. By contrast, Indian scholars’ research on China has a strong realist dimension, and the Indian government has “psychologically” defined China as a strategic competitor rather than a partner. He suggests that China should, therefore, adopt a strategy of balancing based on an “accurate calculation” of relative capabilities and a sophisticated cost-benefit analysis, so as to blunt India’s attempt to gain undue advantages. Such musings from well-placed analysts may influence the future evolution of Chinese policy. Yet, even before Ye’s realist analysis of Sino-Indian relations after the Doklam crisis, realist scholarship on the relationship existed. A May 2017 article published in another leading journal, for example, contends that India is adopting an offensive realist

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strategy (Yang 2017). Other analysts hold that soft balancing against China is a more appropriate characterization (Hu 2018). During the Doklam crisis, Beijing adopted an approach of coercive diplomacy, with strident warnings from official organs and the media, as well as troop reinforcements and exercises, intended to compel Indian concession. There is no shortage of realist-rationalist thinking among decision-makers, especially within the military. China’s public discourse on India, by officials as well as most analysts, has a liberal and constructivist flavor. To a lesser extent, this is also true of official policy, as evidenced by Ye’s realist grumble. As late as 2012, Zhao Gancheng (2012) observed that most Chinese scholars were optimistic about Sino-Indian relations. The shift to a more pessimistic and hawkish tone coincided with the coming to office of assertive leadership in both countries—Xi in China and Modi in India. The balance between liberal, constructivist, and realist thinking has changed and will continue to change in accordance with developments in the international and domestic context. Ye’s argument may herald a new wave of realist analysis.

Conclusion India occupies a curious place in Chinese strategic thinking. It does not command the same attention as America or Japan—attention that at times verges on obsession. But, being relevant to all the major arenas of China’s foreign policy—its relationship with major powers, its neighborhood, the developing world, and its approaches to global governance—India has achieved a rare distinction in China’s foreign relations. Beijing’s policy attitudes have veered from seeing China and India as neighbors and friends in the 1950s, as rivals in the subsequent two decades of the Cold War, back to neighbors and friends after the 1980s, as partners after the 1990s, and finally to a shifting balance between partners and rivals in the Xi era. Since the 1980s, China’s official discourse, as well as a majority of influential research by scholars and analysts, has had a palpable liberal and constructivist underpinning. Cooperation through norms, institutions, and trade is the main theme. Rivalry, while present, has been contained. The 2017 Doklam standoff, however, prompted major soul-searching among Chinese officials and analysts. Pessimism about the future prospects of the relationship is on the rise, as is realist thinking that subjects the relationship to a game of strategic competition based on a cost-benefit analysis. But it is impossible to predict whether realpolitik will dominate future Chinese thinking on India. Much will depend on a range of contextual factors.

Bibliography Bajpai, K. (2014) “Indian Grand Strategy: Six Schools of Thought,” in K. Bajpai, S. Basit and V. Krishnappa, eds., India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases (London: Routledge): 113–150. Bucher, B. and Jasper, U. (2017) “Revisiting ‘Identity’ in International Relations: From Identity as Substance to Identifications in Action,” European Journal of International Relations 23(2): 391–415. Christensen, T. J. (1996) “Chinese Realpolitik: Reading Beijing’s World-View,” Foreign Affairs 75(5): 37–52. Deng, X. (1993) Deng Xiaoping Wenxuan, di san juan (Select Remarks of Deng Xiaoping) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe).

India in China’s strategic thought  149 Du, S. and Lü P. (2014) “Xi Jinping zai yindu shijie shiwu weiyuanhui fabiao zhongyao yanjiang” (Xi Jinping Makes Important Speech at the Indian Council of World Affairs), People’s Daily (19 September), available online at http://jhsjk.people.cn/article/25690780 (accessed 26 October 2018). Du, S. and Zou, S. (2014) “Xi Jinping tong yindu zongli modi juxing huitan” (Xi Jinping Holds Meeting with Indian Prime Minister Modi), People’s Daily (19 September), available online at http://jhsjk.people.cn/article/25690778 (accessed 26 October 2018). Du, S. and Zou, Z. (2017) “Xi Jinping hui jian yindu zongli modi” (Xi Jinping Holds Meeting with Indian Prime Minister Modi), People’s Daily (6 September), available online at http:// jhsjk.people.cn/article/29517444 (accessed 26 October 2018). Ganguly, S. and Scobell, A. (2018) “The Himalayan Impasse: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Wake of Doklam,” Washington Quarterly 41(3): 177–190. Garver, J. W. (2006) “China’s Decision for War with India in 1962,” in A. I. Johnston and R. S. Ross, eds., New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press): 86–130. Hu, J. (2018) “Yindu dui zhongguo de ‘ruanzhiheng’ zhanlüe: dongyin, biaoxian yu juxian” (India’s Strategy of ‘Soft Balancing’ against China: Motives, Manifestations and Limitations), Nanya yanjiu (South Asia Studies) 3: 18–33. Hu, S. (2017) “Donglang weiji yu zhongyin guanxi de weilai” (The Doklam Crisis and the Future of Sino-Indian Relations), Wiandai guoji guanxi (Contemporary International Relations) 11: 9–22. Jiang, Z. (2002) “Quanmian jianshe xiaokang shehui, kaichuang zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi shiye xinjumian: zai zhongguo gongchandang di shiliuci quanguo daibiao dahui shang de baogao” (Build a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Open a New Phase in the Enterprise of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Report to the Sixteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party), CPC News (8 November), available online at http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64162/64168/64569/65444/4429125.html (accessed 24 October 2018). Johnston, A. I. (1995) Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Katzenstein, P. J. (1996) “Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security,” in P. J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press): 1–32. Lan, J. (2008) “Zhongguo dui yindu guanxi de zhanlüe dingwei” (China’s Strategic Positioning of Its Relationship with India), in Y. Zhang, ed., Zhongguo duiwai kaifang: zhanlüe yu shijian (China’s Opening-Up: Strategy and Practice) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe): 228–245. Lan, J. (2009) “Hou lengzhan shidai de zhongguo yu yindu” (China and India in the Post-Cold War Era), in J. Niu, ed., Hou lengzhan shidai de zhongguo waijiao (Chinese Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era) (Beijing: Peking University Press): 273–305. Lan, J. (2015) “Xinshiqi yindu waijiao yu zhongyin guanxi” (Indian Foreign Policy and China-India Relations in the New Era), Guoji wenti yanjiu (International Studies) 3: 51–63. Lebow, R. N. (2016) National Identities and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Legro, J. W. (2009) “The Plasticity of Identity under Anarchy,” European Journal of International Relations 15(1): 37–65. Li, L. (2009) Security Perception and China-India Relations (New Delhi: KW Publishers). Lin, M. (2015) “Yindu dui ‘yidaiyilu’ de renzhi ji zhongguo de zhengce xuanze” (India’s Perception of the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s Policy Choice), Shijie jingji yu zhengzhi (World Economy and Politics) 5: 42–57. Lin, M. (2017) “Sanda fenqi kunrao zhongyin guanxi” (Three Differences Beset Sino-Indian Relations) Shijie zhishi (World Affairs) 24: 24–25.

150  Zhang Feng Lou, C. (2011) “Yinduyang xinbianju yu zhongmeiyin boyi” (New Changes in the Indian Ocean and the China-US-India Game), Xiandai guoji guanxi (Contemporary International Relations) 5: 1–4. Lou, C. (2018) “Yintai shiyu xia de zhongyin haishang anquan guanxi” (Sino-India Maritime Security Relations from the Perspective of the Indo-Pacific), Bianjie yu haiyang yanjiu ( Journal of Boundary and Ocean Studies) 3(5): 61–72. Ma, J. (2010) “Zhongyin guanxi de huigu yu zhanwang” (Sino-Indian Relations in Retrospect and in Prospect), Heping yu fazhan (Peace and Development) 4: 6–11. Ma, J. (2017) “Donglong duizhi yu zhongyin guanxi de zouxiang” (The Doklam Standoff and the Direction of Sino-Indian Relations), Heping yu fazhan (Peace and Development) 5: 62–68. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2018) “Leaders of China and India Reach Broad Consensus in Informal Meeting” (28 April), available online at www.fmprc. gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1556558.shtml (accessed 26 October 2018). Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee (1990) Zhou Enlai waijiao wenxuan (Select Remarks of Zhou Enlai on Diplomacy) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe). Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and Party Documents Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee (1994) Mao Zedong waijiao wenxuan (Select Remarks of Mao Zedong on Diplomacy) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe). Reus-Smit, C. (2009) “Constructivism,” in S. Burchill, A. Linklater, R. Devetak, J. Donnelly, T. Nardin, M. Paterson, C. Reus-Smit and J. True, eds., Theories of International Relations, fourth ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave): 212–236. Rong, Y. (2017) “‘Modi zhuyi’ yu zhongyin guanxi de weilai” (The Modi Doctrine and the Future of China-India Relations), Guoji wenti yanjiu (International Studies) 6: 1–13. Russett, B. and Oneal, J. R. (2001) Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: W. W. Norton). Wang, J. (2017) Biange shidai de zhongguo juese (China’s Role in an Era of Transformation) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe). Winston, C. (2018) “Norm Structure, Diffusion, and Evolution: A Conceptual Approach,” European Journal of International Relations 24(3): 638–661. Wohlforth, W. C. (2008) “Realism,” in C. Reus-Smit and D. Snidal, eds., The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 131–149. Yang, S. (2017) “Yindu yu meiri haiyang anquan hudong: jingongxing xianshi zhuyi shijiao” (India’s Maritime Security Interactions with the United States and Japan: An Offensive Realist Perspective), Guoji anquan yanjiu ( Journal of International Security Studies) 5: 53–78. Ye, H. (2018) “Zhongguo jueqi yu ciyao zhanlüe fangxiang tiaozhan de yingdui” (How Should a Rising China Address the Challenge from the Secondary Strategic Direction? A Case Study on Sino-Indian Relations after the Doklam Incident), Shijie jingji yu zhengzhi (World Economy and Politics) 4: 106–128. Zhang, F. (2012) “Rethinking China’s Grand Strategy: Beijing’s Evolving National Interests and Strategic Ideas in the Reform Era,” International Politics 49(3): 318–345. Zhang, F. (2017) “Is a Second Sino-Indian Border War Imminent?” The Strategist (10 August), available online at www.aspistrategist.org.au/second-sino-indian-border-war-imminent/ (accessed 26 October 2018). Zhao G. (2012) “Zhongguo ruhe guliang yindu jueqi” (How Does China Assess India’s Rise), Dongnanya nanya yanjiu (Southeast Asia and South Asia Studies) 2: 1–5. Zhao G. (2014) “Zhongguo zhoubian zhanlüe zhong de yindu yinsu” (The India Factor in China’s Peripheral Strategy), Guoji zhanwang (International Outlook) 6(2): 34–46.

8

China in India’s strategic thought Ian Hall

China plays many different roles in the minds of India’s strategic thinkers, divided as that group has long been on the question of how best to manage its northern neighbor (Hoffmann 2004: 35). The People’s Republic figures variously as a cautionary warning of the dangers of communism and authoritarian government; as an economic powerhouse with a development model to be emulated; as a ruthless repressor of minority rights whose approach to diversity contrasts with India’s management of such issues; as a center of power or even a putative partner in the multipolar world to come; as India’s only true peer as a great Asian civilization; and as an existential threat, determined to encircle India and hold it down as it struggles to rise. In turn, these visions of past, present, and future China inform the four main traditions of strategic thought on which New Delhi’s policymakers have drawn since 1947 to construct their China policies: Nehruvianism, Realism, Hindu nationalism, and Liberalism.1 These traditions have evolved over time and, as they attract new adherents in the strategic elite, have waxed and waned in intellectual and political influence, but as this chapter aims to show, their core tenets can be discerned in key texts, speeches, and statements of policy.2 Nehruvians—taking their inspiration from India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru—regard China as a civilization to be respected and a power to be reckoned with. But they also see it as a state with which a lasting and satisfactory diplomatic accommodation can be reached and one with which New Delhi might profitably work to reform the rules and institutions of global governance. For Realists, on the other hand, China poses a serious economic and military threat to India that needs to be managed not just diplomatically, but by a concerted effort to build and use the economic and military power needed to defend interests and deter encroachment. Hindu nationalists, for their part, admire China’s civilization and the extraordinary transformation of its economy its government has achieved since the late 1970s, believing lessons might be learned. Like the Realists, however, they too fear Beijing’s expanding influence and the effects it might have on India’s own development. They counsel that New Delhi needs to build both hard and “soft power” to maintain influence throughout the Indo-Pacific.3 Finally, Liberals maintain that Sino-Indian economic interdependence, in terms of both trade and investment, is transforming the bilateral relationship. They argue that New Delhi should encourage further trade and investment to help reduce political tensions between the two states. Since 1947, India’s China policy has been shaped by all four of these traditions at one point or another, as their adherents gain power and influence or events prompt reappraisals of accepted positions, opening the door for different ideas. Until the late 1950s, Nehruvian thinking prevailed—though not without notable resistance from Realist

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and Hindu nationalist critics, who, with some key exceptions, languished far from power. Between late 1962 and Rajiv Gandhi’s watershed summit with Deng Xiaoping in December 1988, however, Realism became dominant, underpinned by a broad consensus in New Delhi that China was a hostile power inimical to India’s interests. In the post-Cold War period, as trade grew and talks about the border were held, there was more contestation over India’s approach to China, and more variation in opinion and in policy. Nehruvian, Liberal, Realist, and Hindu nationalist thought, in turn, informed New Delhi’s shifting approach during the 1990s and early to mid-2000s. In the late 2000s, however, adherents of the Hindu nationalist and Realist traditions became more influential, as India tried to come to terms with the more assertive China that emerged in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and with the growing influence Beijing sought to exert in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. This chapter explores the key features of each tradition, in turn, examining the foundations of their respective assessments of China and its significance for India’s security and prosperity, and the policy recommendations that flow from those assessments. It then looks more closely at the influence exerted by each tradition on India’s approach to China since independence.

The four traditions In almost all areas of India’s strategic policy since independence, with the significant exception, after 1962, of China policy, the Nehruvian tradition has been the most influential. Its preeminence reflects Nehru’s personal stature as a strategic thinker and practitioner, and the institutionalization of his ideas in the Indian foreign affairs and national security bureaucracies.4 Nehruvians hold—as Nehru did—that as a state lacking in economic and military power but replete with what we now call “soft power,” India ought to focus on development at home, avoid entanglements abroad, and seek to persuade others of the virtues of a more equitable international order. It should maintain “nonalignment” and try to maximize “strategic autonomy,” sustaining sufficient military power to ward off threats to India’s population and territorial integrity, albeit with restraint. Nehruvians put premiums on deft diplomacy, status, and moral example, believing that India’s cultural and religious inheritance offers a stock of accumulated wisdom on which it and others can draw in international relations. They are not unconscious of the unpleasant realities of contemporary power politics, but they believe—as Nehru did—that they can be mitigated, and eventually superseded.5 The Realists, of course, reject these ideas. They hold that an anarchical international system demands that states focus on acquiring and using economic and military power. They point also to a venerable tradition of Indian thinking, stretching back to the Vedas and to Kautilya’s Arthashastra, which understood this predicament and laid out the unsentimental approach to politics and foreign policy that is required to manage its pressures.6 They argue that under Nehru and his successors, India has often behaved naively, seeking status and pursuing moral causes rather than engaging in hard-headed strategic analysis and building the effective military force it needs to defend its interests and deter its adversaries (see, for example, Koithara 1999; Singh 1999; Karnad 2015, 2018).7 They maintain that New Delhi should focus on rapidly developing India’s economy, overhauling its notoriously inefficient defense industry, modernizing its armed forces, and developing instruments by which it can effectively defend and extend the country’s interests, including the capacity to project military power beyond India’s borders.

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Many Hindu nationalists agree with the Realist critique of the Nehruvians and some of the recommendations they advance. But because they view the world and India’s place within it in a very different way, their preferred approach to managing the country’s national security is quite distinct. For Hindu nationalists, the core units of international relations are cultures or civilizations, not sovereign states, which are transient and epiphenomenal European inventions of a particular historical age. In the past and today, these cultures have struggled with each other, sometimes in open warfare. Some cultures have prevailed, some have been extinguished, and some—including India’s, according to Hindu nationalists—have survived against the odds, despite centuries of Muslim and British rule. What determines whether cultures rise or fall, Hindu nationalists argue, is whether they are unified, true to their values, and vital. They believe that their culture will rise because they think that Hindus have a special mission to fulfill in the world, namely to teach others of the truth of the maxim that the world is one family (in Sanskrit, vasudhaiva kutumbakam) and that there were many paths to God (Miller 2018: 81).8 As a result, the Hindu nationalist view of Nehruvian strategy is more thoroughgoing than the Realist one, focuses on the cultural as well as diplomatic, economic, and military dimensions of international relations, and prescribes a distinctive alternative. It looks from the inside out, arguing that India was weakened from the outset by the combined effects of Partition and Nehru’s attempt to construct a secular state and modernize Indian society through education, central planning, and large-scale industrialization. These expedients, imported from the West and from the Soviet Union, promoted individualism, socialism, and religious division, threatening India’s unity and its cultural integrity, the ultimate sources of strength for any nation (see Upadhyaya 1992). The Hindu nationalist view holds that an alternative mode of governance more in keeping with (supposedly) indigenous knowledge and values would have enhanced India’s social unity, made the nation strong, and laid the necessary foundation for it to realize its mission and become a “world guru” (Vishwa Guru) ( Joshi 2014). It also holds that for as long as international relations remain characterized by conflict—until all realize the truth of vasudhaiva kutumbakam—India must pursue hard power as well as promoting its values and wisdom (Sagar 2014). Here, Hindu nationalist prescriptions align with Realist ones (Ogden 2014). Finally, Liberals take a rather different view, privileging economics over Nehruvian diplomatic finesse, Realist military power, and Hindu nationalist cultural influence. They argue that globalization has transformed relations between states, channeling competition from armed conflict into the economic realm (Bajpai 2014: 122–123; cf. Sisodia 2014). They observe that since the reforms of the early 1990s, which opened up India’s markets to foreign goods and capital, its development is now dependent on global economic stability. And they maintain that New Delhi ought to focus on modernizing and growing its economy, allowing interdependence to change the cost-benefit structures in bilateral relations that in the past have been antagonistic, and using its growing wealth and the opportunities its developing market presents as leverage over others (see Baru 2007, 2016). For Liberals, “India’s global influence is viewed as flowing primarily from its economic success” (Ollapally and Rajagopalan 2012: 98). They are generally not naïve about the role of violence in international relations or the need to sustain military power, but they argue that its role is diminishing and that, in any case, a robust economy is the necessary foundation for equally robust armed forces (Mohan 2015: 203–204).

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Accommodation and assertion Nehru’s approach to managing China is probably the most debated topic in the international history of independent India. In broad terms, it was shaped by the convictions that China, while more powerful than India, did not pose a serious military threat, due to the logistical obstacle posed by the Himalayas and the distance between the border and its heartlands; that goodwill shown to Beijing would generate goodwill in return; that Beijing shared many of New Delhi’s aspirations and would help reshape the international order to realize them; and that playing a global role as a postcolonial exemplar of a different kind of foreign policy to those practiced by the Western powers necessitated maintaining cordial relations with other Asian states (Garver 2012: 85–87). These beliefs generated a set of policies that oscillated between accommodation and assertion, and which—according to Nehru’s critics9 —brought about neither a diplomatic understanding nor greater security for India. Nehru’s government inherited two problems from the British: the unsettled border between the two countries and the status of Tibet. In both cases, it determined early on to maintain the positions held by the colonial authorities: the so-called Macartney– MacDonald Line in the western sector of the border concerning the area known as Aksai Chin, and the McMahon Line in the east, adjacent to Tibet, neither recognized by China; and claim to Beijing’s suzerainty over Tibet, but not the claim to sovereignty. In September 1949, New Delhi was confronted with one further problem: the establishment of the People’s Republic by Mao Zedong’s Communist Party, which brought an ideological dimension to the bilateral relationship. Mao’s swift move to resolve the status of Tibet, ordering the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to “liberate” the country in early October 1950, exacerbated this predicament still further.10 Nehru’s responses were in keeping with his broader philosophy of international relations. They alternated between accommodation and assertion. Convinced that the power political behavior characteristic of Western states need not be replicated by non-Western states and that the ideological schism of the early Cold War need not be carried over into the non-Western world, Nehru sought in the early 1950s, in particular, to accommodate Beijing’s interests and to promote the ideas of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai,” or Sino-Indian brotherhood, and “good neighbourliness” (Nehru 1961: 306–308). For this reason, Nehru’s India also became one of the first states to recognize the People’s Republic after it was proclaimed on 1 October 1949.11 This conciliatory approach was informed too by the belief that New Delhi should avoid any actions that might lead to India having to align with either the United States or Soviet Union, which ran the risk of dragging the country into ruinous competition or even war (Thomas 1986: 17–18). India thus kept only a light force on the disputed border, where it had one at all, in line with a policy of “minimum defense” (Thomas 1986: 18). And New Delhi followed British precedent on the status of Tibet, recognizing Beijing’s suzerainty while continuing to call for the country to remain autonomous and hoping that it remain within India’s “historic sphere of cultural influence” (Garver 2001: 39). The approach that Nehru followed had, however, both ideological consistency and internal contradictions. Convinced that in the unlikely circumstance a conflict did break out between China and India, the United Nations (UN) would step in to punish the aggressor and end hostilities, Nehru was also sometimes assertive, both diplomatically and militarily, and grew more so toward the end of the 1950s. Before and after independence, and prior to Mao’s seizure of control in Beijing, India gave assurances to

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Tibet that it backed its continued claim to autonomy, covertly supplied arms to Tibetan fighters, and risked Chinese ire in inviting officials from Lhasa to attend the Asian Relations Conference (Garver 2001: 44). When Mao dispatched the PLA, Nehru rebuffed an American suggestion jointly to support Tibetan resistance, however, seeing such a move as a threat to India’s nonaligned stance and to its wider relationship with China (Garver 2001: 48). Instead, he sought to reassure Beijing of India’s benign intentions, hoping that Mao would conclude that “establishing a large military presence in or direct political rule over Tibet” was too expensive (Garver 2001: 49). This was signaled by acts of goodwill such as the recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet in the so-called Panchsheel agreement in April 1954 (Garver 2001: 52) or Nehru’s ill-fated attempt to woo Mao’s Premier, Zhou Enlai, at the Bandung Conference a year later (see Acharya 2017: 96–130).12 This strategy was recalibrated in the late 1950s, as it became evident that China was not responding to Nehru’s overtures and was committed to consolidating control over Tibet. Covertly, New Delhi began to work with the United States to train and supply Tibetan rebels (Riedel 2015). Overtly, it made official protests about Chinese intrusions into territory India claimed, including road building in Aksai Chin and elsewhere, and the publication of Chinese maps (Raghavan 2010: 244–249). Letters were exchanged with Beijing. Deep concern was also expressed about the Chinese response to the Tibetan rebellion that began in March 1959, which ultimately led to the flight of the Dalai Lama to India, which gave him and his entourage asylum. An inconclusive summit between Nehru and Zhou was held in April 1960 in New Delhi to discuss the border. In the background, India began preparations to implement what became the socalled “forward policy,” pushing troops into border areas to assert its claims and deter Chinese adventurism (Maxwell 2015: 191–288). Belatedly, it also began to modernize India’s military, neglected for a decade. In the event, however, New Delhi’s newly assertive approach came too late to deter Mao, and some argue it provoked Beijing into launching its “pedagogic war” in October 1962.13

Reverting to Realism The failure of Nehru’s China policy was, however, clear long before that attack. Tibetan autonomy was not upheld by Beijing after 1950, and Tibet’s culture and religious heritage fell victim to Communist depredation, including the destruction of monasteries during the repression that followed the failed 1959 uprising. The Chinese were not dissuaded from building infrastructure and deploying large numbers of troops in Tibet or along the disputed border with India. Nor were they persuaded by Nehru’s repeated demonstrations of supposed goodwill toward the People’s Republic, including lobbying for Beijing to be given the permanent UN Security Council seat then held by Taiwan. As Garver observes, Mao and Zhou continued to view the Indian Prime Minister as a disingenuous reactionary and aspiring imperialist, and a meddler in China’s internal affairs (Garver 2001: 19, 2012: 89). Nehru’s hybrid strategy of accommodation and assertion had not brought China to the negotiating table to settle the border, nor had it ultimately deterred Mao from using the PLA to punish India. Nehru’s critics had long warned his approach might not succeed. His deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, had argued in early November 1950, in the months following Mao’s consolidation of power and the invasion of Tibet, that a more Realist strategy was needed. In a letter written to Nehru just before his death which remains a

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key, much-cited Realist statement on China, Patel observed that Beijing had acted with “perfidy” in the run up to the invasion, intentionally deceiving the Indian ambassador (Nehru’s confidante, K. M. Panikkar) despite New Delhi’s efforts to “assuage Chinese feelings” (Patel 2013: 521). More broadly, India was now faced, for the first time, with a “united and strong” China with its forces sitting right on the “undefined” border. “Recent and bitter history also tells us,” he went on, “that communism is no shield against imperialism and that the Communists are as good or bad imperialists as any other” (Patel 2013: 522). In fact, their “cloak of ideology … makes [China] ten times more dangerous” (Patel 2013: 523). Patel drew attention to the facts that in the areas bordering China “[c]ontinuous defensive lines do not exist,” the loyalties of local communities were not settled, there was little Indian government presence, and ideas, people, and weapons could move relatively easily (Patel 2013: 523). He urged Nehru commit the government to a full assessment of the threat China might pose, what was needed to guard the border, what was required for India’s defense needs and good governance in the north and northeast, and what should be done to build necessary infrastructure. He encouraged him too to recalibrate his diplomacy, and consider dropping his advocacy for Beijing in the UN (Patel 2013: 525). Finally, he hinted that “a consideration of these matters may lead us into wider questions of our relationship with China, Russia, America, Britain and Burma” (Patel 2013: 526). For more than two decades after 1962, at least until the late 1980s, this Realist strategy for managing China became the one favored by the majority of India’s political and strategic elite. Most perceived that China was a hostile power and that India needed to build up the means to defend itself as best it could against any future intrusion by the PLA. As then-President of India Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan put it in June 1963: “military weakness has been a temptation, and a little military strength may be a deterrent” (quoted in Kavic 1967: 192). These perceptions were reinforced as China constructed a de facto alliance with Pakistan during the 1960s, tested a nuclear bomb, worked to undermine India’s influence in the nonaligned movement and beyond, and delivered material support to insurgent groups within India. In Indira Gandhi’s (1972: 72–73)14 words: … China’s systematic support of Pakistan against India, her provocative criticism of India for alleged subservience to the United States and later the Soviet Union, and her persistent though futile efforts to promote internal subversion leave us no option but to infer that the border dispute was the outcome of a more complex policy which was aimed at undermining India’s stability and at obstructing her rapid and orderly progress. Longtime critics of Nehru and the Congress Party concurred. Hindu nationalist leader Deendayal Upadhyaya, for example, argued in 1963 that the “dragon’s designs” posed an “imminent danger” to India that demanded Nehru’s approach be set aside (Upadhyaya 1968: 49).15 In his view, New Delhi needed instead to align itself with other states against China, recognize the Tibetan exiles as the “émigré government” and assist them to liberate their country, and build “the A-Bomb” to deter possible retaliation from Beijing (Upadhyaya 1963: 50–53). With a broad Realist consensus in place after 1962, India implemented what Raju G. C. Thomas (1986: 17) terms “a policy of sufficient defense,” and modified its diplomacy.

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New Delhi boosted its defense budget, doubled the size of its armed forces, created ten new mountain divisions dedicated to the northern frontier, and, in 1965, began a nuclear weapons program (Pardesi 2016: 177). It also trained and supplied Tibetan insurgents—some in collaboration with the United States—including the so-called “Special Frontier Force,” effectively a 10,000 strong army (Garver 2001: 63). In parallel, New Delhi shifted away from strict nonalignment. A US arms embargo imposed during the 1965 war with Pakistan led to India turning to the Soviet Union for supplies of military equipment. As the US–India relationship deteriorated during the latter half of the decade, with Indira Gandhi emerging as a prominent critic of the Vietnam war, New Delhi moved ever closer to Moscow. When President Richard Nixon announced in July 1971 that he intended to travel to Beijing early the following year, Indira Gandhi agreed a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviets to mitigate some of the risk to India inherent in any emerging Sino-US understanding (Thomas 1986: 10). In this phase, then, lasting until the late 1980s, China was viewed by India’s elite through Realist eyes as a strategic competitor and potential adversary, albeit limited in power due to its relative poverty and political upheavals like the Cultural Revolution.16 They remained concerned about Beijing’s intentions toward India and about the possibility of a US–China–Pakistan alliance emerging that could threaten its interests. They were reassured—to a degree—by China’s decision not to intervene in India’s wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 (Thomas 1986: 26–27). They observed too that during the 1960s and 1970s China lagged behind India in terms of access to civilian and military technology, and that the country was dependent on food imports. And they noted that China’s military struggled in the “pedagogic war” it initiated with Vietnam in early 1979, its conventional weapons were for the most part “obsolete,” and that Beijing’s reputation in the developing world had been hit by a decade or more of domestic political turmoil (Subrahmanyam 1983: iv, 190).17

Oscillating between options The hold of Realism over India’s China policy slackened toward the end of the Cold War. During the dynamic three decades that followed—years that saw the rise and demise of the so-called “unipolar moment,” China becoming the world’s second biggest economy, and India struggling to find its place and accelerate its own development— Realism was challenged by Nehruvian, Hindu nationalist, and Liberal thinking. India’s China policy shifted as elite perceptions of Beijing’s capabilities and intentions changed, and as New Delhi’s relations with other major actors, including the United States, changed too. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nehruvian thinking made a partial return. In the latter half of the 1990s, Realism exercised more influence, though Nehruvianism continued to be drawn upon by many. In the 2000s, at least until the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, some segments of the strategic elite favored Liberal approaches. But by the late 2000s, Realism and Hindu nationalism were vying to shape India’s China policy. The return of Nehruvianism was heralded by Rajiv Gandhi’s landmark meeting with Deng Xiaoping in Beijing in late December 1988. It was prompted both by a shift in Chinese behavior and by a mixture of confidence and anxiousness on the Indian side. After consolidating his power a decade earlier, Deng had ended covert support for insurgencies within India, removing one major issue of contention in bilateral ties. New Delhi was also buoyed both by its apparent success in deterring Chinese reprisals for its

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decision to grant statehood to Arunachal Pradesh in December 1986 and by the widespread civil protests against Chinese rule that broke out in Tibet in 1987 (Pardesi 2016: 179–181). At the same time, however, New Delhi was taken by surprise by the progress made by Beijing and Moscow in settling their long-running border dispute, and the possibility that a Sino-Soviet rapprochement might undercut India’s partnership with the Soviet Union (Garver 2012: 97). In response, Rajiv Gandhi attempted a Nehruvian “reset” with China. Speaking at Tsinghua University during his visit to Beijing, he called for the rekindling of the “spirit” of “peace and goodwill” that had animated his grandfather’s approach to China in the early 1950s. He recalled too Nehru’s argument that China and India were “ancient civilizations” once brought low by European imperialism but now able to progress and further the cause of “world peace.” He called for an end to the two countries’ “estrangement” and appealed to the Panchsheel (Gandhi 1989: 187–188). And this approach brought dividends. China and India reaffirmed the Panchsheel principles in the joint communiqué issued after Deng and Gandhi met. More substantively, they also agreed to create a Joint Working Party to discuss the border—destined to meet fourteen times between 1989 and 2002—and to produce two important agreements intended to mitigate tension in the disputed areas (Pardesi 2016: 181). This accommodative approach lasted into the early 1990s, which saw a number of bilateral summits, including a visit to Beijing by Indian Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in 1993 and one to New Delhi by President Jiang Zemin in 1996, and some agreement between the two countries on international issues, including opposition to Western-led so-called “humanitarian interventions” (Garver 2012: 98). It did not, however, deliver the kind of reassurance India sought. As the decade wore on, China’s economic growth consistently outpaced India’s, giving it more diplomatic clout and the resources to modernize its military. Over time, this eroded New Delhi’s earlier confidence in managing bilateral relations. Beijing also showed itself willing to collaborate with Washington to put pressure on India, especially concerning its nuclear weapons program (Garver 2012: 99). In 1992, China signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Three years later, it voted in favor of that agreement’s indefinite extension, and the following year, much to New Delhi’s dismay, signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty too, leaving India as an outlier in the nuclear regime. These developments, combined with China’s unwillingness to settle the border dispute, its deepening partnership with Pakistan, and its growing capacity to potentially coerce India in a crisis, generated mounting concern in New Delhi and opened the door for Realism to return.18 The election of a Hindu nationalist-led government in May 1998 confirmed this shift, as India’s new Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, appointed leading Realists to the posts of External Affairs Minister ( Jaswant Singh) and National Security Advisor (Brajesh Mishra), and ordered the testing of five nuclear devices.19 The potential threat India faced from China figured highly in the calculation to cross that latter threshold and become a de facto nuclear weapons state (Kennedy 2011). A week before the tests, India’s Defense Minister, the veteran socialist George Fernandes, called China “potential threat No. 1” (Burns 1998). In the aftermath of the tests, Vajpayee effectively repeated this claim in a letter—subsequently leaked—to US President Bill Clinton (Vajpayee 1998). Realist thinking was also evident in his government’s decision openly to pursue a closer strategic partnership with the United States. This involved setting aside past ideologically grounded qualms about American motivations and methods central to the Nehruvian tradition of thought (Mohan 2003: 83–115; cf. Chaulia 2002). For

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Vajpayee, at least, the United States was a “natural ally” in its efforts to manage China, as well as Islamist terrorism (Parthasarathy 2000). Some diplomacy did take place in this context, though only after China relaxed the sanctions it placed on India following the nuclear tests. Vajpayee went to Beijing in June 2003 with the intention of reviving talks about the border. These negotiations did lead to further confidence-building measures, including Sino-Indian joint exercises, and a protocol for settling the frontier dispute, agreed in April 2005 (Smith 2014: 36–38). By this point, however, a new Congress-led government was in power, with a China policy underpinned by a different way of thinking.

Commerce, competition, and culture Under the Manmohan Singh (2004–2014) and Narendra Modi (2014–2019) governments, India’s China strategy passed rapidly through three distinct phases. The first, which lasted until about 2009, was partly Liberal in inspiration; the second, extending to the end of Singh’s time in office, tended toward Realism; and the third combined elements of Realism and Hindu nationalist thinking. In the Liberal phase, there was some optimism about the future of the Sino-Indian relationship underpinned by a conviction that greater trade and investment between the two would lead to interdependence, produce incentives to settle their various differences, and reduce the chances of conflict. Buoyed by wider enthusiasm about the latent potential in so-called “emerging markets”—enthusiasm encapsulated in the nowfamous 2003 report produced by Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman (2003) from Goldman Sachs that coined the term BRICs to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China—the Liberals argued that globalization was transforming geopolitics. Influential figures argued that given the complementarities and sheer size of the Chinese and Indian economies, an integrated, influential “Chindia” (Ramesh 2005) could emerge. Some even speculated that, as US “hegemony” now appeared in decline, China and India might soon “dominate the West” ( Jha 2010).20 Manmohan Singh, for his part, agreed that “economic factors” were increasingly the drivers of India’s relations with other major powers, including China (Baru 2014: 165). The 2000s did see indeed a major transformation in the Sino-Indian economic relationship. In 1998, the value of bilateral trade was a mere $1 billion (Smith 2014: 36). By 2010, it was more than $60 billion (Pant 2011: 107). This trade was, however, heavily skewed in China’s favor, with India exporting mostly raw materials and running a considerable trade deficit. Moreover, greater interdependence did not translate in any clear way into greater security for India. Overall, Sino-Indian ties did not improve as much or as fast as some in Singh’s first government might have liked. An agreement on principles for settling the border dispute in 2005 and the start of a bilateral strategic dialogue did not lead to substantive progress. Indeed, tension over this issue increased, as Beijing grew increasingly vocal about its claims. In 2006, on the eve of a visit by President Hu Jintao, the Chinese ambassador to India declared that all of Arunachal Pradesh belonged to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (Smith 2014: 39). Beijing also began to refuse to grant visas to residents of that state and escalated the dispute in 2008 by issuing only stapled visas for residents of the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir (Smith 2014: 44). In 2009, it blocked an Asian Development Bank loan for infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh. In parallel, it stymied Indian efforts to secure international cooperation to bring to justice Pakistani-based individuals suspected of planning the 2008 Mumbai

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terrorist attacks (Pant 2011: 108). Finally, China began to intrude into areas India has long considered within its sphere of influence. In 2008, the PLA deployed warships into the Indian Ocean for the first time, initially to help with multinational antipiracy operations; China’s navy has maintained a presence ever since, generating a new security dilemma for New Delhi (Koh 2016; cf. Pant 2011: 112; Mohan 2012: 4). These issues, combined with China’s broader move to more assertive foreign and security policies after 2009, led to a tempering of the influence of Liberalism and the reemergence of Realism.21 The language of prominent Congress-aligned analysts became tougher, as influential voices argued that India needed to be cautious in engaging China and build up its capacity to defend itself and its interests. They warned that Asia was a “theatre of many strategic rivalries” and “great power competition,” and that China now impinged “directly on India’s geopolitical space” (Khilnani et al. 2013: 12–13). They expressed concern about the asymmetries in the bilateral economic relationship, the leverage this might give Beijing over India and other states in South Asia, and the power of China’s state-owned enterprises (Khilnani et al. 2013: 14–15). Although they warned of the dangers of “prematurely antagoniz[ing]” Beijing by entering into alliances with other powers or participating in initiatives aiming at containment, they accepted the Realist argument that India needed to work harder to develop its own economic and military power, deepen its strategic partnerships, and try to compete with China economically, diplomatically, and even militarily (Khilnani et al. 2013: 31–32). The China policy of Singh’s second government, which took power in 2009, increasingly reflected this more Realist way of thinking. It began (long-overdue) work on upgrading border infrastructure and pushed ahead (albeit to mixed effect) with military modernization, including the expansion of the Indian navy and the introduction of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. In 2013, it also announced that a Mountain Strike Corps would be formed, consisting of just over 90,000 troops, to defend the northern border (Karnad 2015: 284–286). In parallel, New Delhi worked on deepening defense and security cooperation with a number of Indo-Pacific partners, including Australia, Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam, despite some turbulence in India’s strategic relations with the United States (Grare 2016). These moves did not satisfy all Realists (see Karnad 2015 or Chellaney 2013), let alone Hindu nationalists (see Madhav 2014), who argued they were too little, too late, but they did signal a shift to a more Realist approach. The advent and initial behavior of the Modi government, dominated by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, raised hopes that India would adopt a more assertive policy and that swift action would be taken to bolster the country’s capacity to manage China. Risking Beijing’s opprobrium, the new Prime Minister invited representatives from both Taiwan and Tibet to his inauguration. During his early months in office, he also made a point of visiting, or having senior ministers visit, a series of strategic partners, including Australia, Japan, and Vietnam. Standing alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping at a press conference in September 2014, Modi broke with precedent to publicly criticize an alleged incursion by Chinese troops into India’s territory. New Delhi also made clear that India objected strongly to China’s Belt and Road Initiative-linked China Pakistan Economic Corridor, announced the following year (Bajpai 2017: 80–83). And Modi’s government went to considerable lengths to regain some influence over South Asian and Indian Ocean states thought to be coming under Beijing’s sway, with official visits, promises of investment and assistance, and security agreements (Bajpai 2017: 87–89).

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Some analysts have argued that this approach was more Realist than his predecessor’s (see, for example, Pant 2017). They note that Modi’s government more closely aligned India to the United States and joined groupings like the so-called “Quad,” a means of coordinating responses to challenges of Indo-Pacific security among its participants, including challenges generated by China. They point to the resolve shown by New Delhi during the so-called “Doklam standoff” in mid-2017, when Indian troops confronted PLA soldiers constructing a road through a disputed area of Bhutan.22 Others complain, however, that between 2014 and 2019 Modi’s government fell short of the strategic rigor or concerted effort to build economic and military power one might expect from thoroughgoing Realists (Tharoor 2018: 450–455; Rej and Sagar 2019; cf. Karnad 2018). They note that monies were not found to fully fund Mountain Strike Corps nor to make much needed investments in new equipment such as the sizable number of multi-role combat aircraft required to meet the long-standing goals of replacing antiquated systems like the MiG-21 and forming 42 air force squadrons (Tellis 2016). Some argue that the Modi government has failed to pursue a more concerted, power seeking, and agenda setting approach because the Prime Minister himself and some of his leading allies are essentially inward looking, with little clear view of their preferred international order (Miller 2018: 86–87). Others suggest that they are beholden to Hindu nationalist ideology that places excessive faith in “soft power” over its “hard” equivalent, and diplomacy over strategy (Karnad 2018; Hall 2019; Rej and Sagar 2019). There is some evidence to support both arguments. Modi’s speeches on foreign and security policy—such as his address to the Shangri-La Dialogue in June 2018 (Modi 2018)—made extensive reference to India’s past and present cultural and religious influence across the Indo-Pacific, and its supposed role in promoting the idea of “unity in diversity.” After coming to office, his government invested heavily in a variety of soft power initiatives, including public, cultural, and religious diplomacy, ranging from the championing of an international Yoga Day to more targeted and politically sensitive attempts to sway Buddhist opinion in East and Southeast Asia (Hall 2019). In parallel, citing budget pressures and channeling funds elsewhere, predominantly to social welfare programs, as well as facing a big escalation in pension costs, the Modi administration did not commit to invest in the major program of military modernization that Realists think is needed to help manage the challenge posed by China ( Joshi 2018).

Conclusion The various challenges posed by China since 1947 have helped to generate considerable contestation in Indian strategic thought. In no small part this reflects India’s scale and complexity, as well as its evolution from a poor country bent on furthering and exporting revolution to an economic powerhouse with uncertain international ambitions. Today, however, it is clear that concern about China’s intentions and growing capabilities is widespread in New Delhi’s elite, and Realist and Hindu nationalists, who both advocate competitive strategies, are the most influential. Unless the People’s Republic undergoes some significant internal change, with a more benign leadership group coming to the fore, it is difficult to see how either Nehruvians or Liberals could command the respect they once had. While there are those in India, including some in Modi’s government, who grudgingly admire the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party since Deng’s economic reforms of 1978, there are few who think that Beijing is presently willing to settle its outstanding disputes with New Delhi, cooperate with it on anything

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other than a purely instrumental basis, or pursue economic interdependence in a balanced and mutually beneficial fashion. By default, the present debate over India’s China policy is thus one between Realists, who want a more robust and competitive approach that emphasizes hard power, and Hindu nationalists, who believe that soft power, as well as hard, can give New Delhi what it needs to manage the challenges it confronts.

Notes

China in India’s strategic thought  163 20 Prem Shankar Jha is an economist and journalist who served in the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, and as the information advisor to the Prime Minister of India. 21 On China’s assertiveness, see inter alia Friedberg (2014), and on the shift to Realism, see Hall (2012). 22 For a balanced analysis of this episode and its implications for Sino-Indian relations, see Ganguly and Scobell (2018).

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China in India’s strategic thought  165 Mohan, C. R. (2003) Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (New York: Palgrave). Mohan, C. R. (2012) Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Mohan, C. R. (2015) Modi’s World: Expanding India’s Sphere of Influence (New Delhi: HarperCollins). Nehru, J. (1961) India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 (New Delhi: Government of India). Nye, J. S. (1990) Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books). Nye, J. S. (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs). Ogden, C. (2014) Hindu Nationalism and the Evolution of Contemporary Indian Security: Portents of Power (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Ollapally, D. M. and Rajagopalan, R. (2012) “India: Foreign Policy Perspectives of an Ambiguous Power,” in H. R. Nau and D. M. Ollapally, eds., Worldviews of Aspiring Powers: Domestic Foreign Policy Debates in China, India, Iran, Japan, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press): 73–113. Pant, H. V. (2011) “India Comes to Terms with Rising China,” in A. J. Tellis, T. Tanner, and J. Keough, eds., Strategic Asia 2011–12: Asia Responds to Its Rising Powers, China and India (Seattle and Washington, DC: National Bureau of Asian Research): 101–130. Pant, H. V. (2017) Indian Foreign Policy: An Overview (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Pardesi, M. S. (2016) “India’s China Policy,” in S. Ganguly, ed., Engaging the World: Indian Foreign Policy Since 1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press): 167–194. Parthasarathy, M. (2000) “India, US Natural Allies: Vajpayee,” The Hindu (9 September), available online at www.thehindu.com/2000/09/09/stories/01090005.htm. Patel, V. (2013) “Tibet: Patel’s Letter to Nehru,” in B. Krishna, ed., Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel: India’s Iron Man (New Delhi: Rupa): 520–526. Raghavan, S. (2010) War and Peace in Modern India (New York: Palgrave). Ramesh, J. (2005) Making Sense of Chindia: Reflections on China and India (New Delhi: India Research Press). Rej, A. and Sagar, R. (2019) “The BJP and Indian Grand Strategy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (4 April), available online at https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/04/ bjp-and-indian-grand-strategy-pub-78686. Riedel, B. (2015) Kennedy’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War (Washington, DC: Brookings). Sagar, R. (2009) “State of Mind: What Kind of Power Will India Become?” International Affairs 85(4): 801–816. Sagar, R. (2014) “‘Jiski Lathi, Uski Bains’: The Hindu Nationalist View of International Politics,” in K. Bajpai, S. Basit and V. Krishnappa, eds., India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases (London, New York and New Delhi: Routledge): 234–257. Sharma, J. (2006) Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Penguin). Shourie, A. (2013) Self-Deception: India’s China Policies: Origins, Premises, Lessons (New Delhi: HarperCollins). Singh, J. (1999) Defending India (New Delhi: Macmillan). Singh, J. (2007) In Service of Emergent India: A Call to Honor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Sisodia, N. S. (2014) “Economic Modernisation and the Growing Influence of Neoliberalism in India’s Strategic Thought,” in K. Bajpai, S. Basit and V. Krishnappa, eds., India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases (New Delhi: Routledge): 176–195. Smith, J. M. (2014) Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington). Subrahmanyam, K. (1983) Indian Security Perspectives (New Delhi: ABC Publishing House). Tanham, G. (1992) Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation).

166  Ian Hall Tellis, A. J. (2016) Troubles, They Come in Battalions: The Manifold Travails of the Indian Air Force (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Tharoor, S. (2018) The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India (New Delhi: Aleph). Thomas, R. G. C. (1986) Indian Security Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Upadhyaya, D. (1968) Political Diary (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House). Upadhyaya, D. (1992) Integral Humanism (Noida: Jagriti Prakashan). Vajpayee, A. B. (1998) “Nuclear Anxiety: Indian’s Letter to Clinton on the Nuclear Testing,” The New York Times (13 May), available online at www.nytimes.com/1998/05/13/world/ nuclear-anxiety-indian-s-letter-to-clinton-on-the-nuclear-testing.html. Wilson, D. and Purushothaman, R. (2003) “Dreaming with the BRICs: The Path to 2050,” Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper No. 99 (1 October), available online at www.goldmansachs.com/insights/archive/brics-dream.html.

Part 3

Core bilateral conflicts

9

Stability in a secondary strategic direction China and the border dispute with India after 1962 M. Taylor Fravel

The China–India border dispute is perhaps the world’s most continuously negotiated territorial dispute. Since 1981, negotiations or talks regarding the border have been held every single year—for thirty-eight years. This includes eight rounds at the viceministerial level in the 1980s, fifteen meetings of the joint working group from 1989 to 2005, and twenty-one meetings of the special representatives at the level of national security advisor since 2003. Moreover, several agreements on confidence-building measures were concluded in the 1990s, along with agreements relating to principles for settling the dispute or managing the border in 2005 and 2013. Nevertheless, a final settlement of the border dispute has remained elusive, and the two sides appear no closer to reaching agreement today than they did when negotiations resumed in 1981. At the same time, since 1962, armed conflict along the border has been limited. Apart from the clash over Nathu La in 1967, no soldier has died on the border since 1975 (Menon 2016: 22). This chapter examines China’s general approach to the border dispute after the 1962 Sino-Indian war. China’s approach has emphasized maintaining stability on its southwestern frontier, defined as preventing the escalation of armed conflict on the border and maintaining the dominant position in the dispute it enjoyed after the war. Stability has been more important than either making unilateral concessions to settle the dispute or resorting to armed force to advance its claims. In other words, China seeks to balance the defense of its claims in the dispute with its other interests, either in its overall foreign policy or in its relationship with India. The reason is straightforward: despite the sheer size of the territory at stake, India and the border dispute have never posed the main threat to China’s national security. The dispute has been a secondary threat that must be managed so that it does not impact China’s ability to pursue its interests in other areas that the country deems more important. China’s approach to military strategy distinguishes the country’s main or primary strategic direction (zhuyao zhanlue fangzhen) from secondary (ciyao) strategic directions. The primary strategic direction refers to the most important threat that China faces and the geographic direction in which China should focus its efforts (Fravel 2019: 28, 60). Secondary strategic directions include other potential sources of armed conflict that, as the name suggests, are secondary or less important when compared with the threat in the primary strategic direction. For China, its relationship with India and the border dispute have always been a strategic secondary direction. This is not to say that India does not pose important security concerns for China. India can threaten China on its southwestern frontier, especially dangerous from China’s standpoint when combined with instability in Tibet, or, hypothetically, in a “chain reaction” (liansuo fanying) when China faces a simultaneous threat in another direction (Fravel 2007: 716). Nevertheless,

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since 1949, China’s leaders have never viewed China’s southwest, or India, as the country’s primary strategic direction. Instead, it was the northeast in the 1950s and 1960s (the United States), the north in the 1970s and 1980s (the Soviet Union), the southeast after the end of the Cold War (Taiwan), and the southeast along with the maritime domain today. India has never been China’s main or primary strategic adversary or opponent. Even when during the 1962 war, China remained more concerned about the potential of a US invasion along the Chinese coast. Thus, generally speaking, China seeks to maintain stability in its secondary strategic directions in order to conserve energy and forces for the contest in the primary strategic direction. China may use force in a secondary strategic direction, but the purpose is to manage the conflict in order to maintain a focus on the primary strategic direction. Stability is a primary goal. Since 1962, from China’s standpoint, the challenges to stability on the China–India border have varied, but generally are reflected in the level of military activity and tensions. One of China’s main goals in attacking India in 1962 was, paradoxically, to reduce military tensions on the border (which China viewed as caused by Indian actions) and not to seize land it claimed but did not control (especially in the eastern sector). Later, from the mid-1990s, maintaining stability on the border was a prerequisite for developing a broader China–India bilateral relationship, to ensure the ongoing territorial dispute would not harm the development of ties in other spheres (Fravel 2011). For China, dominance on the border and deterring Indian challenges form the basis of stability. This chapter proceeds as follows. The first section reviews China’s goals in the 1962 war, which frame how China has approached the dispute afterward. The main goals were to restore stability by evicting Indian forces from territory controlled under Nehru’s “forward policy” and to compel India to negotiate a final resolution, based on the “package deal” that Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru discussed in April 1960. The second section examines the situation along the border from 1962 to the mid-1990s. Apart from the 1967 clash at Nathu La, the border remained stable until the mid-1980s, when a crisis erupted over Sumdorong Chu in the eastern sector. From China’s standpoint, the resumption of Indian patrols in this area threatened China’s position on the border. The third section examines the 1993 border peace and tranquility agreement, which has allowed the broader India–China relationship to flourish. The fourth section examines how changes on the border have led to an increase in “transgressions” in areas where the two sides differ regarding the line of actual control (LAC). The final section discusses the 2017 standoff in Doklam and how it might shape China’s approach to the border dispute in the future.

China’s goals in the 1962 war Any assessment of China’s approach to the territorial dispute after 1962 must start with the goals that China pursued when Mao decided to attack Indian forces along the disputed border in October of that year. The origins of China–India border war are covered elsewhere in this volume and by previous research. Briefly, from China’s perspective, the revolt in Tibet highlighted the fragility of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule in this region and broader concerns about territorial integrity in China’s ethnic minority regions adjacent to its international frontiers. Tibet itself had been governed indirectly after it was seized by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1950. When the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 amid the revolt that had spread from Kham to Tibet proper, the border dispute with

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India became intertwined with the territorial integrity of the People’s Republic. Beijing viewed the implementation of Nehru’s “forward policy” of establishing outposts to control contested land as threatening and increasing instability on the border, especially as China faced unrest in Xinjiang in the spring of 1962 and the prospect of a Nationalist invasion along the east coast that summer. After blocking moves in the summer of 1962 failed to halt the momentum of the forward policy in the western sector, tensions escalated over Dhola and the Namka Chu in the eastern sector north of Tawang. In mid-October, China decided to attack India forces all along the border. One goal was to protect Tibet, which China believed India would continue to threaten if it strengthened its position in disputed areas.1 China perceived that India was continuing the British policy of northern expansion into Tibet, seeking to transform Tibet into a colony or protectorate (Lei 1997: 207). For China, India had first opposed China’s occupation of Tibet in 1950, later supported Tibetan rebels, and then provided refuge to the Dalai Lama and sanctuary to a government in exile with claims to Chinese territory. The forward policy was a continuation of such Indian pressure on Tibet. PLA documents describe the attack as necessary because, otherwise, India would continue to press north and expand inside Tibet and Aksai Chin ( Jiang and Li 1994: 473–474). To this day, Chinese analysts almost uniformly view the territorial dispute through the lens of Tibet and residual Indian ambitions (despite the statements of the Indian government to the contrary) (Fravel 2011). Another Chinese goal was to demonstrate resolve. China’s leaders believed that India had concluded China was debilitated by internal unrest, or “weak and easily bullied” (Lei 1997: 188). Beijing believed that Delhi was seeking to take advantage of not just the Tibetan revolt but also the upheaval of the Great Leap Forward to make gains on the border at China’s expense. As Zhou Enlai (1997: 472) said at the time, India “reckoned that our famine was very serious, Tibet was empty, the rebellion unsettled.” He also noted, “when you have no room for retreat and you do not counterattack, that is really showing weakness.” Attacking India allowed China to demonstrate resolve in the face of Indian pressure and during a moment of internal strife—and to deter India from challenging China again. Finally, and most importantly, fighting was seen as the only way to eliminate Indian pressure and restore stability along this frontier. Given that diplomacy and deterrence in the spring and summer of 1962 had failed to halt the forward policy, war was necessary. As Chinese General Lei Yingfu had concluded in August 1962, “not fighting was not enough to prevent the Indian intrusions” (Xu 1993: 91–92). Likewise, Mao said that “if we counterattack one time, then the border will become stable and the boundary problem can be peacefully resolved” (Lei 1997: 210). A former Chinese diplomat recalls that Mao believed the attack would “create ten years of stability on the border” (Zhang 1990: 75). To achieve these goals, the Central Military Commission (CMC) highlighted that the purpose of attacking India was to protect the stability of China’s frontiers and to create conditions for a negotiated settlement of the dispute ( Jiang and Li 1994: 473–474).

After 1962 After the 1962 war, China had achieved its goal of stability, defined in terms of deterring further Indian challenges. Yet two crises occurred on the border that involved a forceful response. In both cases, whether warranted or not, China viewed India as challenging the post-war stability on the border.

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The first occasion was a six-day clash at Nathu La, on what was then China’s border with Sikkim adjacent to the Yadong (Chumbi) valley between Sikkim and Bhutan. The area had become a source of tension in 1965 and tensions grew in August and September 1967 (on the clash at Nathu La, see Bajpai 1999: 156–195). The proximate spark for the Chinese attack was India’s effort to construct fencing and other fortifications in order to consolidate the Indian position around the pass. More generally, Indian forces deployed in this area had grown substantially since 1962, as part of a much broader effort to strengthen the Indian Army after its defeat in the war with China. Evidence suggests that the PLA actions were not authorized by the party and military leadership in Beijing and that local PLA commanders may have lacked authorization to attack, even if at a tactical level the Indian actions challenged the Chinese position around Nathu La (Fravel 2008: 199). After the 1967 clash, no major incidents occurred on the border. When the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution subsided, China focused on the growing threat from the Soviet Union all along its northern border. Maintaining stability on its southwestern flank with India served this interest, as China did not want conflict on two fronts. Following the gradual move to normalize relations in the mid-1970s, China and India began boundary talks in 1981 at the vice-ministerial level. China opened the talks again with the idea of pursuing a package deal. India rejected this approach, preferring to hold talks over each sector separately (the “sector-by-sector” approach). At the same time as talks started, however, military forces on both sides began to move back toward the border. While these talks were occurring, a new and much more severe crisis occurred in 1986 in an area called Wangdong or Sumdorong Chu in the eastern sector. It involved the same territory north of the McMahon Line but south of the watershed near Dhola over which a struggle for control in 1962 escalated to war. In 1983, India resumed patrols in the area and created a seasonal outpost or patrol point on the banks of the Sumdorong river. China viewed the Indian post as an effort to start changing the situation along the border, retaking land from which it had been expelled in 1962. Meanwhile, the border talks had stalled. Thus, China may have viewed India’s action as intending to create a fait accompli in the eastern sector. In 1986, China preempted the return of the Indian detachment and occupied the area first. China then fortified the position and refused to leave. Over the next twelve months, both sides mobilized tens of thousands of troops. The crisis subsidized in June 1987, when the Indian foreign minister visited China. Nevertheless, Indian and Chinese forces would not disengage in the area for another seven years.

Border peace and tranquility agreement Paradoxically, the intensity of the standoff at Sumdorong Chu prompted a bilateral effort to prevent a recurrence of such an event. When Rajiv Gandhi visited China in December 1988, a breakthrough occurred. During the visit, China and India agreed to “actively develop the bilateral relations in other fields and create an atmosphere and conditions conducive to a reasonable settlement of the boundary issue” (MFA 2004). Toward this end, joint working groups were created on the boundary issue and for economic issues. Progress in the joint working group on the border soon stalled, however, as Chinese leaders became consumed by the demonstrations in Tiananmen, the violent crackdown, and subsequent elite rifts over party policy. In 1992, India proposed to China drafting an agreement that would be focused not on resolving the dispute but instead on maintaining peace and tranquility along the border. By September 1993, the two sides

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reached an agreement, based largely on a draft text that India had created to serve as the basis for the talks. The most important provisions were committing to resolving the dispute through “peaceful and friendly consultations,” not threatening or using force, and to “strictly respect and observe the line of actual control” (Bhatia and Tang 1993: 1). Given differences in thirteen areas over the location of the LAC, the two sides formed a working group to discuss where the line lay and attempt to resolve these differences. The agreement also called for confidence-building measures, which were detailed in a 1996 agreement, and affirmed that joint efforts to maintain the status quo along the LAC did not prejudice either country’s claims in the territorial dispute. The agreement was ground-breaking. As one of its architects, Shivshankar Menon (2016: 19), notes, it was the first agreement of “any kind” between China and India over the border. Moreover, “it formalized in an international treaty a bilateral commitment by India and China to maintain the status quo on the border.” As a result, the agreement “effectively delinked settlement of the boundary issue with the rest of the relationship, and delinked it also from the maintenance of peace on the border” (Menon 2016: 19). In this way, the agreement “permitted the expansion of bilateral relations in other areas, despite the boundary question remaining unsettled” (Menon 2016: 20). Although India had proposed the agreement, China readily and quickly agreed. China’s leaders were facing severe internal challenges to the regime’s stability and security in the aftermath of Tiananmen. The leadership was initially divided over the merits of suppressing the demonstrations and later divided over whether to continue with reform and opening. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union collapsed, removing a key security threat to China but also underscoring the vulnerability of communist systems. US leadership in the Gulf War indicated that unipolarity might eclipse the multipolarity that China hoped would materialize with the end of the Cold War. Thus, China moved to settle many of its outstanding territorial disputes, concluding that stability on its borders and improved bilateral relations with neighbors were more important than the territory at stake. By 1994, China had reached boundary agreements with the Soviet Union, Laos, Vietnam, Russia, and Kazakhstan (Fravel 2008: 126–174). In this context, India’s proposal for an agreement to maintain the status quo along the border was pushing on an open door. Also, by affirming the existing LAC, rather than competing definitions of the line from before the war, the agreement in many ways consolidated China’s position along the border. Following the election of the Hindu nationalist BJP in 1998, India–China relations suffered a temporary setback, with India justifying its nuclear tests in 1998 based on the China threat. Nevertheless, in the decades since the 1993 agreement, and despite the presence of one of the world’s largest territorial disputes between two sovereign states, bilateral relations have flourished. Bilateral trade reached 84 billion USD in 2017, up from only a few billion in the early 1990s. Likewise, China and India have deepened cooperation in international fora such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Finally, each now is an observer in a regional organization the other leads, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) (Fravel 2011).

Incursions in the 2000s In the past decade, a number of reported incidents along the border have occurred, often described in the Indian media as “transgressions” or “incursions.” Here it is worth noting some of the limits of the 1993 and 1996 agreements. First, they did not clarify

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the location of the LAC. Unlike India’s Line of Control with Pakistan, the LAC has never been depicted on a map. The two sides began to exchange maps in the early 2000s, starting with the central or middle sector, but then stopped when it appeared that the process might increase tensions, as both sides began to “exaggerate their claims” (Menon 2016: 22). In thirteen sectors, China and India hold different views regarding the location of the LAC. In these sectors, one side’s patrol up to what it views as the limit of the LAC violates the other side’s view of the LAC. Second, these agreements did not cover broader efforts to enhance military infrastructure in border areas and, perhaps unintentionally, may have created an incentive to build such infrastructure to enable each side to be able to consolidate control on their side of the LAC (without violating the agreement itself ). The number of reported incursions by China began to increase significantly after 2010. As shown in Table 9.1, incursions peaked at around 500 in 2014. This figure refers to the number of times that Chinese patrols have violated what India views as the LAC, based on reports from the Indian government. China has never released any information regarding what it views as Indian violations of the LAC. If India patrols up to what it sees as the limit of the LAC in contested sectors, then these would also be “transgressions” from China’s perspective. The question, for our purposes, is what explains the general increase in Chinese activity, and how does such activity contribute to maintaining stability on the border? Analysis here remains speculative, but China appears to be responding to several changes along the border. The first change is the substantial improvement of India’s border infrastructure along the China-India frontier. India’s efforts to upgrade infrastructure in the area has lagged behind China’s, which started earlier (in the mid-1990s) as part of a much broader modernization of China’s border defense forces (Fravel 2007: 729–731). In 2006, the Indian government approved a plan to build 73 strategic roads along the LAC. The second change is a modification of the Indian military’s force structure directed at China. Under the guideline of strengthening “active deterrence,” India decided to establish two new mountain divisions in 2009 and, later, in 2013, announced the intent to create a mountain strike corps of 90,000 soldiers in order to be able to conduct

Table 9.1 Chinese border transgressions on the LAC, 2010–2018 Year

Transgressions

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

250 220 430 340 500 350 200*/271** 415 137 (through 20 September)

Source: Figures for 2010–2016 from Sandhu (2016) (*). Figures for 2016–2017 from PTI (2018) (**). Figures for 2018 from Gupta (2018).

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offensive operations against China in Tibet (Pandit 2013). India has reactivated airfields (“advanced landing grounds”) along the border, in the east and west, which facilitate the rapid movement of troops as well as offensive strikes across the LAC (DHNS 2014). In 2013, for example, the Indian Air Force landed a C-130 at the Daulat Beg Oldi landing ground (Firstpost 2013). In 2014, advanced Su-30 aircraft and surface-to-air missile squadrons were deployed (Pandit 2014a). As Menon wrote in 2016, “India has done more in the past ten years to strengthen and build border infrastructure and military preparedness and to create offsetting and asymmetric capabilities than in any decade since independence” (Menon 2016: 24). A third change was an increase in the frequency of Indian patrols along the LAC. By 2014, India had increased both the frequency and tempo of operations, and was patrolling most areas on a daily basis (Pant 2014). Although India may have merely been catching up with China’s own rate of patrols, the increased frequency, all else equal, would not only improve India’s tactical intelligence of the situation on the LAC but also increase the odds of encountering a Chinese patrol and prompting a face-off or incident. Amid this context, unprecedented standoffs occurred in areas where the LAC was contested. For several weeks in April and May 2013, Chinese and Indian forces faced off in the Depsang area in the western sector. China may have been using the incident to signal resolve before Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to India, but it was likely also reacting to India’s renewed activism along this part of the disputed border, and signaling that China would not accept India’s actions without reacting in any way. In 2014, a similar incident occurred near Chumar, also in the western sector, as China tried to build a road to an area near where India had erected an observation post (Pandit 2014b). This incident occurred during Xi Jinping’s first summit with Narendra Modi in India, perhaps indicating a desire to signal China’s dominance and strength to India (Menon 2016: 26).

The standoff at Doklam The 2017 standoff over the Doklam bowl was the most serious military confrontation between the two countries on the border since Sumdorong Chu. The proximate cause was China’s intention to enhance a road in the area from the Yadong Valley to an Indian border post at Doka La in the Doklam bowl. The road travels through territory in an area that has been under Chinese control but is disputed with Bhutan (not India). To complicate matters further, China and India differ regarding the end of their common border. China places it to the south of Doklam, at Mount Gipmochi, while India maintains it lies to the north, at Batang La. India may have believed that China was seeking to extend an existing track all the way to China’s claimed trijunction and, in this way, be in a position to threaten the Siliguri corridor. China’s intent may have been more limited, namely, to improve the track from the Yadong Valley (Bardalai 2018: 5). Nevertheless, before China was able to begin construction, India deployed approximately 300 troops. From China’s standpoint, Indian forces had crossed an international boundary, not the LAC, as China and India have never disputed the border between Sikkim and Tibet (although it has never been demarcated). If India hoped that the Chinese construction crews would depart, it was mistaken. Instead, China strengthened its forces and the two sides hunkered down. Diplomatically, the situation was resolved at the end of August. During the standoff, both sides acted cautiously, using their armed forces to strengthen their diplomacy but not taking tactical military actions that would result in an escalation of the situation or the use of

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force. In this way, both sides sought to maintain stability while defending their positions regarding the border. Chinese analysts suggest that China did not want maritime issues to be linked with the Indian border situation, underscoring that the border remained a secondary strategic direction and thus should be managed accordingly (Guan and Zhang 2017; Ye 2018). One Chinese scholar notes that China could have characterized the Indian actions as “aggression” (qinlue), which would have justified a forceful response to the Indian intervention. Instead, however, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) used the word “incursion” (ruqin), a phrase that gave China more flexibility in how to deal with the situation diplomatically (Zhang 2017). Thus, with China refusing to remove its personnel, India had to choose between compelling China to leave Doklam through force or accepting the Chinese presence. At the tactical level, China’s position in Doklam was weak. China’s main military facilities in the area were tens of kilometers away, in the Yadong Valley, which meant that the PLA would need to transport forces uphill and at high altitude to reach what China views as the border with India. The Indian Army also maintained several divisions in Sikkim while the PLA has far fewer forces in the border area, at least on a permanent basis. Although China maintained a track in Doklam up to Doka La, and patrolled it occasionally, it had not erected any permanent facilities to match those of India’s. India’s ability to intervene to halt Chinese activities in Doklam highlighted India’s superiority and China’s vulnerability in the area of the standoff. After the diplomatic resolution, however, China moved to significantly enhance its physical position in Doklam in the areas adjacent to the Indian position at Doka La and its control over this area. The purpose of this buildup was to prevent a recurrence of the Indian intervention and thus restore stability that, from China’s standpoint, India’s intervention had upset. Satellite imagery reveals the construction of a network of roads from the Yadong Valley, fortifications and defensive positions, helipads, and barracks and other buildings (Bhat 2018). India has also enhanced its own defensive positions, including what appears to be a track or trench that runs south from Doka La to China’s claimed tripoint, allowing India to monitor Chinese activity in the area. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chinese analysts have viewed India’s action of a sign of increasing hostility toward China and tension more generally between China and India, along with exposing the limits of “mutual trust.” Hu Shisheng (2017), for example, believes that India initiated the action because of its growing concerns about China along with a desire to preserve India’s preeminent position in South Asia. Other scholars suggest that China has been too optimistic—even naive—regarding India. These scholars view India’s willingness to confront China over Doklam as a sign that India will never stop challenging China on the border. Thus, for one pair of scholars, “China should be ready diplomatically and militarily and predict possible Indian actions in the border region” (Guan and Zhang 2017: 74). Although many experts called for greater vigilance on the border with India, one of China’s most prominent Indian experts, Ma Jiali (2017), called for greater management of the disputed border by both sides and even encouraged a resolution of the dispute. In other words, the border dispute in the context of the bilateral relationship could be managed and stability could be maintained. The long-term effect of the Doklam standoff remains unknown. In the short term, however, China and India recommitted to maintaining peace and stability along the border. One of the outcomes of the informal meetings between Xi and Modi in Wuhan in late April 2018 was “strategic guidance to their respective militaries to strengthen communication in order to build trust and mutual understanding and enhance predictability

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and effectiveness in the management of border affairs” (MEA 2018). In essence, they appeared to recommit to the language of the 1993 agreement and to “strengthen existing institutional arrangements and information sharing mechanisms to prevent incidents in border regions” (MEA 2018). As noted in Table 9.1, for the first half of 2018, the number of transgressions along the LAC has decreased from previous years.

Conclusion Both before and after 1962, China has viewed the border with India as a secondary strategic direction. Stability on the border allows China to focus on other priorities. As a result, China’s main goal has been to manage the border so that it does not weaken China’s efforts to address its main security threats or other diplomatic goals. China has sought to balance the defense of its border claims with the pursuit of other objectives. When China believes India threatens its claims in the dispute or stability along the border, China has responded in order to restore stability and not to impose a final settlement. For the past few decades, China has sought to prevent the dispute from dominating its relationship with India, in order to pursue other goals linked with economic growth and to expand Chinese influence in other regions around the world. Although India’s action at Doklam has renewed Chinese concerns about India’s intentions and willingness to raise tensions on the border, China is unlikely to shift from its current approach so long as it assesses that it faces greater foreign policy challenges from other countries. The deterioration of US–China relations since 2017 suggests that China will prioritize other strategic directions, not the border with India.

Note

Bibliography Bajpai, G. S. (1999) China’s Shadow over Sikkim: The Politics of Intimidation (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers). Bardalai, A. K. (2018) “Doklam and the Indo-China Boundary,” Journal of Defence Studies 12(1) ( January–March 2018): 5–13. Bhat, V. (2018) “China Has Quietly Altered Its Boundary with Bhutan after Doklam Stand-Off with India,” The Print (8 October), available online at https://theprint.in/defence/china-hasquietly-altered-its-boundary-with-bhutan-after-doklam-stand-off-with-india/130148/. Bhatia, R. L. and Tang, J. (1993) “Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas,” United Nations Peacemaker (7 September), available online at https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/ CN%20IN_930907_Agreement%20on%20India-China%20Border%20Areas.pdf. DHNS (2014) “India Plans Advanced Landing Strips at Ladakh, Tawang,” Deccan Herald (22 February), available online at www.deccanherald.com/content/387892/india-plansadvanced-landing-strips.html. Firstpost (2013) “India Flexes Muscle as IAF Lands Hercules Aircraft at Ladakh’s Daulat Beg Oldie” (20 August), available online at www.firstpost.com/india/india-flexes-muscle-as-iaflands-hercules-aircraft-at-ladakhs-daulat-beg-oldie-1047253.html. Fravel, M. T. (2007) “Securing Borders: China’s Doctrine and Force Structure for Frontier Defense,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30(4–5): 705–737.

178  M. Taylor Fravel Fravel, M. T. (2008) Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Fravel, M. T. (2011) “China Views India’s Rise: Deepening Cooperation, Managing Differences,” in A. J. Tellis, T. Tanner and J. Keough, eds., Strategic Asia 2011–12: Asia Responds to Its Rising Powers—China and India (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research): 65–98. Fravel, M. T. (2019) Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy since 1949 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Garver, J. W. (2006) “China’s Decision for War with India in 1962,” in Johnston, A. I. and Ross, R. S., eds., New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press): 86–130. Guan, P. and Zhang C. (2017) “Donglang duichi yinfa de guonei fanying ji fansi” (The Domestic Reaction and Reflection Caused by the Dong Lang Stand-off ), Bianjiang yu haijiang yanjiu 2(5): 67–75. Gupta, S. (2018) “Chinese Transgressions on LAC Down by 20% this Year: Officials,” Hindustan Times (24 September), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/chinaincursions-along-lac-dropped-by-20-in-a-year-officials/story-TD5egBE5rgswWSkNAy4CiP. html. Hu, S. (2017) “Donglang duichi weiji yu ZhongYin guanxi de weilai” (The Donglang Crisis and the Future of China-Indian Relations), Xiandai guoji guanxi (Contemporary International Relations) 11: 9–22. Jiang, S. and Li H. (eds.) (1994) Zhongyin bianjing ziwei fanji zuozhan shi (An Operational History of China’s Counterattack in Self-Defense against India) (Beijing: Junshi kexue chubanshe). Lei, Y. (1997) Zai zuigao tongshuaibu dang canmou: Lei Ying fu huiyilu (Staff Officer at the Supreme Command: General Lei Ying fu’s Recollections) (Nanchang: Baihua wenyi chubanshe). Ma, J. (2017) “Donglang duichi yu ZhongYin guanxi de zouxiang” (The Donglang Confrontation and the Trend of Sino-Indian Relations), Heping yu fazhan (Peace and Development) 5: 62–68. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) (2018) “India-China Informal Summit at Wuhan” (28 April), available online at www.mea.gov.in/press-releases.htm?dtl/29853/IndiaChina_ Informal_Summit_at_Wuhan (accessed 12 February 2019). Menon, S. (2016) Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings). MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) (2004) “Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi Visited China” (17 May), available online at www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/ziliao_665539/3602_665543/ 3604_665547/t18017.shtml (accessed 15 September 2019). Pandit, R. (2013) “China-Wary Army for Mountain Strike Corps,” The Times of India (13  January), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/China-waryArmy-for-mountain-strike-corps/articleshow/18001374.cms. Pandit, R. (2014a) “With Eye on China, India Deploys Akash Missiles in Northeast,” The Times of India (24 August), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/With-eyeon-China-India-deploys-Akash-missiles-in-northeast/articleshow/40645978.cms. Pandit, R. (2014b) “India, China Set to End 16-Day Chumar Stand-Off by Saturday,” The Times of India (26 September), available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/43467644.cms. Pant, H. V. (2014) “Why Border Stand-Offs between India and China are Increasing,” BBC News (26 September), available online at www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29373304. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2018) “China Troops Intruded Eastern Ladakh Last Month, Pitched Tents: Sources,” NDTV (14 August), available online at www.ndtv.com/india-news/ china-troops-intruded-300m-into-demchok-in-eastern-ladakh-last-month-pitched-tentssources-1900588. Sandhu, K. K. (2016) “Exclusive: How China’s Transgressions of Indian Borders have Decreased over 7 Years,” India Today (26 December), available online at www.indiatoday.in/india/story/ chinese-pla-india-transgression-359662-2016-12-26.

China’s view of the border dispute  179 Xu, Y. (1993) Zhongyin bianjie zhizhan lishi zhenxiang (The Real Facts of the Chinese-Indian Border War) (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books). Ye, H. (2018) “Zhongguo jueqi yu ciyao zhanlue fangxiang tiaozhan de yingdui: Yi Donglang shijian hou de ZhongYin guanxi weili” (China’s Rise and Response to Challenges of Secondary Strategic Directions: Taking Sino-Indian Relations after Donglang Incident as an Example), Shijie jingji yu zhengzhi (World Economics and Politics) 4: 106–218. Zhang, C. (2017) “Jielun Donglang shijian zhong Yinjun xingwei jieding de falu liju yu waijiao yinsu” (On the Legal Motivation and Diplomatic Factors of the Definition of the Indian Army’s Behavior in Donglang Incident), Bianjiang yu haijiang yanjiu 2(5): 61–66. Zhang, T. (1990) “DuiYin ziwei fanji qianhou de huiyi” (Recollections of the Counterattack in Self-Defense against India), in J. Pei, ed., Xin Zhongguo waijiao fengyun (The Storm of New China’s Diplomacy) (Beijing: Shiji zhishi chubanshe). Zhou, E. (1997) Zhou Enlai Junshi Wenxuan (Zhou Enlai’s Selected Works on Military Affairs), vol. 4 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe).

10 Differences not disputes India’s view of the border after 1962 Rishika Chauhan

At the heart of the Indian and Chinese hostility lies a border dispute that strains the relationship between the two rising powers. It is generally accepted now that the British drew the border to serve their own interests, without consulting the native border communities. Border talks between British India, Tibet, and China were intense, as disagreements arose over certain parts of the state boundaries. Although Indian representatives were not allowed to attend the border talks with Tibet and China, postindependence India inherited the border conflicts along with the border. Predictably, tensions ensued between India and China, as nationalist sentiments on both sides left little room for an understanding of the other’s perspective on the issue. In the absence of a common understanding of the boundaries, Chinese violations of the line and construction efforts in what India considers its own territory have occurred from time to time. These actions have compounded Indian resentment since India’s defeat in the 1962 war. After the war, the prospect of resolving the border dispute has risen and fallen. Over the years, the two countries have instituted a number of comprehensive dialogue mechanisms in an effort to settle the dispute. As a result, there exist institutionalized channels to enhance diplomatic, political, and military engagement at different levels between India and China. In addition, trade with China and Chinese financial investments in India have grown, as has the understanding that a spirit of cooperation along the border is conducive to each state’s economic growth. Yet, recurring border incursions and skirmishes have roused antagonism, while episodes related to the unsettled boundary have impeded political and economic engagement. The border dispute has intermittently threatened to unravel the peace. In recent years, a series of Chinese actions— including aggressively claiming disputed territories as theirs (See PTI 2019a), giving them Chinese names (Global Times 2017), offering stapled visas to the residents of such territories (PTI 2019b), and destroying maps not depicting contested boundaries as their own (Sun 2019)—have annoyed New Delhi and provoked retaliatory actions and protests. All through the ups and downs in the relationship, however, the two leaderships have persisted in diplomatic engagement, maintaining that quarrels over the border should not be allowed to turn into disputes.1 This chapter attempts to present the Indian perspective of the border dispute after the 1962 war. It is divided into four sections. The first section briefly explains the causes of the war and its consequences. The second section discusses Chinese violations—both “transgressions” and “intrusions”—of the border after 1962. The third section traces the attempts to solve the border dispute through negotiation especially after 1981. The final section looks at three factors related to the boundary dispute that affect India’s approach to the issue.

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War and the beginning of “armed co-existence” It has been argued that India–China relations progressed from a phase of “peaceful co-existence” (up to 1954), to “armed co-existence” (1959 onwards), to open conflict (1962), and after a diplomatic impasse of many years, back to “armed co-existence” (Kapur 2015). Each phase played a role in defining the relationship between the two states, but it was the 1962 war that brought a decisive shift in India’s perception of China. Miscalculations and misunderstandings about the border were prominent causes of war. India failed to perceive China’s growing bitterness over the alignment of the boundary, with its resentment toward India intensifying and peaking in October 1962. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s Forward Policy in particular attracted Chinese antipathy. In 1961, against the backdrop of China’s growing aggressiveness, Nehru had decided to launch the Forward Policy. The policy aimed to check Chinese advances into disputed territories by blocking potential ingress routes and establishing a presence in the contested Aksai Chin area. Creating posts and conducting patrols around Chinese positions to cut supply lines were the related intention of the policy (Maxwell 2013: 192–193). In August 1962, the border dispute with China was brought up for discussion in the Indian Parliament for the last time before the outbreak of the war. The year had been bootless with regard to border negotiations, with China refusing to change its stance (Sandhu 2013). Nehru explained to Parliament that “Chinese aggression” at the frontiers had intensified in the previous five years (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 111). Even as relations between the two neighbors deteriorated, India decided to establish a military post in the area of the Thagla Ridge. This action is widely regarded as the trigger of the war (Sandhu 2013). India’s paramilitary force, the Assam Rifles, had established the Dhola post on the southern slope of Thagla in early June 1962 in the Namka Chu Valley of the Eastern Sector, then known as North East Frontier Agency (NEFA, now Arunachal Pradesh). The move provoked China to launch countermoves in Dhola on 8 September 1962. This set off a series of deployments on both sides that culminated in a full-fledged war beginning on 20 October 1962 and ending with China’s unilateral ceasefire on 20 November 1962 (Sandhu 2013). The Indians had not anticipated war. While proclaiming an emergency in November 1962, under article 352 of the Constitution, Nehru accepted his miscalculation and failure to anticipate the extent of Chinese anger over the border dispute. He noted: Even the Chinese aggression on our borders during the last five years, bad as it was, and indicative of an expansionist tendency, though it troubled us greatly, hardly led us to the conclusion that China would indulge in a massive invasion of India. Now, we have seen and experienced this very invasion and it has shocked us, as it has shocked a large number of countries. (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 110) After the Chinese attack, Nehru also felt that he had misunderstood China’s perception of the boundary. Chinese leaders had not acknowledged the McMahon Line, which India recognized as the boundary between the two states. Nehru lamented that the “phrases” of the Chinese leaders had a “double meaning attached to them which could be interpreted any way” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 114). According to some scholars, post-war China’s “net gain” in territory was merely “2,000 square kilometres of alpine desert in Ladakh” (Kalha 2012). Officially, India

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insisted that 14,500 square miles of Indian territory was occupied by China during the war. China lays claim to an additional 30,000 square miles beyond the present delineations (Ganguly 1989: 1124). At any rate, with the end of hostilities, the India–China relationship entered a phase of armed co-existence which continues to this day. Several territories continue to be disputed between India and China. Most of the boundary disputes between the two states are in what India terms the Western and Eastern sectors. In the Western Sector, the disputes involve the Aksai Chin plateau, which shares its border with Ladakh, Tibet, and Xinjiang. In the Eastern Sector, at issue is what was called the NEFA—what later became the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh (Miller 2013: 57). Here China claims approximately 90,000 sq. km, which it calls South Tibet. In the Western Sector, India believes that China remains in possession of 38,000 sq. km of illegally occupied territory in the Aksai Chin, which is part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. China also has 5,180 sq. km of territory that India claims in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK). Pakistan ceded this area to China in 1963. An additional 2,000 sq. km is disputed in the provinces of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, in the so-called Middle Sector. China also challenges boundary alignments in the Sikkim Sector (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 26–27).

Incursions: end of “happily ever after” India’s defeat in the 1962 war made its leaders realize that the relationship with China could not be of the “happily ever after variety” (GPD 1983: 1875). In the absence of a settled boundary, New Delhi and Beijing imagined their territorial claims differently. After the war, the Chinese insisted that both sides should return to the border prior to 7 November 1959, while the Indians maintained that China should respect the frontier that existed before war started on 8 September 1962 (Kalha 2012). Since the perception of the border differs between India and China, disagreements have occurred periodically. In the 1960s, after the war, there were border skirmishes in north Sikkim and NEFA, the most notable of which were in the Nathu La and Cho La areas of the Eastern Sector. The 1970s saw disputes over the status of Sikkim as it was being integrated into the Indian union. In the 1980s, a border confrontation in the Sumdorong Chu valley in the Eastern Sector led to a confrontation between the two armies, and it took years to return to the earlier military positions. Various positive developments with regard to the border dispute marked the 1990s, primarily the agreements on Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) in the military field. Five years after the India–China war, a confrontation took place between the militaries at the Nathu La Pass in Sikkim. Termed as the “bloodiest” border clash since the war, the 1967 confrontation left hundreds dead (Garver 2001: 171). While disagreements arose about installing a barbed wire along the border at Nathu La, tensions escalated. On 11 September 1967 when the Indian troops were laying down the wire on the South Shoulder of Nathu La, the Chinese opened fire, and the Indian side reciprocated (Bajpai 1999: 187–188). As both sides subsequently resorted to heavy artillery fire, a number of casualties were reported. The firing from the Chinese side stopped briefly on 12 September but resumed the next day. On 13 September, a Chinese patrol crossed over and confronted an Indian team, followed by Chinese firing and shelling. While the Chinese fired again the next day, the Indians maintained a unilateral ceasefire. On the morning of 16 September, the Chinese handed over the dead bodies of Indian soldiers (Bajpai 1999: 190–191). Though there was loss of life, the Indians believed that their

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combat performance had improved since the 1962 war (Garver 2001: 171). Moreover, the Indian side did not vacate any positions or yield ground. In fact, the barbed wire that had originally attracted Chinese ire stayed in place (Bajpai 1999: 193). The two sides also squared off four miles northwest of Nathu La at Cho La. On 17 September 1967, Chinese troops protested the presence of Indian post there and threatened to remove it. When Indian troops refused to leave, Chinese forces commenced construction of defense structures near the post. Subsequently, on 1 October, scuffle broke out between the Indian and Chinese troops. When the Chinese suddenly opened fire, the Indians suffered casualties in the surprise attack. Indian troops returned fire, destroying a number of bunkers and tents and causing significant loss of life and property on the Chinese side (Bajpai 1999: 193–194). In the 1970s, disagreements over the integration of Sikkim into the Indian union caused tensions to rise. Sikkim had become India’s protectorate by signing the India-Sikkim Peace Treaty, on 12 December 1950. Since the understanding was that Sikkim’s external relations as well as security would be handled by the Indian government, direct communications between Sikkim’s chogyal (king) and Beijing in the early 1960s became a cause of worry in New Delhi (Garver 2001: 170–171). When India shared its doubts about Beijing’s intentions in Sikkim, there were reports of the chogyal seeking to make Sikkim sovereign and contacting Chinese emissaries. As pro-democracy and anti-chogyal protests broke out in 1973, Indian army and paramilitary units were deployed in Sikkim, a move that China condemned. In September 1974, Sikkim was made an “associate state” of India. China protested again, describing India as a state with “expansionist” tendencies. On 10 April 1975 the Sikkim Assembly called for complete integration with India and the removal of the chogyal. A referendum later supported the assembly’s decisions. Sikkim became a full Indian province, its twenty-second state, on 29 April 1975. China did not however recognize Sikkim (Garver 2001: 171–173). All along China maintained that India had annexed Sikkim by force and that the referendum was a farce. In the past, Beijing has also refused to discuss the border in the Sikkim Sector (Bajpai 1999: 212–214). Finally, in 2003, during Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to China, Article I of a joint memorandum designated Changgu in Sikkim as a site for border trade (MEA 2003), giving de facto recognition to Sikkim. In October 2003, the Chinese Foreign Ministry website removed Sikkim from the list of independent countries ( Joseph 2004). In 1986, an Indian patrol discovered a Chinese military presence in the Thandrong pasture on the banks of the Sumdorong Chu river in the Tawang district of Arunachal Pradesh (Singh 2013). On 26 June 1986, India lodged a formal protest with the Chinese government, though Beijing denied the intrusion. In the meantime, India set up military posts right across from Chinese forces in the Longrola and Hathungla heights (Singh 2017). An impasse followed. Throughout the standoff, the Indian government insisted on resolving the issue peacefully. Speaking in Parliament on the Chinese intrusion, K. R Narayanan, then Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs, said that the border dispute should be settled through “consultations” while pursuing a “peaceful and negotiated settlement to the border question” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1986: 279). When foreign minister N. D. Tiwari visited Beijing, he conveyed that India did not wish the situation to deteriorate any further. Subsequently, following a flag meeting at Bum La on 5 August 1987, both sides began to de-escalate their militaries in the area. Nonetheless, the standoff had lasted eight months, making it the longest confrontation between the Indian and Chinese militaries. It took seven more

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years of diplomatic negotiations for India to finally recover the territories in the Sumdorong Chu valley. In the meantime, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing in 1988, where New Delhi set aside its post-1962 insistence that the resumption of normal intercourse between the two countries depended on the return of all territories claimed by India (Singh 2017). While the 1990s and 2000s were periods of relative calm along the border, India has repeatedly drawn attention to Chinese violations across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) after 2010. In doing so, New Delhi has made a distinction between intrusions and transgressions. In 2014, a Member of Parliament (MP) explained the difference between intrusions and transgressions. Intrusions were when “Chinese troops crossed over to Indian side of the LAC and stayed put,” while transgressions meant that Chinese troops entered Indian territory but eventually retreated to their side ( Jain 2014). In 2014, the government maintained that as against transgressions there had been no PLA intrusions since 2010. On 13 August 2014, in reply to a question from Narayan Lal Panchariya, a member the Upper House of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), the Union Minister of State for Home, Kiren Rijiju, said, “No intrusion has been reported or taken place on [the] Indo-China border including Sikkim during the last five years. However, there are cases of transgression due to difference in perception of [the] Line of Actual Control (LAC)” (MHA 2014). Beyond Chinese transgressions, there have been serious incursions in which Chinese troops have violated Indian territory and stayed put. Since 2010, these include the instances of 2013, 2014, and 2017. Each time, negotiations and diplomacy paved the way for dispute resolution. In 2013, Chinese tents were pitched nineteen kilometers into what India considers its own territory in the Daulat Beg Oldi Sector of eastern Ladakh. The dispute came to light on 15 April, when Indian authorities noticed the tents. In spite of Indian protests at the site, the Chinese side refused to turn back, and a three-week standoff ensued. The standoff was resolved on 6 May 2013. Subsequent revelations revealed that the dispute was settled largely at the diplomatic level (Dikshit 2013). While the standoff at the border was resolved through diplomacy, there were angry voices in the Parliament supporting stronger action. For example, Mulayam Singh Yadav, leader of the opposition Samajwadi Party, emphasized “there is a serious threat to the borders of the country. At the same time the government should have been careful.” Citing the 1962 war, Yadav referred to Nehru, saying that China was Nehru’s “biggest and best friend. But the same China betrayed Nehru and attacked our country. It was a shock, because Nehru was deceived, He considered China as the ultimate friend. I am repeatedly saying that China is a deceitful country” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 2013: 1). A military standoff between India and China occurred in the Chumar–Demchok area in Ladakh in September 2014, starting just days before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit for a summit with India’s newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi. On 10 September, in Chumar, an Indian patrol team discovered more than 200 PLA troops two kilometers inside Indian territory. They were equipped with bulldozers and cranes, with the intention of building a road (Gupta 2014). Confrontations and shouting matches between the two sides ensued. The Indian side eventually demolished the temporary road constructed by the Chinese. Unsuccessful flag meetings were held on 15 and 17 September between senior officers from both militaries. In the end, it took a flag meeting, held on 25 September, among even more senior officers to resolve the dispute (Pandit 2014). The border standoff continued through Xi’s stay from 17 to 19

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September. On 30 September, the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi issued a statement noting that As per [an] understanding reached between India and China, the two sides have carried out disengagement and redeployment of border troops in [the] Chumar and Demchok areas in Eastern Ladakh on September 26–27, 2014 to restore the status quo ante as on September 1, 2014. (MEA 2014) The most dangerous episode between China and India though was in Doklam in 2017. During the crisis, from June to August, the Indian military decided to block Chinese road construction in an area disputed between China and Bhutan. Both sides threatened military action when tensions rose between the border guards (O’Donnell 2018: 3). India, while consulting Bhutan, said that it was “deeply concerned” about Chinese actions and insisted that Beijing stop the road construction. In New Delhi’s view, Chinese actions had “serious security implications for India” (MEA 2017b). It maintained that the road inside Bhutanese territory was a violation of the 1988 and 1998 agreements between Bhutan and China, and it insisted that Chinese troops return to their positions before 16 June 2017 (MEA 2017b). In the end, the standoff lasted seventy-three days, making it the second longest India–China border confrontation, after the Sumdorong Chu Valley incident. After Doklam, Indian MPs raised questions about the status of the border. In 2018, while answering a query on Chinese “activities in the Doklam region,” Minister of State for External Affairs, General V. K. Singh, informed parliament that the government regularly discussed the issue of transgressions along the LAC with Chinese counterparts “through established mechanisms,” which included “border personnel meetings, flag meetings, meetings of [the] Working Mechanism for Consultation & Coordination on India-China Border Affairs, as well as through diplomatic channels” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 2018). An area that has remained contentious between India and China is a part of Kashmir that India refers to as POK. India maintains that China occupies a total of 38,000 sq. km of Indian territory in the province of Jammu and Kashmir, the Aksai Chin plateau. Besides that, India also claims 5,180 sq. km of POK that was ceded to China through a Sino-Pakistan agreement in 1963 (Lok Sabha Secretariat 2009). Since then, Chinese incursions and construction inside the disputed territory have been rampant. The launch of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as part of China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR)/Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has further increased India’s worries, as CPEC infrastructure passes through POK. New Delhi has maintained that the construction “violates India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “ignores its core concerns” (MEA 2018a). In addition, the CPEC poses a security challenge as it could bring Chinese construction and military personnel associated with the projects right up to India’s boundaries. In the event of a conflict with Pakistan, India could face the possibility that Chinese personnel would be in harm’s way, with the risk of a confrontation with China.

The border talks: differences and agreements after 1962 Border violations and negotiations have occurred concurrently. There was a n ineteenyear gap in bureaucratic engagement following the 1962 war. However, since the 1980s, communication between New Delhi and Beijing has never again been as elusive.

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Continuous talks and interactions at various levels have ensured that disputes have been managed even as there remain persistent differences in Indian and Chinese perceptions of the border. Discussions on boundary concerns have not been limited to bureaucratic negotiations. Indian and Chinese leaders also have discussed the subject, in bilateral summits and on the sidelines of multilateral conferences. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had discussed the border at a summit in April 1960, the most extensive discussions between the top leadership on both sides. Nearly two years after the war, in May 1964, Nehru once again attempted to negotiate, with a focus on Aksai Chin (Ranjan 2016: 107). Later leaders interacted with China even when bureaucratic engagement was frozen. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered India’s special frontier force to draw back from the India–China border (Ranjan 2016: 107) and also normalized relations by resuming ambassadorial-level interactions in 1976. In 1979, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then Foreign Minister of India, visited Beijing, reviving higher level interactions between the two neighbors (MEA 2012).2 The following year, Chinese Premier Hua Guofeng met Indira Gandhi in Belgrade and discussed the border issue (Ganguly 1989: 1125). The 1988 visit of Rajiv Gandhi to China was a turning point. In essence, during the summit, India agreed to change its policy on normalization. After the 1962 war, India had decided that it would not resume broad-ranging normal ties with China until Chinese occupation of occupied lands was ended. During the Rajiv visit, New Delhi agreed that the two sides could resume trade and people-to-people ties even as border negotiations continued (Kalha 2014: 205–207) In 1981, after a twenty-one-year gap, border talks were formally resumed but at the bureaucratic level. From 1981 to 1988, eight rounds of border talks were held. While the first four focused on sketching out “basic principles,” the last four occupied themselves with “the situation on the ground” (Ganguly 1989: 1126). The Joint Working Group, formed in 1988 following Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to China, conducted fifteen rounds of negotiations between 1988 and 2003. With the aim of providing an impetus to the negotiations, from 2003 onward the two states decided that Special Representatives would conduct the talks. With the purpose of providing an institutional mechanism to maintain “peace and tranquility in the India-China border areas,” the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination (WMCC) on India–China Border Affairs was established in 2012. The initiative was especially significant as it aimed to strengthen communication and cooperation between border security personnel. In 2018, WMCC finished its eleventh round of talks (MEA 2018b). The twenty-first meeting of the Special Representatives was held in November 2018 between Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Chengdu (PTI 2018a). Among the notable successes of this long period of discussions and negotiations was the agreement on “Maintaining of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas” in 1993 and on “Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field along the Line of Actual Control in India-China Border Areas” in 1996. In addition, the two states agreed on Border Personnel Meetings (BPMs) in disputed areas of Spangur in the Western Sector, Nathu La in the Sikkim Sector, and Bum La in the Eastern Sector. In these areas, meetings are held twice a year, and flag meetings are organized when required. In light of the 2013 and 2014 border confrontations, two more points—Kibithu-Damai in the Eastern Sector and Daulat Beg Oldi in the Western Sector—were identified for BPMs (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 29).

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Transgressions and incursions have occurred amid borders talks, sometimes leading to the cancellation or postponement of talks, while at other times talks have provided a platform for resolving ongoing tensions. For instance, in 1986 during the Sumdorong Chu incident, border talks were scheduled on 21–23 July 1986. Though the scheduled talks provided a platform for the resolution of the dispute, differences persisted until 1995 when both sides agreed to withdraw troops from their forward positions (Kalha 2014: 211). On the other hand, during the Doklam standoff, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping’s meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hamburg was productive. The meeting helped in resolving the standoff (IANS 2017).

Three factors influencing India’s view of future border negotiations Through the years, discussions over the border have progressed. Both sides understand that a final boundary settlement will be a long-drawn process. In the 1980s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had implied that the task of resolving the border dispute should be left to a “future generation” (Sen 2014). India has gone along with this view but has increasingly questioned the slowness of the process, especially during Prime Minister Modi’s leadership. Modi has asked China to clarify the LAC and also linked further progress in relations to a final border settlement (Bajpai 2018: 254). Here we assess various other changes and some constants in India’s post-1962 attitude on the following: (i) the nature of territorial claims; (ii) its general disposition toward China (which conditions its view of the border negotiations); and (iii) the manner in which the dispute can be resolved. Clearing misunderstandings on territorial claims Before the 1962 war, Indian statements and debates implied that the leadership and government agencies were confused about China’s understanding of the border. After the war, the confusions became ever more apparent. Discussing the subject after the war, Nehru said, [i]t is rather difficult for me to say what they [i.e. the Chinese] say. Because, if any person takes the trouble to read through this vast correspondence, he will notice that their alleged frontier is a very mobile one; it changes. (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 113) A few days after the Chinese attack, Nehru said in Parliament that the Chinese Prime Minister had come out with a “three-point proposal” as a condition for a ceasefire. However, India found the proposal “very vague” and was “not quite clear what he [Zhou Enlai] meant” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 127). There was confusion particularly over the McMahon Line. Nehru maintained that, during his meeting with Zhou Enlai, he got the “clearest impression” Beijing would recognize the Line despite its insistence the Line was “illegal” and was but a “British imperialist” construct. Owing to a “large number of facts” and the Chinese “desire to be friendly,” China would eventually accept the delineation. Nehru added that the Chinese leader later “denied it,” making it “difficult to say what they [the Chinese] stood by at a particular time” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 114–115).

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However, New Delhi now clearly understands that China questions the legality of the McMahon Line, calling it an unfair border drawn by the “imperialist” British (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 26). The area remains disputed, as Indian officials have maintained that in Myanmar, China accepted the very same line, which suggests that Beijing’s stand is hardly a principled one (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 30). Meanwhile, there are issues on which there was clarity earlier, over which there is no great confusion up to the present time. One of these is the status of NEFA/Arunachal Pradesh. In 1962, speaking about NEFA, Nehru argued that India shared its independence with the people of that region. After independence, New Delhi had developed the area by not only extending its administration to it but also by building basic infrastructure like “schools, hospitals, roads, etc” (Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 113). He contended that any person who sees the “history behind them [i.e. Indian government initiatives] would easily say that we have occupied it in every sense, legally, constitutionally, administratively, practically for a large number of years” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 114). Thus, despite frequent Chinese assertions that Arunachal Pradesh is a part of their territory, India has maintained that the Chinese claim “does not have [an] adequate historical basis” and the state is an “integral and inalienable part of India” (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 26). With respect to border communities in the state, the Parliamentary Committee report argued that the “Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles on the settlement of the India-China Boundary Question” signed in April 2005 emphasized that “settled populations will not be disturbed.” India insists that China repeatedly claiming parts of Arunachal Pradesh, where Indian citizens reside, violates the principle agreed upon in the 2005 agreement (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 35). Post-war reactions and changes in Indian attitudes India’s view of China was powerfully influenced by its decisive defeat in the 1962 war. Across the country, amongst the elite and at the popular level, the once-positive view of China gave way to resentment and anger. With the defeat, India also suffered a loss of international reputation. Nehru, who was building his image as a prominent leader  of the developing countries, was humiliated diplomatically (Lüthi 2012: 118). While proclaiming a national emergency after China’s attack, Nehru shared his anguish in parliament: [i]t is sad to think that we in India, who have pleaded for peace all over the world, and who have sought the friendship of China and treated them with courtesy and consideration and pleaded their cause in the councils of the world should now ourselves be victims of new imperialism and expansionism by a country which says that it is against all imperialism. (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 109) The sense of humiliation has abated over time. India has become stronger domestically as well as internationally. High rates of economic growth since the early 1990s and India’s rising international standing after the nuclear tests of 1998 have given New Delhi greater self-confidence in dealing with China (Singh 2008: 85). This confidence has had a bearing on the way New Delhi deals with Beijing. In 2018, India’s Foreign Secretary,

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Vijay Keshav Gokhale emphasized that in the last thirty years India’s relationship with China had changed. Diplomatic, economic, and military capacities in both states had increased, so that even their bilateral interactions would have an impact “multilaterally as well as regionally.” Given China’s growing role internationally, the India–China relationship would become one of the most “defining relationships of this century” (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 2). India too is also playing a greater role internationally. In recognition of the fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping in 2017 asserted that India– China relations were vital for stability in “a time of global uncertainty” (Roche and Jain 2017). Regarding the border issue, they stated that differences should not become disputes. During the Doklam standoff, on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit, the two leaders decided to resolve the dispute at a ‘functional level’ (Committee on External Affairs 2018: 3–4). When they met again at Wuhan in April 2018, they agreed to remain in regular contact, and to give “strategic guidance” to their militaries in order to improve communication and maintain peace and stability (Roche 2018). Peaceful means to resolve territorial disputes One of the constants of Indian policy over the years has been the determination to resolve the border dispute peacefully. Right after the war, Nehru argued that even if China’s boundary claim was legal or constitutional, it did not justify the use of force and “sudden invasion” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 114). He argued that to resolve the dispute, China should have persisted with negotiations or opted for other peaceful means of settlement including appointing arbitrators or going to the International Court of Justice (Lok Sabha Secretariat 1962: 116). The Indian commitment to peaceful resolution of the dispute has led to agreement on various mechanisms to produce a final settlement and to promote military stability. These include the border negotiations since 1981, the signing and implementation of various CBMs (in particular the accords of 1993 and 1996 but also more recently, in the wake of the confrontations of 2013, 2014, and 2017), and the increasing frequency of meetings between the highest political leadership in bilateral and multilateral settings. Since 2014, permanent representatives of the Indian Air Force and the Navy have been stationed in the Indian Embassy in Beijing along with the defense attaché from the Indian Army. China is the fourth country after the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia where India has attachés from all three wings of the Indian armed forces. In addition, Annual Defence and Security Dialogues have been institutionalized to deal with misunderstandings and enhance trust (Krishnan 2014). Though defense cooperation was suspended after the Doklam incident in 2017, it was resumed in 2018 (PTI 2018b). Both states endorse “peaceful negotiations and in a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable manner” (MEA 2015). India has tried to ensure that normal functional cooperation continues and that military stability is sustained in spite of the quarrel over the border. There are “established mechanisms such as Hot Lines, Flag Meetings, Border Personnel Meetings and the newly established Working Mechanism on Consultation and Coordination on India-China border affairs” to help in resolving instances of transgressions (MOD 2012). India’s commitment to normalizing and sustaining stable relations with China is long-standing. Several episodes underlining India’s stabilizing intent have come to light. In 1980, when Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua delayed his visit to India in

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protest over India’s support of the Vietnamese-supported regime in Kampuchea, New Delhi responded in a measured way. Foreign Minister Narasimha Rao made the delay appear a “routine postponement owing to prior commitments” (Ganguly 1989: 1126). As noted earlier, in 1988, in the wake of the 1987 Sumdorong Chu confrontation, Rajiv Gandhi changed India’s post-1962 aversion to normalization. In 2011, responding to a parliamentary question on the border talks, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that despite the lack of progress “peace and tranquillity continue to be maintained along the border” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 2011: 13). When Chinese incursions in the Daulat Beg Oldi Sector were reported, the Indian Prime Minister insisted that it was a “localised problem” that could be “resolved” and that India did not intend to “accentuate the situation” (Kumar 2013). Meanwhile, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid insisted that the standoff was “acne on the otherwise pretty face of India-China relations” (quoted in Dikshit 2013). Likewise, India has gone out of its way to emphasize the difference between transgressions and intrusions, stressing that Chinese transgressions were nothing but the result of a different understanding of the LAC.

Conclusion Since the 1962 war, various steps have been taken to resolve the India–China border dispute. On the other hand, the two countries are not much closer to a settlement. For India, Chinese incursions and objectionable construction inside disputed territory have complicated the post-1962 period. While the relationship between the two powers has been described as one of the most significant in international politics, capable of providing stability to not only the Asian region but also the world, major differences linger. In spite of differences over the border and despite intermittent tensions along the LAC, India and China have tried to improve the overall relationship. To ameliorate the situation, border management instead of a border settlement has come to be the focus of bilateral relations. Over the years, a comprehensive dialogue has been established that has enhanced cooperation not only between political and military leaders but also increasingly at the business-to-business and people-to-people levels. Dialogue has helped in mitigating hostility and in building trust between India and China. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jingping’s formal and informal engagements have brought the two states closer, especially after the Wuhan summit. The political leaderships in both India and China have played an important role in border negotiations. As in other international relationships (see Byman and Pollack 2001), the personal intervention of the top leadership has powerfully affected ties. In contrast to Pakistan, India’s animosity toward China is not enduring. Resolving the border issue with Beijing would be easier to sell to the Indian public. The question is how it is to be resolved. It is clear from the parliamentary debates on the subject that India has a range of views on how to relate to China. Kanti Bajpai (2002: 245) has divided Indian strategic thinking into three different streams—Nehruvianism, neoliberalism, and hyperrealism. According to him, Nehruvians view China as a possible ally against imperialist powers, Neoliberals regard India–China relations as being susceptible to rational initiatives in an era when both sides are more concerned with economic development, and Hyperrealists want the Indian leadership to build the country’s military power in order to deter China (Bajpai 2002: 266–272). Proponents of all three viewpoints are still present in India, and clearly, they would approach the border quarrel in quite different ways. On the other

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hand, since the 1980s, Indian decision-makers have consistently followed a core policy, namely, a policy of engagement with Beijing, and have insisted that continuous and wide-ranging interaction and avoiding military conflict is in India’s interest. Responding to a question in parliament in 2011, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stressed that the previous government, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the more conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had maintained a similar stance on China. His government’s approach, he noted, was “not a new policy and this was the policy also of the NDA regime—to engage China to find peaceful ways of resolving the border dispute” (quoted in Lok Sabha Secretariat 2011: 13). A similar approach guided Modi’s diplomacy with Xi Jingping at Wuhan in 2018 following the border skirmish at Doklam. In a joint statement after the summit, the two sides insisted that “maintaining peace and tranquillity in all areas of the India-China border region [is] in the larger interest of the overall development of bilateral relations” (MEA 2018c). India and China also constantly acknowledge that along with differences there are opportunities. As then Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar explained in 2017, “I think there was also an understanding that where we have differences it was important that those differences should not become disputes and in fact [if ] they were handled well, could even be opportunities” (MEA 2017a). Leaders in India as well as China in the years after the 1962 war have broadly shared a similar sentiment.

Notes 1 Various leaders in the context of the India–China border dispute have used the discourse of “difference” and “disputes.” Xi Jingping, Narendra Modi, S. Jaishankar, V. K. Singh, and Nirmala Sitharaman are some of them. 2 However, as the Chinese attacked Vietnam at this time, Vajpayee cut short his visit (Garver 1991: 59).

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11 Solving a solved problem The Tibet issue in China–India relations Fang Tien-sze

China considers Tibet an integral part of its territory and strongly opposes any foreign intervention in Tibetan affairs. With the 1954 Agreement Between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India on Trade and Intercourse Between Tibet Region of China and India, India implicitly recognized that Tibet is a part of China by referring to the area as the “Tibet Region of China.” Since then, despite the ebb and flow of China–India relations, India’s official position regarding Tibet’s status vis-à-vis China has generally remained unchanged. The joint statements issued by Beijing and New Delhi suggest that China and India have reached a consensus on the Tibet issue, in which India accepts China’s sovereignty over Tibet and promises not to allow Tibetans to conduct anti-China activities in India (see Table 11.1). Chinese officials have even claimed that the Tibet issue is no longer a problem between China and India (IANS 2005). That view is in fact shared by some Indian strategists, who believe that the Tibet issue was settled in 2003 when the countries issued a joint declaration stating that the Tibet Autonomous Region is part of the People’s Republic China (Banerjee 2013: 22). Despite the optimistic viewpoint suggested by these joint statements, Tibet has remained a troublesome and sensitive issue between China and India. In 2009, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was reluctant to meet Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the sidelines of the Copenhagen Climate Summit because he worried that “contentious issues like Tibet would be raised” by the Chinese side (Saran 2017: 242). In the March 2013 meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Manmohan Singh, the only concern the Chinese side raised was Tibet. Beijing hoped India would “maintain its responsible position,” while New Delhi conveyed that Tibet is part of China (Samanta 2013). Many Chinese experts on China–India relations do not hide their worry that the Tibet issue is a major barrier in bilateral relations between India and China (Kang 2013; Meng 2016; Hu 2017). This chapter seeks to answer the question of why China and India have not been able to solve the Tibet issue. It begins by exploring China’s policy toward Tibet and discusses the perspectives of India and China on Tibet’s significance within the framework of China–India relations. This is followed by an analysis of Tibet as a bargaining chip. China’s failure to win over Tibetan hearts and minds, after more than sixty years of rule, has made Tibet into a focus of international attention. Though China has warned against any meddling in Tibetan affairs, India’s historical, cultural, and geographical links with Tibet cannot be wiped out and give New Delhi a special role to play. India is the host of the present Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government-in-exile (the Central

Table 11.1 China–India joint statements Date

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Text on Tibet

29 April 1954 The Agreement between Desirous of promoting trade and cultural India and China on intercourse between the Tibet Region of China Trade and Intercourse and India and of facilitating pilgrimage and travel between Tibet Region by the peoples of China and India of China and India 23 December Joint Press Communiqué The Chinese side expresses concern over anti1988 China activities by some Tibetan elements in India. The Indian side reiterates the longstanding and consistent policy of the Government of India that Tibet is an autonomous region of China and that anti-China political activities by Tibetan elements are not permitted on Indian soil The Chinese side expresses concern about the 16 December Joint Communiqué continued activities in India by some Tibetans 1991 against their motherland and reiterates that Tibet is an inalienable part of Chinese territory and that it is firmly opposed to any attempt or action aimed at splitting China and bringing about the “independence of Tibet.” The Indian side reiterates its longstanding and consistent position that Tibet is an autonomous region of China and that it does not allow Tibetans to engage in antiChina political activities in India. 23 June 2003 Declaration on Principles The Indian side recognizes that the Tibet for Relations and Autonomous Region is part of the territory of Comprehensive the People’s Republic of China and reiterates that Cooperation it does not allow Tibetans to engage in antiChina political activities in India. The Chinese side expresses its appreciation for the Indian position and reiterates that it is firmly opposed to any attempt or action aimed at splitting China and bringing about “independence of Tibet.” 11 April 2005 Joint Statement The Indian side reiterates that it recognizes the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China and that it does not allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in India. The Indian side recalls that India was among the first countries to recognize that there is one China and its one-China policy remains unaltered. The Indian side states it will continue to abide by its one-China policy. The Chinese side expresses its appreciation for the Indian position 21 November Joint Declaration The Indian side reiterates that it has recognized the 2006 Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China, and that it does not allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in India. The Chinese side expresses its appreciation for the Indian position 15 January A Shared Vision for the (No mention of Tibet) 2008 21st Century of the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China

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Text on Tibet

16 December 2010 20 May 2013 21 October 2013

Joint Communiqué

(No mention of Tibet)

Joint Statement Joint Statement—A Vision for Future Development of India–China Strategic and Cooperative Partnership Joint Statement between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China on Building a Closer Developmental Partnership

(No mention of Tibet) (No mention of Tibet)

19 September 2014

16 May 2015

Joint Statement

The Indian side appreciated the support and cooperation by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the local government of Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China to Indian pilgrims for the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra (Gang Rinpoche and Mapam Yun Tso Pilgrimage). For further promotion of the two countries’ religious exchange and facilitating the Indian pilgrims, and upon the request of the Indian side, the Chinese side decided to open a new route for the Yatra through Nathu La Pass, for which the Indian side expressed its welcome and appreciation The Indian side appreciated the support and cooperation by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the local government of Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China to Indian pilgrims for the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra (Gang Rinpoche and Mapam Yun Tso Pilgrimage). To further promote religious exchange between the two countries and provide facilitation for Indian pilgrims, the Chinese side would launch the route for the Yatra through Nathu La Pass in 2015

Source: Author.

Tibetan Administration), and is home to around 85,000 Tibetans. As a result of these ties, Tibet serves as an important bargaining chip that can be used by New Delhi to deal with Beijing whenever necessary.

China’s failed policy in Tibet China has controlled Tibet since the early 1950s, but the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, escaped in 1959 and established the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, a mountainous town in northern India. Though Tibet has developed considerably under Beijing’s rule, many Tibetans still believe that Tibet has historically been an independent nation, and they are looking for greater autonomy, if not independence. Alleged human rights violations in Tibet and an escalating disappointment over the deadlock between Beijing and Dharamsala have led to continuing Tibetan grievances. A self-immolation protest by a Tibetan was reported to have taken place in December 2018 in Sichuan’s Aba county. With this latest tragic event, more than 155 Tibetans have set themselves on fire against Chinese rule since 2009 (RFA 2018). These developments speak of the continuing tensions between Beijing and the Tibetans.

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Title

September 1992 February 1998 June 2000 November 2001 March 2003 May 2004 September 2008 March 2009 July 2011 October 2013 April 2015 September 2015 July 2018

Tibet—Its Ownership and Human Rights Situation New Progress in Human Rights in the Tibet Autonomous Region The Development of Tibetan Culture Tibet’s March Toward Modernization Ecological Improvement and Environmental Protection in Tibet Regional Ethnic Autonomy in Tibet Protection and Development of Tibetan Culture Fifty Years of Democratic Reform in Tibet Sixty Years Since Peaceful Liberation of Tibet Development and Progress of Tibet Tibet’s Path of Development Is Driven by an Irresistible Historical Tide Successful Practice of Regional Ethnic Autonomy in Tibet ( full text) Ecological Progress on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

Source: Author.

In order to review the Tibet problem, Beijing has sought to reframe its policy toward the region with the “Symposium on Work in Tibet” (Xizang gongzuo zuotanhui), held in 1980, 1984, 1994, 2001, 2010, and 2015. It also has published thirteen white papers on Tibet—more than on other issues (see Table 11.2)—between 1992 and 2018. As Chinese leaders and officials have repeatedly argued, the Tibet issue is closely associated with China’s state sovereignty, territorial integrity, social stability, and peripheral security. At the “Sixth Symposium on Work in Tibet,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said developments in Tibet are related to the overall work of the Party and the country. The focus of work in Tibet should be safeguarding the motherland’s reunification and national unity (Xinhua Wang 2015). In addition, Beijing has made clear that ownership of the enormous Tibetan region is a strategic necessity for China’s security. The Tibet Autonomous Region covers an area of 1.2 million sq. km, accounting for one-eighth of the total area of China, and offers China territorial strategic depth. Without control of Tibet, China’s southwest frontier would recede approximately one thousand kilometers from the present Tibet–India border. It is understandable, therefore, that the Tibet question bears on China’s core interests (or hexin liyi) and is non-negotiable. The Dalai Lama has been aware of the difficulty of making China yield on Tibet’s sovereignty. As a result, after two decades of exile, he officially proposed a middle-way approach at the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1988, seeking greater autonomy under China instead of independence. Nine rounds of talks between China’s officials and the Dalai Lama’s envoys were held between 2002 and 2010 in an effort to find a way out of the impasse. However, Beijing gradually hardened its position toward the Dalai Lama and decided to stop negotiations after the 2010 talks. Although the Dalai Lama has reiterated that he is not demanding full independence, China remains distrustful of him and continues to consider him as a separatist. The “genuine autonomy” for “the greater Tibet” advocated by the Dalai Lama is seen by Beijing as a push for Tibetan independence. Zhu Weiqun, Chairman of the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, has argued that the “genuine autonomy” proposal is a two-step approach leading to “Tibet independence.” He further explained, “[t]he first step is so-called

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autonomy. The second one is actual independence” (Huanqio Shibao 2013). The Tibetan government-in-exile has tried to convince Beijing that the middle-way approach does not challenge China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity; it merely implies autonomy for the Tibetan people within China’s constitution and is beneficial to both Tibet and China (The Kashag 2013, 2018; The Tibetan Parliament in Exile 2018). In Beijing’s eyes, however, the Dalai Lama has been pursuing Tibetan independence in a disguised way. In addition, Beijing has quarrels with Dharamsala over the historical status of Tibet. The Dalai Lama and his followers emphasize that Tibet was historically an independent country, while Beijing asserts that Tibet has been an inalienable part of China since the Yuan Dynasty. The debate relates to whether China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) march into Tibet in the 1950s was a “liberation” or an “invasion.” Yu Zhengsheng, of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, noted that Only when the Dalai Lama publicly announces that Tibet is an inalienable part of China since ancient time[s], gives up the stance of ‘Tibet independence’ and stops his secessionist activities, can his relations with the CPC Central Committee possibly be improved. (China Daily 2013) Dharamsala, for its part, argues that it cannot change history by saying Tibet was not an independent country. This has been one of the most controversial issues in the stalled talks between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and Beijing. In order to reconcile Tibetans to Chinese rule and wean them off their loyalty to the Dalai Lama, China has launched a policy combining economic development and political repression (The Economist 2013). Beijing’s basic formula for Tibet is to support economic development and to impose strict controls on separatist sentiment in the region, while expecting the Tibet problem to be solved naturally after the present Dalai Lama passes away. Given the Dalai Lama’s devolution of political power to the elected representatives in Dharamsala since 2011, however, it appears likely that the Tibetan issue will remain in the post-Dalai Lama period. As self-immolations have tragically continued, some Chinese scholars began to call for a new approach in dealing with the Tibet issue. For example, Jin Wei, Director of Ethnic and Religious Studies at the Central Party School, argued that Beijing should resume negotiations with the Dalai Lama and should not treat the problem in a hostile manner. She even accused former Party officials in Tibet of being biased against the practice of religious affairs, which foreshadowed the accumulation of grievances today ( Ji 2013). Despite her appeal, however, no ameliorative steps have been taken. The discord and mistrust between Beijing and the Tibetans have invited the intervention of other powers, especially as the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile have pursued a strategy of internationalizing the Tibet issue in order to garner more support. Beijing, for its part, has urged foreign countries not to receive the Dalai Lama and has reacted sharply to the warm hospitality extended to him by other countries despite Chinese warnings. The Chinese media sees the Dalai Lama as “a pawn in the hand of foreign forces to serve their anti-China strategies” (Yi 2010). The Tibet issue, claimed to be a domestic and non-negotiable one by Beijing, has been frequently put on the agenda between China and foreign interlocutors.

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India’s special status on the Tibet issue India has a special say on the issue, given India and Tibet’s historical, cultural, and geographical affinities. This has been emphasized by the Dalai Lama, who noted that “India is historically our guru and we Tibetans are the chela (disciple).” (Loiwal 2017) Although some Chinese scholars have tried to discount the cultural significance of the India–Tibet relationship by saying that India has exaggerated the affinity between the two (Ye 1997: 445), the cultural bond between India and Tibet is deep. India’s main strategic interests in Tibet stem from Tibet’s geographical proximity to China. As the inheritor of the British Raj, independent India inherited a policy of sustaining Tibet as a buffer zone and inevitably got drawn into the dispute between the Dalai Lama and Beijing. Although India in 1954 had already given up the extraterritorial rights over Tibet that it inherited from the British, events in Tibet have ramifications that touch on India’s concerns and interests. As B. R. Deepak (2011: 313) observes, the mainstream Indian viewpoint is that apart from China no country has as important a stake in peace and stability in Tibet as does India. In addition, many Indians hold that the border dispute between China and India is intimately linked with the Tibet issue (Saran 2017:143). A popular viewpoint is that it is only after the Chinese take-over of Tibet in the 1950s that the border became an active dispute (Sikri 2011: 55). Without Tibet as a buffer zone, India had to face China directly. In fact, China does use Tibet to lay claim to the disputed border areas between China and India. For example, it has named Arunachal Pradesh as Zhang Nan (southern Tibet) and has insisted that Tawang is the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama. This is why C. Raja Mohan (2012) has commented that Tibet-related issues have poisoned bilateral negotiations on the boundary dispute. Some in India have therefore argued that the return of the Dalai Lama and his followers would push the Chinese to settle the dispute with India (Gupta 2014: 216). More importantly, India has provided shelter to the Dalai Lama and his followers. This has allowed the Tibetan community in India to preserve their distinct cultural identity, and to “keep the fire of Tibetan nationalism burning” (Sikri 2011: 65). The Dalai Lama even calls himself “Son of India” (PTI 2017). Not surprisingly, China has been annoyed at the relationship between the Dalai Lama and the Indian government. Without the shelter provided by India, the exiled Tibetans would find it difficult to energetically conduct missions. Tibetan leaders in India are grateful for Indian support (Lobsang Sangay, personal communication, 17 January 2014). In 2018, a “Thank You India” event was organized by Dharamsala to mark the sixtieth year of the Dalai Lama’s presence. Given the number of Tibetan refugees in India, India will remain as the main base of the followers of the Dalai Lama even if the next Dalai is reincarnated elsewhere. As a result, one of China’s key diplomatic quarrels with India is over the fear that Tibetans will carry out anti-China activities on India’s territory. In fact, New Delhi has implicitly permitted the Tibetan diaspora in India to conduct political activities, in particular electing Sikyong, head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and members of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile on its soil (Pardesi 2017: 9). This is crucial for the Tibetans-in-exile as they need the elections to legitimize their status in the struggle against communist rule and the fight for Tibetan autonomy.

China–India détente on the Tibet issue It seems reasonable for India to use a variety of diplomatic strategies to protect the Tibetan government-in-exile from Beijing’s pressures because the Tibet issue increases

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India’s influence with China. However, India is aware that China has been strongly dissatisfied with India’s support of the Dalai Lama. Officials in New Delhi therefore try to balance the goal of maintaining stable relations with Beijing and supporting Dharamsala at the same time. For its part, China works to ensure Indian commitments on Tibet as they are important to Beijing’s handling of the region. In 1988, when Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited China—the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister since the 1962 war—the two countries agreed to improve and develop good neighborly relations. Against this backdrop, China and India reached a détente on the Tibet issue. The Indian government complied with the Chinese demand by endorsing Tibet as an autonomous region of China and by promising that anti-China political activities by Tibetans would not be permitted on Indian soil. This was a milestone agreement on Tibet, the first after the 1954 treaty. These positions were later reiterated by both sides when Chinese Premier Li Peng visited India in 1991 (Fang 2014: 63). In 1998, however, after India conducted a series of nuclear tests, it cited China as a threat, causing Sino-Indian relations to deteriorate. In order to mend the relationship, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited China in 2003. A seemingly new compromise on Tibet was reached during the visit when Vajpayee and his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao issued the Declaration on Principles for Relations and Comprehensive Cooperation. In signing the statement, India agreed to refer to the region with the official Chinese terminology, the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” and acknowledged the region as part of the “People’s Republic of China.” In return, China implicitly recognized India’s sovereignty over Sikkim by agreeing to designate Changgu as the border trade point. The 2003 declaration in fact triggered animated discussions on whether India had changed its policy toward Tibet. Commenting on the development, an anonymous Chinese official was quoted as saying that “the Indian government has for the first time recognized, in an explicit way, the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of China’s territory” (Renmin Wang 2003). However, New Delhi argued that the declaration did not represent substantial changes in India’s position on Tibet. Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee explained there was no change in the decades-old policy because “Indians have never doubted that the Tibet Autonomous Region is a part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China” (Baruah 2003). Still, there was extensive criticism within India on the use of China’s preferred terminology, for it was felt that India had conceded too much (Kalha 2012: 22). The last time China and India formally referred to the China–India–Tibet relationship after a summit was when Chinese President Hu Jintao paid a state visit to India in November 2006. The joint declaration issued at the end of that visit read, The Indian side reiterates that it has recognized the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China, and that it does not allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in India. The Chinese side expresses its appreciation for the Indian position. (PIB 2006) Remarkably, since then, the status of the region has been not mentioned in subsequent bilateral statements. Beijing seems to have concluded that the Tibet problem was solved with India’s 2003 endorsement. In 2005, the Chinese Ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi, claimed that the Tibetan issue was no longer a problem between China and India as the two countries had reached an agreement by signing the 2003 declaration (IANS 2005). Even though China and India have reached some agreements on Tibet, this modus vivendi might not last. One major challenge to the agreements comes from the widespread

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sympathy of the Indian people for Tibetans. The general feeling of the Indian public toward the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan diaspora has been one of sympathy: Indians seemingly do not accept Chinese arguments about Tibet. Instead, the Indian public believes in the Dalai Lama’s sincerity in pursuing the middle-way approach and his claims of “cultural genocide” in Tibet (Deepak 2011: 310–311). This popular sympathy toward the Tibet issue has not been reflected in the Indian government’s position. While providing refuge to the Tibetan diaspora in India, Indian officials seem to be working hard to remove the Tibet issue from public debate and scrutiny (Anand 2012). India’s Tibet policy is based more on its strategic interests, not on humanitarian concerns or pro-Tibet sympathies. This also explains why New Delhi did not respond strongly in 2008, when turmoil in Tibet reached a level not seen in decades. India also took strict measures to ensure the torch of the Beijing Olympic Games traveled peacefully through India without its being disturbed by the Tibetans-in-exile. Not surprisingly, then, New Delhi places little or no pressure on the Chinese government to negotiate with the Dalai Lama. In response to the spate of self-immolations in Tibet, the Indian government is mostly silent. In addition, the Indian police adopt strict measures to restrict the freedom of movement and expression of Tibetans during the visits of Chinese leaders (Anand 2012). The Dalai Lama was eventually moved to characterize India’s attitude toward the Tibet issue as “overcautious” (Vashisht 2008). In fact, India basically follows a “non-interference” approach toward the Tibetan struggle as it does not have the capability to dislodge the Chinese from Tibet. Nevertheless, New Delhi does face domestic pressures: it is often accused of ignoring developments in Tibet and faces demands that India’s Tibet policy needs to be changed (Khilnani et al. 2013: 14). For example, in September 2013, local leaders from Arunachal Pradesh issued a memorandum to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urging him to promote dialogue between Chinese officials and Tibetan leaders (TNN 2013). Given India’s democratic system, it has been extremely difficult for Indian politicians to ignore public sympathy and support for Tibetans. It is also impossible for the government to curb Tibetan protests or activities (Deepak 2011: 309). This suggests that New Delhi might not always give way to Beijing.

Tibet as a bargaining chip Whether India would cooperate with China on the Tibet issue also depends on its assessment of China’s policy toward India. As Indians have grown disappointed over the lack of improvement in China–India relations, China has reason to worry about the possibility that India may further harden its attitude toward Tibet and other issues. New Delhi is looking for a useful tool against the perceived threat posed by Beijing. Tibet is one of the few issues that has irked China more than it has troubled India, and New Delhi could use this to its advantage. This perspective on Tibet finds support in the view among some Indian analysts that Tibet should not come in the way of stronger India–China relations (Banerjee 2013: 22). That is, New Delhi should treat Tibet as a bargaining chip, something it can trade against gains in other areas rather than as a fundamental and defining quarrel between the two countries. In 2009, the Indian government gave permission to the Dalai Lama to visit Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as its own territory. The Dalai Lama ignited China’s anger by arguing that Tawang is an integral part of India, a position he had taken earlier (TNN 2008). Chinese scholars have cited these events to justify

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the view that India’s policy in Tibet is to use the “Dalai Clique” as a tool to advance its core strategic interests (Ma 2011: 2). From the Chinese perspective, the Dalai Lama has frequently created troubles for China’s engagement with India. He is therefore seen as a “negative asset” in China–India relations by the Chinese side (Zhongguo Pinglun 2011). Behind such a view is a Chinese assessment that India could use Tibet as a bargaining chip against China. This new bargaining posture was evident in 2010, when Indian External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna told his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi that just as India had been sensitive to China’s concerns over Tibet and Taiwan, China should “be mindful of Indian sensitivities” on Kashmir (Varadarajan 2010). As former Indian diplomat Rajiv Sikri argued, India is “not prepared to give China satisfaction on Tibet … as long as China does not give satisfaction to India on what India considers its own core issues” (Sikri 2011: 55, 65). In plain terms, India’s position on Tibet is tradeable if its demands on Kashmir are met by China. In May 2013, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang traveled to India when the relationship between China and India was plagued by the so-called “tent confrontation” standoff along the disputed border. During the meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Li reiterated Beijing’s stance on Tibet, while the Indian Prime Minister said that India recognized Tibet as part of Chinese territory and would not allow any anti-China activities on Indian soil (Renmin Ribao 2013: 1). The joint statement issued at the end of the visit did not mention the Tibet issue directly, but it did state that “the two sides will not allow their territories to be used for activities against the other” (MEA 2013). This suggests that New Delhi was not willing to make unilateral commitments on China’s concerns and insisted on the principle of reciprocity. An anonymous Indian official was quoted as saying that “If they [the Chinese] had insisted on Tibet, then [we] would have asked for something else [Kashmir] to be included” (Dikshit and Krishnan 2013). India’s inconsistency in dealing with the Tibet issue has evoked criticism from Beijing, with Chinese experts accusing India of carrying out a two-faced policy in regard to Tibet. The senior Chinese scholar, Ma Jiali, considers that India publicly says it will not allow Tibetans to conduct anti-China activities on its soil, but privately signals that the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala can conduct “splittist” activities. Ma also complains that Indian leaders and high-level officials have ignored China’s protests over their meetings with the Dalai Lama (Ma 2011: 2). Not surprisingly, China has turned down India’s proposals to re-establish its consulate-general office in Lhasa. Chinese scholars have argued that the Indian government hopes to closely watch, observe, and infiltrate the Tibetan area after the opening of a consulate (GT 2012). In fact, how New Delhi deals with the Tibet issue serves as a barometer of China–India relations. When China–India relations develop smoothly, or when the Indians try to improve bilateral relations with China, New Delhi seems to be more cooperative over the Tibet issue. For example, when relations between China and India improved in the 1980s and 1990s, New Delhi adjusted its policy by putting restrictions on the activities of exiled Tibetans in India, and as a result, mitigated the strategic concerns of China (Ma 2011: 2). Srikanth Kondapalli of Jawaharlal Nehru University, an expert on China–India relations, puts it more bluntly: “Whenever there is a problem between India and China, India plays the ‘Tibet card.’” He adds, “When China indulges in anti-Indian activities, the Indian foreign secretaries meet the Dalai Lama” (Timmons and Vyawahare 2012). After 2013, however, the Indian government failed to reaffirm Tibet’s status as part of China in joint statements—a clear signal of Indian displeasure over subsequent Chinese behavior (Tharoor 2013: 149–150). In 2014, as a strong signal to China, the

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BJP government invited Lobsang Sangay, head of the Central Tibetan Administration (Tibetan government-in-exile) to attend the swearing-in ceremony of Prime Minister Modi. This was a clear change from earlier policy and seemed to signal that the Modi government would take a more assertive line on Tibet. Indian External Minister Sushma Swaraj later confirmed that India’s Tibet policy would be governed by the principle of reciprocity. In her meeting with the visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in June 2014, she said that India understood China’s sensitivities on Tibet and Taiwan and hoped that China would respect India’s sensitivities on Arunachal Pradesh. India would also expect China to adopt a “One India” policy as the new BJP government supported Beijing’s “One China” policy (Samanta 2014). She repeated this argument in September 2014 (Bagchi 2014). Chinese scholars therefore again blamed India for engaging in petty actions and playing the “Tibet card” (Lan 2014). In June–August 2017, India’s relations with China were further strained by the military standoff in the Doklam (Dong Lang) plateau, a tri-junction of India, Bhutan, and China. In order to defuse tensions and “reset” bilateral relations, New Delhi now adopted a more cautious approach in dealing with the Tibet issue. Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale wrote to the Cabinet Secretary, calling on senior Indian leaders and government officials to not attend the “Thank You India” events planned by the Tibetan government-in-exile (Ghosh 2018). In fact, as a gesture of goodwill, New Delhi had informed Beijing of this decision before it sent out its internal note on the matter (Roy 2018). The “reset” process proceeded further with Indian Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Wuhan for an “unofficial summit.” Remarkably, the Dalai Lama’s health condition emerged as one of the major talking points at the summit (Kuronuma 2018). Prime Minister Modi shared intelligence regarding the Dalai Lama’s health with President Xi as part of a more conciliatory approach. An Indian parliament report later asked why the Indian government was overly concerned about China’s sensitivities on Tibet given that Beijing did not exhibit the same deference in dealing with New Delhi’s sovereignty concerns over Arunachal Pradesh or over the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) (Lok Sabha Secretariat 2019: 2). As Tibetans get frustrated at the lack of progress in talks with Beijing, they might be forced to embark on more vigorous forms of protest against China. The recurrence of self-immolations and protests by Tibetans have highlighted that China’s current policies toward Tibet are not working and need to be revised. India is also concerned over the future course of the Tibetan protest movements after the demise of the present Dalai Lama. To some extent, New Delhi finds it increasingly difficult to control the militancy in the Tibetan community, which could lead to greater mistrust between China and India (Saran 2017: 145). Some Indian scholars therefore suggest that India should engage with the Tibetan government-in-exile on the succession issue (Narayanan 2015: 110; Panda 2017: 61). In this view, India’s non-interference policy needs to be reviewed even if New Delhi does not repudiate China’s assertion of sovereignty over Tibet.

Conclusion The long-simmering Tibet problem lies at the heart of the deep distrust between India and China—although it is not clear whether Tibet is the cause of distrust or a symptom of it. China’s failure in Tibet and its increasingly assertive posture toward India create strong incentives for India to play the “Tibet card.” Beijing needs to acknowledge that India is an important stakeholder on the Tibet issue given India’s status as host of

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the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government-in-exile, and the Tibetan diaspora. Given India’s links with Tibet, non-recognition of India’s role only puts China in a difficult situation. On Tibet, India’s position has gradually changed from a deferential stance to a more reciprocal approach. Beijing cannot take India’s endorsement of the “One China” ­policy for granted as it did before. A softer attitude toward India is likely to discourage the Indian leadership from playing the Tibet card: when China–India relations develop smoothly or when the Indians want to improve bilateral relations, New Delhi is more cooperative on Tibet. New Delhi, too, needs to fashion a more sophisticated policy toward the Tibetan diaspora. India’s primary challenge is how it can assure Tibet of a high degree of regional autonomy while not provoking China. A balance can be achieved if India focuses on the humanitarian issues facing the Tibetans while respecting Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. In addition, New Delhi can consult with both Beijing and Dharamsala to get them to resume direct talks. Looking ahead, Tibet continues to exist as a significant dispute even though it has not been mentioned in recent China–India joint statements. There is very high uncertainty over the “post-Dalai Lama” period. Greater coordination between China and India will be required if they are to avoid conflict.

Bibliography Anand, D. (2012) “India’s Tibet Problem,” The Indian Express (19 June), available online at www. indianexpress.com/news/india-s-tibet-problem/963602/2 (accessed 31 January 2019). Bagchi, I. (2014) “India Talks Tough on One-China Policy, Says Reaffirm One-India Policy First,” The Times of India (9 September), available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/india/India-talks-tough-on-one-China-policy-says-reaffirm-one-India-policy-first/ articleshow/42060331.cms (accessed 31 January 2019). Banerjee, D. (2013) “India-China Relations in the 21st Century—Seeking Confidence and Convergence,” in D. Banerjee and J. T. Jacob, eds., Military Confidence-Building and India-China Relations: Fighting Distrust (New Delhi: Pentagon Press): 12–26. Baruah, A. (2003) “No Change in Tibet Policy: PM,” The Hindu (23 July), available online at www.thehindu.com/2003/07/24/stories/2003072405681100.htm (accessed 31 January 2019). China Daily (2013) “Top Political Advisor Urges Stability in Tibet” (9 July), available online at http://africa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-07/09/content_16753388.htm (accessed 31 January 2019). Deepak, B. R. (2011), “India, China and Tibet: Fundamental Perceptions from Dharamsala, Beijing and New Delhi,” Asian Ethnicity 12(3): 301–321. Dikshit, S. and Krishnan, A. (2013) “India Plays Down Omission of ‘Tibet’ from Joint Statement,” The Hindu (21 May), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/national/indiaplays-down-omission-of-tibet-from-joint-statement/article4733709.ece (accessed 31 January 2019). Fang, T.-S. (2014) Asymmetrical Threat Perceptions in India-China Relations (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Ghosh, A. (2018) “Govt Sends Out Note: Very Sensitive Time for Ties with China, So Skip Dalai Lama Events,” The Indian Express (2 March), available online at https://indianexpress. com/article/india/govt-sends-out-note-very-sensitive-time-for-ties-with-china-so-skipdalai-lama-events-5083430/ (accessed 31 January 2019). GT (Global Times) (2012) “Indian Consulate Proposal for Lhasa Denied” (6 August), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/725319.shtml (accessed 31 December 2018).

206  Fang Tien-sze Gupta, S. (2014) The Himalayan Face-Off: Chinese Assertion and the Indian Riposte (Gurgaon: Hachette). Hu, S. (2017) “Donglang Duizhi Weiji Yu Zhong Yin Guanxi De Weilai” (Dong Lang Area Standoff and the Future of Sino-India Relations), Xiandai Guoji Guanxi (Contemporary International Relations) 11: 9–22. Huanqio Shibao (Global Times) (2013), “Zhu Weiqun: ‘Zhongjian Daolu’ Jiu Shi ‘Xizang Duli’ Fen Liang Bu Zou” (Zhu Weiqun: Middle Way Is a Two-Step Approach for the Tibet Independence) (16 July), available online at http://opinion.huanqiu.com/opinion_ china/2013-07/4133389.html (accessed 31 January 2019). IANS (Indo-Asian News Service) (2005) “Tibet No Longer a Chink in Bilateral Ties: China,” Phayul (29 October), available online at www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=11041&t=1 (accessed 31 January 2019). Ji, S. (2013), “Zhuanfang: Zhonggong Zhongyang Dang Xiao She Ke Jiao Yan Bu Jin Wei Jiaoshou: Chong Qi Tanpan Jiejue She Zang Wenti” (Interview with Jin Wei, Professor of the Teaching and Research Department of Scientific Socialism, the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC: Resume Negotiations to Resolve the Tibet Issue), Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly) (9 June) 27(22), available online at www.yzzk.com/cfm/content_archive. cfm?id=1369884897851&docissue=2013-22 (accessed 31 January 2019). Kalha, R. S. (2012) “Tibet as a Factor in Sino-Indian Relations: Past and Present,” Journal of Defence Studies 6(4): 7–26. Kang, S. (2013) “Yindu de ‘Xicang Qingjie’ Jiqi Dui Zhongyin Guanxi de Yingxiang” (India’s ‘Tibetan Infatuation’ and Its Influence on Sino-India Relations), Nanya Yanjiu (South Asian Studies) 2: 80–92. Khilnani, S., Kumar, R., Mehta, P. B., Menon, P., Nilekani N., Raghavan, S., Saran, S. and Varadarajan, S. (2013) Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century (New Delhi: Penguin India). Kuronuma, Y. (2018) “India Uses Rumor of Dalai Lama’s Ill Health to Mend China Ties,” Nikkei Asian Review (7 August), available online at https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/InternationalRelations/India-uses-rumor-of-Dalai-Lama-s-ill-health-to-mend-China-ties (accessed 31 January 2019). Lan, J. (2014) “Yindu Dui Hua Liang Mian Shoufa Yuan Yu Wu Pan Xingshi” (India’s Double-Faced Tactics towards China Is Due to Its Misjudgement of Situation), Huanqiu Wang (Global Net) (November), available online at http://opinion.huanqiu.com/opinion_ world/2014-11/5194382.html. Loiwal, M. (2017), “India Is the Guru, Tibetans Are Disciples, Says Dalai Lama,” India Today (11 April), available online at www.indiatoday.in/india/story/dalai-lama-says-india-is-gurutibet-is-its-disciple-970713-2017-04-11 (accessed on 31 January 2019). Lok Sabha Secretariat (2019) “Twenty Fifth Report, Committee on External Affairs (2018–19) (Sixteenth Lok Sabha)” (February), available online at http://164.100.47.193/lsscommittee/ External%20Affairs/16_External_Affairs_25.pdf. Ma, J. (2011) “Zhongguo Yu Nanya De Anquan Guanxi” (Security Relationship between China and South Asian Countries), Heping Yu Fazhan (Peace and Development) 6(124): 1–4. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) (2013) “Joint Statement on the State Visit of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to India” (20 May), available online at http://mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents. htm?dtl/21723/Joint+Statement+on+the+State+Visit+of+Chinese++Li+Keqiang+to+India (accessed 31 January 2019). Meng, Q. (2016) “Yindu Dui Zhong Yin Bianjie Wenti Taidu De Bianhua” (The Changes of India’s Attitude toward the Sino-Indian Border Issue), Qinghua Daxue Xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) ( Journal of Tsinghua University-Philosophy and Social Sciences) 5: 50–61. Mohan, C. R. (2012) “India-China Talks Today, Tibet Holds Key,” The Indian Express (16 January), available online at www.indianexpress.com/news/indiachina-talks-today-tibetholds-key/900175/ (accessed 31 January 2019).

Tibet: solving a solved problem  207 Narayanan, R. (2015) “India and China: Shifting the ‘Generic’ from the “Specific’,” in G. V. C. Naidu, M. Chen and R. Narayanan, eds., India and China in the Emerging Dynamics of East Asia (New Delhi: Springer): 107–121. Panda, J. P. (2017) India-China Relations: Politics of Resources, Identity and Authority in a Multipolar World Order (New York: Routledge). Pardesi, M. S. (2017) “Modi’s China Policy—Change or Continuity?” in S. Singh, ed., Modi and the World: (Re)constructing Indian Foreign Policy (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co.): 3–24. PIB (Press Information Bureau, Government of India) (2006) “Joint Declaration by the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China” (21 November), available online at http://pib. nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=22168 (accessed 31 January 2019). PTI (Press Trust of India) (2017) “Dalai Lama Describes Himself as ‘Son of India’,” The Indian Express (17 March), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/india/dalai-lamadescribes-himself-as-son-of-india/ (accessed 31 January 2019). Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) (2013) “Li Keqiang Qiangdiao: Tuidong Zhongyin Zhanlue Yu Wushi Hezuo Qude Xin Chenguo” (Li Keqiang: New Achievements in Pushing Forward China-India Strategic and Pragmatic Cooperation) (20 May), available online at http:// politics.people.com.cn/BIG5/n/2013/0520/c1024-21547834.html (accessed 31 January 2020). Renmin Wang (People’s Net) (2003) “Zhongyin Qianshu Shuangbian Guanxi Yuanze He Quanmian Hezuo de Xuanyan” (China and India Sign the Declaration on Principles for Relations and Comprehensive Cooperation) (23 June), available online at http://www.people. com.cn/GB/shizheng/1024/1930439.html (accessed on 31 January 2020). RFA (Radio Free Asia) (2018) “Tibetan Man in Ngaba Stages Self-Immolation Protest,” available online at www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/immolation-protest-12092018132333.html (accessed 31 January 2019). Roy, S. (2018) “Before Cautioning Officials against Dalai Lama Events, New Delhi Sounded Beijing,” The Indian Express (24 April), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/ india/before-cautioning-officials-against-dalai-lama-events-new-delhi-sounded-beijingnarendra-modi-xi-jinping-meet-5149084/ (accessed on 31 January 2019). Samanta, P. D. (2013) “China’s Ties with Others Must Not Hurt India, PM Tells Xi Jinping,” The Indian Express (30 March), available online at www.indianexpress.com/news/chinasties-with-others-must-not-hurt-india-pm-tells-xi-jinping/1095146/1 (accessed 31 January 2019). Samanta, P. D. (2014) “One China? What about One India Policy: Sushma Swaraj to Wang Yi,” The Indian Express (12 June), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ india-others/one-china-what-about-one-india-policy-sushma-to-wang/ (accessed 31 January 2019). Saran, S. (2017) How India Sees the World: Kautilya to 21st Century (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books). Sikri, R. (2011) “The Tibet Factor in India-China Relations,” Journal of International Affairs (Spring/Summer) 64(2): 55–71. Tharoor, S. (2013) Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century (New Delhi: Penguin Books). The Economist (2013) “Bold New Proposals” (22 June), available online at www.economist. com/news/china/21579847-welcome-signs-some-off icials-are-last-starting-questionpolicies-tibet-bold-new (accessed 31 January 2019). The Kashag (2013) “Statement of the Kashag on the 53rd Anniversary of Tibetan Democracy Day,” Central Tibetan Administration (2 September), available online at https://tibet.net/ statement-of-the-kashag-on-the-53rd-anniversary-of-tibetan-democracy-day/ (accessed 31 January 2019). The Kashag (2018) “Kashag’s Statement on the 58th Anniversary of Tibetan Democracy Day,” Central Tibetan Administration (2 September), available online at https://tibet.net/kashagsstatement-on-the-58th-anniversary-of-tibetan-democracy-day/ (accessed 31 January 2020).

208  Fang Tien-sze The Tibetan Parliament in Exile (2018) “Statement of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile on the 58th Anniversary of Tibetan Democracy Day,” Central Tibetan Administration (2 September), available online at https://tibet.net/statement-of-the-tibetan-parliament-in-exile-on-the­ 58th-anniversary-of-tibetan-democracy-day/ (accessed 31 January 2020). Timmons, H. and Vyawahare, M. (2012) “Between Tibet and China, India Plays Delicate Balancing Act,” India Ink, The New York Times (3 April), available online at http://india.blogs. nytimes.com/2012/04/03/between-tibet-and-china-india-plays-delicate-balancing-act/?_ php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (accessed 31 January 2019). TNN (Times News Network) (2008) “Tawang Is Part of India: Dalai Lama,” The Times of India (4 June), available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Tawang-is-part-ofIndia-Dalai-Lama/articleshow/3097568.cms (accessed 31 January 2019). TNN (Times News Network) (2013) “Arunachal Leaders Urge Manmohan Singh to End Tibet Crisis,” The Times of India (19 September), available online at http://articles.timesof india.indiatimes.com/2013-09-19/guwahati/42217362_1_tibetan-issue-tibet-crisistibetan-government-in-exile (accessed 31 January 2019). Varadarajan, S. (2010) “India Tells China: Kashmir Is to Us What Tibet, Taiwan Are to You,” The Hindu (15 November), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-tellschina-kashmir-is-to-us-what-tibet-taiwan-are-to-you/article886483.ece (accessed 31 January 2019). Vashisht, D. (2008) “India Overcautious on Tibet: Dalai Lama,” The Indian Express (23 November), available online at http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/india-overcautious-on-tibetdalai-lama/389620/ (accessed 31 January 2019). Xinhua Wang (Xinhua Net) (2015) “Xi Jinping Qiangdiao Yi Fazhi Cang Fu Min Xing Cang Changqi Jiancang, Jiakuai Xicang Quanmian Jiancheng Xiaokang Shehui Bufa” (Xi Jinping Stresses Governing Tibet by Rule of Law in, Enriching the People and Prospering Tibet, and the Long-Term Construction of Tibet: Accelerating the Pace of Building a Well-Off Society in Tibet) (25 August), available online at www.xinhuanet.com//politics/2015-08/25/c_1116370428.htm (accessed 31 January 2019). Ye, Z. (ed.) (1997) Diyuan Zhengzhi Yu Zhongguo Waijiao (Geopolitics and Chinese Diplomacy) (Beijing: Beijing Publishing House). Yi, D. (2010) “Foreign Backing Gives Dalai Lama No Room but Doom,” Renmin Wang (People’s Net) (20 February), available online at http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/1026/10983507. html (accessed on 31 January 2019). Zhongguo Pinglun (China Review) (2011) “Zhongyin Tanpan Tu Zhongzhi, Dalai Fumian Yingxiang Shangsheng” (Sino-Indian Negotiation Suddenly Stop, the Negative Impact of the Dalai Lama Increases) (29 November), available online at http://hk.crntt.com/ doc/1019/2/0/4/101920488.html?coluid=7&kindid=0&docid=101920488 (accessed 31 January 2019).

12 China–India river-water conflicts Toward a solution through launching a cooperation spiral Sebastian Biba

The management of shared river water has in recent years turned into one of the hottest and most intricate issues in Sino-Indian relations. What is more, river water has mostly, and increasingly so, been framed in terms of conflict rather than cooperation. For reasons to be outlined below, it has in particular been the Indian side—or at least certain quarters in India, including academics, politicians, and media outlets—that continue to use the extraordinarily strong term “water war” to describe Beijing’s ongoing river politics vis-à-vis Delhi. Prominent Indian scholar Brahma Chellaney, for example, has fervently toured the Indian and international media landscape, including the Chinese South China Morning Post, to promote his view of China “stealthily waging a water war” on India (Chellaney 2018b; also see Chellaney 2017, 2018a). Meanwhile, the distinguished US professor Aaron Wolf has long argued that “[v]iolence over water does not seem strategically rational, hydrographically effective, or economically viable” (Wolf 2007: 247). Accordingly, Chinese authors have rejected alarmist viewpoints and treated the water wars narrative as “being overstated” (Zhang 2016: 155). However, even serious, scientific publications have opined, “while it is unlikely that China and India will fight over water, such a possibility cannot be entirely ruled out” (Ho 2018: 138). Similarly, Pak (2016: 53) has stated that even though “[w]ater insecurity itself will not likely lead to armed conflict. But when coupled with other international and domestic factors, it could increase the likelihood of war” between China and India. Such reasoning is in line with the work of Wolf ’s “academic antagonist,” US scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon, who has found that “the renewable resource most likely to stimulate interstate resource war is river water” (Homer-Dixon 1994: 19). No matter where one stands on the controversial and hotly debated question of the likelihood of a Sino-Indian water war, it is undisputed that water resources can act as a grave irritant in inter-state relations, which often entail conflicts below the threshold of actual war (De Stefano et al. 2010). Such a state of affairs is exactly what is currently observed when it comes to China–India relations over their shared rivers. As a result, and given possible future trajectories pointing to developments even worse than the present situation, analysts from both sides have almost unanimously reached the conclusion that there is urgent need for increased, more institutionalized cooperation between Beijing and Delhi on water and related issues. At the same time, however, according to Xie and Jia (2018: 131), “Sino-Indian diplomatic initiatives over shared water resources have entered a deadlock.” Ho (2016: 193) has been similarly pessimistic with regard to the prospects of a bilateral “water management/sharing arrangement” between China and India, seeing it as a “non-starter at the present moment.”

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The various assessments in the existing literature, which argue that Sino-Indian river disputes will be extremely hard to solve in the future, are certainly well founded. Yet, China and India are too big, and their bilateral water issues too consequential, to give in to defeatist reasoning. As Sinha (2016: 171) has pointed out, “[a]s two critically important riparian countries in Asia, it is troubling that there is an absence of institutionalised water cooperation” between Beijing and Delhi. Therefore, this chapter seeks to elaborate a new way forward. As previous attempts at institutionalized cooperation have not borne much fruit to date, we might have to start thinking out of the box. In this chapter, I would like to suggest that one promising, albeit potentially painful, approach is the idea of “cooperation spirals” as originally introduced by Lyle Goldstein with a view to defuse the emerging US–China rivalry. Cooperation spirals are the opposite of escalation spirals. Their chief purpose is to build trust and confidence over time so as to avoid serious future conflict (Goldstein 2015). Before detailing the concept of cooperation spirals and the concrete measures that might present a pathway to better future management of Sino-Indian river-water issues, the following section looks into the reasons that have led to the current situation. In other words, the next section will recount the story of what has happened so far in terms of water-related conflict and cooperation between China and India. The third section will delineate and analyze the key obstacles to greater bilateral water cooperation to date. The fourth and most important section of the chapter will then explore how a cooperation spiral might eventually produce a functioning and legally binding Sino-Indian agreement on shared rivers as the most viable resolution to the two countries’ bilateral water disputes. The conclusion will wrap up the findings and broach the subject of what key features such a Sino-Indian water agreement should have.

Conflict and cooperation on Sino-Indian shared river water: the story so far China and India share a number of cross-border rivers, the major ones of which are the Indus, the Sutlej, and, above all, the Brahmaputra. All of these rivers originate on the Tibetan Plateau and therefore in China. In other words, China is upstream and India is downstream (and other riparian countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh are still further downstream than India). This permanent geographic setting, together with the significant fact that Beijing and Delhi have yet to ink a joint water treaty, creates specific dynamics and has important implications. In particular, it gives China an advantage over India with regard to resource utilization and strategic benefits. If China wants to, it can utilize the rivers according to its needs and without being concerned about the negative externalities and general impacts of its actions on India (and other downstream riparians). In strategic terms, Beijing can undertake actions as leverage against Delhi in the event of a conflict between the two countries because China controls the headwaters of the rivers it shares with India (Ho 2018: 144). Issues of concern In light of this situation, Indian anxieties have mostly revolved around possible Chinese plans for future water diversion projects and a series of dam projects already launched by China on the Brahmaputra, which is called Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet.

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Those Chinese activities could reduce the flow of water into India, thereby incurring huge economic and ecological costs for the latter (Sinha 2016: 167). Another Indian worry has been the opposite—that is, too much water flowing in from China in the form of deadly flash floods, for which there is a heightened risk in the Yarlung during the monsoon season and which pose a great threat to Indian residents downstream (Xie and Jia 2018: 119). The fear of flooding due, for instance, to ineffective water management and deforestation is India’s longest-held concern about Chinese behavior in their shared river basins (Biba 2018: 170). The concern dates back to a major flood in June 2000, which left thirty Indians dead and another 50,000 homeless after a natural dam on a Yarlung tributary broke and three to four billion cubic meters of water poured into Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. Many in India believed that China had kept back hydrological data that could have prevented the disaster (Wuthnow 2016: 25). Meanwhile, the flood issue remains a concern as the events in late summer 2018 showed, when a similar situation occurred. This time it was handled more successfully due to greater communication between the two sides (Das 2018). Water diversion has been another cause of grave apprehension in India—albeit one more abstract than flash floods because, as of now, this point is only about future possibilities that have in fact been assessed differently. What can be said for sure is that in 2002 China officially launched the largest water transfer scheme ever undertaken. The objective of this South-to-North Water Transfer (SNWT) Project is the diversion of up to almost forty-five billion cubic meters of water annually from southern rivers in China to supply the population and agricultural centers of the country’s north over three different routes (Biba 2018: 9). With reference to Chinese sources, it has been feared in India that tapping the Yarlung, along with other international rivers such as the Mekong and Salween, could become part of the project’s Western Route. Yet, while the Eastern and Central Routes of the scheme have by now been completed, the feasibility of the Western Route is unclear due to unresolved technical, economic, and seismic questions. In a move to allay misgivings, the Indian Water Resources Ministry has in the meantime made clear that the Yarlung enters India with seventy-eight billion cubic meters of water, and it leaves India with 629 billion cubic meters (Sinha 2016: 169–170). At the same time, however, Sinha (2016: 169) has noted that given China’s penchant for overdesigned hydraulic engineering, Beijing’s longstanding plans for the Western Route are not off the table and could still be used as an “important threat multiplier” vis-à-vis Delhi. Nevertheless, as long as river rerouting remains in the future, China’s ongoing dam-building activities on the Yarlung and its tributaries are probably India’s main concern. In fact, China’s key interest in the Yarlung is to harness the huge hydropower potential, as hydropower represents a critical renewable resource for China’s sustainable development and, in addition, is part of Beijing’s broader efforts to develop the country’s western regions (Ho 2018: 146). As a result, the Zangmu Dam—proposed by the “11th Five-Year Plan of Tibet’s Development of Society and Economy (2006–2010),” launched in 2010, and operational since 2015—became the first mega hydroelectric power station on the mainstream of the Yarlung, and not far from the border with India (Liu 2015: 355). Three more dams on the middle reaches of the river—at Dagu, Jiacha and Jiexu— were then approved by “China’s 12th Five-Year Plan of Energy Development” on 1 January 2013 (ibid.: 356). And there seems to be no end in sight. In 2010 alone, there were at least twenty-eight dams on the Yarlung and its tributaries that were either completed,

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planned, or under discussion by China (Watts 2010). Of particular worry for India is a potential and gigantic dam project at the river’s Great Bend at Motuo, which is said to have a capacity of 38 GW, dwarfing the Three Gorges Dam by far (ibid.). Generally speaking, large-scale dam building may have a set of negative impacts, comprising ecological, economic, and political aspects (Biba 2012: 609–610). In the case at hand, India seems to be concerned primarily about the uncertain design of the Chinese dams. That is to say, while the Chinese side has asserted that its dams on the Yarlung are so-called “run-of-the-river” projects, which means that the dams return the water to the river after it passes through the turbines, the opaqueness of China’s information sharing has made the Indian side fear that at least some of the dams might in fact have water storage capacities (Sinha 2016: 169). This would enable China to regulate, at least to some extent, the flow of the river, which would create a number of problems for India. One is related to the fact that of India’s total hydropower potential, roughly forty-four percent lies in the Brahmaputra Basin (Rahaman and Varis 2009: 67). Depending on China’s upstream activities, this potential could be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, hydropower features prominently in the Indian government’s objective to provide electricity for its huge and growing population. Consequently, India itself has been planning the development of hydropower schemes in the Brahmaputra Basin on a massive scale—even though implementation remains unclear (Hilton 2014). Attempts at cooperation Given the typical upstream–downstream constellation and its relatively high potential for conflict in Sino-Indian shared rivers, cooperation between the two sides is highly desirable—at least from a neutral point of view. In practice, it has been the Indian side that has repeatedly sought to promote riparian cooperation with China, on an at best institutionalized basis, whereas the latter has generally had few incentives to follow up on Indian proposals (also see next section). As a result, the degree of cooperation between Beijing and Delhi on their shared rivers has overall remained quite limited to date. To begin with, it has already been mentioned that there is no comprehensive and legally binding river treaty that could, for instance, tackle crucial questions of water allocation or dam operation. What does exist, meanwhile, is more than one memorandum of understanding (MOU) on hydrological data sharing. More specifically, there is one such MOU on the Brahmaputra, first signed in 2002 and then renewed in 2008 and 2013, and another on the Sutlej, first inked in 2005 and later renewed in 2010. The terms of these MOUs, however, have remained rather circumscribed. For one thing, China only agrees to provide hydrological information during the flood season. Originally, this meant data provision from 1 June to 15 October. In the 2013 MOU, this period was extended for the Brahmaputra and now lasts from 15 May to 15 October. For another thing, China has rejected requests from India to let its experts visit Chinese dam sites. Finally, the MOUs are not legally binding and there is no oversight body to guarantee implementation (Ho 2016: 190–191). In other words, hydrological data sharing to India only comes at China’s goodwill and can easily be suspended or even terminated. As a matter of fact, there was no data flow in summer 2017, and rumor had it that China held back on the information, presumably in retaliation for the seventy-three-day military standoff between Chinese and Indian soldiers in Doklam near Bhutan around the same

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time (Das 2018). The 2017 flood season cost 130 Indian lives and left three million stranded (ibid.). Even Chinese authors have concluded that the “Beijing government is interested […] in […] the domination of hydrological data and water policy information as well” (Xie and Jia 2018: 116). In addition to the MOUs, an Expert-level Mechanism (ELM) was established in 2006 and has since 2007 met annually. Topics discussed have included information sharing and emergency management. While it can be argued that the mechanism represents a (theoretically) useful channel of communication between the two sides that helps routinize their interactions, promote better understanding, and thus, ultimately, prevent open conflict (Ho 2018: 153), tangible positive outcomes have so far been few, if any. That said, preventing open conflict or, put differently, relying on strategies of nonor de-escalation has certainly been driving China’s riparian behavior vis-à-vis India all along. Despite the limited degree of institutionalized cooperation and the continuation of unilateral actions, China has always sought to not let controversial river-water issues spiral out of control. In a previous article, I have therefore introduced China’s rationale toward its shared rivers—not just with India, but with other riparian neighbors as well—as one of favoring and promoting desecuritization (Biba 2014). In brief, desecuritization is about “turning threats into challenges and security into politics” (Waever 1995: 60). It is a discursive approach aimed at moving contentious issues off the security agenda and bringing them back into the realm of normal political discourse and accommodation. It is not necessarily tantamount to a mode of full-blown cooperation: it can be purely tactical. The way China has employed desecuritization in its river politics has usually been reactive and short-term (Biba 2014: 28–29, 42). In the India case, China has chiefly made use of assuaging rhetoric in times of heightened tensions. This has included reassuring India that Chinese dams are run-of-theriver designs (see above) and insisting that Beijing would “never harm downstream interests,” as then-Premier Wen Jiabao put it during a state visit to India in late 2010 (cited in Chellaney 2011: 196). While such off-and-on desecuritization endeavors from China are better than nothing, they can in no way compensate for the lack of institutionalized cooperation in the form of legally binding treaties.

Obstacles to greater cooperation A deeper level of Sino-Indian river-water cooperation has been impeded by multiple intricate factors. According to Biswas (2011: 664–665), a number of reasons make it difficult to negotiate river treaties apart from water-focused aspects such as water scarcity, including the absence of trust and confidence among riparian countries, historical animosities, existing power asymmetries, zero-sum game thinking, and the emergence of other issues of conflict. Political and strategic mistrust frequently is at the root of prevailing tensions, as power asymmetry, for example, is not as threatening between friends as it is between foes. With a view to the China–India relationship, the following obstacles to greater cooperation deserve to be outlined in greater detail. To begin with, Dinar (2009) has found that riparian dyads sharing high levels of water scarcity are unlikely to initiate river cooperation. Essentially, this is because “[t]he resource is so scarce that there is very little to benefit from and divide among the parties” (ibid.: 128). Both China and India suffer from a variety of domestic water woes, including distribution, pollution, overexploitation, mismanagement, and shortage. In

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fact, China and India are amongst those countries in the world with the lowest per capita freshwater availability. Water demand in some sectors already exceeds supply in both countries—and increasingly so. Given water as a nexus resource, shortages are likely to negatively impact a number of critical other issues such as the two countries’ food and energy security. What is more, some of the water-related future key trends like population growth, urbanization rates, and climate change all point to a direction of further growing water stress, and even scarcity, in both China and India (Biba 2016a). Under these circumstances, it has not been helpful that there is an enormous power asymmetry at work between Beijing and Delhi. China is not only in an advantageous position geographically—being the upstream riparian, as we have seen—it is also much more powerful than India in economic and military terms. To be more precise, in 2017 China’s nominal GDP stood at $12.24 trillion and therefore was almost five times the size of India’s ($2.60 trillion) (World Bank 2017). Similarly, in the same year China spent roughly three-and-a-half times more money on its military than India ($228 billion vs. $63.9 billion) (SIPRI 2018: 2). The problem is, as Ho (2018) has recently shown by using Brantly Womack’s asymmetry theory, that the Sino-Indian power asymmetry has caused asymmetrical threat perceptions and attention as well. That is to say, China, as the more powerful country, does not perceive India as a serious threat and does not pay as much attention to India as India does to China. India, by contrast, tends to view Chinese actions as more threatening than they are. (ibid.: 142) Consequently, China is much more satisfied than India with the current status quo of overall bilateral relations in general as well as with the present state of river-water cooperation more specifically. In light of existing power asymmetries, China has little incentive to enhance riparian cooperation with India because it sees little benefit from doing so. As the lower and weaker riparian, India has an obvious interest in laying down formal water sharing and water use principles, whereas from the Chinese perspective, this would entail considerable sovereignty and autonomy risks as well as limited political and economic gains (Ho 2016: 182). While these problems are already grave enough in and of themselves, they come with a number of controversial non-water issues in Sino-Indian relations that have precipitated very low levels of trust and confidence between the countries and have thereby aggravated the situation in the water realm. In the traditional security realm alone, lingering suspicions over the other’s military build-up and strategic intent spurred by a brief 1962 border war as well as growing rivalries with regard to regional influence and great power relations have continuously strained the bilateral relationship. The one traditional security concern that makes China–India river cooperation even more complicated than it already is, however, is the longstanding question of unresolved territorial disputes between the two countries. This is because cooperation on shared river water has, as a matter of fact, been “overlaid” by territorial disputes (Biba 2016b: 25). Beijing and Delhi have faced a number of those disputes and they are featured elsewhere in this volume. Here, suffice it to say that on the one hand, India believes that water has been central to China’s interest in Tibet and that China claims Arunachal Pradesh (where the Brahmaputra enters into India) so that it can exploit its abundant

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water resources. On the other hand, China has worried that India’s plans to build dams in Arunachal Pradesh could bolster India’s “actual control” over this region and complicate border negotiations between the two countries (Ho 2018: 147). Even though Ho (2016: 194) has reasonably suggested that “[d]elinking the management of shared water resources from other contentious issues between China and India is […] a first step towards greater water cooperation,” China, meanwhile, “has displayed an intention to deliberately link the water-sharing issue with territorial matters” (Xie and Jia 2018: 129) and seems to be completely unwilling to walk away from this approach. In other words, the Chinese side has refused to move toward significantly greater levels of river cooperation without substantial progress on territorial disputes, including the questions of Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

A new path to increased cooperation via starting a “cooperation spiral” It has been shown so far that the controversial issues on China and India’s shared river water have the potential to cause serious—some claim, even hot—conflict between the two countries. Yet the existing obstacles to greater cooperation as outlined earlier are unlikely to go away any time soon, especially in an underlying atmosphere of continued and grave strategic mistrust. It is thus increasingly necessary to make the two countries step upriver water-related cooperation on a permanent, reliable, and equitable basis. As previous attempts to do so have remained unsuccessful, it might be time for fresh ideas. One such idea could be Lyle Goldstein’s concept of “cooperation spirals,” which can be deemed as the opposite of the more well-known notion of escalation spirals and which mainly work by building trust and confidence over time (Goldstein 2015: 2). In this sense, the model can be seen as seeking to tackle one of the root causes of Sino-Indian rivalry, even beyond the issue area of water resources. Cooperation spirals are based on three fundamental and in fact indispensable principles: gradualism, reciprocity, and compromise (Goldstein 2015: 12). What do these principles mean exactly? First, to achieve a fair and legally binding Sino-Indian river-water treaty as the arguably best way to resolve their existing river disputes, it does not make any sense to go like a bull at a gate. A number of smaller and relatively easier cooperative steps need to be taken before such an agreement can even become realistic. In what follows, five preliminary steps each are presented, but there could certainly be several more in practice. Second, it is pivotal that both sides engaged in a cooperation spiral give and take. Whenever one side makes a concession, the other side needs to follow with a concession before moving on to the next round. How quickly one round follows upon another depends on the actors involved and on how fast they manage to build sufficient trust. Because it can be tricky to measure specific concessions against each other, it is better to avoid this in the first place. Each side should rather be judged by what it can offer. In addition, depending on what each side can actually offer, it may at some point become inevitable to deploy linkage tactics, that is to say, to bring issues from river water-unrelated fields to the table. As previously alluded to, the use of issue linkage is debatable. From a normative point of view, it may be desirable to treat issues separately. In practice, however, bilateral relations can often not be neatly compartmentalized. What is more, linkages with non-water issues have been widely used in river treaty negotiations and have often helped promote a more positive outcome (see Fischhendler et al. 2004). Third, and probably the hardest part of any cooperation

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spiral, both sides need to be, or become over time, ready to do without some of their previously declared red lines. Even though this will be extremely challenging, the net result should be compensating for both parties. In the case at hand, the result would be a functioning river-water treaty critical to create a more friendly neighborly relationship and to maintain peace between China and India. In light of the serious obstacles to greater water-related cooperation between China and India, as outlined in the previous section, what is it that makes the framework of cooperation spirals a promising and workable concept—and, in fact, one that is more promising and more workable than others? To begin with, and apart from the already highlighted aspect that the model seeks to tackle one of the root causes of Sino-Indian water disputes, Goldstein (2015: 12) has reasonably argued that it is the “gradual, evolutionary and reciprocal nature [of cooperation spirals that] make them a feasible guide for practitioners.” To be sure, this nature alone is no guarantee for success. It can rightly be claimed, though, that “the endpoints of any cooperation spiral may only seem utopian in the absence of the accomplishments that result from climbing the earlier steps” (Goldstein 2015: 14). Therefore, it clearly is one of the strong suits of cooperation spirals to combine evolutionary pragmatism and reciprocity (i.e. what is possible for each side at any given point in time). After all, the European Union could not have emerged from a process other than one of numerous small and tentative cooperative measures that have proven their intrinsic usefulness. In addition, other frameworks that have been applied to tackle the problem at hand (such as multilateral negotiations, multi-stakeholder diplomacy, issue-(de-)linkage, etc.) are a priori fixated on one specific and relatively narrow toolset ultimately insufficient to fully solve a complex problem that requires a diversified, multi-stage approach. In contrast, the universe of concrete tools available to cooperation spirals is both flexible and extensive and may well include and pool various strategies as suggested by other concepts as well. While the overarching goal of cooperation spirals, in general terms, is to increase the level of trust between the parties involved, the way to reach this goal on the ground is relatively open, albeit strictly case specific. As a result, when compared to other frameworks, the possibilities of cooperation spirals to promote collaboration and foster trust are more comprehensive and yet more nuanced at the same time. Finally, it is crucial that in pursuing their objectives, cooperation spirals are by no means a loose and haphazard category as seen from a larger meta-theoretical point of view. As Goldstein (2015: 14) has stated, cooperation spirals as a matter of fact draw solidly on all major traditions in International Relations theory. More specifically, the model relies on the constructivist conception that norms and ideas have force unto themselves so that creative diplomacy can potentially resolve divisive deadlocks. Also, the framework takes from the liberal tradition the process-related tenet that institutions can shape expectations and behavior, thereby building trust and facilitating further cooperation. Last but not least, cooperation spirals even adopt some realist principles, including that cooperative efforts must be in line with key state interests and must agree with tendencies in the balance of power. Figure 12.1 shows just one example of what a possible cooperation spiral to reach a China–India river-water agreement could look like. There may be several other steps each side could take, or the steps presented could possibly be taken in a slightly different order. In any case, though, it falls to India to start the spiral, if only because India is in more dire need of a water treaty than China.

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Water Treaty China 5 Show flexibility on territorial issues

India 5

China 4 Support China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Hire Chinese dam developers

Enhance cooperation with other riparian neighbors

Stop accusations of China

Reciprocate India’s territorial concessions

Guarantee no water diversions

India 4

China 3

Ramp up environmental protection

China 2

Step up information sharing on dam building

China 1

Increase and stabilize hydrological data sharing

India 3

India 2

India 1

Figure 12.1 Cooperation spiral to achieve a Sino-Indian water treaty. Source: Author.

India’s step 1: stop accusations of China Ho (2018: 150) has argued that with regard to river issues with China, Indian governments have “avoided inflammatory language and sought to calm incendiary language from other Indian politicians and the Indian media.” Generally speaking, such an attitude is exactly what is required from the Indian side to get the cooperation spiral with China going. Accusations, especially if they are not based on not solid ground (because evidence is dubious or even lacking), do not help India’s cause. China would immediately dig its heels in and not accept such behavior as a starting point for greater cooperation. However, even though Indian administrations might have tried, not every politician, scholar, or media outlet in India has heeded the reasonable calls to

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refrain from unduly criticizing China’s river politics. Although some of the criticism may well be justified, certain narratives—such as the claim that China is waging a stealth water war on India or that China is committing water theft vis-à-vis India— go too far and should be rigorously and openly condemned by any incumbent Indian government. China’s step 1: increase and stabilize hydrological data sharing The sharing of hydrological data such as precipitation and stream flow is extremely important in any international river basin. Data sharing produces a number of tangible benefits, as it can be life and crop saving, as well as several intangible rewards, as such transparency measures tend to help build trust. The case at hand has meanwhile demonstrated what can happen if, for whatever reason, such data are not shared between riparian countries. As we have also seen, China has already signed two MOUs on hydrological information provision with India, which moreover have been renewed and slightly modified over the years. However, these MOUs still suffer from a couple of critical shortcomings. In particular, data provision is not legally binding and only occurs during the flood season (see above). For India, this situation creates a not negligible amount of uncertainty. Consequently, the incumbent Modi administration has been asking China to provide year-round hydrological data (Xie et al. 2018: 42). China should no longer treat hydrological information as a state secret, nor as a bargaining chip. Instead, China should respond positively to India’s request. The data exist and for China it is in fact not very costly to share them—especially if India pays for them (as has been the case) and unless China has something to hide (e.g. water storage). In addition, China should make sure that India no longer depends on China’s goodwill with regard to such data sharing. Instead, China should allow a bilateral mechanism such as the ELM to oversee the data transfer. India’s step 2: enhance cooperation with other riparian neighbors India is, as a matter of fact, a middle riparian country. While it is downstream of China, it equally is upstream of Bangladesh in the Brahmaputra Basin and of Pakistan in the Indus and Sutlej Rivers. Strikingly, even though India has signed water treaties with both Bangladesh and Pakistan (the Indus Water Treaty has even endured more than one war between Delhi and Islamabad), India is frequently perceived negatively as a “water hegemon” in South Asia (Sinha 2016: 175). Contributing to this bad image is the fact that Delhi, similar to Beijing, has only been interested in bilateral water cooperation with its riparian neighbors so as to be more able to exploit advantages in geography and power. Accordingly, India’s treaty compliance and information-sharing policies have been criticized downstream on various occasions (Xie and Jia 2018: 123). This Indian attitude has not helped to make the country’s own water-related concerns charge open doors in China, and in fact China has accused India of hypocrisy. As a result, India needs to improve its track record vis-à-vis its riparian neighbors in South Asia. It also needs to open up to the idea of a multilateral approach toward river management, which brings in smaller South Asian riparian countries such as Nepal and Bhutan as well. Critically, though, enhancing cooperation with other riparian neighbors should not intend to build anti-China coalitions, but should rather aim at “sensitising China to downstream concerns and upstream responsibilities” (Sinha 2016: 175).

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China’s step 2: step up information sharing on dam building The reliable sharing of hydrological data is one thing that can increase transparency and thereby trust between China and India over their shared rivers. Another significant measure in this regard is the enhancement of information sharing on dam-related issues. As we have seen, China has been planning and constructing a number of dams on the Yarlung and its tributaries. So far, however, China has been highly secretive about communicating its dam-building activities and the operating schemes of its completed dams (Biba 2018: 173). Obviously, this creates distrust in downstream countries such as India, which can only guess about China’s actions and intentions. At this point in the cooperation spiral, it might be too much to demand of China to agree to full-blown Procedures for Notification or Prior Consultation and Agreement processes that regulate (in theory at least) dam building amongst the member states of the Mekong River Commission. However, even if it is unthinkable for China to consult with India over its dam-building plans, China should at least notify India of those plans ex ante. Also, China should allow regular dam-site visits from Indian experts and share information on the operating schemes of completed dams. Once again, a body like the ELM should be given the authority to oversee that these transparency measures be upheld. India’s step 3: hire Chinese dam developers While India would benefit from receiving river water-related information, the reverse does not hold true. This has to do with the upstream–downstream constellation between Beijing and Delhi. As a result, the Indian side needs to generally be more creative about the steps it can take to incentivize China to ink a future water treaty. One such step could be to hire Chinese dam-building companies for projects in India, as this would reciprocate the leap of faith gained through China’s transparency measures. On the one hand, as mentioned before, India has great plans to develop the country’s hydropower potential—not least in the Brahmaputra Basin. On the other hand, Chinese dam developers have become the world’s leading hydropower firms, with mature technology and expertise in the field of dam building that allow them to construct dams at relatively low cost. At the same time, these hydropower dam builders are having to look abroad for new markets because of, for instance, the Chinese government’s “going out” strategy, growing domestic competition, and the declining number of suitable sites for new dams within Chinese borders (Tan-Mullins et al. 2017: 465). In addition, Chinese dam developers have been found to increasingly adhere to internationally accepted social and environmental safeguard norms (Kirchherr et al. 2017). What sounds like a good example of economic complementarity certainly has a few pitfalls. For one thing, disputed territories such as Arunachal Pradesh should be excluded. For another, the benefits accrued from the dams should be divided in an equitable fashion amongst the various Chinese and Indian stakeholders involved. China’s step 3: ramp up environmental protection The Tibetan Plateau and the adjacent Himalayas constitute an environmentally highly sensitive region prone to accelerated climate change. As dam building in this region gathers speed, ecological matters will likewise gain in importance, too. This

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is because large-scale dam building is likely to have a number of adverse impacts on the environment—both during construction and after completion (see above). Many of those impacts are likely to turn into negative externalities for downstream India, affecting the livelihoods of millions of Indians. In order to anticipate and counter adverse dam impacts on India, China should become open to having impartial environmental impact assessments (EIAs) conducted. China should also take the findings of those EIAs seriously and, for example, refrain from building dams that are held to entail huge negative environmental impacts due, for instance, to the dam site or design chosen. In a similar vein, China should take precautions against the pollution of shared river water resulting, for example, from increasing mining activities on the Tibetan Plateau. India’s step 4: support China’s Belt and Road Initiative As India will quickly run out of possible cooperation steps related more directly to river water, Delhi also has to think about what non-water issues it can bring to the table in order to enhance the chances for a future water treaty with China. Such issue linkage will be inevitable for India; otherwise, it does not have enough to offer to China. One non-water cooperation measure that is likely to be well received by China could be official Indian support for and engagement with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is China’s signature foreign policy project and the Chinese leadership has attached great importance to winning support for it from all countries en route to Europe. Delhi, meanwhile, has remained highly skeptical about the Chinese geopolitical intentions behind the initiative. In response, India has even been found to have “developed new formats of cooperation with Japan, the USA and Australia that are directly or indirectly positioned against China” (Wagner and Tripathi 2018: 1). While such behavior may be understandable from India’s perspective, it will not help bring India any closer toward solving its river-water problems with China because China is very unlikely to react favorably to anti-Chinese coalition building. China’s step 4: guarantee no water diversions Following the sharing of more hydrological data as well as increased transparency and responsibility surrounding dam-building activities, another confidence-building measure China should take along the road toward a Sino-Indian water treaty is to g uarantee— for example, in the form of a unilateral government declaration or another bilateral MOU—that there will be no water diversions in its shared rivers with India. As has been shown earlier, the possibility of Chinese river rerouting in the Brahmaputra Basin has long been a thorn in India’s side. Assuaging Chinese rhetoric aside, the Western Route of the SNWT Project, along with the ostensible tapping of international rivers, has not been officially canceled by the Chinese government. To be sure, the Chinese side is aware of the fact that the project, as long as it is pending, can always serve as a subtle reminder to India of China’s ultimate water leverage. For India, however, water diversion is like the sword of Damocles. No matter how much (or little) water China contributes to the Brahmaputra’s (and other shared rivers’) flow, for increasingly water-scarce India every drop can make a difference in the future. Consequently, China should forgo such threat potential.

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India’s step 5: show flexibility on territorial issues There might be more prerequisites, but at some point in this cooperation spiral territorial issues have to be tackled. This is particularly because, as we have seen, China has steadfastly linked progress on river-water cooperation to headway on territorial disputes. For better or worse, India has to accept this condition if it wants to achieve a water treaty with China. Again, it is up to India to make an advance input on this matter—although this will no doubt be extremely challenging. The border disputes (see previous chapters in this volume) have been quite protracted, and growing nationalism on both sides has made a solution increasingly hard to find and sell (Guruswamy 2017). Nonetheless, the Indian side should be prepared to make a few concessions, such as giving in to Chinese demands on the still debated Line of Actual Control between the two countries. Also, Indian politicians should once and for all refrain from seeking to use Tibet and the Dalai Lama as a “card” to be played against China (Stobdan 2018). The question, however, is whether such relatively minor steps will be sufficient to make China sign a bilateral water treaty with India. Ultimately, therefore, India may be in the highly undesirable situation to be confronted with the enormously tough-to-take decision between a water treaty with China and the administration of Arunachal Pradesh. China’s step 5: reciprocate India’s territorial concessions Even more than India, the Chinese side will probably believe at this point in the cooperation spiral that it has already given away a lot, and maybe too much, especially in light of China’s superior geographical and material position. As a result, it will be even harder to convince China to make territorial concessions than it is the case for India. Nevertheless, China should think about how to reciprocate India’s accommodation of Chinese territorial concerns. One thing China should certainly do is to support the Indian government in not losing too much face over any concessions made. This could happen, for example, through Chinese promises not to disclose to the public any Indian concession before the latter has also achieved some success (such as a water treaty). Moreover, if the Indian side eventually really went as far as to sacrifice Arunachal Pradesh for a water agreement, China should in return accommodate Indian claims over Aksai Chin. With progress on the border disputes and a whole set of mutual transparency and confidence-building measures in place, it should subsequently become relatively easier to negotiate a much-needed river-water treaty between Beijing and Delhi.

Conclusion This chapter has detailed the characteristics of the Sino-Indian river-water disputes, one of the most serious irritants in the two countries’ bilateral relations. The chapter has shown what specific problems exist, what concrete efforts at cooperation have been tried, and why these efforts have been largely insufficient and ineffective. In particular, however, this chapter has not settled for the current situation, which has the potential for further deterioration, even to a point where serious academic accounts have not completely ruled out armed conflict between the two sides. Instead, this chapter has sought to lay out an innovative plan, in the form of a cooperation spiral, to approach the resolution of the river-water disputes. Obviously, this plan is highly ambitious and takes tremendous courage and foresight on both sides to be carried through. However,

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given the stakes involved, it should not be easily dismissed. While at least some of the specific steps suggested here would certainly be exceptionally painful for the two sides to actually take, Beijing and Delhi should also realize that the intended result of the cooperation spiral—that is, a bilateral water treaty—would be worth it. For Delhi, it would be relatively straightforward to understand the enormous benefits of a water treaty with China. But the benefits for China should not be discounted, either, as they would materialize, among others, in a much more stable and friendly overall relationship with another emerging great power on the Chinese periphery as well as in a significant boost for China’s image and reputation as a benign hegemon—one that leads not by force but by example. There is one final thing to highlight. While the inking of a legally binding SinoIndian water treaty arguably is the best way to resolve river-water conflicts between the two countries, the mere existence of such a treaty would serve no self-purpose. In fact, water treaties can be the result of existing power asymmetries between riparian neighbors, thereby locking in the status quo as favored by the stronger country under the pretext of cooperation (Zeitoun and Mirumachi 2008). In order to escape such a scenario, the design of the treaty is of paramount importance. International water law gives some indication of what a functioning inter-state river-water treaty should look like, focusing on the cornerstone elements of scope, substantive rules, procedural rules, institutional mechanisms, and dispute settlement (Chen et al. 2013: 219). While this is not the moment to talk about these five elements in detail, there are a few essential attributes to a future Sino-Indian water agreement that should be briefly mentioned here. First, the treaty should be comprehensive in at least two significant regards: it should cover all rivers shared between China and India and it should tackle a range of relevant issues, including water quantity as well as water quality. Second, the treaty should be explicit about the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization as well as the duty to protect and preserve ecosystems, thereby always seeking to strike a fair balance between the needs of upstream China and the concerns of downstream India. Third, the treaty should set up a robust and autonomous river basin organization for effective management of the shared water resources. Fourth, the treaty should include clearly defined rules for a multi-stage dispute-resolution mechanism, at best bringing in thirdparty mediators. Fifth, and finally, the treaty should be flexible enough to account for and adapt to the dynamic character of riparian conditions. Designed in such a way, a Sino-Indian water treaty could also serve as a blueprint for the next goal—that is, multilateral and truly basin-wide management of transboundary waters in the entire region.

Bibliography Biba, S. (2012) “China’s Continuous Dam-Building on the Mekong River,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42(4): 603–628. Biba, S. (2014) “Desecuritization in China’s Behavior towards Its Transboundary Rivers: The Mekong River, the Brahmaputra River, and the Irtysh and Ili Rivers,” Journal of Contemporary China 23(85): 21–43. Biba, S. (2016a) “The Goals and Reality of the Water-Food-Energy Security Nexus: The Case of China and Its Southern Neighbours,” Third World Quarterly 37(1): 51–70. Biba, S. (2016b) “New Concerns, More Cooperation? How Non-Traditional Security Issues Affect Sino-Indian Relations,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 45(3): 3–30. Biba, S. (2018) China’s Hydro-Politics in the Mekong. Conflict and Cooperation in Light of Securitization Theory (London and New York: Routledge).

China–India river-water conflicts  223 Biswas, A. (2011) “Cooperation or Conflict in Transboundary Water Management: Case Study of South Asia,” Hydrological Science Journal 56(4): 662–670. Chellaney, B. (2011) Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press). Chellaney, B. (2017) “China Is Waging a Water War on India,” Hindustan Times (21 August), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/china-is-waging-a-water-war-onindia/story-6jqgabEffcatPFzJ6fQ6eJ.html. Chellaney, B. (2018a) “China Is Stealthily Waging a Water War,” The Globe and Mail (12 January), available online at www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/china-is-stealthily-waginga-water-war/article37583969/. Chellaney, B. (2018b) “Resource-Hungry China Is in Overdrive as It Wages Water Wars by Stealth,” South China Morning Post (16 January), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/ diplomacy-defence/article/2128119/resource-hungry-china-overdrive-it-wages-water-wars. Chen, H., Rieu-Clarke, A. and Wouters, P. (2013) “Exploring China’s Transboundary Water Treaty Practice through the Prism of the UN Watercourse Convention,” Water International 38(2): 217–230. Das, B. (2018) “Has Flood Warning Turned the Tide in China-India Relations?” South China Morning Post (9 September), available online at www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/ article/2163306/has-flood-warning-turned-tide-china-india-relations. De Stefano, L., Edwards, P., de Silva, L. and Wolf, A. (2010) “Tracking Cooperation and Conflict in International Basins: Historic and Recent Trends,” Water Policy 12(6): 871–884. Dinar, S. (2009) “Scarcity and Cooperation along International Rivers,” Global Environmental Politics 9(1): 109–135. Fischhendler, I., Freitelson, E. and Eaton, D. (2004) “The Short-Term and Long-Term Ramifications of Linkages Involving Natural Resources: The US-Mexico Transboundary Water Case,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 22(5): 633–650. Goldstein, L. (2015) Meeting China Halfway. How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press). Guruswamy, M. (2017) “Why India and China’s Border Disputes Are So Difficult to Resolve,” South China Morning Post (17 December), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/ diplomacy-defence/article/2124528/why-india-and-chinas-border-disputes-are-so-difficult. Hilton, I. (2014) “It’s Time for a New Era of Cooperation on the Brahmaputra,” The Third Pole (5 March), available online at www.thethirdpole.net/en/2014/03/05/its-time-for-a-newera-of-cooperation-on-the-brahmaputra/. Ho, S. (2016) “A River Flows Through It. A Chinese Perspective,” in K. Bajpai, J. Huang and K. Mahbubani, eds., China-India Relations: Cooperation and Conflict (London and New York: Routledge): 182–197. Ho, S. (2018) “Power Asymmetry and the China-India Water Dispute,” in T.V. Paul, ed., The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press): 137–161. Homer-Dixon, T. (1994) “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases,” International Security 19(1): 5–40. Kirchherr, J., Matthews, N., Charles, K. and Walton, M. (2017) “‘Learning It the Hard Way’: Social Safeguards Norms in Chinese-led Dam Projects in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia,” Energy Policy 102 (March): 529–539. Liu, Y. (2015) “Transboundary Water Cooperation on the Yarlung Zangbo/Brahmaputra—A Legal Analysis of Riparian State Practice,” Water International 40(2): 354–374. Pak, J. (2016) “China, India, and War over Water,” Parameters 46(2): 53–67. Rahaman, M. and Varis, O. (2009) “Integrated Water Management of the Brahmaputra Basin: Perspectives and Hope for Regional Development,” Natural Resources Forum 33(1): 60–75. Sinha, U. K. (2016) “Towards Riparian Rationality. An Indian Perspective,” in K. Bajpai, J. Huang and K. Mahbubani, eds., China-India Relations. Cooperation and Conflict (London and New York: Routledge): 167–181.

224  Sebastian Biba SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) (2018) “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2017,” SIPRI Fact Sheet (May), available online at www.sipri.org/sites/default/ files/2018-04/sipri_fs_1805_milex_2017.pdf. Stobdan, P. (2018) “The Modi Government Must Realise the Folly of India Playing the ‘Tibet Card’,” The Wire (30 March), available online at https://thewire.in/diplomacy/ modi-government-folly-of-india-playing-the-tibet-card. Tan-Mullins, M., Urban, F. and Mang, G. (2017) “Evaluating the Behaviour of Chinese Stakeholders Engaged in Large Hydropower Projects in Asia and Africa,” The China Quarterly 230 ( June): 464–488. Waever, O. (1995) “Securitization and Desecuritization,” in R. Lipschutz, ed., On Security (New York: Colombia University Press): 46–86. Wagner, C. and Tripathi, S. (2018) “India’s Response to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative: New Partners and New Formats,” Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, SWP Comment ( January), available online at www.swp-berlin.org/fileadmin/contents/products/comments/2018C07_ wgn_Tripathi.pdf. Watts, J. (2010) “Chinese Engineers Propose World’s Biggest Hydro-Electric Project in Tibet,” The Guardian (24 May), available online at www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/ may/24/chinese-hydroengineers-propose-tibet-dam. Wolf, A. (2007) “Shared Waters: Conflict and Cooperation,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 32: 241–269. World Bank (2017) “Data: GDP (Current US$)” available online at https://data.worldbank.org/ indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD. Wuthnow, J. (2016) “Water Power, Water Worries: China’s Goals and Challenges as the Brahmaputra’s Uppermost Riparian,” in N. Samaranayake, S. Limaye and J. Wuthnow, eds., Water Resource Competition in the Brahmaputra River Basin: China, India, and Bangladesh (Arlington, VA: Center for Strategic Studies): 15–37. Xie, L. and Jia, S. (2018) China’s International Transboundary Rivers. Politics, Security and Diplomacy of Shared Water Resources (London and New York: Routledge). Xie, L., Zhang, Y. and Panda, J. (2018) “Mismatched Diplomacy: China-India Water Relations over the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna River Basin,” Journal of Contemporary China 27(109): 32–46. Zeitoun, M. and Mirumachi, N. (2008) “Transboundary Water Interaction I: Reconsidering Conflict and Cooperation,” International Environmental Agreements 8(4): 297–316. Zhang, H. (2016) “Sino-Indian Water Disputes: The Coming Water Wars?” WIREs Water 3(2) (March/April): 155–166.

Part 4

Military relations

13 Offensive defense India’s strategic responses to the rise of China Yogesh Joshi and Anit Mukherjee

India’s security relations with China have been shaped by the Thucydidean trinity of “fear, honor and interests” (Kalyanraman 2013). Since the beginning, the two countries have been embroiled in a territorial dispute along their Himalayan frontier. India fought a brief but intense border war with China in 1962 and the ensuing defeat still informs mainstream views on China. Since then, the fear of China as an uncertain and aggressive power has entrenched itself in India’s strategic mindset (Garver 2001a). The clash of India’s territorial interests and the fear engineered by uncertainty about Chinese behavior is compounded by the fact that the two countries have always competed for both global and regional leadership (Malone and Mukherjee 2010; Joshi 2011). These leadership claims are premised upon the differences in the countries’ approaches to issues of governance and development—India’s liberal democracy competing with China’s communist authoritarianism. The meteoric rise in China’s economic and military prowess in the last two decades has only intensified India’s security concerns. Maintaining a robust military balance against China therefore remains a top priority for India’s defense establishment (Ministry of Defence 2017: 4). What are India’s military objectives vis-à-vis China and what is its preferred military strategy? How has the interaction between conventional military power and nuclear weapons shaped this strategy vis-à-vis China? With the growing asymmetry of power between the two countries, these questions have gained immense traction among policymakers and analysts, both in New Delhi and beyond. For most of the Cold War, India’s military objectives vis-à-vis China remained limited to preserving the status quo along the India–China border. Deterrence by denial, primarily through preponderance in force ratios, was its preferred military strategy ( Joshi and Mukherjee 2019). This defensive strategy relied heavily on ground troops with the Indian Air Force (IAF) relegated to the role of air defense against enemy air intrusions. The Navy, on the other hand, had no role in India’s military strategy visà-vis China. Even when China went nuclear in 1964 and New Delhi demonstrated an explosive nuclear capability in May 1974, India’s military strategy remained purely conventional. As part of this strategy, India did not even build up the infrastructure on its own part of the disputed border with China, as it was afraid that these would be used as “lanes of invasion” by the Chinese military. At the same time, the Indian military responded strongly to perceived Chinese attempts to change the status quo during the 1967 (Nathu La) and 1987 (Sumdorong Chu) crises. These contrasting approaches and beliefs captured the mixture of bravado and fear that characterized the Indian military’s mindset about China.

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In the last two decades, however, China’s rapid military modernization and its increasing capabilities both along the land border and in the maritime domain have created enormous military pressure on India. Massive military expenditures sustained by the Chinese economy in the last fifteen years have allowed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) a fair amount of defense modernization, accumulating capabilities which are generally associated with the Revolution in Military Affairs. Infrastructure development along the Indo-Tibetan Border has increased the PLA’s ability to mobilize quickly vis-à-vis Indian defense forces. Moreover, naval modernization and acquisition have given China an ability to project power in an unprecedented manner into the Indian Ocean Region. As a top-secret report of a task force on national security, more popularly known as the Naresh Chandra Committee, constituted by the Indian Prime Minister in 2012, observed, “China’s development of military infrastructure in Tibet and the Indian Ocean region coupled with the PLA’s modernization changes its military capabilities meaningfully” (NSCS 2012: 18–19). This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section elaborates on India’s military objectives and strategy vis-à-vis China from the 1962 war till the end of the Cold War. It will specifically discuss India’s military strategy of deterrence by denial and the force structures that were required to achieve a dissuasive deterrent against China. The second section focuses on the changes in the military balance in the last quarter century, the shifts in India’s conventional military strategy, and consequent changes in force structures in the Indian armed forces. The last section delves into the nuclear balance between the two countries and analyzes its relationship with the conventional military balance in the Sino-Indian military equation. Though India remains committed to the doctrine of no first use (NFU), arguments in favor of leveraging India’s nuclear might to bolster its conventional deterrence are increasingly becoming a part of mainstream discourse. The nuclear balance between the two countries therefore promises to become a prominent aspect of their overall military balance.

Forging a defensive deterrent In October 1962, India fought a brief but intense war with China. India lost the war in high Himalayas which, according to Lorne Kavic (1967: 183), “exposed many deficiencies in India’s defence.” This led to a sustained effort to build its defense forces. Much of the focus went to the Army and the Air Force, as New Delhi realized the “reality of having to make defensive arrangements along a vast frontier” (Ministry of Defence 1964: 1). By late 1963, a new defense plan was formulated, and India decided to increase its defense expenditures from two percent of GDP to about five percent.1 Under this defense plan, ten mountain divisions were raised along the Himalayan frontier. India also brought MiG fighters from the Soviet Union, along with radar acquisitions from the United States, to provide an effective air defense against China (Cohen 1976). The Indian Navy had a miniscule role in any potential conflict with China but received some attention as it had to deal with the threat posed by Pakistan. India’s strategy along the Himalayan frontier was one of “deterrence by denial.” According to Wess Mitchell, “this form of deterrence depends on fear that the defender will inflict a level of pain that exceeds whatever gains the attacker hoped to achieve through aggression” (Mitchell 2015). The main approach was to ensure that a repeat of 1962 was avoided by putting up a resolute defense against any aggression from the Chinese forces. As Raju G. C. Thomas (1986: 17) argues, “the underlying Indian military

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posture (since 1962) has been to … maintain minimum border defense capabilities for a holding operation against China.” The sole focus was defending the mountain passes along the border (Thomas 1986: 138). The Air Force was similarly geared toward supporting, in limited capacity, the Indian Army’s ground operations (Thomas 1986: 138). During the 1965 India–Pakistan war, China threatened troop movements along the border to put pressure on India and support Pakistan. These proved to be “empty threats,” strengthening impressions in New Delhi that Beijing would not risk an unnecessary military confrontation with India (Mehta 2006: 106–107). The lessons learned by India were obvious: China will exercise “military prudence” until and unless there is a “certainty of military victory” or its “integrity was perceived to be threatened” (Mehta 2010: 150). India had fulfilled the latter of these conditions by giving up the option of recovering the lost territories through force. By 1967, the defensive measures initiated after the 1962 war proved successful when a major incursion by the PLA in Nathu La was successfully thwarted by the Indian Army (Kalha 2014: 182). A number of factors explain India’s defensive strategy. First, India’s aims vis-à-vis China remained very limited. Rather than planning any recovery of the lost territories, New Delhi focused on maintaining the status quo and denying China an easy victory along the frontier. Second, the Soviet–China rivalry helped ease pressure on the Indian border. The Chinese military focus remained firmly on the Soviet Union and, accordingly, in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Chinese military capability along the Indian border was comparatively thin (Cohen 1975: 205).2 Third, as an inadvertent result of India’s wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 and consequent military modernization of its defense forces, India’s deterrent capability vis-à-vis China automatically increased. By the mid-1970s, Indian assessments of the Chinese threat were reduced to Beijing’s support for insurgencies in India’s North East and provision of military equipment to Pakistan ( Joshi 2015: 6). If India’s military modernization had created a deterrent, infirmities in China’s military capability became quite evident during its war with Vietnam in 1979 (Bain 1994: 133). By the early 1980s, analysts predicted that the Indian army enjoyed an “advantageous” position against China to the extent that it could make “incisive thrusts into Tibet across the Chinese borders in the north” (Thomas 1986: 140–141). Yet, no change in strategy was perceptible. The introduction of mechanized forces in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the Indian Army remained concentrated on the western frontier with Pakistan (Gupta 1995: 447). Even when the IAF acquired Deep Penetration Strike Aircrafts (DPSAs) in the late 1970s, the target remained Pakistan rather than China.3 Vis-à-vis China, the IAF was committed to interception and air defense rather than long-range strikes against assets in the Chinese mainland (Thomas 1980: 295). Finally, the Navy never figured into India’s military strategy toward China during the Cold War. The Indian naval strategy was predominantly disposed toward sea control in its immediate neighborhood and sea denial against larger naval forces operating in the Indian Ocean (Tellis 1985, 1990a, 1990b; Naidu 1991). China’s limited naval capability ruled out any sustained involvement in the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, India’s naval capabilities were too limited to project power overseas. As Ashley Tellis (1990a: 81) has argued, India’s naval strategy toward the end of the Cold War was essentially one of creating a “cordon sanitaire” around India’s waters. “Deterrence by denial” therefore was India’s preferred military strategy. This military stalemate also helped India’s diplomatic strategy toward China. Once assured of its defenses, India could take the risk of opening diplomatic channels with the PRC.

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India had first indicated her willingness to establish diplomatic relations after the 1969 Sino-Soviet Crisis. Full diplomatic relations could only be resumed in 1976 when the two sides exchanged ambassadors. In 1981, after the visit of Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua to Delhi, the two states began their first-ever boundary negotiations after the hostilities of 1962 (Elkin and Fredericks 1983; Ganguly 1989). The initiation of this dialogue invoked compromises on both sides. China signaled its willingness to a “package deal” where the de facto status quo on the frontier could be accepted by both sides. India, for its part, gave up its insistence on China’s withdrawal from the territory it had annexed during the 1962 war. A comprehensive agreement, however, entailed constant bargaining. Part of this bargaining strategy was to check each other’s military preparedness. This resulted in a brief military confrontation during 1986 and 1987 along the India–China border in the eastern sector. Yet at the same time, the incident underlined the importance of India’s strong military posture to its diplomatic effort in finding a solution to the India–China boundary problem. In June 1986, after the PLA had occupied Sumdorong Chu in North East Frontier Agency (Arunachal Pradesh), the Indian Army mobilized an entire brigade and controlled the heights around the area. As Ambassador Ranjit Singh Kalha (2014: 203) explains, The speed of Indian deployment (operation Falcon) made the Chinese realize that they could not deploy overwhelming numbers as that would take time and Indian troops, too, could be reinforced … as the Indian Army had deployed in strength and with great speed, the Chinese realized that if any conflict ensued, the results would be quite different from those of 1962. Operation Chequerboard, as the Indian Army’s response in Sumdorong Chu was called, demonstrated India’s military capability in effectively deterring the Chinese probes (Baindur 2016: 7). India was able to signal to Beijing that a military victory along the frontier is highly doubtful (Gupta 2014: 88–89). India’s successful military deterrence of China also provided the Indian government many dividends. It first assimilated the North Eastern Frontier Agency as a full province of the Indian republic in December 1986. This military stalemate also led to a realization among the Chinese that the border could not be resolved through a military conflict (Kalha 2014: 203–204; Menon 2016: 20); for the boundary negotiations to move forward, political intervention was now necessary. As Ambassador Shiv Shankar Menon argued, the standoff “served a political purpose” (Menon 2016: 15). During the eighth round of negotiations in November 1987, both sides stressed the need to avoid any armed confrontation along the border (Chakravarthy 1987). This political intervention came with the December 1988 visit of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to China, during which the two sides agreed to initiate negotiations for “fair and reasonable” settlement of the border (Kalha 2014: 206). It was also agreed that the two sides would maintain peace and tranquility along the border, pending negotiations of a settlement (Menon 2016: 20). This process resulted in the Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement of 1993. India’s dissuasive defense had prepared the “ground situation” where the first steps toward political settlement of the India–China territorial dispute could be taken by the two sides after decades of “mistrust and hatred” (Menon 2016: 15, 20; Arpi 2013). By the early 1990s, the bilateral relationship had entered its “most cordial” phase since the 1962 war (Garver 1992: 67).

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A new paradigm: offensive defense

4

In 1998, Sino-Indian relations were damaged when India conducted five underground nuclear tests and, more importantly, justified the tests with the “threat” posed by China. However, after some years, due to sustained diplomacy from both sides, “a level of comity more normal to relations between Asia’s two giants had been restored” (Garver 2001b: 865). During this time and in the early years of the twenty-first century, the Indian military was engaged on the western front—dealing with the 1999 Kargil war and continued violence along the Line of Control (with Pakistan) and with Pakistani- supported insurgent violence in Kashmir. However, with the entry of US troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 and the toppling of the Taliban regime, violence levels in Kashmir gradually reduced. In 2003, India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire along the Line of Control. Around the same time, India started to re-focus on its western neighbor and realized that it had to play “catch up” relatively quickly. In the absence of primary documents, it is difficult to put a precise date on the shift, but since around 2005, the Indian military has in both public and semi-public forums increasingly spoken about the threat posed by growing Chinese military power—both along the border and in the Indian Ocean Region. In part this was in response to China’s impressive infrastructure development in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), which gave it the capability to rapidly mobilize and project power across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that separates the two countries. Infrastructure development, combined with massive military modernization, caused serious concern within the Indian Army (Bhardwaj 2014; Gupta 2014: 105). In the naval domain, under the guise of anti-piracy missions, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) undertook regular patrols into the Indian Ocean Region (Koh 2016). These developments, especially port calls by Chinese nuclear submarines in Sri Lanka, deeply alarmed the Indian Navy. Consequently, therefore, India’s military strategy has also seen a major shift to “deterrence by punishment,” under which the Indian military intends to take the battle into Chinese territory or target Chinese assets in the high seas. Unlike “deterrence by denial,” which aims to deny the enemy any territorial gain, a strategy of “deterrence by punishment” deters by imposing higher costs upon the adversary by being more offensive in its approach (Snyder 1961: 15). Therefore, the “dominant function” of India’s conventional deterrence strategy, to use the words of Glenn Snyder, has changed significantly. First, India now intends to communicate its deterrence by not only denying any gains to the PLA in Indian-held territory but also by imposing significant costs both in terms of Chinese territory in Tibet as well as in its war-making potential both on land and the high seas. Second, to impose such costs, India would not fight the battle only in its own territory; it would open up additional fronts on land, air, and the high seas. Finally, the strategy of “deterrence by punishment” communicates India’s intentions to escalate the conflict into new areas and avenues so as to signal to the Chinese that once initiated, Beijing cannot be sure that it can fully control the process of hostilities. There are two main elements to this strategy of deterrence by punishment: infrastructure development and military modernization. For a long time after the 1962 war, India had deliberately ignored infrastructure along the border regions, under the belief that this might facilitate “lanes of invasion” for a possible Chinese aggression (Kapoor 2013). China, however, was uninhibited in this department and especially from the late 1990s onward invested massively in infrastructure development on its side of the border. Over time, this created a defensive shortcoming for India as China could rapidly

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mobilize and move its troops to project power at selected areas. In 2005–2006, the government took a decision to develop strategic infrastructure along the LAC. Since then there has been a concerted effort to build roads and bridges, activate forward airfields, and even build railways to connect the border regions more closely with the rest of the country. To be sure, there has been some criticism of the slow pace of work, but over the last decade the logistical network to the border regions has improved significantly (Kotoky and Bipindra 2018). This has enhanced the ability of the Indian military to mobilize and deploy forward in a shorter time period. Military modernization is the second pillar of this strategy of deterrence by punishment. Over the last decade and a half, all three services have acquired capabilities and platforms aimed primarily at India’s western neighbor. The following describes these developments for each of the three services. In 2009, then Chief of the Indian Army, General Deepak Kapoor, publicly spoke about India’s “two-front” dilemma—referring to the challenge posed by Pakistan and China (Mehta 2017). The threat posed by China along the land border increasingly fetched the attention of army strategists and came across clearly in writing by professional military journals (Mukherjee 2009; Sahgal 2009; Nagual 2010; Kanwal 2012; Nair 2013). In 2012, giving in to the logic of these arguments, the government approved the creation of a Mountain Strike Corps tasked for offensive operations along the China border. This force accretion was motivated by a perception that “China had now acquired the capability to launch an offensive almost without warning” (Gupta 2014: 225). Under such a situation, the Army’s “deterrence by denial” strategy would have resulted in major territorial losses on India’s part given the time required to mobilize reserves. These additional forces gave India more options, particularly to conduct strikes into Chinese territory and to punish the PLA for any potential misadventures. Over the last few years, despite some hesitation (mainly on financial grounds), new formations have been established in the Eastern theater. Apart from manpower accretion, the Indian Army has also invested in weapons platforms more suited for mountainous terrain. For instance, in 2016, India signed a deal with the United States to acquire 145 M-777 ultra-light Howitzers—a weapon system ideally suited for mountains. The Indian Army has deployed the BrahMos cruise missile system, multi-barrel rocket launchers (MBRLs), and armor along the China border. All these have added, in an unprecedented manner, to the capabilities of the troops deployed along the border. The IAF is currently facing a crisis in terms of depleting strength of its fighter fleet (Singh 2019). Notwithstanding this, over the years, the IAF has shifted from a defensive to offensive posture vis-à-vis China. The primary task of the IAF along the Sino-Indian border had long remained one of interception of Chinese air ingress. However, the IAF is slowly projecting itself as a strategic force able to strike deep inside Chinese territory creating what the IAF doctrine calls “strategic outcomes” (Indian Air Force 2012: 10).5 It has done so by deploying its frontline Su-30MKI deep penetration aircraft, unlike the MiG-21 interceptors (which had limited operating ranges), to operate along Chinese border. Accordingly, in 2009, Sukhois were deployed at the strategically important base of Tezpur in Assam, with which India can reach almost all of Tibet. This has been combined with the acquisition of mid-air refueling capabilities, which places the IAF in an advantageous position against the Chinese Air Force (Bhatia 2013). The IAF is also currently acquiring Apache attack helicopters, which are ideal for providing supporting firepower to the Indian Army in the mountainous terrain and creating “kill zones by directing this firepower along pre-determined ingress routes in Sikkim and Arunachal”

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(Malsekar 2014: 61). Equally importantly, the IAF has invested resources in acquiring significant strategic airlift capabilities—which allows for rapid deployment of troops across various theaters of operations. This gives the Indian military an option to switch forces from one theater to another and thereby rapidly mobilize and project power. Accordingly, since 2009, the IAF has built an impressive fleet of 10 C-17 Globe Masters and 17 C-130J Super Hercules, with reports of possible additional orders, and has also placed orders for Chinook heavy-lift helicopters. In sum, these capabilities indicate that the IAF is focusing on the threat posed by China along its border and, most recently, validated its operational plans for a “two-front war” by holding one of its biggest live exercises, titled Gaganshakti, involving more than 1,000 aircraft. The Indian Navy has also been paying attention to the threat posed by the rise of China. By undertaking a number of measures, the Indian Navy now intends to be part of the larger military strategy of “deterrence by punishment” against China. First, the Indian Navy has made a serious effort at acquiring new hardware and capabilities. It has taken on lease a nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) from Russia, the INS Chakra, and the aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya (ex-Admiral Gorshkov). Also on order from various sources are seven stealth frigates, six diesel submarines, and thirty other warships. Apart from this, the Navy has purchased twelve Boeing P8i maritime patrol aircraft, forty-five MiG 29K aircraft, and over 200 helicopters. After accounting for all the other acquisitions on order, the Indian Navy has a “committed expenditure in the region of US 30–40$ billion, in the next decade, on naval hardware of strategic significance” (Prakash 2016: 156), which will enhance the operational capabilities of the Indian Navy. Second, the Indian Navy has also embarked on major new projects for naval infrastructure development, including the development of one of the largest sea bases in the Eastern hemisphere (INS Kadamba near Karwar along India’s western coastline); the construction of a state-of-the-art very low frequency (VLF) transmitting station called INS Kattabomman in Tirunelveli (Tamil Nadu); launch of the GSAT-7 satellite, which is dedicated solely for the Indian Navy; and the establishment of the Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC) in Gurugram, which links fifty-one substations to provide real-time information awareness. In sum, in terms of acquisition and doctrinal changes, all three services have gradually shifted their attention to deal with the challenge posed by the Chinese military. At one level, arguably, this is a case of bureaucratic role expansion, with the armed forces justifying their budgets by playing up new threats. However, it is not a coincidence that during this time, India and China got into multiple crises mainly along the land border—in 2013 near Daulat Beg Oldi and in Chumar, in 2014 in Demchok, and most recently in 2017 at Doklam (Dutta 2017). Therefore, this is not just a case of the military’s role expansion but rather of a clash of perspective. As discussed later, India’s shift to a more pro-active stance on the border may have contributed to these crises.

Interaction between conventional and nuclear strategy Forging a persuasive nuclear deterrent vis-à-vis China has been a long-term goal for New Delhi. It was the Chinese nuclear test in 1964 that first animated the debate over an Indian nuclear weapons capability (Mirchandani 1968; Perkovich 2002). In later decades, China receded in the background of India’s concerns and Pakistan became the most immediate motivation for India to go nuclear ( Joshi 2018). However, China did remain a long-term nuclear threat because of the disputed land border and because of

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Beijing’s political, economic, and military support to Pakistan. China’s larger strategy in Asia also demanded that India remain embroiled in the South Asian region. A nuclear India was, therefore, a problem for Beijing. Notwithstanding the long-term hostility between the two countries, India’s nuclear equation with China—unlike that of Pakistan—has remained stable. Two reasons are primarily responsible for this muted nuclear competition (Kampani 2014a). First, in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 tests, India’s nuclear deterrent was too rudimentary to have been a concern for Chinese decision-makers. Whereas China was capable of targeting the whole of Indian territory with its medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, India’s air-delivered nuclear arsenal faced serious vulnerabilities. Second, Chinese military strategy, unlike that of Pakistan, did not depend upon its nuclear forces. China followed, at least at the level of rhetoric, a “no first use” policy with regard to the use of nuclear weapons. Being conventionally superior, there was also no need for China to engage in nuclear coercion against India. However, after the 1998 nuclear tests, India’s nuclear trajectory has been determined by a quest to achieve an effective nuclear deterrent against China. Its missile program has grown substantially with the Agni series of missiles becoming the primary delivery vehicle. With the coming of Agni-V, India now has an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile capability (O’Donnell and Pant 2014). These missile platforms have been silohardened and made road and rail mobile. India is also working on developing the Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) technology, which will allow its missiles to carry multiple nuclear warheads, increasing the bang for the buck of its nuclear arsenal. The nuclear submarine program has achieved fruition with the commission of the first nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarine, the Arihant ( Joshi 2019). A series of nuclear submarines are now under production. This trajectory of India’s nuclear forces in the last two decades has been mainly determined by the requirement to achieve an effective second-strike capability (Kampani 2014b: 395). This entails that India’s nuclear forces be able to withstand an initial onslaught of nuclear attack from the enemy, yet still retain a formidable force for nuclear retaliation. The drive to attain a stable nuclear balance with China is driven by a number of factors. First, even when China continues to decouple its nuclear forces from its conventional forces, a large gap in nuclear capabilities between India and China may provide China with the capability to blackmail India in case of a serious conventional war (Nagal 2015). The India–China boundary dispute along the Himalayas continues to dodge any resolution. If anything, China’s growing economic and military power in the last two decades has made the country more, rather than less, adamant about its claims on the Indian territory. Some Indian strategists have therefore argued that India’s conventional military strategy must also be extended to the nuclear domain (Karnad 2008: 148–149; Rej 2018: 14). The rationale for interconnecting India’s conventional and nuclear strategies is two-fold. First, some have argued that China has in the recent past diluted its NFU commitment. The Indian military is also unsure that, if faced with military defeat during a conventional war, China would continue to adhere to its NFU pledge. As a former Chairman of India’s Chiefs of Staff Committee speculated, “Faced with a serious conventional military setback [in hostilities with India] China may resort to nuclear first use, initially at the tactical level” (Quoted in Karnad 2008: 148). In light of this development, India cannot sequestrate its conventional military response from its nuclear deterrent. Second, the increasing imbalance in conventional military power vis-à-vis China can only be offset by linking India’s conventional military strategy with

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its nuclear weapons. As Bharat Karnad (2015: 389) argues, the “only credible nuclear deterrent in the circumstances [of India-China war on the Himalayan front] are atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) places just behind the prepared defensive line along the likely ingress routes of the PLA in the mountains.” Third, after a substantial time-gap, China has started expanding and modernizing its nuclear forces in response to its growing military competition with the United States.6 This automatically creates pressure upon India. The most troublesome aspect of Chinese modernization has been its expansion of missile capabilities, both conventional and nuclear. Indian military analysts see in this a major missile gap between the two countries as India’s missile capabilities have not yet reached that level of sophistication and maturity. This “strategic imbalance,” in the words of a senior Indian military commander, may force India to “obtain matching or counter capabilities” by boosting the growth of its nuclear deterrent (Nagal 2015: 15–16). Fourth, the modernization of the Chinese nuclear forces also provides China with a counter-force capability of specifically targeting India’s nuclear forces and infrastructure. These developments in Chinese nuclear infrastructure and thinking engender enormous challenges for India’s nuclear deterrence, especially with regard to minimizing the expanding deterrence gap between the two counties. India also faces the threat of a Sino-Pakistani nuclear nexus. Historically, New Delhi has viewed China’s support to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program as Beijing’s way of propping up a proxy in South Asia and containing India’s rise ( Joshi 2018: 12–16). China has not only helped Pakistan in designing its nuclear weapons. It has also provided designs for much of Pakistan’s missile force (Small 2015). Strategists fear that this cooperation still continues unabated (Chow 2018). Moreover, Beijing has firmly supported Pakistan’s entry into the nuclear mainstream even when the rest of the global community has hesitated in engaging with Islamabad on civilian nuclear cooperation. China is the only country supplying new nuclear reactors to Pakistan. It has already built a nuclear reactor at the Chashma Nuclear Power Complex called Chashma-2 and is currently engaged in constructing two more reactors at the same complex. Beijing’s support is also vital for Pakistan’s atomic diplomacy. Beijing has consistently pushed the Pakistani case in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). Beijing’s strategy is as much about propping up its close ally as it is to thwart India’s membership bid. By equating the case of all Non-Proliferation Treaty (non-NPT) member countries, Beijing has ensured that India’s candidature is put on an indefinite hold (Press Trust of India 2019). SinoPakistan nuclear nexus, some have argued, is a major spoiler in Sino-Indian relationship (Menon 2013). India’s build-up of its nuclear forces in the post-1998 period has been primarily driven by the need to achieve deterrence stability with China. Even when its conventional military doctrine has seen a shift toward a more offensive strategy of “deterrence by punishment,” India remains committed to a NFU and retaliation only nuclear doctrine. It is hard to imagine that India would link its conventional and nuclear military strategies in response to China’s actions to increase military prowess on the Himalayan frontier.

Conclusion This chapter explains the shift in India’s military strategy and its big picture response to the rise of Chinese military power. In doctrinal terms and in terms of capabilities, the Indian military has shifted from a strategy of deterrence by denial to one of deterrence

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by punishment. Was the Doklam crisis in 2017 triggered by this shift in strategy? As a relatively recent event, the Doklam incident requires more research. However, one can argue that infrastructure improvements and greater troop presence on both the Indian and Chinese sides have increased each other’s visibility and could have perhaps been the trigger for the recent spate of border crises (there have been four such border crises since 2013). Significantly, after the Doklam crisis, both the governments resolved to facilitate greater military to military contacts—suggesting that inadvertent orders from lower formation commanders may have led to the crisis. However, substantiating such a claim requires more evidence. For the time being, it is enough to note that growing capabilities in both countries are leading to a jostling for power, both on land and in the seas. Whether this jostling remains peaceful or leads to the outbreak of military hostilities, inadvertent or otherwise, remains to be seen.

Notes 1 Summary of Records of Foreign Minister’s Discussion with General Maxwell Taylor, 21 December 1963. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi: B.K. Nehru Papers: 1961–1963, Subject File No. 17 (as Ambassador to the US, 1961–1966): 153. 2 According to K. Subrahmanyam, by the middle of the 1970s, the India–China force ratio on the LAC was in India’s favor. PLA strength was around 100,000 compared to India’s ten mountain divisions (approximately 200,000 troops). See Subrahmanyam (1972: 52). 3 For more on debates surrounding the DPSAs in the mid-1970s, see Joshi (2015). 4 This section draws on our earlier paper on India’s military strategy toward China. See Joshi and Mukherjee (2019). 5 For more on the shift to offensive air operations vis-à-vis China, see Sahgal (2012: 296). 6 For a perceptive discussion on the changing Chinese strategic profile, see Wu (2013).

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Offensive defense in India’s responses  237 Elkin, J. F. and Fredericks, B. (1983) “Sino-Indian Border Talks: View from New Delhi,” Asian Survey 23(10): 1128–1139. Ganguly, S. (1989) “The Sino-Indian Border Talks: A View from New Delhi, 1981-89,” Asian Survey 29(12): 1123–1135. Garver, J. W. (1992) “China and South Asia,” The Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science 519(1): 67–85. Garver, J. W. (2001a) Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press). Garver, J. W. (2001b) “The Restoration of Sino-Indian Comity following India’s Nuclear Tests,” The China Quarterly 168: 865–889. Gupta, A. (1995) “Determining India’s Force Structures and Military Doctrine: I Want My MiG,” Asian Survey 35(5): 441–458. Gupta, S. (2014) The Himalayan Face-Off: The Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (New Delhi: Hachette). Indian Air Force (2012) Basic Doctrine of the Indian Air Force, 2012 (New Delhi: Air Headquarters). Joshi, S. (2011) “India and China: Awkward Ascents,” Orbis 55(4): 558–576. Joshi, Y. (2015) “The Imagined Arsenal: India’s Nuclear Decision-Making, 1973–76,” Nuclear Proliferation International History Project Working Paper #6 ( June), available online at www. wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/WP6--The%20Imagined%20Arsenal_2.pdf. Joshi, Y. (2018) “Between Principles and Pragmatism: India and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime in the Post-PNE Era, 1974–1980,” International History Review 40(5): 1073–1093. Joshi, Y. (2019) “Angles and Dangles: Arihant and the Dilemmas of India’s under Sea Nuclear Deterrent,” War on the Rocks (14 January), available online at https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/ angles-and-dangles-arihant-and-the-dilemma-of-indias-undersea-nuclear-weapons/. Joshi, Y. and Mukherjee, A. (2019) “From Denial to Punishment: The Security Dilemma and Changes in India’s Military Strategy towards China,” Asian Security 15(1): 25–43. Kalha, R. S. (2014) India-China Boundary Issue: Quest for Settlement (New Delhi: Pentagon Press). Kalyanraman, S. (2013) “Fear, Interest and Honor: The Thucydidean Trinity and India’s Asia Policy,” Strategic Analysis 37(4): 381–387. Kampani, G. (2014a) “India: The Challenge of Nuclear Operationalization and Strategic Stability,” in A. Tellis, A. M. Denmark and T. Tanner, eds., Strategic Asia 2013–2014: Asia in the Second Nuclear Age (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Asian Research). Kampani, G. (2014b) “Is the Indian Nuclear Tiger Changing Its Stripes?” Nonproliferation Review 21(3&4): 383–398. Kanwal, G. (2012) “China’s Growing Military Power: Implications for India,” in S. Kondapalli, ed., China’s Military and India (New Delhi: Pentagon Press): 7–8. Kapoor, D. (2013) “Infrastructure Development: Key to a Credible Defence,” India Strategic (September), available online at www.indiastrategic.in/topstories3036_Infrastructure_ development_key_to_credible_defence.htm. Karnad, B. (2008) India’s Nuclear Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger). Karnad, B. (2015) Why India Is a Not a Great Power (Yet) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Kavic, L. J. (1967) India’s Quest for Security: Defence Policies, 1947–1965 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Koh, C. S. L. (2016) “‘New Normal’ in the Indo-Pacific: Sino-Indian Maritime Security Dilemma,” in A. Mukherjee and C. R. Mohan, eds., India’s Naval Strategy and Asian Security (London and New York: Routledge): 144–174. Kotoky, A. and Bipindra, N. C. (2018) “After Decades of Neglect, India Builds Roads along China Border,” The Economic Times (12 July), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/after-decades-of-neglect-india-builds-roads-along-china-border/ articleshow/58833597.cms?from=mdr. Malone, D. M. and Mukherjee, R. (2010) “India and China: Conflict and Cooperation,” Survival 52(1): 137–158.

238  Yogesh Joshi and Anit Mukherjee Malsekar, R. A. (2014) “Inducting Apaches and Chinooks in Indian Armed Forces: Preparing for the Next War,” The War College Journal (Army College of Combat, Mhow) 43(1): 58–64. Mehta, A. K. (2017) “Dilemma of a Two-Front War,” The Tribune (14 July), available online at www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/dilemma-of-a-two-front-war/436191.html. Mehta, J. S. (2006) Negotiating for India: Resolving Problems through Diplomacy (New Delhi: Manohar). Mehta, J. S. (2010). The Tryst Betrayed: Reflections on Diplomacy and Development (New Delhi: Penguin, Viking). Menon, R. (2013) “Not the Border, Nor the Ocean,” The Indian Express (12 April), available online at http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/not-the-border-nor-the-ocean/1101073/. Menon, S. (2016) Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press). Ministry of Defence (1964) Annual Report 1963–64 (New Delhi: Government of India). Ministry of Defence (2017) Annual Report 2016–2017 (New Delhi: Government of India). Mirchandani, G. G. (1968) India’s Nuclear Dilemma (New York: Humanities Press). Mitchell, A. W. (2015) “The Case for Deterrence by Denial,” The American Interest (12 August), available online at www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/12/the-case-for-deterrenceby-denial/. Mukherjee, A. (2009) “A Brand New Day or Back to the Future? The Dynamics of IndiaPakistan Relations,” India Review 8(4) (October–December): 404–445. Nagal, B. (2015) “Strategic Stability: Conundrum, Challenge and Dilemma: The Case of India, China and Pakistan,” CLAWS Journal (Summer): 1–22. Nagual, V. (2010) “Indian Military Doctrine: The Way Ahead,” The War College Journal (Army College of Combat, Mhow) 39(2): 4–5. Naidu, G. V. C. (1991) “The Indian Navy and South East Asia,” Contemporary South East Asia 13(1): 72–85. Nair, V. K. (2013) “The Challenge Posed by China’s Military Posture in Tibet,” Indian Defence Review (9 March), available online at www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/ the-challenge-posed-by-chinas-military-posture-in-tibet/. NSCS (National Security Council Secretariat) (2012) Report of the Task Force on National Security (New Delhi: Government of India). O’Donnell, F. and Pant, H. V. (2014). “The Evolution of India’s Agni-V Missile: Bureaucratic Politics and Nuclear Ambiguity,” Asian Survey 54(3): 584–610. Perkovich, G. (2002) India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Nuclear Nonproliferation (Los Angeles: University of California Press). Prakash, A. (2016) “Evolution of the Indian Navy: Towards a Maritime ‘Awakening’?” in H. V. Pant, ed., Handbook of Indian Defence Policy: Themes, Structures and Doctrines (New Delhi: Routledge India): 149–164. Press Trust of India (2019), “China Rules Out India’s Entry into the NSG without Consensus on Allowing Non-NPT Countries” (21 June), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/china-rules-out-indias-entry-into-nsg-without-consensus-onallowing-non-npt-countries/articleshow/69893448.cms?from=mdr. Rej, A. (2018) “The Sobering Arithmetic of a Two Front War,” Observer Research Foundation Special Report 67 ( July), available online at www.orfonline.org/research/the-soberingarithmetic-of-a-two-front-war/. Sahgal, A. (2009) “Perspectives of Chinese Threat to India,” Pinnacle: The ARTRAC Journal 6(2): 63–77. Sahgal, A. (2012) “China’s Military Modernization: Responses from India,” in A. J. Tellis and T. Tanner, eds., Strategic Asia 2012–13: China’s Military Challenge (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research): 277–308. Singh, S. (2019) “IAF Worry: In Next Two Years, Only 26 Fighter Squadrons, Short by 16,” The Indian Express (24 January), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/ india/indian-air-force-rafale-china-pakistan-worry-in-next-two-years-only-26-fightersquadrons-short-by-16-5553150/.

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14 Asymmetric but uneven The China–India conventional military balance Oriana Skylar Mastro and Arzan Tarapore

The strategic competition between China and India has had a conventional military dimension for decades. The two countries fought a limited war on their disputed land border in 1962 and have engaged in perennial confrontations over the Line of Actual Control (LAC) ever since. But the conventional military balance has taken on a new complexion in the past decade, as both China and India have modernized their forces and given them new missions. Both countries have equipped their forces with increasingly lethal and long-range weapons, from nuclear submarines to cruise missiles. And both have begun to use their militaries to defend ever-wider security interests, so their forces encounter each other in new locales, from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia. Where do these changes leave the conventional military balance? Military capabilities are founded, most basically, on quantities of materiel and personnel. China, for example, has just over two million active duty personnel, whereas India has just under 1.4 million; China operates 6,740 main battle tanks, and India operates 3,097; China operates fifty-seven attack submarines, and India operates fourteen. China has 3,736 more artillery pieces, 55 more major surface combatants, 1,181 more fighter/multi-role aircraft, and 162 more bombers than India (IISS 2019). But military capabilities are determined by a much wider and more important range of factors. In this chapter, we assess the conventional military balance in three parts: first, by explaining the context of each military force’s main priorities; second, by outlining key factors in military modernization; and third, by directly comparing India and China’s relative advantages as they face each other across the LAC and in the Indian Ocean. We show that the conventional balance is asymmetric but un even—that is, China has a larger and more powerful military overall, but this may not translate into military superiority in every scenario. The relative advantages are highly context dependent.

Military priorities For the past three decades, the primary mission of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been to support the main strategic objective of safeguarding China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity as Beijing defines it. This has meant developing the capabilities to deter and defeat the US military within the first and second island chains.1 To do so, China has adopted an anti-access area-denial (A2AD) approach to warfare. Anti-access refers to China’s focus on capabilities designed to prevent the US military from entering into an area of operations, for example by disrupting mobilization or excluding US forces from certain bases and thus forcing them to operate farther from the center of conflict. Area denial focuses on disruption: China’s integrated air

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defense systems, anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles, maritime bombers, and missile and torpedo-carrying submarines would all inflict high costs on the United States in the event of war, limiting its freedom of maneuver within the first island chain. Because of China’s focus on deterring, disrupting, delaying, and degrading the deployment of US forces into the region in a Taiwan, South China Sea, or East China Sea scenario, Chinese forces are heavily concentrated in the eastern part of the country. The A2AD approach also affects China’s investments: resources are increasingly diverted away from ground forces and toward the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). In other words, while China and India share a disputed border and are competing in the Indian Ocean, India falls relatively low on China’s list of threats to its national security and ability to rise to great power status (Ren 2017; Mastro 2019). The Indian military’s primary mission is the defense of India’s territorial integrity. Most of India’s uses of force have been intended to consolidate or defend its territorial unity, including several minor actions soon after independence in Goa, Hyderabad, and Kashmir and the more recent annexation of the Siachen glacier. India’s threat perceptions have long been dominated by land threats on its northern borders from China and Pakistan. Its four wars against Pakistan and one against China were all fought over disputed territories. Those territories remain disputed, and they are heavily militarized. India routinely exchanges artillery fire—and occasional special-forces raids—with Pakistan. It also seeks to fend off frequent incursions by Chinese troops across the LAC. These continental threats, unsurprisingly, dominate India’s military procurement and planning. The Indian Army attracts the lion’s share of the country’s defense budget and personnel: in the 2018–2019 budget, it was allocated fifty-five percent of the military services’ budget (whereas the Air Force was allocated twenty-three percent and the Navy, fifteen percent), in large part because it accounts for over eighty-five percent of India’s military personnel (Behera 2018a). The continental bias is even more pronounced when we include the paramilitary security forces outside the conventional military—a total of another 1,586,000 personnel (IISS 2019). In contrast, New Delhi has traditionally perceived less acute threats from its southern maritime approaches. It regards the Indian Ocean, including its islands and littoral states, as an area of natural Indian influence. India has occasionally intervened militarily to assert its primacy over smaller states—for example, in Sri Lanka in 1987–1990 and in the Maldives in 1988—especially in the face of perceived encroachment by extra-regional powers. In the past decade, India has recognized new maritime threats such as terrorism. To address these threats, and especially because the perpetrators of the “26/11” Bombay attacks in 2008 infiltrated from the harbor, India is redoubling its coastal security defenses.

Military modernization to date Thanks to China’s significantly larger economy and greater defense allocations, the PLA has modernized its forces much more ambitiously in the past decade than has India. India’s modernization has been encumbered not only by its comparative lack of resources, but also by its low bureaucratic capacity. The PLA’s key modernization initiatives (often driven by other requirements such as its competition with the United States) affect the dyadic China–India balance, creating a growing military capabilities gap between the two countries. The different trajectories of modernization are vividly apparent in four dimensions.

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Economic resources First, the Chinese military has access to significantly greater national economic resources with which to modernize, while the Indian military must make do with a smaller share of a smaller pie. Thanks to decades of high economic growth, China now has the second-largest defense budget in the world, after the United States. The official defense budget continues to enjoy real growth, even as national economic growth has slowed in the past decade. The actual defense budget is probably about twenty to twenty-five percent larger than official figures suggest, because these figures omit major spending categories such as research and development and foreign acquisitions. As the PLA’s modernization reduces the number of active duty personnel, a greater share of the Chinese defense budget will be available for capital expenditure and operations (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018). In contrast, India’s defense allocations as a share of the national budget have been stagnant for the past decade (Behera 2018b). Despite vocal calls for increased defense spending—including from parliamentary committees—New Delhi is unlikely to summon the political will to increase defense spending significantly at the cost of other urgent priorities. Even more damaging, however, is the fact that a growing share of the defense budget is being spent on pay and pensions rather than on new equipment for military modernization (Behera 2018a). India’s military services, as a result, cannot replace aging equipment, let alone expand their inventory. The Air Force is in a particularly problematic position: its aircraft strength has dwindled in recent decades as its older aircraft reach obsolescence, while insufficient resources and inefficient procurement processes delay the acquisition of replacements. It can now field only thirty-three fighter and multi-role aircraft squadrons out of a mandated strength of forty-two squadrons (IISS 2019). The core of its fighting power comes from eleven squadrons of Su-30MKI multi-role aircraft, but even they suffer extremely low serviceability rates of approximately fifty-five to sixty percent (Bedi 2017). The centerpiece of the Indian Army’s offensive capability against China has also been gutted by resource constraints. The Mountain Strike Corps, which had been bedeviled by funding shortfalls since the announcement of its creation in 2013, was suspended in 2018, and its future remains in doubt (Dutta 2018). More generally, the Indian military lacks the resources to maintain its mandated “war wastage reserves” (WWR)—the stock of equipment and ammunition required to fight expected contingencies. The Indian Army, for example, has revised downward its WWR requirement in some categories of ammunition such as anti-tank missiles. Although the new requirement mandates sufficient reserves for just ten days of intense combat, the army cannot meet even these modest demands ( Joshi 2018). The Indian military uses a planning construct of fighting a simultaneous two-front conventional war against Pakistan and China, but its resourcing and readiness shortfalls suggest that such a benchmark is grossly unrealistic. Indigenous production Second, the PLA has access to a burgeoning defense industrial sector that develops and produces advanced capabilities indigenously at improving efficiency. In contrast, India’s inefficient defense industries have struggled to deliver major systems. China’s defense industry has undergone serious reform and modernization in the past decade, largely

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in response to President Xi Jinping’s strategic push for science and technology innovation to help rejuvenate China by 2050. This 2050 rejuvenation strategy has four major milestones, two of which necessitate indigenous innovation (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018: 121). Furthermore, the PRC has taken numerous steps to maximize domestic defense development through mixed-ownership reform, which includes extensive civilian–military integration (Yang 2017), and the implementation of the Strategic Support Force, which is intended to pursue “leapfrog development” and the advancement of military innovation (Kania 2017). As a result, most of the PLA’s equipment, weapons, and platforms are made indigenously, with a number of major Chinese state-owned companies competing for contracts. For example, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation and the China Shipbuilding Industry Company have built most of the hundred or so ships purchased by the PLAN over the past ten years (Yeo 2018). In aviation, fighters like the J-10, J-11, and J-20 are built at home, though with Russian knowhow and engines. Three Chinese firms are within the top ten defense companies in the world (Nouwens and BéraudSudreau 2018). In the strategic sector of shipbuilding, China now produces its own engine plants and almost all of its shipboard weapons and electronic systems and is almost entirely self-sufficient (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018). Critics of China’s defense industry point out that its inefficient monopolistic structure undermines domestic innovation, resulting in the need to procure high-tech military equipment abroad (Chase et al. 2015: 125–134). To mitigate these problems, China has recently launched initiatives such as the 13th Defense Science and Technology and Industry Five-Year Plan and the 2025 Defense Science and Technology Plan prepared by the State Administration for Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense. While some quality deficiencies remain and the aircraft defense industry remains reliant on foreign-sourced aircraft engine components, the remarkable advances in the PLA’s capabilities demonstrate that China is rapidly becoming self-sufficient in producing high-quality advanced capabilities and is arguably already self-sufficient in many areas. India’s defense industrial sector is also largely state-owned and monopolistic, but it is highly inefficient due to cumbersome bureaucratic processes and weak institutional capacity. Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd., the monopoly aircraft producer, has long built airframes on license, including the Russian-origin Su-30MKI. But its flagship indigenously developed platform, the Tejas light combat aircraft, was initiated in the early 1980s and did not enter service until 2016—over a decade late, by which time many of its capabilities were already obsolete (Miglani and Wilkes 2015). As a result of such inefficiencies, the Indian military is still heavily reliant on foreign sources of weaponry. To mitigate its foreign dependence, New Delhi has sought to encourage domestic co-development or co-production of equipment, along with foreign partners. With the Modi government encouraging more indigenous development and production through its “Make in India” program, Indian companies have entered into joint ventures with foreign suppliers. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has a long association with various Russian suppliers and has succeeded in developing some state-of-the-art weapons such as the BrahMos cruise missile. More recently, other joint ventures—for example, between BAE Systems and Mahindra for M-777 self-propelled artillery, and between Boeing and Tata for Apache helicopter fuselages—promise several benefits. They will not only provide technology transfer to India and integrate India into global supply chains for some equipment but also forge deeper strategic partnerships with a more diverse range of suppliers, including the United States, Israel, and France.

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Organizational structure Third, the PLA has made major organizational changes to consolidate its operational-level command arrangements and improve joint war-fighting, whereas the Indian military continues to lack inter-service coordination at both the strategic and operational levels. The PLA aims to complete its most comprehensive push for restructuring and modernization over the next decade. These reforms will “reinforce the CCP’s control of the military, improve the PLA’s ability to perform joint operations, increase combat effectiveness, and curb corruption” (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018: 2). During the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, China reduced the membership of the Central Military Commission from eleven to seven (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018: 2). The service chiefs were removed from the body, leaving the chairman, vice chairmen, minister of national defense, joint staff department chief, political work department director, and discipline inspection commission secretary (DIA 2019: 15). In theory, the new command structure should facilitate joint operations and decision-making in times of crisis. To improve its ability to conduct joint operations, the PLA has also reorganized its forces from internally focused military regions into a smaller number of joint operational commands. In contrast, India’s Army, Navy, and Air Force have separate command arrangements, acquisition programs, and doctrines. Each service designs and prioritizes its own acquisitions independently of other services. This may create difficulties of interoperability, which undermine combat effectiveness, or it may lead to duplication and inefficiencies. For example, each service operates the Israeli-origin unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) Searcher Mk. II and Heron—but each service placed a separate order for each type. In command and control, in August 2019, Prime Minister Modi announced an intent to establish a Chief of Defense Staff (CDS), who would oversee the military and provide unified military advice to the government—although it remains unclear whether the position will be endowed with the necessary authority. At the operational level, the Army, Navy, and Air Force continue to operate their own single-service geographic commands—seventeen in all, none of which are co-located. India’s only tri-service joint command, the Andaman and Nicobar Command, was established to test and develop the practice of joint commands, but it has been starved of resources and institutional support from each of the services. Certain other advances have given the illusion of progress on jointness, such as the creation of an Integrated Defense Staff, the establishment of “joint” agencies for cyber, space, and special operations (each commanded by a single service), and even the promulgation of India’s first joint doctrine. But none of these initiatives amount to true jointness in the form of unified operational command or interdependent operational concepts. At the operational level, the absence of joint theater commands impedes the Indian military’s ability to coordinate plans, doctrine, and operations. Despite the recommendations of several review commissions, the concept of jointness, at both the strategic and operational levels, has been stillborn due to the resistance or lethargy of individual services, civilian bureaucrats, and political parties (Mukherjee 2016). Networked capabilities Fourth, the PLA has aggressively pursued command, control, computer, communication, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) enabling capabilities, whereas the Indian military retains a personnel-intensive force lacking in networked capabilities. In this pursuit of capabilities for “informatized” war, the PLA has emphasized advanced networked C4ISR and counter-C4ISR technologies, while simultaneously

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reducing the number of personnel in its force. Chinese strategists have determined that defeating an enemy like the United States or Japan will require integration among services and a more robust command and control network. President Xi has also set the following overarching goals for the Chinese military: by 2020, the Chinese military should have basically realized mechanization, made significant progress in information technology, and made a big leap in strategic ability; by 2035, the modernization of national defense and the military should have been largely achieved; and by 2050, the Chinese military should be a world-class force (Gao 2017). In contrast, India’s investments and doctrine have not emphasized intelligence or information technology as a key enabler. The Air Force has sought to upgrade its fighters with the addition of Israeli-made Litening Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) pods (Egozi 2016), and all of the services are acquiring various types of UAVs to improve their situational awareness. The communications and battlefield management systems, however, lag behind. India’s recently acquired P-8I maritime patrol aircraft are highly capable, but for years could not realize their potential without secure communications and data links (Rosen and Jackson 2017: 14). In 2018, India and the United States signed the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), which will over time improve India’s ability to share secure data and communications with US forces. The Indian Army’s battlefield management system is accessible only down to the Brigade level (Katoch 2017), which significantly limits the lower echelons’ situational awareness and ability to operate autonomously. These differences, in areas ranging from national resource allocation to tactical equipment and doctrine, show clearly that the Chinese military has made greater strides in modernization than India’s military has. On balance, it is larger, better-equipped, better-organized, and better-prepared for the battlefield of the future. The balance of forces is generally asymmetric. Conflicts, however, are not decided on the basis of arithmetic comparisons between adversaries. A richer analysis of the conventional balance should also consider the strategic context in specific locations where India and China are likely to engage each other.

Local military balances A military crisis or conflict between China and India is most likely to occur either on their shared land border or, with increasing likelihood, in the Indian Ocean. The land border was the site of China and India’s only war, in 1962, and has seen several tense crises and innumerable non-violent troop incursions since then. The Indian Ocean is a more recent arena of strategic competition, as the PLAN now regularly deploys into the area that the Indian Navy for decades considered its sphere of influence. Other geographic locales, such as the South China Sea and other East Asian waters, are unlikely to witness China–India security crises, at least for the next decade, because India has negligible direct security interests or military presence there. On the land border, military geography favors China. The Tibetan plateau and Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang are sparsely populated and offer China enormous strategic depth—its major population and industrial centers are far from the LAC. In that relatively flat terrain, China has built all-weather road and rail infrastructure and dual-use airfields that it can use to quickly reinforce its military presence at the border. This infrastructure includes the landmark Qinghai–Tibet railway, which was the first (in 2006) to connect Lhasa to the rest of China and was subsequently extended further toward the border; a new multi-lane expressway along a similar path, construction for which began in 2018; and a host of other road and rail links connecting the border to China’s interior.

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China has also built or expanded several airfields in Tibet and Xinjiang, many of which are dual-use facilities, to support economic development and Beijing’s political control over its restive provinces. This ground and air infrastructure has been supplemented by telecommunications infrastructure, with an extensive satellite and fiber optic network for both civilian and military communications (Chansoria 2011). In contrast, the Indian side of the border is extremely mountainous and much closer to major population and industrial centers. Because of its lack of strategic depth and its scarring historical memories of the loss of the 1962 war, India deliberately neglected transport infrastructure near the border for decades, with the expectation that parlous roads would impede any Chinese invasion. Over the past decade, India has sought to reverse this neglect with an ambitious program to build seventy-three new border roads, mostly in the northeast. Bureaucratic delays and a lack of resources, however, have caused the road-building program as a whole to fall severely behind schedule (Singh 2018). Railway construction is even further delayed. But some significant advances have been made, such as the Bogibeel road and rail bridge across the Brahmaputra River, which has greatly improved access to northern Assam and eastern Arunachal Pradesh (Shukla 2018). For the Air Force, India has reactivated fourteen Advance Landing Grounds, bare bases disused since the 1962 war, which can be used to forward deploy aircraft closer to the border in contingencies. India has deployed more forces close to the LAC than China has; indeed, given India’s lack of strategic depth, even Indian garrisons and rear areas are closer to the LAC than their Chinese counterparts. However, given the steep uphill terrain and inadequate lines of communication, these Indian forces would still face delays in reinforcing the border. While recognizing these ground-force shortfalls, the Indian military has sought to develop a more robust offensive capability against China with a combination of armor, aircraft, and missiles. Thus, it raised two new divisions as part of the new Mountain Strike Corps and plans to deploy new variants of BrahMos cruise missiles and its latest Rafale multi-role fighters in Arunachal Pradesh. China, in contrast, maintains a relatively small (though expanding) force on the border. Consequently, the Indian Army can often assert a stronger tactical position on the LAC—although such advantages may be short-lived and highly localized. In the summer of 2017, for example, Chinese and Indian troops faced off at Doklam, a disputed area at the China–India–Bhutan border tri-junction. Indian soldiers had physically impeded a PLA attempt to extend a road into territory that India recognized as Bhutanese. While the crisis remained non-violent, and both India and China reinforced their positions to the rear, the Indian contingent held a local tactical advantage. The Chinese road-building crew eventually withdrew (Mastro and Tarapore 2017). Within months of the crisis, however, China had built an array of permanent facilities to house a larger forward troop presence adjacent to the Doklam standoff site and a new road extension, also in disputed territory, that Indian forces could not interdict (Bhat 2018). Beyond the LAC, the PLA can more readily reinforce its positions. It garrisons heavy maneuver formations near major cities such as Urumqi, Nyingchi, and Lhasa that are well-connected to the border with high-capacity roads and railways. In case of contingency, they could be forward deployed to the border and sustained in part through pre-positioned logistics and the rapidly expanding civilian infrastructure for energy and water ( Jha 2017). For either side, reinforcing border security or preparing for offensive operations would be a significant logistical undertaking, requiring a large and slow movement of forces that would be observable by the other side.

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Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean, military geography favors India. The Indian Navy enjoys the advantage of having several home ports nearby, on the Indian Ocean. It can therefore more readily deploy vessels across the area and sustain them for longer periods or at greater distances compared to an extra-regional power like China, whose vessels require greater endurance to operate in the Indian Ocean. India also has the geographic advantage of sitting astride the sea lines of communication (SLOC) upon which China (like all other East Asian states) depends for trade and energy supplies—giving the Indian Navy leverage to interdict Chinese shipping. From Indian home ports, the Indian Navy can easily deploy to loiter at or screen the Indian Ocean’s key chokepoints: the Malacca, Lombok, and Sunda Straits, leading to the Pacific Ocean; the Strait of Hormuz, leading to the Persian Gulf; and the Bab el-Mandeb, leading to the Red Sea. In addition to ships, the Indian Navy operates US-origin P-8I maritime patrol aircraft and has the added advantage of shore-based surveillance and, in a conflict scenario, shore-based cruise missile and air interdiction support. These operating advantages are extended by the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian territory next to the Malacca Strait. Indian naval and air platforms can project from several bases in the island chain, the home of the Indian military’s only joint command, the Andaman and Nicobar Command. In contrast, the Chinese military must operate in the Indian Ocean with extended supply lines, reducing its vessels’ endurance and increasing their vulnerability. While the PLAN has a viable A2AD capability off the Chinese mainland’s east coast, any activity in the Indian Ocean is expeditionary: vessels must cross the Malacca Strait and face the constraints of limited logistics and maintenance support. An Indian Ocean presence is, however, an important strategic mission for the Chinese military. Such a presence would allow it to overcome its “Malacca dilemma”—a recognition that China’s economic power is highly vulnerable to interdiction through narrow chokepoints, especially the Strait of Malacca. To mitigate those challenges, China has sought to establish permanent bases and access to facilities across the Indian Ocean littoral. China’s first overseas military base, established in Djibouti in 2017, is more than a naval logistics base; it also includes an underground facility, UAVs, and a contingent of marines (US Department of Defense 2018). China also has various levels of access or control at several other civilian ports in the Indian Ocean under the rubric of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s overall strategy for building transport and energy infrastructure, and through it, economic and political influence across Eurasia (Rolland 2017). China’s most secure Indian Ocean foothold is in Pakistan, where it has begun a decades-long program to develop the port of Gwadar and may develop another military base nearby, at Jiwani. China also took control of Hambantota port in Sri Lanka when the local authorities could not make adequate debt repayments. In a similar way, it may gain control of more ports across the Indian Ocean littoral, from Mombasa in Kenya to Kyaukpyu in Myanmar (Szechenyi 2018). While these are all civilian ports, they could serve a military logistics or maintenance function in the future. India has similarly sought to develop infrastructure across the Indian Ocean, both for its own military uses and to deepen security cooperation with its regional partners. To support its priority mission of enhancing its maritime domain awareness, India has built shore-based surveillance radars in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Sri Lanka. It fuses data from these and other sensors at the newly established Information Management and Analysis Centre. It has also undertaken to develop port facilities in Sabang, Indonesia at the entrance to the Strait of Malacca and has secured military logistics access to Duqm port in Oman. And it has signed logistics-sharing agreements with the United States

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and France, enabling Indian ships to receive logistics support from Indian Ocean territories such as Diego Garcia and Réunion (Samanta 2018). This infrastructure supports an expanding Indian Navy operational presence in the region. India’s 2015 maritime security strategy defined the entire Indian Ocean as its primary area of interest. The country’s priorities as outlined in this strategy are to protect energy supplies and shipping, provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, combat terrorism and piracy, and deter aggression and coercion (Indian Navy 2015). Operationally, the Indian Navy has since 2017 conducted near-constant “mission-based deployments” at several critical locations in the Indian Ocean, including chokepoints, that allow it to monitor the PLAN’s presence and to position itself to respond quickly to emergencies (Pandit 2018). The Indian Navy has aggressively accelerated its combined training exercises, both bilaterally and multilaterally, with a growing range of partners, including the United States, Japan, Australia, Singapore, and Indonesia. It has also undertaken a wide range of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, from the Boxing Day tsunami relief across Southeast Asia in 2004 to noncombatant evacuations in Yemen in 2015. The PLAN has a smaller presence, but it is sufficiently capable to concern New Delhi. China’s naval strategy moved explicitly from a coastal defense to an expeditionary posture in 2015, incorporating the newly expanded mission of “open seas protection” of Chinese SLOCs and global maritime interests (The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China 2015). China’s shipbuilding program has also shifted to favor larger ocean-going platforms (Koh 2018). The PLAN’s Indian Ocean deployments are the responsibility of its largest fleet, the South Sea Fleet, which in recent years has begun to launch combat readiness patrols through the South China Sea and—briefly— to cross the Lombok and Sunda Straits into the Indian Ocean (US-China Economic and Security Review Commission 2014). To the Indian Navy’s surprise and chagrin, PLAN submarines have also docked at Karachi and Colombo ports. The PLAN has maintained a constant presence in the Indian Ocean since 2008, when it began to deploy a three-ship anti-piracy task force in the Gulf of Aden. With the decline of piracy and the expansion of Chinese security interests, that task force now provides naval support for a range of China’s regional interests, including noncombatant evacuations from Yemen and Libya, and is supported by the new Chinese base in Djibouti. Critically, the Gulf of Aden deployment now also serves an important training function for the PLAN, which gains vital expeditionary experience for a wide array of vessels, including submarines (Erickson and Strange 2013; Shinn 2017).

Conclusion: relative advantages and implications As the foregoing discussion has shown, the conventional military balance between China and India is highly contextual. The PLA remains, in aggregate, a more powerful military. It has the resources to quickly—and, to an increasing extent, indigenously— produce large numbers of key weapons systems such as submarines, surface combatants, long-range bombers, tanks, and artillery. It is also more technologically advanced; it fields some fifth-generation aircraft, for example, and has a more robust enabling network of C4ISR. And it has undertaken painful organizational reforms, shedding large numbers of personnel and establishing new joint operational structures to improve its combat effectiveness. On all those measures, the Indian military lags. Nevertheless, China’s advantages are uneven, and the outcome of any specific scenario is unpredictable. The dynamics of a crisis on the LAC would depend on the tactical balance

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at that particular locale, which varies along the length of the LAC. If such a crisis were to flare into a limited war, the PLA would be better positioned to quickly surge offensive forces to the border, using standoff strikes to gain an operational advantage. In the Indian Ocean, India holds significant advantages and could inflict extensive harm on Chinese military interests by threatening China’s shipping, SLOCs, or fixed bases. Depending on the scenario, India may also benefit from military or nonmilitary assistance from its regional partners, with which it has increasingly close defense relationships and shared security interests. However, such options would be highly escalatory, and they would be viable only if India had the political will to expand a local coercive confrontation. In any scenario, the conventional military balance will play only one part in the strategic outcome. Whether in peacetime deterrence, crisis, or open conflict, contemporary strategic competition involves a wide suite of national capabilities. Nonconventional military power, including cyber exploitation and attacks, ballistic missiles, space-based C4ISR, special forces, and information operations, may play at least as important a role in conflict outcomes as conventional capabilities. Nonconventional and nonmilitary instruments of power, especially political warfare, have become particularly salient in recent years as certain states have begun to use “gray zone” tactics to achieve political goals short of conventional conflict. Indeed, such methods—sometimes known as the “three warfares”—have become a staple of Chinese strategic behavior (Mattis 2018). Thus, while conventional military capabilities offer a highly visible way of comparing China’s and India’s national power, they are an imprecise and unreliable measure of the likelihood that either state would prevail in strategic competition.

Note

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250  Oriana Skylar Mastro and Arzan Tarapore Dutta, S. (2018) “Indian Army puts Mountain Strike Corps Aimed at China in Cold Storage,” The Print (12 July), available online at https://theprint.in/defence/indian-army-putsmountain-strike-corps-aimed-at-china-in-cold-storage/82319/ (accessed 8 January 2020). Egozie, A. (2016) “Rafael Will Supply 164 Examples of Its Litening Targeting Pod to the Indian Air Force, for Use on Four Types of Combat Aircraft Including New Delhi’s Sukhoi Su-30 Fighters,” Fight Global (blog) (29 June), available online at www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/india-acquires-litening-targeting-pod-426811/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Erickson, A. and Strange, A. M. (2013) “No Substitute for Experience: Chinese Antipiracy Operations in the Gulf of Aden,” US Naval War College China Maritime Studies 10, available online at www.andrewerickson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/China-Antipiracy-Opsin-GoA_CMS10_201311.pdf (accessed 5 February 2019). Gao, C. (2017) “3 Major Takeaways from Xi Jinping’s Speech at the 19th Party Congress,” The Diplomat (18 October), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/3-majortakeaways-from-xi-jinpings-speech-at-the-19th-party-congress/ (accessed 5 February 2019). IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies) (2019) The Military Balance 2019 (London: IISS). Indian Navy (2015) “Ensuring Secure Seas: Indian Maritime Security Strategy,” available online at www.indiannavy.nic.in/sites/default/files/Indian_Maritime_Security_Strategy_ Document_25Jan16.pdf (accessed 5 February 2019).Jha, S. (2017) “China’s Creeping Invasion of India,” The Diplomat (6 July), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2017/07/ chinas-creeping-invasion-of-india/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Joshi, M. (2018) “Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel: Budgets, Organisation and Leadership in the Indian Defence System,” ORF Special Report 74 (August), available online at www.orfonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ORF_Special_Report_74_Defence_1.pdf. Kania, E. (2017) “China’s Strategic Support Force: A Force for Innovation?” The Diplomat (18 February), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2017/02/chinas-strategic- supportforce-a-force-for-innovation/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Katoch, P. (2017) “Battlefield Management System for Indian Army—Where Are We?” Indian Defence Review (31 December), available online at www.indiandefencereview.com/news/ battlefield-management-system-for-indian-army-where-are-we/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Koh, C. (2018) “China-India Rivalry at Sea: Capability, Trends and Challenges,” Asian Security (November), doi: 10.1080/14799855.2019.1539820. Mastro, O. (2019) “It Takes Two to Tango: Autocratic Underbalancing, Regime Legitimacy and China’s Responses to India’s Rise,” Journal of Strategic Studies 42(1): 114–152. Mastro, O. and Tarapore, A. (2017) “Countering Chinese Coercion: The Case of Doklam,” War on the Rocks, available online at https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/countering-chinesecoercion-the-case-of-doklam/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Mattis, P. (2018) “China’s ‘Three Warfares’ in Perspective,” War on the Rocks (30 January), available online at https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/chinas-three-warfares-perspective/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Miglani, S. and Wilkes, T. (2015) “Exclusive: Modi Pushes ‘Obsolete’ Made-in-India Plane on Reluctant Military,” Reuters (7 October), available online at www.reuters.com/article/usindia-defence-aircraft-idUSKCN0S10DD20151007 (accessed 5 February 2019). Mukherjee, A. (2016) “Fighting Separately: Jointness and Civil-Military Relations in India,” Journal of Strategic Studies 40(1–2), doi: 10.1080/01402390.2016.1196357. Nouwens, M. and Béraud-Sudreau, L. (2018) “Global Defence-Industry League: Where Is China?” Military Balance Blog (blog) (28 August), available online at www.iiss.org/blogs/ military-balance/2018/08/china-global-defence-industry-league (accessed 5 February 2019). Office of the Secretary of Defense (2018) Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018 (16 May) (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense), available online at https://media.defense.gov/2018/Aug/16/2001955282/-1/1/1/2018-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT.PDF (accessed 5 February 2019).

Asymmetric but uneven military balance  251 Pandit, R. (2018) “Increase in Deployment of Chinese Ships in Indian Ocean Region: Admiral Sunil Lanba,” The Times of India (26 February), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/committeed-to-provide-capacity-building-assistance-to-friendly-naviesadmiral-sunil-lanba/articleshow/63072419.cms (accessed 5 February 2019). Ren, T. (2017) “Jianchi Junshi Fucong Zhengzhi, Zhanlve Fucong Zhanlvu” (Supporting Politics over Military, Political Strategy over Military Strategy), Zhongguo jun wang (6 January), available online at www.81.cn/jmywyl/2017-01/06/content_7439669.htm (accessed 5 February 2019). Rolland, N. (2017) China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research). Rosen, M. and Jackson, D. (2017) The U.S.-India Defense Relationship: Putting the Foundational Agreements in Perspective (February) (Washington, DC: Center for Naval Analyses). Samanta, P. D. (2018) “Trailing China, a New Defence Deal with France Gives India a Foothold in Indian Ocean,” The Print (31 January), available online at https://theprint.in/opinion/stateof-play/a-new-defence-deal-with-france-gives-india-a-foothold-in-indian-ocean/32604/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Shinn, D. (2017) “China’s Power Projection in the Western Indian Ocean,” China Brief 17(6), available online at https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-power-projection-western-indian-ocean/. Shukla, A. (2018) “Brahmaputra Bridge to Connect Arunachal through New ‘Strategic Railway’ Line,” Business Standard (26 December), available online at http://ajaishukla.blogspot. com/2018/12/brahmaputra-bridge-to-connect-arunachal.html (accessed 5 February 2019). Singh, V. (2018) “Govt. Puts Delayed Road Projects on Indo-China Border on Track,” The Hindu (4 March), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-puts-delayed-roadprojects-on-indo-china-border-on-track/article22920308.ece (accessed 5 February 2019). Szechenyi, N. (2018) “China’s Maritime Silk Road Strategic and Economic Implications for the Indo-Pacific Region,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (March), available online at https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/180404_Szechenyi_ ChinaMaritimeSilkRoad.pdf?yZSpudmFyARwcHuJnNx3metxXnEksVX3. The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China (2015) “China’s Military Strategy,” available online at www.scio.gov.cn/zf bps/ndhf/2015/Document/ 1435159/1435159.htm (accessed 5 February 2019).US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (2014) “China’s Navy Extends Its Combat Reach to the Indian Ocean” (14  March), available online at www.uscc.gov/research/chinas-navy-extends-its-combatreach-indian-ocean (accessed 5 February 2019). US Department of Defense (2018) Assessment on US Defense Implications of China’s Expanding Global Access (December), available online at https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/14/2002079292/1/-1/1/EXPANDING-GLOBAL-ACCESS-REPORT-FINAL.PDF (accessed 5 February 2019). Vorndick, W. (2018) “China’s Reach Has Grown; So Should the Island Chains,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (22 October), available online at https://amti.csis.org/chinasreach-grown-island-chains/ (accessed 5 February 2019). Yang, Z. (2017) “Privatizing China’s Defense Industry,” The Diplomat (7 June), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2017/06/privatizing-chinas-defense-industry (accessed 5  February 2019). Yeo, M. (2018) “China’s Military Capabilities Are Booming, But Does Its Defense Industry Mirror That Trend?” Defense News (14 August), available online at www.defensenews. com/top-100/2018/08/14/chinas-military-capabilities-are-booming-but-does-its-defenseindustry-mirror-that-trend/ (accessed 5 February 2019).

15 China–India and maritime security A contest for power and influence in the Indian Ocean David Brewster

Strategic competition between India and China has the potential to profoundly affect the stability and security of the Indo-Pacific. The countries’ relationship in the maritime realm is part of a broader relationship that includes elements of cooperation, coexistence, and competition. But there are also factors that tend to give the maritime security relationship its own, often negative, dynamic. Delhi considers itself the leading Indian Ocean state and a natural leader of the Indian Ocean region (IOR) and as the regional security manager of South Asia. It takes a somewhat proprietorial attitude toward the Indian Ocean, perceiving the presence of extra-regional powers, particularly China, as essentially illegitimate. In contrast, Beijing is assertively expanding its economic, political, and military role in the Indian Ocean and refuses to recognize India’s claims for a special role in the region. These factors are leading to what may become a protracted contest for dominance in the Indian Ocean. As India’s national power grows while China’s presence in the IOR expands and as the US presence likely declines in the long term, there is a real risk that the interactions between India and China will become ever more competitive. The chapter is organized in four sections. The first deals with India’s strategic aspirations in the IOR. The second turns to China’s growing role in the region. The third engages India’s response to China. The final section relates to the future of Sino-Indian strategic competition in the maritime realm.

India’s strategic aspirations in the Indian Ocean India has long harbored ambitions to be the leading power in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, though few Indian officials would publicly admit it, many in Delhi would like to see the Indian Ocean as “India’s Ocean,” at least in the long term (Brewster 2014). As one US analyst commented, New Delhi regards the Indian Ocean as its backyard and deems it both natural and desirable that India function as, eventually, the leader and the predominant influence in this region—the world’s only region and ocean named after a single state. (Berlin 2006: 60) India’s aspirations in the Indian Ocean reflect several strands of thinking. To some extent India’s ambitions in the Indian Ocean are connected with its aspirations to be recognized as a major power of global ranking.1 As former Indian Foreign Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, expressed it:

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after nearly a millennia of inward and landward focus, we are once again turning our gaze outwards and seawards, which is the natural direction of view for a nation seeking to re-establish itself, not simply as a continental power, but even more so as a maritime power, and consequently as one that is of significance on the world stage. (emphasis added) (Mukherjee 2007) For the moment, however, India’s maritime security concerns are principally defensive. With the growth of its trading interests, India has ever greater imperatives to secure its sea lines of communication (SLOCs) across the Indian Ocean. India’s colonial experience has also long driven a view that it must either establish a forward-defense perimeter in the Indian Ocean to preclude intervention in the subcontinent or that extra-regional powers must otherwise be excluded from the vicinity of India (Panikkar 1945). Ideas about an exclusive sphere of influence in and around the Indian subcontinent have sometimes been labeled as India’s “Monroe Doctrine.” This concept grew from the British Raj, which maintained virtually exclusive control over the Indian Ocean, and intentionally echoed the US Monroe Doctrine, which was propounded by the United States in the nineteenth century as a way of rejecting the presence of “outside” powers in the Americas. The term was expressly invoked by Jawaharlal Nehru shortly after India’s independence as an expression of India’s determination to rid the subcontinent of residual colonial influence and exclude other powers from the entire South Asian region (Nehru 1985: 133). India’s Monroe Doctrine has been expressed in several different ways, but broadly involves an assertion that the military presence of “outside” powers in India’s neighborhood is illegitimate and that India’s neighbors must instead rely upon India as a regional manager and security provider (Gupta 2014). India’s antipathy toward the presence of extra-regional powers was focused on the United States for much of the Cold War, and more recently toward China. Although the idea of an exclusive zone of influence is usually primarily focused on India’s special role in South Asia, it has also influenced Indian strategic thinking about the entire IOR. Even if it has become apparent that China’s growing material strength may make it unrealizable in the short to medium term it remains a long-term aspiration (Brewster 2014). But concepts of “spheres of influence” do not sit easily with Westphalian ideas of sovereignty and non-interference. Public discussion of India’s maritime security role in the Indian Ocean is now often expressed by the Indian government using a new terminology: that India should be recognized as a “net security provider” to its region. This was pronounced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2013 and was adopted by the Modi administration from 2014 (Miglani 2015).2 What constitutes the role of “net security provider” is left elastic and undefined, but in broad terms it expresses an aspiration and intention for India to act as a benign provider of public goods in its region. Despite India’s maritime aspirations, in practice its role in the Indian Ocean has long been constrained by its continentalist strategic perspectives in which the maritime realm has a secondary priority. Historically, major military threats to India are perceived to have come over land, primarily from India’s northwest. This land-based focus was reinforced by the complete domination of the Indian Ocean by the Royal Navy during most of the colonial era—meaning that the Indian administration did not need to concern itself much with the maritime realm. The continuing threats on India’s western and northern borders and from domestic insurgencies since Independence has led to the Indian Army holding an indisputably dominant position within the Indian military establishment, in comparison to which the Indian Navy and its supporters have had much less influence.

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This is changing, if slowly. Indian maritime strategists are seeking to expand India’s “mental map” in strategic affairs to include the maritime dimension. One reason for an increased focus on the Indian Ocean is that realistically any significant geographic expansion of Indian influence can realistically only take place in the maritime domain. The expansion of India’s influence in continental Eurasia is largely blocked by competitors and geography. Expansion and modernization of the Indian Navy The Indian Navy is currently undergoing a long-term modernization program that, if implemented in accordance with public announcements, could in time make India the leading naval power in the IOR. However, there remain some significant questions about whether these plans will be fully implemented. According to the 2019 Military Balance (IISS 2019: 268–269), the Indian Navy has around 135 vessels, including one aircraft carrier, twenty-seven destroyers and frigates, and sixteen submarines (including one SSBN and one SSN), in addition to amphibious, support, and coastal vessels. The Indian Coast Guard also operates around hundred armed patrol vessels of various sizes (IISS 2019: 271). This makes it the largest maritime power among Indian Ocean states by size, although there are some significant capability gaps, including in submarine and anti-submarine warfare. Under its Maritime Capability Perspective Plan 2012–2027, the Navy plans to build some 150 new ships by 2027, including two additional aircraft carriers. According to the Indian Navy (as of July 2018), this would result in a 200-ship fleet by 2027 (PTI 2018). But there are significant doubts that the target will be achieved—due, among other things, to problems in the acquisition processes and capacity constraints in Indian shipbuilding (Mazumdar 2018). The Navy recently announced that a reduction in navy’s share of spending in India’s 2020 budget would mean that it would need to scale back procurement plans and was now targeting a 175-ship fleet by 2027 (Pubby 2020). The overall expansion of India’s naval capabilities has been accompanied by doctrinal developments reflecting expanded responsibilities. The Indian Navy’s 2015 strategy document, Ensuring Secure Seas: India’s Maritime Security Strategy, included a number of developments relevant to India’s relationship with China. It confirmed India’s primary area of interest as being most of the Indian Ocean, with portions of the western Pacific being of secondary interest, and India’s role as a “net security provider” across this extended space. Deterrence (against China and Pakistan, although they are not named) is listed as the navy’s first priority; the navy’s role as a security manager and provider of public goods is also expanded upon (Limaye 2017). In announcing the Indian Navy’s expansion plans in December 2018, the then Indian Naval Chief, Admiral Sunil Lanba, claimed that it was prompted by China’s growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean (Gurung 2018). But in reality, the “China threat” is only one of several factors driving the expansion of the Indian Navy (Limaye 2017). Other factors also remain important, including protection of maritime trade, maritime terrorism, and threats from Pakistan (although the latter is likely to become more and more asymmetric over time). In broad terms, the growth and opening of India’s economy over the last two decades have expanded India’s economic and other interests across the region, requiring an expanded naval range. The range of potential threats is reflected in the current and planned composition of the Indian Navy, where there is a marked emphasis on the surface fleet (including aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates, and amphibious vessels) useful for sea lane protection/

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sea control. In contrast, India has hardly grown its conventional submarines, giving it only a relatively limited sea denial capacity (Ladwig 2012). Finally, it should be noted that although India’s naval expansion plans may seem impressive on paper, they come with important caveats. The Indian Navy has a long history of announcing plans that are rarely fully funded and implemented in practice. Despite considerable rhetoric about the importance of the maritime realm, India still spends a small portion of its overall defense budget on its navy. In 2019–2020, the Indian Navy was due to receive only around thirteen percent of its total defense budget (Bhalla 2019), a significantly smaller proportion than in prior years. This proportion compares poorly with the proportion devoted to naval spending by maritime powers such as Australia, the United States, and, most likely, China. Accordingly, unless there is a significant change in India’s defense priorities, its naval capabilities are unlikely to fully reflect its overall economic power and interests compared with other countries.

China’s growing role in the Indian Ocean region Despite being a major Eurasian continental power, for most of its history China has been almost completely cut off from direct access to the Indian Ocean. High mountain ranges, deserts, and jungles extend across southern Asia, cutting off much of the continental hinterland from easy access to the sea. These formidable barriers mean that there are few overland pathways between the Eurasian hinterland and the Indian Ocean (Brewster 2017). This geographic disconnect contributed to China’s historical orientation away from the Indian Ocean. To the extent that China pursued maritime interests, it largely did so only in East Asia, on its Pacific coast, from which it generally did not stray very far. Beijing’s recent efforts to promote the exploits of Zheng He, a Chinese mariner who led several expeditions to the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century, only underlines the country’s virtually complete historical absence from the Indian Ocean in the modern era. This disconnect is changing, principally driven by China’s growing economic role in the IOR and an accompanying demographic presence, which are now increasingly shaped by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The initiative includes the development of new overland pathways through Pakistan and Myanmar that will, for the first time ever, provide substantial direct transport connections between China and the Indian Ocean. The BRI also involves the development of ports to support China’s maritime pathways across the Indian Ocean to the Pacific as part of the so-called Maritime Silk Road. Chinese infrastructure projects, involving investment in ports, roads, and railways under the umbrella of the BRI, are among the most controversial features of China’s regional presence, in part because of concerns over “undue” influence over local governments and the potential military use of nominally commercial infrastructure. China’s BRI is adding to its growing strategic imperatives in the Indian Ocean that will likely drive a much larger and long-term naval and military presence in the region. China’s most important interest in the Indian Ocean is the protection of its trading routes, over which energy is carried from the Middle East and Africa. In 2017, China imported some sixty-seven percent of its oil requirements (with around eighty percent of that transported via the Indian Ocean). Its oil import requirements are expected to grow to eighty percent of total oil needs by 2035 (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018: 54). China’s Indian Ocean SLOCs for energy imports are vulnerable to various threats, especially at the narrow chokepoints through which most maritime trade must pass, including Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Strait of Malacca (the latter of which

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was transited by some eighty percent of total oil imports in 2017) (Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018: 54). These threats may come from non-state actors such as pirates and terrorists or from state adversaries, including those that may try to use China’s vulnerabilities as a bargaining chip in a wider dispute. But China also has many other important strategic interests in the IOR that will likely drive its naval presence in the region (Brewster 2019). These include the need to provide security for Chinese people and investments in unstable countries and the ability to evacuate Chinese nationals in response to local crises. In 2004, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs adopted guidelines which made protecting PRC citizens abroad a national priority, and that has been reflected in several humanitarian operations China has conducted in the IOR over the last decade. China’s economic interests in the Indian Ocean are also growing. These include the extraction of hydrocarbons (off the coast of East Africa and the Bay of Bengal) and undersea mining (where China has been one of the most active countries in seabed mining exploration in international waters). In recent years, there has been a major expansion in China’s fishing fleet that is pushing ever further into international waters, including in the Indian Ocean. Beijing’s views on India’s regional role Beijing also takes a quite different view from India on the legitimacy of China’s presence in the IOR. Many Chinese strategists believe that India lacks comprehensive national power and tend to give it a status below that of other Asian powers, making China less respectful toward India compared with other powers. Overall, there is also a pronounced asymmetry in threat perceptions: India tends to regard China as a much greater threat than China does India. Importantly, Beijing strongly resists any suggestion that India has any right to restrict China’s relationships in the IOR or that India should be somehow recognized as having a sphere of influence in the region, which Beijing argues is a nineteenth-century concept (Yu 2018). China takes the view that it is free to enter into relationships as it chooses with India’s neighbors. Some believe that there is potential for a relationship characterized by cooperation more than competition. Chinese analysts such as Zhu Cuiping argue that India and China have similar (if not necessarily shared) interests in the Indian Ocean (Zhu 2018: 29–45). First, China and India will need to maintain stability in the Indian Ocean in the post-America era. Second, both countries seek to benefit from cooperation in the overlapping area between India’s “Look East” strategy and China’s Western strategy. Third, China and India have similar needs in addressing non-conventional security challenges in the Indian Ocean. According to Zhu, this creates overlapping strategic spaces that may bring opportunities for cooperation, rivalry for strategic benefits, and may even result in fierce conflicts. Zhu argues that on the one hand, India hopes to weaken the US’s control over the Indian Ocean with the support of China, while on the other hand it doesn’t want to create an opening for a more assertive China. Zhu argues that China would make a good partner for India because China doesn’t have the intention or capability to dominate the IOR, and it will not strengthen its influence at the cost of other countries’ interests. Zhu acknowledges that China finds it extremely difficult to convince India that its rising regional influence will pose no threat to India in the future. India’s traditional geopolitical ideology and its deep-rooted China threat perceptions will only be magnified as China grows richer and more powerful. There is a risk that India will be trapped in a “prisoner’s dilemma” instead of benefiting from cooperation.

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Despite these arguments, in practice, differences in perceptions have led Beijing to pay little heed to Indian sensitivities about China’s relationships in the region—whether or not those sensitivities may be justified. Some argue that China suffers from strategic “blind spots” in understanding the perspectives of its neighbors, particularly with India. Strong Chinese beliefs about their country’s history may make it difficult for the Chinese to put themselves in their neighbor’s shoes and reassure them about China’s growing power. These beliefs may also make China dismissive of Indian fears (Garver 2018). These blind spots are exacerbated by China’s approach toward the BRI. Beijing claims that these initiatives are purely economic and takes the position that it does not require India as a partner in the region. Thus, it need not explain its regional initiatives to India nor ask for India’s cooperation. Indeed, in many cases, Beijing appears to be actively seeking to displace Delhi as a key regional partner for local states. China’s future naval presence in the Indian Ocean For more than a decade, China has been building a “Blue Water” navy capable of supporting an extended presence in the IOR. Over some twenty-five years China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has been undergoing a major modernization and expansion which now includes aircraft carriers, nuclear and conventional submarines, and logistics support vessels. As of 2017, the PLAN had some 317 ships in active service (Myers 2018), the largest number of any navy in the world. Indeed, the speed of the PLAN’s expansion in recent years has been remarkable. According to one analyst, since 2014, China has launched more submarines, warships, principal amphibious vessels, and auxiliaries than the total number of ships currently serving in the navies of Germany, India, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom (Childs and Waldwyn 2018). Some analysts have projected that by 2030 the PLAN fleet may consist of around 550 ships, including some 450 surface ships (including small combatants) and ninety-nine submarines (Fanell and Peters 2017). This would likely make the PLAN the dominant naval force up to the first island chain that encircles the Yellow, East China, and South China seas, while it will also enjoy significant advantages out to a farther limit running roughly from Japan to Indonesia through islands such as Guam and Palau. However, predicting the future size of the PLAN fleet is a difficult exercise, and it is possible that the ultimate size and composition of China’s navy is an unsettled issue even among Chinese military and political leaders (O’Rourke 2018). It is almost certain, however, that China will develop an ever-greater naval presence in the Indian Ocean in coming years. The expansion of the PLAN’s capabilities is part of China’s two-ocean strategy extending its responsibilities beyond the Pacific into the Indian Ocean. That has involved revising its doctrine and developing new capabilities, facilities, and support arrangements with host countries in the IOR (You 2018). Much of this still remains in the realm of aspiration. As Andrew Erickson commented in early 2019: “At present, the PLA remains incapable of conducting most far-seas operations against a capable opponent, including force projection, sustainment, capacity, coordination, defense and opposed intervention” (Erickson 2019: 259). A major challenge for China’s navy in the Indian Ocean will be the tyranny of distance. Any sustained and significant Chinese naval presence, whatever its missions, will require local bases or at least assured access to naval facilities of local partners. In 2017, China opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti. Its facilities will allow for the docking of up to four vessels, including replenishment and amphibious vessels, which is

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consistent with a primary focus on Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW), including support for anti-piracy, UN peacekeeping, and Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations in the western Indian Ocean, Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. But the Djibouti base has significant limitations, including the lack of a dedicated airfield suitable for manned fixed-wing aircraft. Any significant and sustained Chinese naval presence across the Indian Ocean would require additional basing. In addition to its current base at Djibouti, China will likely establish a naval and air presence in Pakistan, and probably elsewhere in the IOR such as East Africa and the central/eastern Indian Ocean. Otherwise it will need to rely as much as possible on “commercial” Chinese logistics providers located in neutral ports. Andrew Erickson, a US naval analyst, argues that China’s efforts to establish logistical support facilities over the next decade would still leave it far from the naval port network that naval sea powers have needed to ensure their ability to project major naval power under all conditions (Erickson 2019: 262). Any enhanced Chinese naval strategy in the IOR would also require substantial airpower support. China’s lack of maritime surveillance and strike aircraft in the Indian Ocean currently places it at a substantial disadvantage to potential adversaries such as India (Menon 2018). It would be difficult for China to adequately plug this gap without acquiring local air basing facilities in several locations in the IOR. Although China’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean has been growing, there are still considerable uncertainties about its size and composition. The PLAN’s future presence and mission in the Indian Ocean could evolve in several different ways. For the last decade, the PLAN’s principal focus in the region has been on MOOTW, including anti-piracy and humanitarian relief operations. Many have assumed that the PLAN is pursuing a sea control strategy to protect its SLOCs across the Indian Ocean and achieve naval dominance of the region (as the US Navy achieved some decades ago). However, it may be a mistake to automatically equate China’s strategic ambitions with the experience of the United States. There are reasons to believe that sea control over large parts of the Indian Ocean would represent a major challenge for China that may not be realistic for some decades if at all (Brewster 2019). It may be that, like the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, China will pursue its own strategic imperatives in the IOR, involving a mix of capabilities that provide China with options in the event of a contingency affecting its interests. Although China’s naval presence in the IOR has been steadily growing over the last decade, Beijing has so far been relatively cautious and incremental. Its current naval presence is limited to around five or six surface vessels (including survey ships) and submarine deployments, although this number may spike during a crossover between transiting vessels (Gurung 2017). In assessing the future Sino-Indian naval balance, figures on the aggregate size of the PLAN fleet also need to be treated with caution. As discussed below, the Indian Ocean is the main area of any potential contest with India and the theater where virtually all of India’s forces would be deployed. In contrast, only a small fraction of China’s naval capabilities is likely to be deployed to the Indian Ocean, and the country’s maritime focus will likely be overwhelmingly in the Pacific theater for the foreseeable future. The future naval balance of power in the Indian Ocean is unlikely to be unipolar (US or China or India) or bipolar (e.g. US–China or even India–China). It is much more likely to be multipolar, involving several major naval powers (US, India, China) as well as several capable middle powers (including France and Australia), each pursuing their own interests.

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India’s response to China’s maritime presence China’s growing presence in the IOR causes significant anxieties for India. For many in Delhi, the BRI neatly fits a long-standing narrative that China is pursuing a so-called String of Pearls strategy in the Indian Ocean that involves the development of a string of naval bases right across the northern Indian Ocean. China’s relationships in the region are generally not perceived, within the Indian government, as being merely a legitimate reflection of its interests. Rather, many Indian analysts perceive China’s regional relationships as being directed against India in one way or another: either as a plan of maritime “encirclement” or to keep India strategically off balance in the broader IOR, just as China’s relationship with Pakistan has long kept India off balance in South Asia. There is a view in Delhi that India needs to act quickly to secure its position in its neighborhood. Some years ago, Indian strategists hoped that China would remain preoccupied in its immediate maritime theater in the Western Pacific, with the Indian Ocean having a much lower priority (Khilnani et al. 2012: 164–177). However, in the last several years, China’s BRI has progressed and its influence has grown far faster than most analysts predicted. This has left India scrambling to play catch up in securing its regional relationships and trying to minimize (and, if at all possible, exclude) China’s presence. But India’s concerns about any Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean are not only motivated by a desire to secure or expand India’s influence and leadership role. There is also a desire to maintain China’s strategic vulnerability in the Indian Ocean. Unlike other dimensions of the Sino-Indian relationship, such as economic power, the nuclear balance, or the conventional military balance in the Himalayas, where India is at a major disadvantage to China, the Indian Ocean is the theater in which China is relatively vulnerable, giving India opportunities to pursue an asymmetric strategy against China. In strategic terms, the Indian Ocean represents “exterior lines” for China and “interior lines” for India (Holmes 2016). The Indian subcontinent physically dominates the northern Indian Ocean, giving India a natural centrality. The geography of the Indian Ocean also provides India with many military advantages, including short lines of communication to its own bases and resources. China has corresponding disadvantages, including the need to deploy its naval forces through narrow and dangerous chokepoints and then cope with uncertain logistical support when it arrives (Holmes 2012). These factors mean that the Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean, under any realistic scenario, is unlikely to present a substantial military threat to Indian territory or trade. On the contrary, the Indian Ocean is the one area in which India holds a clear military advantage over China. As former Indian Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Mehta, commented, “The weak area for China today is the Indian Navy. We sit in the Indian Ocean and that is a concern for China and they are not happy as it is not so easy for them to come inside” (Zeenews 2009). Although China has been seeking to ameliorate its strategic vulnerabilities by different means, especially at the so-called maritime choke points such as the Strait of Malacca, it is difficult to see China ever being in a position to fully defend the entirety of its SLOCs that run from the Strait of Hormuz around the Indian subcontinent and through the Strait of Malacca. There is little value in having the capability to defend only a portion of the SLOCs—China must be capable of defending their whole length against both state and non-state actors. Scenarios involving the PLAN interdicting Indian SLOCs in the Indian Ocean while leaving China’s trade unhindered are also very difficult to envisage.

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India’s relative advantage over China in the Indian Ocean gives the maritime dimension of the relationship a special strategic significance. India’s strategy of building its naval presence and relationships at or near the entrances/exits to the Indian Ocean and in southern India makes it apparent that Delhi believes there is value in creating an implicit threat of interdiction of China’s SLOCs. American academic John Garver argues that in the event of a military conflict between the two countries, India might be tempted to escalate from the land dimension (where it may suffer reverses) to the maritime dimension (where it enjoys substantial advantages), and employ those advantages to restrict China’s vital Indian Ocean trade (Garver 2001: 277). Similarly, a report by a panel of leading Indian strategists advocated that India should leverage “potential opportunities that flow from peninsular India’s location in the Indian Ocean” as part of an asymmetric strategy toward China (Khilnani et al. 2012: 164–177). The maintenance of China’s relative vulnerability in the Indian Ocean may therefore be an important element in the overall balance of power between India and China. It also considerably complicates Sino-Indian relations in the Indian Ocean. India’s response to China’s maritime presence in the Indian Ocean India is responding to China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean in several ways. As discussed previously, India is expanding and modernizing the Indian Navy, although there is a marked emphasis on sea control over sea denial capabilities. India is also developing naval and air facilities beyond the subcontinent as a cost-effective way of extending India’s military reach across the Indian Ocean. Over the last several years, India has opened several new bases in its Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which stretches across the western entrance of the Strait of Malacca—the PLAN’s main point of entry into the Indian Ocean. A second element involves reinforcing security relationships with its regional neighbors in order to limit China’s military presence and regional influence, while simultaneously expanding India’s presence. Delhi has, for example, been seeking to construct military facilities on the territory of friendly states such as Seychelles and Mauritius (Chaudhury 2018; Pilling 2018). These are intended to consolidate India’s role as a security provider to those island countries while also providing useful staging points to interdict Chinese energy supplies that cross the southwest Indian Ocean. India’s regional strategy also includes significant economic assistance and investment in neighboring states in response to China’s BRI. In 2014, the Modi government announced its SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) initiative, involving sponsoring maritime connectivity projects in small Indian Ocean states as an alternative to the BRI. However, the effectiveness of this initiative is limited by India’s relatively limited financial resources and its own institutional inefficiencies. For this reason, India has sought to partner with Japan as a valuable source of infrastructure finance, including through the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC) initiative. In 2018, this economic strategy was expanded to include the United States and Australia under the label “Free and Open Indo Pacific.” A third approach is to reinforce security cooperation with other powers that share India’s concerns about China, including the United States, Japan, France, Australia, and Indonesia. Enhanced cooperation with these naval powers can be an effective way of leveraging India’s power. For example, logistics exchange arrangements with the United States (signed in August 2016), France (signed in March 2018), and Australia (2020), facilitate access by Indian warships and aircraft into the various military bases operated by the US

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and  France throughout the region, including, for example, in Diego Garcia, Reunion, Djibouti, Oman, and the Persian Gulf. A strategy of working with others to limit China’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean is helped by geography: the Indian Ocean has few maritime entry points, and vast distances across the water with few islands between. The semi-enclosed nature of the Indian Ocean has long created a premium for powers that can control the few points of entry into the ocean and deny rivals access to the ports necessary to sustain a naval presence. During the Cold War, the United States dissuaded most Indian Ocean states from cooperating with the Soviet Union, meaning that the Soviet Navy could gain only very limited access to modern maintenance and logistics facilities in the Indian Ocean. Soviet vessels were forced to deploy into the region from bases in the Mediterranean or the Pacific, entailing long voyages through narrow chokepoints where they could be tracked and potentially interdicted, and often had to rely on afloat logistical support. India, in cooperation with the United States and other partners, are now employing a similar denial strategy against China. This is why the competition for influence among the island and littoral states of the Indian Ocean is such a key element in maritime security competition. Sino-Indian maritime competition in the Pacific Maritime competition between India and China is also extending into the Pacific Ocean, although in a less intense way. India’s emergence as a major Indo-Pacific power has involved the expansion of its strategic interests beyond the Indian Ocean, including the growth of important economic and political relationships in East Asia and consequently the heightening of India’s interests in maintaining a stable Indo-Pacific regional order and ensuring freedom of navigation. On top of this is a wish to counterbalance China closer to its home turf, as a quid pro quo for China’s activities in the IOR. The Indian Navy conducts regular exercises in the South China Sea and Western Pacific with countries such as Singapore, the United States, Japan, and Vietnam as part of developing a naval presence in that theater. However, despite India’s substantial interests in the Pacific, that theater has a secondary place in the Sino-Indian maritime security relationship, reflecting India’s realization of its military limitations. As India’s Chief of Navy, Admiral Lanba, commented in December 2018, the balance of power rests with India over the Chinese naval forces in the Indian Ocean, but in the South China Sea the balance of power rests with China (Gurung 2018). This has caused Delhi to limit any possibility of confrontations with China in the Pacific. Although Hanoi has sought to encourage India to establish a naval presence in Vietnam as part of its strategy of partnering with major powers and internationalizing its territorial dispute with China, Delhi has so far resisted. The Indian Navy has a clear understanding that any confrontation between it and the PLAN in the South China Sea would place India at a severe disadvantage.

The future of Sino-Indian strategic competition in the maritime realm The emergence of both China and India as major Indo-Pacific powers is causing a historically unprecedented overlap of their strategic interests, both on land and in the maritime realm. Differences in perceptions of status and regional roles are driving what appears to be a sharper and more sustained political and economic contest in the Indian

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Ocean that in some ways is coming to resemble the jostling for power and influence between the superpowers during the Cold War. Recent developments in the Indian Ocean island states of Sri Lanka and the Maldives provide useful examples. Over the last several years, the growth of China’s economic presence in conjunction with the BRI has significantly increased Beijing’s political influence in those countries. Many Indian policymakers and analysts fear that, among other things, China might use its influence to obtain rights to base warships or aircraft, which could have a significant effect on the balance of military power in the region. This competition has been an important factor in political instability in those countries. In both those states, political leaders tagged as “pro-China” or “pro-India” have battled for power, with the support of their foreign backers. In February 2018, the “pro-China” president of the Maldives, Abdulla Yameen, who saw his position under threat, moved to arrest opposition leaders and shut down democratic institutions. He then called on Beijing’s support to forestall a possible Indian military intervention against him. There were widespread fears that China would establish naval and air bases in the country, with a significant impact on regional security (Brewster 2018). Some months later, Yameen was thrown out of power, to be replaced by the “pro-India” President Ibu Solih. India then offered more than US$1.4 billion in economic assistance to the Maldives, while Solih provided assurances that he would not permit any Chinese security presence in the country (Roy 2018). Sri Lanka also saw an extended constitutional crisis in November and December 2018 when the Sri Lankan president moved to sack Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister and install Mahindra Rajapaksa, considered to be “pro-China.” During his previous term as president he had been closely involved in several dubious deals with China, including allowing the construction of a new port at Hambantota that was subsequently handed over to Beijing (Abi-Habib 2018). The sacking of the prime minister led to a standoff between the president and parliament, each insisting on their own prime ministers, with both China and India publicly supporting their preferred candidates. The crisis caused significant further damage to Sri Lanka’s democratic institutions. The return of the Rajapaksa family to power in the presidential elections in late 2019 has re-ignited intense jostling for influence between China and India. There is a significant risk that strategic competition of this sort will not only continue in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, but also spread to affect other states in the IOR, particularly countries with smaller populations, weak economies, and/or unstable governments, all of which make them relatively vulnerable to outside influence. At stake is long-term political and economic influence in the region, as well as access to naval and air facilities by India and China. This does not mean that India will not be prepared to make some partial accommodations to China. The April 2018 Wuhan Summit between Indian Prime Minister Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping raised the potential for a rapprochement between India and China in the Indian Ocean. This may have involved a recognition that India’s aspirations toward spheres of influence were no longer realistic. As one Indian official commented, The days when India believed that South Asia was its primary sphere of influence and that it could prevent other powers, such as China, from expanding its own clout are long gone … India cannot claim sole proprietorship of the region. We can’t stop what the Chinese are doing, whether in the Maldives or in Nepal, but we can tell

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them about our sensitivities, our lines of legitimacy. If they cross it, the violation of this strategic trust will be upon Beijing. (Malhotra 2018) According to sketchy reports on the summit, the two sides agreed to enhance policy coordination in their neighborhood to discuss cooperation in the form of “China, India plus one.” Long Xingchun, Director for Indian Studies at the China West Normal University, notes that the two-plus one mechanism “can not only enhance mutual trust between China and India, [also] but prevent other South Asian countries from being caught in between” (Aneja 2018).

Conclusion The relationship between India and China is a broad and complex one, within which the Sino-Indian maritime security relationship has its own, frequently negative, dynamic, as Delhi’s views on its special role in the Indian Ocean and its preference to exclude competing powers encounters a significant expansion of China’s presence in the region. Many in Delhi fear that China will develop a substantial naval presence in the Indian Ocean in pursuit of its growing interests. Although China’s naval and military presence is set to grow, China’s overall maritime security strategy is not yet clear. A “sea control” strategy may be beyond China’s reach for the foreseeable future; instead China may seek to develop naval capabilities that could mitigate some of the risks that it faces in the region. In the meantime, we are seeing an ever-sharper and long-running contest between India and China, particularly in the maritime realm. Although 2018 saw a partial tempering in relations between the two countries, there are few reasons to believe that they will come to a long-term accommodation about their respective security roles in the Indian Ocean. The fundamental reasons for strategic competition between India and China in the Indian Ocean run deep, and any understandings reached at Wuhan are almost certainly only tactical and limited in time. Indeed, as China’s presence in the IOR grows and the US presence likely declines, there is a real risk that their interactions will become ever more competitive and even come to resemble the contests for power and influence that were witnessed during the Cold War.

Notes 1 There are parallels between these views and China’s maritime security ambitions in the Pacific as a foundation for its global ambitions. 2 The term “net security provider” seems to have been borrowed from the description of India’s role in the IOR in the 2012 US Department of Defense Strategic Guidance.

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China–India and maritime security  265 Ladwig, W. (2012) “Drivers of Indian Naval Expansion,” in H. V. Pant, ed., The Rise of the Indian Navy: Internal Vulnerabilities, External Challenges (London: Ashgate): 19–40. Limaye, S. (2017) “Weighted West, Focused on the Indian Ocean and Cooperating across the Indo-Pacific: The Indian Navy’s New Maritime Strategy, Capabilities, and Diplomacy,” Center for Naval Analyses (April), available online at www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/DRM2016-U-013939-Final2.pdf. Malhotra, J. (2018) “Stepping Back from Maldives, India Tells China,” The Indian Express (28 March), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/india/stepping-back-frommaldives-india-to-china-doklam-5113855/. Mazumdar, M. (2018) “Pushing the Boat Out,” Naval Warfare International 1(3) (September/ October): 28–31. Menon, R. (2018) “Scenarios for China’s Naval Deployment in the Indian Ocean and India’s Naval Response,” in D. Brewster, ed., India and China at Sea: Competition for Naval Dominance in the Indian Ocean (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018): 125–136. Miglani, S. (2015) “Modi to Ramp Up Help for Indian Ocean Nations to Counter China Influence,” Reuters (5 March), available online at https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-indiamodi-islands-idUKKBN0M10AZ20150305. Mukherjee, S. P. (2007) “International Relations and Maritime Affairs—Strategic Imperatives,” Speech at the Admiral Ak Chatterjee Memorial Lecture, Kolkata, Ministry of External Affairs (30 June), available online at www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/1866/. Myers, S. L. (2018) “With Ships and Missiles, China Is Ready to Challenge U.S. Navy in Pacific,” The New York Times (29 August), available online at www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/ world/asia/china-navy-aircraft-carrier-pacific.html. Nehru, J. (1985) Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 3, Series 2 (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund). Office of the Secretary of Defense (2018) Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018 (16 May) (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense), available online at https://media.defense.gov/2018/Aug/16/2001955282/-1/1/1/2018-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT.PDF. O’Rourke, R. (2018) China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress (1 August) (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service). Panikkar, K. M. (1945) India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Sea Power on Indian History (London: George Allen & Unwin). Pilling, D. (2018) “India’s Plans on Archipelago in Mauritius Cause Unease,” Financial Times (25 October), available online at www.ft.com/content/30199e16-d6d7-11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8. PTI (2018) “Indian Navy Aiming at 200-Ship Fleet by 2027,” The Economic Times (14 July), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/indian-navy-aiming-at200-ship-fleet-by-2027/articleshow/48072917.cms. Pubby, M. (2020) “Indian Navy Cutting Down on Procurement Due to Budget Cuts,” The Economic Times (16 January), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ defence/indian-navy-trims-acquisition-list-due-to-budget-cuts/articleshow/73281243.cms. Roy, S. (2018) “India Offers $1.4 Billion Aid to Maldives,” Indian Express (18 December), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-offers-1-4-billion-aid-tomaldives-5498261/. You, J. (2018) “The Indian Ocean: A Grand Sino-Indian Game of ‘Go’,” in D. Brewster, ed., India and China at Sea: Competition for Naval Dominance in the Indian Ocean (New Delhi: Oxford University Press): 90–110. Yu, J. (2018) “Don’t View Maldives from Lens of Sphere of Influence,” Global Times (12 September), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/1115020.shtml. Zeenews (2009) “China Afraid of India’s Naval Presence in the Ocean” (13 August), available online at https://zeenews.india.com/news/nation/china-afraid-of-indias-naval-presence-inthe-ocean_555196.html. Zhu, C. (2018) India’s Ocean: Can China and India Coexist? (Singapore: Springer).

16 China and India Two models for AI military acquisition and integration Lora Saalman

A decade ago, a volume on India’s military modernization levied the criticism that India often seeks to arm itself with the most advanced platforms without aiming (Cohen and Dasgupta 2010). When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), the opposite logic holds. India could be said to be “aiming without arming.” In spite of its reputation as an information technology hub, India has been lagging on AI integration. Recognizing this, India has initiated multi-disciplinary task forces to develop a conceptual framework for AI development across a range of sectors (DIIP 2018; PIB 2018). Yet when it comes to implementing these frameworks, particularly in national defense, India’s current procurement and research and development (R&D) structure presents a number of challenges. By contrast, China could be said to have shifted to “arming without aiming” over the past decade, particularly when it comes to AI. In other words, China has leapt ahead with fielding of AI technologies, with its strategic documents following many of these breakneck advances. Technical writings on everything from neural networks in hypersonic glide vehicles to swarm capabilities in unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles illustrate a profusion of stakeholders already well-engaged in the push toward leading the AI field. When viewed in light of the 2017 “New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” (State Council 2017), China’s approach seems to have been to funnel as much funding and talent as possible into AI-related projects and then to shape a doctrine to fit. And, unlike the stove-piped structure in India that has only recently begun to try and bridge the civil–military divide, China’s long-standing fusion of the two facilitates its development and integration of dual-use AI technologies. Within this AI pantheon, five dual-use applications stand out for India’s and China’s national defense modernization: computational military reasoning, intelligent and autonomous unmanned weapon systems, AI-enabled information processing and intelligence analysis, cyber defense and warfare, and electronic warfare. Both countries have undertaken efforts to integrate these technologies with varying levels of success. This chapter explores the differences and similarities between the Indian and Chinese models. To date, China remains ahead in operationalization of these AI technologies. At the same time, India shows promise if it is able to deliver on its recently released conceptual frameworks and transition from simply aiming to arming.

India New and emerging technologies like AI and Robotics will perhaps be the most important determinants of defensive and offensive capabilities for any defence force

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in the future. India, with its leadership in [the] information technology domain, would strive to use this technology tilt to its advantage. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, April 2018 (Pandit 2018) This [AI] is where the future is going to be. We need to prepare ourselves for the next-generation warfare which will be more and more technology-driven, more and more automated and robotised. India’s Secretary of Defence Production, Ajay Kumar, May 2018 (PTI 2018) Creating an AI ecosystem One of the core requirements for AI development, as with any technology, is ample and diversified funding. Over the past five years, the Indian AI sector has been estimated to consist of over 400 companies comprising $180 million annually in revenues, with investment nearly doubling in one year to reach $77 million in 2017 (Mishra 2018; Pant 2018). In the latest budget, the Indian government set aside $480 million for investment into emerging technologies, including AI (Ravi and Nagaraj 2018). Part of this sum was meant to build upon the approximately 29,000 AI professionals from such centers as the University of Mumbai, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), University of Pune, and Delhi University (Gupta 2018). While much of India’s AI activity has been devoted toward the foundation of an AI ecosystem at the civilian level, there is also a national defense component. The Indian government has set military priorities in such areas as AI-enabled communications, “unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned naval vessels, unmanned tanks, and automatic robotic rifles,” among others (PTI 2018). Segments of India’s AI ecosystem have been in place for decades. Its Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) under the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has been at the center of many of the country’s efforts since 1986. In 2000, the R&D groups of Electronics and Radar Development Establishment that specialized in command control communication and intelligence (C3I), communication and networking, and communication secrecy merged with CAIR (CAIR 2019a). With this merger, CAIR has become a core laboratory for R&D in defense-related information and communication technology. In association with CAIR, academic institutions like the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and IITs have been tasked periodically with conducting research in areas of interest to the laboratory (CAIR 2019a). As recently as January 2019, CAIR’s primary focus was on research and development of net centric systems for tactical command control and communication systems, intelligent systems, unmanned systems, information processing, and information security (CAIR 2019b). Among the five CAIR directives, the organization has also highlighted “driving the national debate where technology policy is critical to preserving national security and self-sufficiency” (CAIR 2019a). This description points to two dilemmas of AI development that are inherent to the Indian system, one stemming from a difference with China and the other from a similarity. First, unlike China, India is a vibrant democracy with an active debate on how to best integrate and control AI. At the same time, this has led to obstacles in India in mobilizing funding and talent. Second, both India and China prize self-sufficiency—but India’s partnerships with Israeli and Russian firms on many

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of its military platforms indicate that even with requirements for technology transfer, the country remains dependent on external inputs. In the case of AI, however, foreign collaboration can have advantages. There are a diverse range of AI developments in cooperation with external partners that could have spin-on effects for the Indian military. For example, the big data storage supplier Data Direct Networks contracted to engage Council of Scientific Industrial Research- Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute to design, test, and execute computation and storage solutions for AI, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DDN 2018). Adobe has also announced plans to open an AI lab in Hyderabad, following a meeting between the Telangana IT minister, KT Rama Rao, and Adobe chief executive officer, Shantanu Narayen (Agarwal 2018). Further, the Swedish company Ericsson has expressed an interest in opening a Global AI Accelerator in Bangalore, focused on automation and AI systems, with a second AI center in Chennai (Kannan 2018). At the domestic level, there has also been collaboration between the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) and the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) to set up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Artificial Intelligence in Bangalore with the help of the state government of Karnataka (Sinha, Hickok and Basu 2018). While smaller in scale than domestic and international collaboration found in China, these examples serve as solid launching points. They contribute to the overall AI and machine learning ecosystem in India, expanding its body of trained talent and domestic strengths. As these capabilities proliferate into other arenas, including national defense, the oxygen for India to carry some of these developments into national defense aims will expand. Of particular note in growing this AI ecosystem in the military sector, India faces a key obstacle with its often opaque and stove-piped system dominated by DRDO. Recognizing this, India’s recent AI-related task forces have sought representation from such diverse stakeholders as Tata Consultancy Services, Defence Public Sector Undertakings, the Indian Space Research Organisation, the Indian Army, Navy, and Air Force, Bharat Electronics Limited, the IIsc, the IITs, Idea Forge, Velamakanni Fractal Analysis, Carnegie India, Celeris Technologies, High Tech Robotic Systemz Ltd., Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, TCS Innovation Labs, HCL Technology, Cognizant, XLPAT Labs, uTrade Solutions, Ministry of Electronics and IT, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, NITI Aayog, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Department of Science and Technology, Unique Identification Authority of India, and even purportedly the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (PIB 2017, 2018; Artificial Intelligence Task Force n.d.). In addition to this domestic inclusivity, India has also begun looking to foreign companies and models. In doing so, while empowering domestic industry through the “Make in India” campaign, Delhi may be able to engage in some of the expansive high-technology growth found in China with its “Made in China 2025.” Launched in 2014, “Make in India” covers 25 sectors—including aviation, defense manufacturing, defense exports, electronic systems, information technology, and space—and encourages companies to manufacture their products in India and to engage in dedicated investments into manufacturing (DIIP 2019). While there are understandable barriers to information sharing between the civilian and military sphere, the

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dual-use nature of AI requires greater transparency and cross-collaboration to flourish. Similar to China, India applies its own form of techno-nationalism, as well as insistence on technology transfer, under its offset system. While there are indications that India’s often complicated and cumbersome procedure has often served as a deterrent to foreign firms, India has a track record of working with Israel in aerospace and with Russia throughout all defense sectors (Mohammad 2018). Given these two countries strong background in AI-enabled technologies in conventional and even nuclear platforms, there appears to be room for AI-related foreign inputs into the Indian defense sector. At the domestic level, India’s AI defense ecosystem has begun to expand beyond CAIR. India is building a range of new centers, including the CoEs and the International Centre for Transformational Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI). These bodies could be instrumental in undertaking some of the diversification of innovation that has allowed China to thrive. In the Chinese case, the introduction of mega-projects has allowed some space and momentum for cooperation among sectors. Similarly, in India there has been a suggestion that the ICTAIs may commission “moonshot projects” that span multiple departments or may spearhead the formation of limited-term independent project teams (Ravi and Nagaraj 2018). This has further contributed to speculation as to whether ICTAI Inc., the overall governing body, could be the future equivalent of the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for AI research in India. To achieve this would require a high level of autonomy and a designated budget, as well as the means to bring in multiple stakeholders across the private and public sectors to lead innovation in dual-use AI-related technologies. To this end, the Inter-Ministerial National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (IM-ICPS) shows promise (NITI Aayog 2018). It suggests a four-tier framework for promoting research focused on all aspects of the technology life cycle: research, technology deployment, translation, and management. The International Centres of New Knowledge (ICON) focus on the creation of new knowledge through basic research; the Centre for Research on Sub-Systems (CROSS) seeks to develop and integrate core technologies developed at the ICON level; the Center for Advanced Studies, Translational Research and Leadership (CASTLE) engages in development and deployment of application-based research; and the Centre of Excellence in Technology Innovation and Transfer (CETIT) works on the commercialization of these technologies (NITI Aayog 2018). This framework provides an interlocking set of mechanisms for taking innovation from R&D into application. To populate all of these new initiatives, however, one of India’s other pressing challenges remains its limited number of trained researchers. While this lacuna may seem surprising in light of India’s large population and dominance in IT-related fields, the concern over a relative dearth of trained experts appears repeatedly throughout domestic discussions of the future of AI. Some estimates claim that only four percent of AI professionals in India have worked on such emerging technologies as deep learning and neural networks. There is also a significant gap of doctoral research scholars in the field. While the new AI framework seeks to enhance educational access, even the IITs are struggling to keep up with demand, with brain drain remaining a persistent issue. As one sign of working to overcome this gap, there has been collaboration between India’s Central Board of Secondary Education and the

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Royal Academy of Engineering in the United Kingdom, which have undertaken an initiative under the Newton Bhabha Fund on “AI and deep learning skilling and research” (LeadingIndia.AI 2019). This collective works with University College and Brunel University in London and Bennett University in India, as well as industry partners NVIDIA, AWS Educate, Videoken, Edvantics, among others. Initiatives such as this one—comprising approximately ten collaborator institutions, 1,000 basic partner institutions, 10,000 teachers, and 1,000,000 students—promise to reduce the gap in training on essential AI capabilities. Civil–military partnership Beyond diversification of the ecosystem, India has begun to build a “partnership model” between the armed forces and the private sector. Of late, this has taken the form of a multi-stakeholder task force on AI integration, constituted by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and headed by V. Kamakoti of IIT Madras, which released a 72page report on AI integration and recommendations in March 2018 (DIIP 2018). This is definitely a step in the right direction, though the document has been critiqued for its generalities within sectors that span manufacturing, financial technology, health, agriculture, technology for the differently abled, national security, environment, public utility services, retail and consumer relationships, and education. As a report in Business Today alleges, it is really only able to skim the surface, given its wide scope and limited space (Datta 2018). When it comes to the report of the Ministry of Defence’s own AI task force under the Chairmanship of Shri N Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons, the focus is understandably sharper. While the DRDO continues to dominate domestic innovation in the military sphere, the lead role for industry in the task force is a step toward a more inclusive defense structure. Moreover, this grouping has targeted aims, including: (1) establishment of a tactical deterrent in the region; (2) support for AI’s peaceful and commercial use; (3) mitigation of catastrophic risk; (4) visualization of potential transformative weaponry of future; (5) facilitation of monitoring of non-state actors; (6) development of intelligent, autonomous robotic systems; (7) enhancement of capabilities for collection and analysis of data and also creation of data; (8) boosting of cyber defense; (9) studies on the use of AI by other leading countries including United States, China, Japan, Germany, Russia; (10) inquiries on the level of AI/ML development in India in general and specific in the context of defense needs; (11) means to integrate AI in aviation, naval, land systems, cyber, nuclear, and biological warfare; (12) suggestions on defensive and offensive needs including counter AI needs; (13) arrangements for AI safety required within defense ecosystem; (14) policy and institutional interventions required to regulate and encourage robust AI-based technologies for defense sector; (15) suggestions for increased focus on AI within DRDO, BEL, service units, selected academic institutions of the country; (16) ways ahead on collaboration with domestic and US startups/commercial industry in the field of use of AI for defense purposes; (17) recommendations of Requests for Information (RFIs) over the next two years on dual-use AI capabilities; and (18) funding required to achieve aforementioned goals (PIB 2018). In achieving these goals, there are some positive signs of how India may start to diminish some of the pre-existing silos. Among these, Nirmala Sitharaman, who headed the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry, in her position heading the Ministry of Defence could play a vital role. Sitharaman’s experience in both the economic and

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defense spheres has the potential to be a sizable boon to AI promotion and future collaboration between the public and private sectors, since she has spearheaded business incubators and AI task force formation. If leveraged, her position can make greater use of the role of AI in both civilian and military arenas, while also empowering the private sector to supplement CAIR under the DRDO. Still, while India has made strides in forming a conceptual framework for its AI acquisition, its approach does not necessarily lend itself to a prioritization of military applications. While private sector engagement may be expanding, India remains an AI ecosystem with only a few major players. In China, there is a profusion of stakeholders and grassroots activity that can be channeled into the government and military. By contrast, much of the Indian approach remains centralized in just a few public sector departments. And despite its promotion of a multi-stakeholder process through its AI task force, India is still dominated by an inherent lack of transparency and limited cross-collaboration between private industry and the public sector. This translates into a weaker tender process that is dominated by a select few, while others who might be more innovative from the university and private sector level do not have the funding and support to compete. Moreover, the high cost and low availability of computing infrastructure required for the development, training, and deployment of AI-based services remain an obstacle to the ability of startups to even enter the cycle. Cloud infrastructure, though growing rapidly, is limited in terms of its capabilities. Also lacking are AI-as-a-service models of cloud platforms. The lack of infrastructure has led many Indian AI startups to incorporate their businesses outside of the country, which places AI beyond the reach of Indian researchers in government labs and many industries. While some have suggested that initiatives like GI Cloud (MeghRaj) are a step in the right direction, they are ill-equipped to address these issues at scale. Startups face numerous barriers and a paucity of information resources and computing power needed in the data intensive field of AI (NITI Aayog 2018). Further, an ongoing difficulty in the Indian military AI ecosystem is that even as there has been an effort to reach out to local firms and startups as suppliers, many of the current AI-related tenders only seek spare parts and components. This contrasts with China, where in 2017 the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) issued a call for tenders for thirteen transformative technology projects that are privileged as recipients of state funds to be realized by 2021. One of these projects is the development of an AI chip that seeks to be more powerful than a product offered by US chipmaker NVIDIA (Ding 2018). The scope of Chinese ambition, often coming from industry as much as from government, creates an ecosystem built on growth and moonshots, rather than scraping around the margins to innovate. China’s model is beset by its own challenges, but merits further analysis for lessons learned for India. Unmanned systems Given this overview, it is illustrative to undertake a brief case study of unmanned systems development in India. India is still at an early phase of AI integration when compared with China: its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) number in the dozens and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) remain a growing field. Nonetheless, there are some signs of AI-related progress. In February 2018, DRDO successfully tested the Rustom 2 UAV and is reportedly developing a “Multi-Agent Robotics Framework,” a system that would enable the Indian Army’s many battlefield robots to collaborate with each other on surveillance and

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reconnaissance (Ray 2018). The DRDO is also reportedly developing chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNe) UAVs to detect radiation, as well as Remotely Operated Vehicles for surveillance and improvised explosive device disposal (Ray 2018). In doing so, DRDO has on occasion collaborated with a limited number of domestic firms, including Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd., to expand India’s presence in air and at sea. At the same time, the domestic market works with Israeli and Russian firms to fill in the gaps, as with the IAI Heron (Defense Industry Daily 2019). More recently, Adani Defence and Aerospace and Elbit Systems have announced the inauguration of the Adani Elbit UAV Complex in Hyderabad (Lasania 2018). Apart from reportedly serving as India’s first private UAV manufacturing facility, the complex will reportedly serve as the first UAV manufacturing facility in India and the first outside Israel to manufacture the Hermes 900 Medium Altitude Long Endurance UAV. The factory is aimed at assembly and integration of carbon composite aero-structures for Hermes 900 and Hermes 450. While still dependent upon Israeli foundations, the idea is for such facilities to allow India to expand its own domestic expertise and to deliver on the “Make in India” concept. Nonetheless, in contrast to the “Made in China 2025” plan, local industry and scientists require further investment to innovate within this ecosystem. At sea, the Indian Navy faces a number of issues in terms of acquisition priorities, budgetary issues, the unavailability of technology, and political buy-in. Still, it has made some progress. The DRDO inaugurated an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Centre in Visakhapatnam in 2008 that has worked on developing an AUV at its Naval Science and Technology Laboratory (NSTL). From the NSTL AUV that has undergone sea trials to the Larsen and Toubro Adamya AUV that is built to be operated from a submarine’s torpedo tube, India’s AUV technology has steadily progressed over the last few years (Korulla 2016). However, the length of this timeline and the relatively limited number of platforms over the decade demonstrate ongoing challenges to the rate and quality of procurement as India crosses from development into deployment. Facing such limitations, India’s Ministry of Defense recently released two RFIs in line with the indigenous development component of India’s Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) 2008, a special category that can be invoked by the armed forces for “high technology complex systems designed, developed and produced indigenously” (Aroor 2018). The intention behind the bidding is to procure twelve Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and eight high-endurance AUVs for the Indian Navy, capable of missions lasting a minimum of fifteen days (Aroor 2018). This would be a significant jump from a decade ago when the platforms under development were only destined to conduct seven to eight hours of surveillance and sea-bed mapping. The new profile suggests a much more aggressive plan, with the platforms envisaged for use in anti-submarine warfare, mine counter measures, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and force protection measures operations with dedicated mission modules. Indian Navy Spokesperson Captain Dalip Sharma explains that India is “looking to induct AUVs in various roles, including ISR and anti-submarine warfare. We currently operate self-propelled underwater reusable targets (SPURTs),” as with Saab’s AUV-62 (Aroor 2018). While these cases are frequently either DRDO-led or procured in collaboration with foreign firms, reports indicate that incubation projects may also be taking off. For the recent RFI from the Indian Navy, there are suggestions that IITs that displayed AUVs at the Def Expo in 2018 could be contenders through collaboration with larger firms. While not necessarily breaking through the cost, training, and market access barriers faced by domestic universities and startups, their incorporation in the process would

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constitute a start. In fact, since December 2011, students at IIT-Bombay have been working on Matsya, an AUV that reportedly can control its own movements and execute specific tasks “without human intervention” (Aroor 2018). Even though Delhi Technological University, IIT-Madras, and other government entities worked on AUVs before 2011, the Matsya team is reportedly working to develop an autonomous submarine that is intelligent enough to re-attempt a task if the previous try is unsuccessful. IIT-Bombay’s design could make a strong contribution to Indian military operations, with indications that it could also autonomously shoot torpedoes, place and monitor sensors on the seabed, track down and destroy enemy submarines, carry out rescue missions, and recover remnants from crash sites. While these reports may be overstating the progress made to date, they indicate that there is academic effort to contribute to military aims. However, reports are also quick to point out the limitations in resources and funding for these grassroots endeavors, in stark contrast to China. The current RFI on the part of the Indian Navy is part and parcel of this strategic realization. To be acquired under the DPP-2016, the Indian Navy has kept the method of its purchase open to include the possibility of acquiring an Indian system, an Indian-built foreign system, or a fully imported system (Department of Defence 2019). Yet without more fulsomely engaging in financial and resource inducements for domestic startups and universities, Indian-built foreign systems and fully imported systems are likely to continue to dominate. This contributes to an evergrowing chasm with China’s model.

China We should develop a dynamic, innovation-driven growth model … The Fourth Industrial Revolution is unfolding at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Xi Jinping, President and Chairman, People’s Republic of China, January 2017 (World Economic Forum 2017) Facing disruptive technology, [we] must … seize the opportunity to change paradigms (Wan Dao Chao Che). If you don’t disrupt, you’ll be disrupted! Lieutenant General Liu Guozhi, Director, Central Military Commission’s Science and Technology Commission, October 2018 (Canadian Security Intelligence Service 2018) Expanding an AI ecosystem Much like India, China’s pursuit of AI receives support from the uppermost echelons of Chinese leadership. President and Chairman Xi Jinping followed up the July release of the State Council’s “New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” with a 19th Party Congress speech in October 2018, in which he emphasized the development of advanced manufacturing and the promotion of further integration of the Internet, big data, and AI with the real-world economy. In combination with the “Made in China 2025” campaign that was announced in 2015, the country has set itself on a path toward achieving world-leading levels in AI technology and reducing its vulnerable “external [foreign] dependence for key technologies and advanced equipment” (Wübbeke, Meissner, Zenglein, Ives and Conrad 2016; Allen 2019). In essence, “Made in China 2025” climbs the next rung on the development ladder beyond that of “Make

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in India” to move China away from being the world’s factory toward producing higher value products and services. In AI, China stands head and shoulders above the economies of scale in India. It has set as its goal to achieve a core AI industry gross output in excess of $150.8 billion by 2020 and AI-related gross output exceeding $1.5 trillion by 2030 (Ding 2019). Further, China seeks to have its AI theories, technologies, and applications achieve breakthroughs in intelligent economy and society applications, as well as brain-inspired, autonomous, hybrid, and swarm intelligence. To this end, reports abound on how such developments will contribute to China’s advancement of autonomous tanks, aircraft, reconnaissance robots, and supply convoys. China boasts a strong degree of state support, transfer of technology and talent, investment in long-term, whole-of-society measures, as well as horizontal collaboration and cross-sectoral development. This approach allows for China to make headway on such priorities as (1) big data, hybrid, swarm, and enhanced intelligence; (2) cross-medium analytical reasoning; (3) autonomous coordination and control, and optimized decision-making; (4) intelligent technologies of autonomous unmanned systems; (5) high-level ML; (6) brain-inspired intelligence computing; (7) intelligent virtual reality modeling; (8) intelligent computing chips and systems; (9) quantum intelligent computing; and (10) natural language processing (State Council 2017). When it comes to these pursuits, China has moved beyond its traditional R&D models, which often followed US advances. In fact, China’s recent rollout of AI strategic documents and technologies runs in tandem with—and in some cases even precedes— US initiatives. As just one example, China’s release of the “Internet Plus” Artificial Intelligence Three-Year Action Implementation Plan coincided with the US announcement in May 2016 of the formation of a new National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (Xu 2016). Moreover, China’s efforts to be at the forefront of AI technological advancement have taken the form of targeted and concrete action plans for the government, industry, academia, and even military. Among these, the “Three-Year Action Plan for Promoting Development of a New Generation Artificial Intelligence Industry,” under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), provided immediate guidelines to industry and other actors to pursue autonomous vehicles, intelligent service robots, UAVs, medical image diagnosis assistance systems, video and image identification systems, voice interactive systems, translation systems, and smart home products, as well as breakthroughs in “core foundational” technologies such as intelligent sensors, neural network chips, and open-source platforms (Triolo, Kania and Webster 2018). These guidelines were followed in short order by China’s issuance of the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan on Science, Technology and Innovation, calling for China to seize the “high ground” in international scientific development and launch a series of fifteen “Science and Technology Innovation 2030 Mega-projects” that included both big data and intelligent manufacturing and robotics (Department of International Cooperation 2016). Within less than a year, China’s MoST announced the decision to add “AI 2.0” to the initial lineup as a sixteenth mega-project, with an emphasis on data intelligence, cross-media intelligence, swarm intelligence, hybrid-augmented intelligence, and autonomous intelligent systems, among others (Kania 2018). And funding has followed in kind. The “Fund for Industrial Restructuring and Upgrading” levied approximately $404.3 million for projects in smart manufacturing in 2016 alone; the 2017 Central Basic Infrastructure Budget allocated a combined $614 million to infrastructure for “Internet Plus” and “key projects in emerging industries” in 2017 (Kania 2018). As such,

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China is not just making empty pronouncements. It has the wherewithal to mobilize the financing needed to support the action plans and initiatives that it puts forth. In guiding this future development, the National Science and Technology Structural Reform and Innovation System Construction Leading Small Group will take the lead in comprehensive planning and coordination. The MoST will, in turn, be responsible for propelling forward the implementation of major science and technology programs for a new generation of AI and strengthen linkages and coordination, with the establishment of an AI Plan Implementation Office and AI Strategy Advisory Committee to provide advice and assessment concerning major AI policy decisions (Webster, Creemers, Triolo and Kania 2017). An AI Strategy Advisory Committee has also been established to conduct research and make recommendations. This is reportedly headed by Pan Yunhe, an academic in advanced manufacturing at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, who is also deputy chairman of the China Association for Artificial Intelligence (Future of Life Institute 2018). In addition, China has established an AI Industry Development Alliance, which is co-sponsored by more than 200 enterprises and agencies nationwide and focuses on building a public service platform for the development, integration, and acceleration of China’s AI industry. The alliance, backed by several state ministries and commissions including the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and MoST, will be led by top-tier institutes such as the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. The aforementioned multi-layered structure has started to generate strategic priorities and to promote technological advances that were already occurring in a number of fields. In August 2017, just one month after the AI plan’s release, the National Natural Science Foundation of China released Guidelines on AI Basic Research Urgent Management Projects, identifying a series of research priorities to receive millions in new funding, including new brain-inspired computing architectures and methods and man-machine cooperative hybrid intelligence (Kania 2018). Just two months later, the NDRC announced a parallel AI Innovation and Development Mega-Project, highlighting priorities that included advances in deep learning AI chips and highly reliable intelligent unmanned systems and service robots. Other projects on the NDRC docket include cloud services and open-source platforms, among others. Also, in 2017, the MoST convened a high-level meeting that set up the New Generation AI Development Plan Promotion Office, including 15 entities and led by the MoST, NDRC, and MIIT (Kania 2018). Most importantly, from a national defense perspective, there has been involvement of the Central Military-Civil Fusion Development Commission Office, the Central Military Commission (CMC) Science and Technology Commission, and the CMC Equipment Development Department in a variety of these initiatives, speaking to future AI military applications within this broader agenda. In parallel to these efforts at the national level, cities throughout China have started to develop and to release their own plans and policies for AI, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Tianjin. In total, as many as 19 different cities and provinces are slated to engage in AI development. In 2017, before the State Council report, Tianjin announced a $5 billion fund to support the AI industry. Shanghai and Guangzhou both plan to establish a special fund and institute to invest in AI development. Hangzhou has also launched its own AI park, along with a fund that will invest $1.59 billion (Shanghai Shi Renmin Zheng fu Xinwen Bangongshi 2017). And the Zhongguancun Development Group in Beijing is promoting a $2.12 billion AI development park that could host up to 400 AI enterprises that will feed into a “national-level” AI

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laboratory within the park (Reuters 2018). As China directs support and domestic resources toward AI development at the state and city level, major Chinese technology companies have been designated as “national champions” to develop new open innovation platforms in AI. In support of this endeavor, the “New Generation AI Strategic Advisory Commission” convenes senior academicians and experts from prominent private sector players, including Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, iFlytek, and Horizon Robotics. Thus far, Baidu has been responsible for autonomous vehicles, Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) for smart cities, Tencent for medical imaging, and iFlytek for voice recognition (Dickinson 2018). Baidu is also leading China’s National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning Technologies, which will pursue next-generation research in deep learning through promotion of brain-inspired neural chips and brain-inspired intelligent robotics. In doing so, Baidu is building upon work that began in 2013 with its launch of the Institute for Deep Learning and later establishment of a Silicon Valley AI Lab. Li Yanhong, Baidu’s CEO, in his capacity as a delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, proposed the creation of a “China Brain” Plan in 2015 that would devote extensive state investment to AI, welcoming military funding for such an initiative (Ding 2018). Thus, Baidu’s recommendations may even be credited with shaping national policy, demonstrating the depth of public and private sector interoperability. Rather than just serving as domestic guards of Chinese innovation, these companies also have international ties and outposts. The Beijing Frontier International AI Research Institute, under the leadership of Kai-Fu Lee of Sinovation, was established in 2018 to invest in AI research in both China and the United States, and Tencent and Baidu already have AI research labs in the United States (Kaja and Yan 2018). While the inclusion of multiple actors can lead to rivalries, competition can also provide the impetus for scientific advancement. Crossover among government, industry, and military continues to grow. Alibaba’s Aliyun is working with the new National Engineering Laboratory of Big Data Systems and Software, led by Tsinghua University (Synched 2017). Similarly, Baidu has announced a $104 million partnership with Peking University to further research in AI-related topics and an AI center for law and legal issues was unveiled to research applications to improve legal efficiency (Xinhuanet 2018). At the military level, news reports detail a four-year “experimental program for intelligent weapons systems” at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), which selected twenty-seven men and four women from more than 5,000 candidates (Chen 2018b). The BIT is one of China’s top weapons research institutes. Moreover, the launch of the new program at the headquarters of defense contractor Norinco in October 2018 is evidence of the weight China places on the development of AI technology for military use. After completing the four-year course, the students are expected to continue on to a doctoral program and to become the next leaders of China’s AI weapons program. Such students will be funneled directly into China’s national apparatus and pursuits of military modernization. The aforementioned channels between private companies and national laboratories engaged in dual-use and even military R&D have direct implications for not only the party–corporate complex but also the policing and military AI applications that will follow. Military–civil fusion “Military-Civil Fusion” ( Junmin Ronghe) is one of the cornerstones of China’s national AI strategy—and for that matter any number of national advances. Combined with AI’s dual-use nature, China’s ever-growing integration of its political, military, industrial,

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and academic communities has fed into military applications of its AI advances (Krekel, Adams, and Bakos 2012). As just one example, Li Deyi is both the director of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence and a major general in the People’s Liberation Army (Kania 2017). Further, China’s State Council explicitly promotes a number of initiatives for military–civil collaboration: (1) sharing and joint use among military and civilian bodies for a variety of platforms; (2) strengthening of military–civil integration in the AI domain; (3) deepening of military–civil fusion development strategy implementation to promote the formation of all-element, multi-field, high-efficiency AI military–civil integration; (4) construction of a new generation AI based on R&D in common theories and critical technologies; (5) establishment of mechanisms to normalize communication and coordination among scientific research institutes, universities, enterprises, and military industry units; (6) promotion of military–civil, two-way transformation of AI technologies; (7) strengthening of a new generation of AI technologies as a strong support to command and decision-making, military deduction, defense equipment, and other applications; (8) guidance of defense domain AI technology toward civilian applications; (9) advancement of scientific research forces to participate in the domain of national defense for major scientific and technological innovation tasks in AI; (10) promotion of a variety of AI technologies to be quickly embedded in the field of national defense innovation; (11) strengthening of the construction of military and civilian standard systems of AI technologies; and (12) promotion of the overall layout and open sharing of science and technology innovation platform and bases (State Council 2017). Beyond the AI surveillance applications that are ubiquitous within policing and counter-terrorism in China, private industry plays a central role in achieving China’s military aims (Zhou 2018). Major General Ding Xiangrong, Deputy Director of the General Office of China’s CMC, has argued that to “narrow the gap between the Chinese military and global advanced powers” it is necessary to take advantage of the “ongoing military revolution … centered on information technology and intelligent technology” (Allen 2019). To aid in this process, China has engaged a number of bodies, including the NDRC, MoST, MIIT, Central Military-Civil Fusion Development Commission Office, CMC Science and Technology Commission, and the CMC Equipment Development Department. In 2018, the National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology, a subsidiary of the National University of Defense Technology, reportedly set up two Beijing-based research organizations focusing on military operationalization of AI: the Unmanned Systems Research Center and the Artificial Intelligence Research Center (Allen 2019). The latter of the two is engaged in research into dual-use AI technology, including applying ML to robotics, swarm networking, wireless communications, and cybersecurity. Such expansion speaks to strengths that China has already begun to demonstrate in domestic and foreign markets. Chinese weapons manufacturers are selling armed drones with significant amounts of combat autonomy. Ziyan reportedly sold its Blowfish A2 drone to the United Arab Emirates and has engaged in negotiations with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for Blowfish A2 sales (Allen 2019). This system is thought to “autonomously performs more complex combat missions, including fixed-point timing detection, fixed-range reconnaissance, and targeted precision strikes” and can be equipped with either missiles or machine guns (Awford 2019). Beyond using AI for autonomous military robotics, China’s Zeng Yi, a senior executive at China’s third largest defense company, has claimed that “[i]n future battlegrounds, there will be no people fighting,” as lethal autonomous weapons would be commonplace by 2025 and the military use of AI is “inevitable” (Allen 2019).

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Semiconductors are another key element of this process. For China, US restrictions placed on ZTE Corporation, among others, have demonstrated the importance of developing independent and controllable core technologies (Delaney 2018). As a result, Chinese firms are expending a great deal of financial and human capital to develop AI-optimized hardware and semiconductors designed for AI algorithms such as neural networks for machine language processing and facial recognition. According to China’s Semiconductor Industry Association, Chinese producers are on track to increase their share of domestic consumption from twenty-nine percent in 2014 to forty-nine percent by the end of 2019 (Allen 2019). In 2014, China’s government established a national  integrated circuit industry investment fund that in 2018 was on track to invest $20.5 billion to reduce China’s dependence on foreign semiconductors. A growing number of deep tech startups are pursuing dedicated AI integrated circuit design and development, including Cambricon, Bitmain, DeepPhi, Vimicro, ChipIntelli, and Horizon Robotics. Targeted at generating image sensor chips, image processing chips, and semiconductors, these developments have the potential to make longer-term national defense contributions, whether these companies identify as defense contractors or not. Further, while Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law gives the government legal authority to compel any organization or citizen to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work known to the public,” there are other incentives for private sector cooperation (Chinese National People’s Congress Network 2017). China officially designated Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, iFlytek, and SenseTime as “national champions” in 2018, allowing them privileged positions for the establishment of domestic technical standards and insulating them from competition from state-owned enterprises. Among these, China’s SenseTime Corporation, a national champion in computer vision AI, is a major provider of surveillance technology to China’s government, including for Xinjiang. SenseTime cofounder Bing Xu has stated “we are very lucky to be a private company working at a technology that will be critical for the next two decades. Historically, governments would dominate nuclear, rocket, and comparable technologies and not trust private companies” (Allen 2019). This direct connection between private industry and national security is a major difference with the structural stove-piping found in India. Given SenseTime’s computational capacity (estimated at more than 160 petaflops—more than the world’s top-ranked supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory), combined with a computing infrastructure spanning over 54,000,000 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) cores across 15,000 GPUs within twelve GPU clusters in several countries, SenseTime has the potential to make significant contributions throughout China’s military–civil fusion. To enhance the contributions from the civil side of this equation, the Chinese government has taken an active role in funding AI ventures, disbursing funds through “government guidance funds” set up by local governments and state-owned companies (Kania 2017). The government has reportedly invested more than $1 billion on domestic startups, with a large subset of the investment shifting toward AI over the last two years. At the same time, the central government is exploring methods, including through the establishment of party committees and “special management shares,” to exert more influence over large tech companies. And this approach is succeeding. The Chinese AI industry reportedly grew sixty-seven percent from 2017 to 2018 and produced more patents and research papers than the United States, despite having access to about a fifth of the US talent pool (Robles 2018). Quantity can trump quality when it comes to AI, particularly when it comes to data. Data are essential to ML and critical

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for AI. The Chinese Academy of Sciences President estimates that “by 2020, China will hold twenty percent of the global data, which is expected to reach 44 trillion gigabytes,” making China well positioned to lead the field (Lee and Triolo 2017). These data are likely not limited to domestic sources, as shown by the high-profile cases of alleged Chinese hacking of the US Office of Personnel Management and other defense contractors (ThreatConnect 2015). Beyond training systems, China is well on its way to training professionals. China’s Microsoft Research Asia has trained over 5,000 AI experts, many of whom have moved on to universities, companies, and startups, including Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Lenovo, Face++, and Momenta, among others (Lee and Triolo 2017). The Chinese government also plans to continue to use a number of pre-existing recruitment and talent programs, such as the program “Thousand Talents,” as well as university projects on such topics as sensory AI including computer vision; physical AI, including robotics, and industrial automation; cognitive AI, including worker training; general AI; high-precision learning from small data sets; research on new algorithms and data sets, including advance cryptography and security; and explainable AI (Lee and Triolo 2017). To fulfill these research fields, China has launched a five-year university program to train at least 500 teachers and 5,000 students in AI technologies. The program is a collaboration between government bodies, private companies, and universities. Further, China’s Ministry of Education (MoE) has launched an AI Innovation Action Plan for Colleges and Universities that seeks to develop fifty world-class teaching institutes and research institutions, fifty national level high quality online open courses and 50 AI faculties by 2020 as part of the “AI+X” program (Ding 2018). It is frequently asserted that China’s scientific research institutions and enterprises do not yet possess sufficient international influence upon ecological cycles and the supply chain, and that they lack a systematic R&D layout. Nonetheless, China has set its sights on mitigating these deficiencies and is likely to succeed. Chinese firms Baidu (in partnership with Intel), Alibaba (via a new subsidiary, Pingtouge), and Huawei (via its HiSilicon subsidiary) have all established semiconductor design divisions focused on developing AI accelerator chips. Chinese AI chip startups Horizon Robotics and Cambricon have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. In fact, the basis for the Cambricon-1A chip was developed while company founders were working at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which later backed them with seed funding; Cambricon is now reportedly worth $1 billion (Lee and Triolo 2017). Thus, while China is often criticized for its relative weakness on core AI technologies, such as hardware and algorithm development, developers of AI systems rarely start from scratch. They can leverage pre-written programs developed by others and shared into code libraries. This allows developers to focus on the unique specifics of their application usage requirements, rather than solving generic problems faced by all AI developers. Some organizations have combined ML code libraries with other AI software development tools into mature ML software frameworks, many of which are open source. Although it is true that none of the most popular ML software frameworks have been developed in China, at this early stage this is not necessarily determinative. Companies that are working toward their own ML frameworks, including SenseTime, may end up working within the Chinese AI ecosystem. Much like quantum encryption, these technological advances would aim to provide platforms for the Chinese government and military that would not require—or even desire—an international market.

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Unmanned systems Advances in unmanned systems provide another illustration of the differential in capacity and structure between India and China. China has a staggering number of UAV and UUV platforms available for domestic use and international export. On UAVs alone, the country counted more than hundred developers and manufacturers as of 2010, with this number doubling in just four years generating an excess of 15,000 UAV civil and military platforms (Fan 2014). Of the firms, over twothirds are private enterprises and the remainder are state-owned enterprises. This is a stark difference with India, where military and AI development is dominated by state-led organizations including DRDO, CAIR, and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). In the air, the number of collaborative technical papers on such AI-related arenas as integrating neural networks into hypersonic glide and other platforms has grown substantially (Saalman 2018b). Chinese experts have explored applications of bee colony algorithms and swarm technologies for nearly a decade to address parameter identification problems found in complex operating environments for such platforms as hypersonic glide vehicles (Li and Duan 2012). These works rely on autonomy as a means of achieving coordinated guidance control of adjacent space platforms, namely “cooperative guidance and control of hypersonic vehicle autonomous formation” (gao chaoshengsu feixingqi zizhu biandui xietong zhidao kongzhi) (Fan, Wang, Liu, Qin and Liang 2018). Whether integrated into autonomous swarm-like formations or utilized for enhancement of maneuverability and control, neural networks are contributing to China’s communication and decision-making systems, high-precision guidance, targeting and discrimination, as well as cyber-centric and electronic warfare (Zhao, Hu, Liang Yang 2017). At sea, reports suggest that AI-enabled submarines are part and parcel of China’s future development of what has been dubbed as its Underwater Great Wall (Wong 2016). Such platforms have a variety of functions, including gathering intelligence, deploying mines, stationing at geographical chokepoints, working with manned submarines to scout or decoy to draw fire and expose the position of adversaries, and potentially even ramming high-value targets. Lin Yang, the marine technology equipment director at the Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has reportedly confirmed that China is developing a series of extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles (XLUUVs) (Glass 2018). The Shenyang Institute of Automation is a major producer of underwater robots to the Chinese military and Lin developed China’s first autonomous ­ UUV with operational depth beyond six kilometers. He is now chief scientist of the 912 Project, a classified program that reportedly seeks to develop new-generation military underwater robots in time for the hundred-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021. AI-enabled submarines fit perfectly into China’s prioritization of systems that can be produced and operated on a large scale at a relatively low cost, while addressing other asymmetries in battle. China’s pursuit of such platforms also makes sense in the context of US and Russian military trends. Chinese reports discuss the US military’s pursuits using Lockheed Martin’s Orca and Boeing’s Echo Voyager-based prototypes, the latter of which would have an approximately 12,000-km range (Zhong 2017). Moreover, Russia has reportedly built and begun sea trials of the Poseidon, also known as the Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System, an unmanned nuclear-powered platform

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with an intercontinental range for the purported delivery of nuclear weapons (Gady 2018). Luo Yuesheng, a professor at the College of Automation in Harbin Engineering University, which also serves as a development center for China’s new submarines, emphasizes the psychological and operational pressure placed by these relatively lowcost platforms—whether conventional- or nuclear-armed—on human captains of other vessels in battle (Chen 2018a). China’s entrance into this field of UUVs poses its own challenges to other maritime powers, India included. For countries that, in spite of their growing military dominance, continue to perceive themselves at a distinct asymmetrical disadvantage, the greater incorporation of automation and autonomy into both conventional and strategic platforms remains a trend to watch (Saalman 2018a). This applies to both China and India.

Conclusion Within the past five years, both India and China have issued strategic documents and action plans that detail the importance of AI for the countries’ political, economic, and military futures. While there are certainly some areas of overlap between India and China, as with the “Make in India” and “Made in China 2025” plans and requirements on technology transfer, there remain stark differences in the two countries’ models and systems. Official Indian documents label India’s future as becoming the AI “garage” for the third world, while China maintains a goal of being second to none. The breadth of Chinese pre-existing achievements and ambition is staggering, while India still seems to be working from an earlier phase of developing an AI ecosystem. To this end, financial and educational commitments, combined with public-sector support for private-sector innovation, have been essential in advancing AI development. The difference in capacity between India and China is immense: India is earmarking $150 million in AI, compared with a Chinese effort to generate $150 billion, and Indian startups have been able to raise $87 million, in contrast with an estimated $28 billion raised by Chinese startups in 2017. Even with government support, under the Startup India Hub, investments remain diffuse in terms of AI and still by orders of magnitude lower than that of China (Agarwal 2017). Given this disparity, India could be said to be “aiming without arming.” In other words, India’s AI conceptual framework takes aim at a number of developments, while facing significant challenges in terms of operationalization under its current national defense structure. There is no question that the various multi-disciplinary task forces have done an admirable job in articulating a sound framework for India’s AI priorities. If even a fraction of the recommendations contained in these reports are implemented, then India could ostensibly make a large dent in the realm of AI. However, much will need to change in terms of structure to accomplish this. While the task forces may be diverse, the roles of each of the various participants in implementing this AI agenda remain unclear. Moreover, stove piping and secrecy among the various departments remain an impediment to successful development of AI technologies that are currently overly dependent upon the private sector. Further, India will be hard pressed to deliver on its framework without the commensurate funding, transparency, and civil-military partnerships. A review of existing programs reveals that universities and startups in India continue to receive relatively limited inducements and economic support from the government in achieving their aims. This is in spite of the country’s large population of young,

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technically savvy engineers and programmers, who lack the resources needed to promote their laboratory findings. Domestic tenders and RFI remain largely focused on supplemental software and hardware that nibble at the edges of the core technologies and platforms. While recent efforts to empower the IITs and the CoEs are strong steps toward innovation, India remains limited in terms of both opportunities and megaprojects within its local governments and private sector. There is a stark difference between how AI is approached by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, with its ad hoc engagement of the defense complex, and Chinese leverage of the “national champions” program. This illustrates just one of the ways in which the Indian model for AI national defense integration will continue to falter when compared to China (FICCI and EY 2018). In contrast, China could be said to be “arming without aiming.” This is not to suggest that China lacks “aims,” as it seeks to become an AI leader and continues to target the United States with its economic and national defense advances. Instead, it means that China has leapt ahead with developing and fielding its AI technologies and platforms, while its overarching strategy often struggles to keep up with the pace of deployments. It is important to keep in mind that, with a few exceptions, most of China’s policy pronouncements have come out over the past few years, while China’s AI technological advances and systems have been decades in the making. China’s conceptual framework for AI development is at best running apace of these advances and at worst behind them. This may seem counterintuitive since China has long been lauded as a strategic powerhouse and seeks to be an AI leader. And yet, implementation and integration of technological advances in AI and any number of arenas often outpace their theoretical and strategic underpinnings. If anything, technology is driving China’s strategy and doctrine, rather than the other way around. As a result, documents such as the 2017 State Council plan read more like a laundry list of areas that China not only seeks to develop but has already been aggressively pursuing. Much of this foment has occurred in the private sector, but the government has been effective in tapping into the talent base. China’s designation of “national champions,” resulting in governmental regulatory and financial support for these companies, allows it to engender dual-use advancement in both policing and military. In essence, China has undertaken an approach of vacuuming in as much talent and information as possible, with the policies, controls, and norms set to follow. China also has the advantage of budgetary largesse and limited constraints, allowing it to allocate the funds to invest in mega-projects and to empower local governments, universities, think tanks, and AI hubs in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and elsewhere. When it comes to education, China has been able to make the most of the centripetal force of the promise of research funding to attract the best talent both domestically and internationally. Nonetheless, China also faces pressures, as it will be increasingly confronted by pushback from the international community that questions the level to which “military-civil fusion” compromises the independence and integrity of its companies and commitments to the responsible development of AI. By contrast, responsibility is embedded in the Indian approach in which a conceptual framework is created, and domestic innovation and national defense grow out of this foundation. As just one example, India has already played a prominent and engaged role in the Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems debate (Panwar 2018). Moreover, privacy, ethics, and human rights permeate India’s official and unofficial documents on AI. Such

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concerns are debated to a much lesser degree in China. Kai-Fu Lee and Paul Triolo’s report on AI notes that, when a new technology comes out, [China’s] government will give it the benefit of doubt and let it grow, rather than stifle it with policy or endless debates. Also, the environment in China is more conducive to fast launch and iteration. There is a general belief that it is better to launch something and then get it approved later. This allows Chinese businesses to generate real data at scale, which in turn allows technology to improve over a shorter period of time, particularly once AI is introduced into the equation. (Lee and Triolo 2017) The authors cite US examples of unions undermining various programs, but these examples could be easily applied to interest groups in India. Thus, while there are some indications that China may be considering the implications of arms races and norms in the AI space, many of these discussions are being undertaken after the fact (Allen 2019). China has placed itself on a trajectory of implementation and integration of AI in policing, military, and other platforms, and would be hard pressed to adhere to these norms if they are ever realized. Chinese policy reflects an understanding of US approaches toward emerging technologies and its third-offset strategy of staying ahead of the technological curve (Ellman, Samp and Coll 2017). It also applies to lessons learned, with China’s own past of developing nuclear weapons before the implementation of limits and norms. The difficulty that India faces is that it found itself caught as a late entrant into the nuclear realm and may again be facing the same technological quandary of late entry into AI. This is not to suggest that the Chinese approach of technological advance driving strategy and doctrine is the right one. It can lead to unanticipated consequences that jeopardize humanity with cascading effects, particularly in an arena like AI that permeates into all levels of politics, economy, military, and society. Despite these concerns, India could still benefit from undertaking a more integrated and multi-stakeholder approach in developing its AI-enabled platforms, beyond its current task forces and reports. This will require greater transparency and integration of diverse actors in implementing AI-related research and projects. Given that India’s financial constraints are greater than that of China, India would benefit from undertaking this approach in a more targeted manner. Doing so would utilize a similar rationale applied by China early on when it concentrated its more limited resources on niche capabilities, particularly in the military realm. Rather than trying to compete with the United States and Russia on all fronts, China instead sought out specific technologies and platforms that offered a military edge. China also provides an example of how to increase research transparency and cross sectoral collaboration in a country that is not traditionally known for openness: its engagement and funding of universities, industry, and military departments in such targeted research projects as the integration of swarm and neural networks in UAVs and UUVs are a perfect illustration of this evolution. Successful implementation of such structural changes in India may not address all of the aforementioned asymmetries but would mitigate the pressure to compete in all AI arenas that is mandated by its current national strategy. By focusing on specific areas for AI to enhance, India could improve upon its already sizable naval and aerospace advances in submarines, supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles, and missile defense. It

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is also essential that AI be seen as a series of enabling technologies, not as the answer to re-calibrating India’s national defense balance with other nations. Domestic innovation of AI can offer India greater predictive and early warning capabilities, data and information processing, reconnaissance, and maneuverability, but it does not come without financial and manpower costs. Trying to determine how to best leverage and target these investments, using China’s experience for insights, will allow India to avoid the pitfalls of doctrine shaped by technology and to better integrate its current aiming into its arming.

Bibliography Agarwal, M. (2018) “Adobe to Set Up Artificial Intelligence Centre in Hyderabad,” The Economic Times (19 February), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ ites/adobe-to-set-up-ai-centre-in-hyderabad/articleshow/62986469.cms?from=mdr. Agarwal, M. (2017) “Government Launches Startup India Hub to Bring All the Stakeholders on a Single Platform,” Inc42 (19 June), available online at https://inc42.com/buzz/startupindia-hub-launch. Allen, G. (2019) “Understanding China’s AI Strategy: Clues to Chinese Strategic Thinking on Artificial Intelligence and National Security,” Center for a New American Security (CNAS) (6 February), available online at www.cnas.org/publications/reports/understanding-chinasai-strategy. Aroor, S. (2018) “After US Navy Raises 1st Full Underwater Drone Squadron, Indian Navy Wants Its Own,” LiveFist Defence.com (12 July), available online at www.livefistdefence. com/2018/07/indian-navy-scouts-stealthy-long-range-unmanned-submarines.html. Artificial Intelligence Task Force (n.d.) Artificial Intelligence Task Force, constituted by Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of the Republic of India, available online at www. aitf.org.in. Awford, J. (2019) “China Releases Fully Autonomous Killer Robots and Drones for Combat,” Technology News and Trends (11 February), available online at www.technocracy.news/ china-releases-fully-autonomous-killer-robots-and-drones-for-combat. CAIR (Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics) (2019a) “About Lab,” Defence Research and Development Organisation (updated 9 January), available online at www.drdo.gov.in/drdo/ labs1/CAIR/English/indexnew.jsp?pg=about-lab.jsp (accessed 15 January 2019). CAIR (Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics) (2019b) “Area of Work,” Defence Research and Development Organisation (updated 9 January), available online at www.drdo.gov.in/drdo/ labs1/CAIR/English/indexnew.jsp?pg=areaofwork.jsp (accessed 15 January 2019). Canadian Security Intelligence Service (2018) “Chinese Military Innovation in Emerging Technologies” (11 May), available online at www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/ corporate/publications/china-and-the-age-of-strategic-rivalry/chinese-military-innovationin-emerging-technologies.html. Chen, S. (2018a) “China Military Develops Robotic Submarines to Launch a New Era of Sea Power,” South China Morning Post (22 July), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/society/ article/2156361/china-developing-unmanned-ai-submarines-launch-new-era-sea-power. Chen, S. (2018b) “China’s Brightest Children Are Being Recruited to Develop AI ‘Killer Bots’,” South China Morning Post (8 November), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/ science/article/2172141/chinas-brightest-children-are-being-recruited-develop-ai-killer. Chinese National People’s Congress Network (2017) “National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic,” Brown University, available online at http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1800/ sources/2017_PRC_NationalIntelligenceLaw.pdf. Cohen, S. and Dasgupta, S. (2010) Arming Without Aiming: India’s Military Modernization (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press).

AI military acquisition and integration  285 Datta, P. (2018) “V. Kamakoti Committee on Artificial Intelligence Only Skims the Surface,” Business Today (17 April), available online at www.businesstoday.in/opinion/prosaicview/v-kamakoti-committee-on-artif icial-intelligence-only-skims-the-surface/story/ 275079.html. DDN (2018) “DDN Storage and CSIR-CEERI Enter Partnership to Provide Artificial Intelligence as a Service Solutions [sic]” (27 November), available online at www.ddn.com/ press-releases/ddn-storage-csir-ceeri-enter-partnership-provide-artificial-intelligence-as-aservice-solutions. Defense Industry Daily (2019) “Israel Sells Heron UAVs to India, Leases to Germany Imminent, Signs Contract with Vietnam,” (6 June), available online at www.defenseindustrydaily.com/ israel-sells-heron-uavs-to-india-01476. Delaney, R. (2018) “US Slaps China’s ZTE with 7-Year Components Ban for Breaching Terms of Sanctions Settlement,” South China Morning Post (16 April), available online at www. scmp.com/business/companies/article/2142002/us-slaps-zte-seven-year-components-banbreaching-terms-sanctions. Department of Defence (2019) “Defence Procurement Procedure,” Government of India, available online at https://mod.gov.in/dod/defence-procurement-procedure. Department of International Cooperation (2016) “China Science and Technology Newsletter,” Ministry of Science and Technology, People’s Republic of China (15 September), available online at www.cistc.gov.cn/upfile/842.21.pdf. Dickinson, S. (2018) “China’s Artificial Intelligence Plan—Stage 1,” China Law Blog (19 March), available online at www.chinalawblog.com/2018/03/chinas-artificial-intelligence-planstage-1.html. DIIP (Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade) (2019) “Make in India,” Government of India, available online at www.makeinindia.com/about. DIIP (Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade) (2018) Report of The Artificial Intelligence Task Force (20 March), available online at https://dipp.gov.in/sites/default/files/ Report_of_Task_Force_on_ArtificialIntelligence_20March2018_2.pdf. Ding, J. (2019) “China’s Current Capabilities, Policies, and Industrial Ecosystem in AI,” Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on Technology, Trade, and Military-Civil Fusion: China’s Pursuit of Artificial Intelligence, New Materials, and New Energy (7 June), 16–25, available online at www.uscc.gov/sites/default/ files/transcripts/June%207%2C%202019%20Hearing%20Transcript.pdf. Ding, J. (2018) “Deciphering China’s AI Dream: The Context, Components, Capabilities, and Consequences of China’s Strategy to Lead the World in AI,” Future of Humanity Institute (March), available online at www.f hi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Deciphering_Chinas_ AI-Dream.pdf. Ellman, J., Samp, L. and Coll, G. (2017) “Assessing the Third Offset Strategy,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (March), available online at https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws. com/s3fs-public/publication/170302_Ellman_ThirdOffsetStrategySummary_Web.pdf. Fan, C., Wang, Y., Liu, T., Qin, X. and Liang, H. (2018) “Linjin Kongjian Gao Chaoshengsu Feixingqi Xietong Zhidao Kongzhi Zongti Jishu Yanjiu” (System Design of Cooperative Guidance and Control of Near Space Hypersonic Vehicles), Zhanshu Daodan Jishu (Tactical Missile Technology) 4: 52–58. Fan, Y. (2014) “Wurenji Buhu Minyong Lingyu, Guanli Fangmian Jiang Youfa Keyi,” (UAV Layout in the Civil Field, Will Have to Rely on Laws), Carnoc.com (7 March), available online at http://news.carnoc.com/list/275/275541.html. FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) and EY (Ernst & Young) (2018) “Make in India for Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Awaiting Its ‘Kitty Hawk’ Moment” (12 July), available online at www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/eymake-in-india-for-unmanned-aircraft-systems/$File/ey-make-in-india-for-unmannedaircraft-systems.pdf.

286  Lora Saalman Future of Life Institute (2018) “AI Policy—China,” available online at https://futureoflife.org/ ai-policy-china. Gady, F. (2018) “Russia Begins Sea-Trials of Nuclear-Capable ‘Poseidon’ Underwater Drone’, The Diplomat (21 July), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2018/07/ russia-begins-sea-trials-of-nuclear-capable-poseidon-underwater-prone. Glass, P. (2018) “China’s Robot Subs Will Lean Heavily on AI: Report,” Defense One (23 July), available online at www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/07/chinas-robot-subswill-lean-heavily-ai-report/149959. Gupta, D. K. (2018) “Military Applications of Artificial Intelligence,” Centre for Land and Warfare Studies (17 March), available online at https://archive.claws.in/1878/militaryapplications-of-artificial-intelligence-deepak-kumar-gupta.html. Kaja, A. and Yan, L. (2018) “Covington Artificial Intelligence Update: China’s Vision for The Next Generation of AI,” Covington and Burling LLP (24 March), available online at www. insideprivacy.com/artificial-intelligence/chinas-vision-for-the-next-generation-of-ai. Kania, E. (2018) “China’s AI Agenda Advances,” The Diplomat (14 February), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/chinas-ai-agenda-advances. Kania, E. (2017) “Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission: Chinese Advances in Unmanned Systems and the Military Applications of Artificial Intelligence—the PLA’s Trajectory towards Unmanned, ‘Intelligentized’ Warfare,” U.S.China Economic and Security Review Commission (23 February), available online at www.uscc. gov/sites/default/files/Kania_Testimony.pdf. Kannan, U. (2018) “Ericsson Sets Up Global AI Accelerator in B’luru,” Deccan Herald (13 December), available online at www.deccanherald.com/business/ericsson-sets-global-ai-707969.html. Korulla, M. (2016) “‘Make in India’ Paradigm—Roadmap for a Future Ready Naval Force: Autonomous Underwater Vehicles,” Organized by FICCI in Association with Indian Navy (18–19 April), available online at http://ficci.in/events/22716/ISP/2-Dr-Manu-Korula.pdf. Krekel, B., Adams, P. and Bakos, G. (2012) “Occupying the Information High Ground: Chinese Capabilities for Computer Network Operations and Cyber Espionage,” Northrop Grumman Corporation for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (7 March), available online at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/docs/Cyber-066.pdf. Lasania, Y. (2018) “Adani Elbit UAV Complex Inaugurated in Hyderabad,” Livemint (15 December), available online at www.livemint.com/Technology/EXlKtDL4Vo2aqQr8lLIjkK/ Adani-Elbit-Unamanned-Aerial-Vehicles-complex-inaugurated-in.html. LeadingIndia.AI (2019) LeadingIndia.AI, available online at www.leadingindia.ai. Lee, K. and Triolo, P. (2017) “China’s Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Understanding Beijing’s Structural Advantages,” in “China Embraces AI,” Eurasia Group (December), available online at www.eurasiagroup.net/files/upload/China_Embraces_AI.pdf. Li, S. and Duan, H. (2012) “Jiyu Rengong Fengqun Youhua de Gao Chaoshengsu Feixingqi Zai Xian Canshu Bianshi” (Artificial bee colony approach to online parameters identification for hypersonic vehicle), Zhongguo Kexue: Xinxi Kexue (China Science: Information Science) 42(11): 1350–1363. Mishra, D. (2018) “Artificial Intelligence Task Force Seeks 1,200 Crore Corpus from Govt,” The Times of India (22 March), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ trend-tracking/artificial-intelligence-task-forceseeks-1200-crore-corpus-from-govt/articleshow/63409127.cms. Mohammad, N. (2018) “Despite the Hype, the Defence Offset Policy Hasn’t Really Worked for India,” The Wire (2 August), available online at https://thewire.in/security/despitethe-hype-the-defence-offset-policy-hasnt-really-worked-for-india. NITI Aayog (2018) “National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence” NITI Aayog Discussion Paper ( June), available online at http://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/ NationalStrategy-for-AI-Discussion-Paper.pdf.

AI military acquisition and integration  287 Pandit, R. (2018) “India Now Wants Artificial Intelligence-Based Weapon Systems,” The Times of India (21 May), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-movesto-develop-ai-based-military-systems/articleshow/64250232.cms. Pant, A. (2018) “Future of Warfare and Artificial Intelligence: The Visible Path,” IDSA Occasional Paper No. 49 (August), available online at https://idsa.in/occasionalpapers/ future-warfare-and-artificial-intelligence-49. Panwar, R. (2018) “Artificial Intelligence in Military Operations: Technology, Ethics and the Indian Perspective,” Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (31 January), available online at https:// idsa.in/idsacomments/artificial-intelligence-in-military-operations-india_ rspanwar_310118. PIB (Press Information Bureau) (2018) “Raksha Mantri Inaugurates Workshop on AI in National Security and Defence” (21 May), available online at http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=179445. PIB (Press Information Bureau) (2017) “Commerce and Industry Minister Sets Up Task Force on Artificial Intelligence for Economic Transformation” (25 August), available online at http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=170231. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2018) “India Working on Unmanned Tanks, Vessels, Robotic Weaponry for Future Wars,” The Economic Times (20 May), available online at www.outlookindia. com/website/story/india-is-working-on-unmanned-tanks-vessels-robotic-weaponry-forfuture-wars/312030. Ravi, S. and Nagaraj, P. (2018) “Harnessing the Future of AI in India,” Brookings (18 October), available online at www.brookings.edu/research/harnessing-the-future-of-ai-in-india. Ray, T. (2018) “Slow and Steady: India’s Tentative Steps into the AI Race,” The Diplomat (14 July), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2018/07/slow-and-steady-indias-tentativesteps-into-the-ai-race. Reuters (2018) “Beijing to Build $2 Billion AI Research Park: Xinhua” (3 January), available online at www.reuters.com/article/us-china-artificial-intelligence/beijing-to-build-2billion-ai-research-park-xinhua-idUSKBN1ES0B8. Robles, P. (2018) “China Plans to Be a World Leader in Artificial Intelligence by 2030,” South China Morning Post (1 October), available online at https://multimedia.scmp.com/news/china/ article/2166148/china-2025-artificial-intelligence/index.html. Saalman, L. (2018a) “Fear of False Negatives: AI and China’s Nuclear Posture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (24 April), available online at https://thebulletin.org/military-applicationsartificial-intelligence/fear-false-negatives-ai-and-china%E2%80%99s-nuclear-posture. Saalman, L. (2018b) “China’s Integration of Neural Networks into Hypersonic Glide Vehicles,” in N. Wright, ed., AI, China, Russia, and the Global Order: Technological, Political, Global, and Creative Perspectives (A Strategic Multilayer Assessment (SMA) Periodic Publication, U.S. Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff ) (December), available online at https://nsiteam. com/ai-china-russia-and-the-global-order-technological-political-global-and- creativeperspectives. Shanghai Shi Renmin Zheng fu Xinwen Bangongshi (Shanghai Municipal People’s Government Press Office) (2017) “Shanghai Juxing Tuidong Xinyidai Rengong Zhineng Fazhan ‘Shishi Yijian’ Fabuhui” (Shanghai Holds Press Conference on ‘Recommendations for Implementation’ of the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development), Guowuyuan Xinwen Bangongshi Wangzhan (The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China) (14 November), available online at www.scio.gov.cn/xwf bh/gssxwf bh/xwf bh/shanghai/Document/1606039/1606039.htm. Sinha, A., Hickok, E. and Basu, A. (2018) “AI in India: A Policy Agenda,” The Centre for Internet and Society (5 September), available online at https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/ ai-in-india-a-policy-agenda. State Council (2017) “Xinyidai Rengong Zhineng Fazhan Guihua” (New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan), in F. Sapio, W. Chen and A. Lo, trans., The

288  Lora Saalman Foundation for Law and International Affairs, available online at https://flia.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/07/A-New-Generation-of-Artificial-Intelligence-Development-Plan-1.pdf. Synched (2017) “Baidu Leads China’s Construction of the Upcoming National Engineering Laboratory of Deep Learning Technology and Application” (26 February), available online at https://medium.com/syncedreview/baidu-leads-chinas-construction-of-the-upcomingnational-engineering-laboratory-of-deep-learning-999c763e1207. ThreatConnect (2015) “OPM Breach Analysis” (5 June), available online at https://threatconnect. com/opm-breach-analysis. Triolo, P., Kania, E. and Webster, G. (2018) “Translation: Chinese Government Outlines AI Ambitions through 2020,” New America (26 January), available online at www. newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/digichina/blog/translation-chinese-governmentoutlines-ai-ambitions-through-2020. Webster, G., Creemers, R., Triolo, P. and Kania, E. (2017) “Full Translation: China’s ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” New America (1 August), available online at www.newamerica.org/cybersecurity-initiative/digichina/blog/full-translationchinas-new-generation-artificial-intelligence-development-plan-2017. Wong, C. (2016) “‘Underwater Great Wall’: Chinese Firm Proposes Building Network of Submarine Detectors to Boost Nation’s Defence,” South China Morning Post (19 May), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/1947212/underwatergreat-wall-chinese-firm-proposes-building. World Economic Forum (2017) “Opening Plenary with Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China,” World Economic Forum Annual Meeting (17–20 January), available online at www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2017/sessions/ opening-plenary-davos-2017. Wübbeke, J., Meissner, M., Zenglein, M. J., Ives, J. and Conrad, B. (2016) “Made in China 2025,” Mercator Institute for China Studies (December), available online at www.merics.org/ sites/default/files/2018-07/MPOC_No.2_MadeinChina2025_web.pdf. Xinhuanet (2018) “Baidu, Peking University Cooperate on AI Research” (28 April), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-04/28/c_137144303.htm. Xu, G. (2016) “Analysis of Three-Year Implementation Plan of ‘Internet Plus’ Artificial Intelligence,” CNKI, available online at www.en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTotalHLWT201612010.htm. Zhao, H., Hu, Y., Liang, Y. and Yang, X. (2017) “Gao Chaoshengsu Feixingqi Zishiying Shenjing Wangluo Kongzhi” (Hypersonic Vehicle Adaptive Neural Network Control), Guti Huojian Jishu ( Journal of Solid Rocket Technology) 40(2): 257–263. Zhong, H. (2017) “Guowai Wuren Shuixia Hangxingqi Zhuangbei Yu Jishu Xianzhuang Ji Zhanwang” (Current Status and Prospects of Equipment and Technology for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles Abroad), Shuixia Wuren Xitong Xuebao ( Journal of Unmanned Undersea Systems) 25(3): 215–225. Zhou, J. (2018) “Drones, Facial Recognition, and a Social Credit System: 10 Ways China Watches Its Citizens,” South China Morning Post (4 August), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/ society/article/2157883/drones-facial-recognition-and-social-credit-system-10-ways-china.

Part 5

Economy and connectivity

17 Bilateral economic relations amid trade and trust deficits Pradeep Taneja

When Deng Xiaoping met the then Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in Beijing in 1988, he is believed to have told his guest that there cannot be an Asian Century until China and India are developed, adding further that “if China and India are developed, we can say that we have made our contributions to mankind” (Deng 1988). Since that historic meeting, China has become the world’s second largest economy and India has broken free of the so-called “Hindu rate of growth” to emerge as the world’s fastest growing major economy and its sixth largest. International trade and foreign investment have been among the key drivers of China’s economic growth and development since it first began its reform and opening policy in 1978. They are also playing an important and growing part in India’s economic development. India–China trade has grown rapidly since the turn of the century, with China becoming India’s largest trading partner in 2008, a position it has maintained ever since. Hundreds of companies from the two countries have successfully invested in each other’s market and the number of tourists and business travelers between the two countries has grown significantly. This chapter focuses on bilateral trade and investment ties between the two Asian neighbors. It argues that economic factors are drawing China and India closer—despite the continuing strategic competition and mistrust—through the introduction of business interest groups and individuals as new stakeholders in the bilateral relationship. The chapter is divided into the following four sections: the first section provides a brief historical background to bilateral trade relations from the 1950s onward. This is followed by an examination of the bilateral trade data from 1995 to 2016, including an explanation for the large and widening trade deficit against India. The third section looks at capital investment. The fourth and final section identifies some of the challenges that continue to impede bilateral economic relations but also opportunities that would be hard to ignore.

Background The history of trade between China and India goes back thousands of years, but, until a couple of decades ago, it was rare to find Chinese products in India and Indian products in China. After the 1962 border war, the Chinese goods available in India were generally smuggled into India via Nepal and included simple items such as pens and cigarette lighters. In the early years after the resumption of ambassador-level relations in 1976 and the beginning of China’s open-door policy, China began to import lower grade tobacco from India for domestic consumption while it exported some of its own higher grade tobacco to other countries to earn foreign exchange. The rapid transformation of

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China into the “factory of the world” over the subsequent forty years has also witnessed a radical shift in China’s foreign trade system and policies. The old unified system of international trade where all imports and exports were handled by a limited number of state-owned import–export corporations gave way to a decentralized system with a multitude of players. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 required China to reduce tariffs on over 7,000 items, relax quotas and other trade barriers, and remove many restrictions on the trading rights of Chinese companies. China’s international trade as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which indicates the relative importance of foreign trade in the economy of a country, was less than ten percent in 1978, but rose to more than thirty-eight percent by 2001 and then peaked at sixty-four percent in 2006, before falling back again to thirty-seven percent in 2016.1 India, which had managed to protect its domestic manufacturers and producers from foreign competitors for a long time despite being a founding member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), also began to relax trade tariffs and other barriers as part of its economic reforms that began in 1991. Figure 17.1 shows India and China’s trade as a percentage of GDP. Like China, India’s trade as a percentage of GDP also rose sharply from seventeen percent in 1991 to nearly fifty-six percent in 2012, then dropping to forty percent in 2016. The data indicate that India’s economy is slightly more dependent on international trade than China’s.

Bilateral trade In December 2010, during a visit to New Delhi by the then Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, the two countries set a bilateral trade target of $100 billion by 2015. The total value of Sino-Indian trade in 2015–2016 financial year was just under $71 billion (The World Bank 2019)—well short of the hundred billion dollars target.2 Eight years after that

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Figure 17.1 Trade as a percentage of GDP—China and India. Source: Compiled by author based on data from The World Bank (2019) on 4 April 2019.

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aspirational target was set, the total value of two-way trade in 2017–2018 had climbed up to $89.7 billion and, according to Chinese sources, in 2018 it had gone up to $95.5 billion (Luo 2019), which is still below the target set for 2015. The discrepancy between the two figures is probably the result of different time frames, as the Indian data relate to the financial year whereas Chinese data are for the 2018 calendar year. While Chinese exports to India have grown substantially over the years, Indian exports to China have not performed as well as Indian leaders and industry would have expected. As Figure  17.2 shows, China and India had generally balanced trade until the early 2000s, after which India’s trade deficit with China began to grow rapidly. The rise in Chinese exports to India, starting around 2004, can be attributed to the increase in India’s economic growth rate and the concomitant rise in demand for imported machinery and intermediate goods. As a low-cost supplier of such equipment, China emerged as the preferred source of imports for price-sensitive Indian firms and, at least in some cases, imports from China were made attractive by the low-interest finance provided by China’s Exim Bank. Chinese products also came to dominate several consumer product categories in the Indian market. Chinese brands such as Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo are household names in India, and their share of the Indian mobile phone market grew to fifty-three percent in 2017 from thirty-four percent a year earlier.

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Figure 17.2 China–India trade, 1995–2015. Source: Compiled by author based on data from United Nations (2019).

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In fact, Oppo is the main sponsor of the Indian cricket team after it signed an exclusive five-year deal in March 2017. It paid more than $160 million for the right to have its brand name emblazoned on the Team India jersey and training gear. Its nearest rival in the sponsorship bid was also another Chinese company, Vivo (Hindustan Times 2017). The success of these and other Chinese brands in the Indian market is not the only or principal reason for the booming Chinese exports to India. Industrial goods in machinery, electrical, chemical, and allied sectors make up the bulk of Indian imports from China (based on calculations from United Nations 2019). While a large proportion of these goods are imported by Indian companies, the Chinese brands operating in India are increasingly taking advantage of the incentives offered by the Indian government to encourage local manufacturing under its “Make in India” program. Chinese mobile phone handset manufacturers like Xiaomi and Oppo have set up factories in India to assemble handsets from components imported from China. As a result, there were 120 mobile phone assembly plants in India in 2018, compared to just two in 2014 (Pathak 2019). Local Indian mobile phone brands such as Jio also import the majority of their components from China for assembly in India. According to an estimate by the Hong Kong-based consulting firm Counterpoint, India imported mobile phone components worth $13 billion in 2018 (Pathak 2019). Although the distribution by country of origin for these imports is not available, it is safe to assume that a large proportion of these were imported from China. Indian exports to China, on the other hand, continue to be dominated by raw materials or semi-processed goods such as metals, minerals, and chemicals. Exports of minerals (mainly iron ore) made a significant contribution to the overall growth in Indian exports to China between 2006 and 2012 (based on calculations from United Nations 2019). However, iron ore exports were hit hard in 2011 by legal wrangling in India over mining licenses and a subsequent ban on iron ore mining in the leading iron ore exporting state of Goa. The ban was triggered by the findings of an inquiry commission that illegal mining worth 350 billion Indian rupees (roughly $5.2 billion) had taken place between 2005 and 2012 (Tare 2018), a period that corresponded directly with the jump in iron ore exports to China. The ban was lifted in 2014 and iron ore exports to China resumed in 2015. Four years later, in March 2018, the mining ban in Goa was reimposed, seriously affecting the confidence of Chinese iron ore importers in Indian suppliers. Following the initial ban on iron ore mining in Goa, a representative of China Minmetals Corporation told the Indian media, “India’s Iron Ore (sic) supply is not very stable. Who can tell what is the policy about the Iron Ore (sic)? Chinese companies are looking for alternatives” (PTI 2011). In addition to uncertainty over mining policy in India, the continuing slowdown in China’s economy is also likely to affect Indian minerals exports to China in the years ahead. Although the total value of Indian exports to China rose by thirty-one percent in 2017–2018 to $13.3 billion, imports from China also grew by nearly twenty-five percent in the same year to hit $76 billion, thus creating the highest ever bilateral trade deficit for India of $63 billion (Department of Commerce, Government of India 2019). The widening trade deficit has been one of the major points of friction between the two countries and remains one of the top items on the agenda in bilateral discussions between the leaders of the two countries. A number of memoranda of understanding (MOUs) have been signed between the two countries with the aim of boosting Indian exports to China to reduce the trade deficit. For example, during the visit of Premier Li Keqiang to New Delhi in May 2013, three separate MOUs were signed to assist with

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exports of items seen as priority by India. These included agreements to facilitate Indian exports of pharmaceuticals, buffalo meat, and processed foods to China. Such agreements have become part of a routine, but in practice they have made little difference to the growing trade deficit. One of the main reasons for the widening trade deficit is the difference in productivity between China and India, especially in manufacturing. Chinese manufacturers not only enjoy economies of scale but are also better integrated with the global supply chains than their Indian counterparts. In a 2018 study for the World Economic Forum, India scored 5.99 (on a 0–10 scale where ten is the best score) on the Structure of Production scale in a global manufacturing assessment index, compared to China’s 8.25 and Japan’s 8.99. Structure of Production measures complexity (the mix and uniqueness of products a country can make) and scale (total volume of manufacturing output and the significance of manufacturing for the economy as a percentage of GDP) (World Economic Forum 2018). It shows that India has a long way to go in catching up with China in manufacturing capability and efficiency. This makes it difficult for Indian manufacturers to make significant inroads into the Chinese market for finished products, both industrial and consumer. It also explains why Chinese exports of machinery, power generation, and communication equipment to India have continued to rise year after year as local manufacturers are either unable to match Chinese producers on price or do not have the range of products that India needs at this stage of its development. Another reason for the large trade deficit is the invisible or non-tariff barriers that Indian companies face when trying to grow their business in the Chinese market. The key sectors in which India has most vociferously pressured China to help open up its domestic markets for Indian suppliers are agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and information technology (IT) or IT-enabled services. Indian companies are known worldwide for their success and price competitiveness in IT services and generic medicines. China is one of the world’s biggest markets for both, but Indian companies have not had the same level of success in these sectors in China as they have in other parts of the world. Indian government and companies have frequently complained about significant barriers in winning contracts for IT services with Chinese government agencies and large state-owned enterprises. Chinese officials are, however, dismissive of these criticisms, arguing that “Indian companies had done far less than their foreign counterparts to make their presence felt here [in China]” (Krishnan 2012). While Chinese officials may make light of Indian concerns about the non-tariff barriers facing Indian suppliers to the Chinese market, there is no denying that foreign companies in China do face opaque rules and regulations that seem to apply only to foreign firms. China has also kept its interest rates artificially low and for many years prevented its currency from appreciating, giving Chinese companies a competitive edge over their foreign counterparts. In addition, Indian companies complain about dumping by Chinese companies in the Indian market, with the assistance of export and other subsidies from the Chinese central and provincial governments. India has initiated more than 150 anti-dumping investigations against Chinese companies since China became a member of the World Trade Organization in November 2001, which was more than against any other country.3 In order to address the issue of trade imbalance and to increase market access for Indian products in China, the two governments adopted the Five-Year Development Program for Economic and Trade Cooperation during President Xi Jinping’s visit to India in September 2014. As a result of unrelenting pressure from India, in 2018 China

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agreed to grant limited market access for Indian non-basmati rice, fishmeal, and fishoil. While this was a significant concession by China, Indian complaints regarding the lack of market access are far from being fully resolved and are likely to remain a source of contention between the two countries for the foreseeable future. In addition to market access, businesses from the two countries have also seen the number and type of commercial disputes grow along with the volume of trade between the two countries. As the number of Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) doing business with Chinese firms has grown substantially over the years, the incidence of trade-related disputes has been rising, although this is not a linear trend as the number of Chinese companies involved in these disputes fluctuates from year to year. According to a trade advisory issued by the Indian embassy in April 2019, an average of sixty-one Chinese firms were reported to the Indian embassy each year between 2013 and 2018 by the Indian SMEs as having engaged in unfair, illegal, or unethical conduct. Examples of these complaints, included in the trade advisory, ranged from the supply of sub-standard goods to outright fraud where Chinese suppliers shipped “sand, stones, salt, bricks, mud etc. in place of chemicals, Silicon Carbide, Aluminium and Zinc ingots” (Embassy of India 2019).

Investment relations While India is by far China’s biggest trading partner in South Asia, it is not the largest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment in the region, with Pakistan—China’s traditional ally and “iron brother”—and Sri Lanka receiving a larger amount of Chinese investment so far. China has committed over $60 billion to the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in the form of investment, development assistance, and loans. India has strongly objected to CPEC, arguing that it violates India’s sovereignty because it traverses the disputed region of Kashmir. Primarily for this reason but also because of a number of other concerns surrounding debt sustainability and transparency, India has refused to join the BRI. Although up-to-date and sector-wide data on Chinese investment in India are difficult to obtain because of large discrepancies between different sources, the Indian government sources, citing China’s Ministry of Commerce, put the cumulative Chinese investment in India till the end of 2017 at $4.74 billion (Embassy of India 2019). In terms of sector distribution, until 2015 the bulk of Chinese investment in India went into traditional sectors such as automobiles (59.66 percent), metallurgy (14.35 percent), and electrical equipment (4.15 percent), according to Dunseith and Cyrill (2018). An important reason for a recent uptick in Chinese investment in India is the desire by Chinese investors to exploit opportunities in India’s growing digital economy in addition to the traditional sectors. As of early 2019, more than a thousand Chinese firms were operating in India, according to Luo Zhaohui (2019), the then Chinese ambassador in New Delhi. Chinese companies have extended their reach—either through direct investments or global mergers and acquisitions—from the traditional manufacturing hubs of Maharashtra and Gujarat to other states such as Haryana, Rajasthan, and Tamil Nadu, and diversified into the new economy. A number of prominent Chinese billionaires such as Jack Ma of Alibaba have visited India on multiple occasions and ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into Indian digital startups. Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Miteno, Tencent, and Ctrip have become significant stakeholders in various Indian companies. In 2016,

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Beijing Miteno Communication Technology Co. Ltd. (now renamed Shuzhi) made the biggest investment by a Chinese company in an Indian-owned business when it paid $900 million to acquire the Dubai-headquartered advertising technology company Media.net. Founded in 2010 by Mumbai-born young technology entrepreneur brothers Divyank and Bhavin Turakhia, Media.net was at the time of its acquisition by Shuzhi one of the top five ad-tech companies in the world (Gooptu and Chanchani 2016). Earlier, Alibaba made a $680 million investment in the Indian digital payments startup Paytm in 2015. In the same year, Alibaba (together with Taiwan’s Foxconn and Japan’s Softbank) had made a $500 million investment in Snapdeal, another Indian technology startup. China’s largest online travel agency Ctrip also made an US$180 million investment in India’s largest travel e-portal MakeMyTrip in 2016. In April 2019, Ctrip vastly increased its stake in MakeMyTrip when it acquired the South African company Naspers Ltd.’s 42.5 percent stake in the Indian company in a share-swap deal. This deal means that the Chinese company now owns nearly half of MakeMyTrip (Business Today 2019). These investment deals indicate recognition by Chinese companies of the future growth potential of India and of a positive future for Sino-Indian economic relations. The Indian government and business have also been actively seeking Chinese investment in Indian startups. Since 2017, Startup India Association in partnership with the Indian Embassy in China has been organizing an annual investment seminar in Beijing where Indian startups are able to network with their Chinese counterparts and make presentations before Chinese investors. The 2018 seminar was attended by more than 400 people, mostly drawn from Chinese Venture Capital funds and Angel investors, according to the organizers (Venture Gurukool 2018). Meanwhile, Indian companies have also made inroads into the highly crowded Chinese market space. Large Indian IT companies were among the first to set up operations in China to service their multinational clients but also with an eye on China’s own fast-growing market for IT services. The global attention that Indian IT companies drew as governments and corporations around the world tried to solve the “millennium bug” problem also brought them to the attention of Chinese political and corporate leaders. In January 2002, the pro-business Premier of China, Zhu Rongji, visited the Bangalore campus of Indian IT services giant, Infosys, and granted onthe-spot approval for the Indian company to open an office in Shanghai, a city where most Indian companies in China are now based. Zhu was so impressed by the success of Indian IT companies that he reportedly said: “you (India) are no. 1 in software exports; China is left far behind” (TNN 2002). Infosys has since grown rapidly in China where in 2018 it employed 4,000 people across eight cities. It has built a huge campus in Shanghai’s technology hub in Minhang district that has the capacity to provide workspaces for 9,000 people (Flannery 2018). The digital transformation and disruption of business models that have driven demand for IT services globally have also boosted the business of Indian IT companies in China, which are now servicing a growing list of Chinese companies from banking to retail. Indian IT majors such as Infosys and the Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) have established themselves in China as reliable and cost-efficient providers of IT services to both global and local clients. In fact, TCS was the first Indian IT company to enter China back in July 2002. It now employs more than 3,500 people across a number of cities, including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Dalian, Tianjin, and Shenzhen. The significance of TCS as an important Indian player in the Chinese market was highlighted by the visit to its global software development center in Mumbai by Premier Li Keqiang during an official trip to India in May 2013.

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The Tata group operations in China extend beyond TCS and include a joint venture with China’s Chery Automobile Company to manufacture and sell Tata Motors-owned, United Kingdom-based, Jaguar Land Rover ( JLR) company vehicles in China. Established in 2011, the RMB10.9 billion joint venture manufactures at least four different models of JLR vehicles in its modern production facility in Changshu, near Shanghai. Indian IT companies have the highest profile in China, as software is perhaps the only sector where Chinese officials recognize India’s lead over China, as acknowledged by Zhu Rongji in the statement cited earlier. But IT firms are not the only Indian businesses to have established a presence there. Several other Indian companies that have established either wholly owned subsidiaries or joint ventures with Chinese or other foreign companies belong to the manufacturing sector. These companies produce pharmaceuticals, refractories, auto parts, wind turbines, and other related equipment in China for both Chinese and foreign markets. This is somewhat ironic given that Indian exports to China predominantly consist of minerals, metal ores, precious stones, and chemicals, not manufactures. But these firms have clearly found niches in the Chinese market that they are able to develop further by localizing production. Sundram Fasteners Ltd, an auto parts maker, was the first Indian engineering industry firm to enter the Chinese market in 2003, primarily to supply its multinational customers there. Having commissioned two production units in Zhejiang province, it now sells its products to both multinational and Chinese companies and expects to see its China business to grow at between fifteen to twenty percent annually over the next few years (The Hindu Business Line 2018). But despite some notable successes, Indian companies have not found China an easy market in which to do business. As Chairman of Sundram Fasteners, Suresh Krishna, said, “we are among very few Indian companies that have succeeded there” (The Hindu Business Line 2018). In order to succeed in China, he said, Indian firms need to take a long-term perspective and not look for short-term benefits. Another Indian manufacturing firm, Mahindra & Mahindra, which makes agricultural machinery and automobiles, entered China in 2004, where it formed a joint venture with the Nanchang city government and acquired a Chinese tractor company to produce tractors for the local and international markets. Subsequently, in 2008, Mahindra & Mahindra acquired a majority stake in China’s third largest tractor maker, Jiangsu Yueda Yancheng Tractor Company for $26 million. However, less than a decade later, it decided to exit the Chinese market and sold its fifty-one percent stake to its Chinese partners for just $12.3 million, although it has said that it plans to re-enter the Chinese market independently (Thakkar 2018). While the exact number of Indian companies in China is difficult to determine, many of India’s largest companies and numerous medium-sized companies have some form of presence in China, which could mean just a representative office or a wholly owned subsidiary or a joint venture. According to Indian government sources, the cumulative Indian investment in China till September 2017 stood at $851.91 million (Embassy of India 2019), although the real figure could be considerably higher as the earlier figure does not include investment channeled through third countries such as Mauritius or Singapore. In addition to the in-country presence of individual companies, the two main industry lobby groups, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), have long maintained a presence in China, with the former also being a Founder Member of the Boao Forum for Asia—sometimes dubbed as “China’s Davos” after the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. These chambers also provide valuable advice to their members and engage in advocacy on their behalf. A very experienced Mandarin

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speaker who has lived in China for nearly forty years heads the China office of FICCI, giving the lobby group significant on the ground advantage. However, one Indian industry that has made the most visible impression on China and Chinese people is the Indian film industry or Bollywood. Harvard Business School professor Tarun Khanna wrote that in an informal survey, four out of five Chinese told him that Bollywood movies come immediately to mind when they think of India (Khanna 2007: 62). While China strictly controls the number of foreign films it allows for screening in Chinese cinemas each year, some of the Bollywood films that have been screened in China have been extraordinarily popular. Indian film stars like Aamir Khan have become household names in China, whose films such as Three Idiots, Dangal, and Secret Superstar were hugely successful on the Chinese box office. Dangal (translated as Shuaijiao ba! Baba in Chinese) played for sixty days and was the number one movie at the Chinese box office for sixteen consecutive days, grossing $189 million, more than most Hollywood films screened in China in 2017 (Cain 2017). Khan’s personal economic interest in the Chinese entertainment market is so significant that he was a prominent unofficial attendee at the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations convened by President Xi Jinping in Beijing in May 2019, even though India sent no official delegate to the conference. Khan has become a strong advocate of improved Sino-Indian relations and people-to-people contacts. He has called for further deepening of bilateral cooperation in the film industry and “praised the Chinese public for their open attitudes towards foreign culture and movies” (Kou and He 2019). All things considered, Chinese investment in India and Indian investment in China remain at very low levels and far below what would be expected of two large economies each with a population of 1.3 billion or more and significant growth potential. By way of comparison, tiny Singapore is the second largest foreign investor in India with a cumulative investment of nearly $83 billion between 2000 and 2018, according to the Indian government’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT 2019). China, according to the same source, was the eighteenth biggest foreign investor in India.

Future challenges The leaders of the two countries have repeatedly called for greater economic cooperation between the two countries. But as the foregoing discussion has shown, past trade targets set by the leaders have not been met, and investors from the two countries still see each other’s domestic markets and business environments as difficult. However, trade and investment relations between the two Asian neighbors are increasing despite numerous political differences and growing strategic competition. Since 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Xi Jinping of China have agreed not to allow these differences to become disputes. However, the level of trust between the political and military leaders remains low, and the possibility of another border incursion or other such incident cannot be ruled out. Any such incident will have the potential to further undermine trust and weaken the constituency in both countries that wants to foster better trade and economic relations. This constituency consists of a variety of actors. First, it includes those who champion an Asian renaissance or argue that the twenty-first century is destined to be an Asian Century and believe that China and India must work together politically and economically if that dream is to become a reality. The majority of these actors have no economic skin in the game; they are driven primarily by ideology.

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Second, it represents those who do have an economic interest in seeing a stable development of and steady improvement in bilateral relations. They include those companies and individuals from India and China who have already made significant investments in the other country or see lucrative future opportunities for business across the Himalayan divide. This group consists of the founders and chief executives of major companies as also their senior executives and many of their employees. It also includes successful artistes, film producers, and cultural impresarios. The economic-business group is powerful, and its members have the potential ability to influence political decisions if they choose to act in a coordinated fashion. In the future, this constituency is likely to grow in strength in both China and India as its members will find it difficult to ignore business opportunities in what would be the world’s second and third largest economies. Third, the constituency for better trade and economic relations between the two countries consists of people who do not necessarily have a deep understanding of the factors that drive the bilateral relationship or impede its forward movement but rather whose livelihoods have come to depend on their ability to trade between the two countries. This last group covers thousands of Indian merchants who make multiple trips a year to Chinese commodities trading centers such as Yiwu in Zhejiang province, from where they buy and ship back to India container loads of manufactured goods from toys to power tools. Although their contribution to the overall value of bilateral trade is difficult to measure, their numbers are growing as is evident to anyone who flies between India and China. This author approvingly calls these traders pheriwalas, a Hindi word meaning a hawker or itinerant salesperson. These modern pheriwalas are, however, better educated, conduct their trade across vast distances, and travel by air. At its heart, their core business is to make available to the end-users the products they want, when they want them, and at affordable prices. The number of Chinese pheriwalas traveling to India to buy Indian products remains small in comparison but will grow in the future as Indian products become more acceptable and competitive in the Chinese market. In conversations this author has had with the Indian traders, he has found them to be very favorably impressed with the quality of Chinese infrastructure, the speed with which China has been able to transform its economy, and the business-friendly attitude of Chinese local governments. They also evince an interest in a stronger bilateral relationship. However, the constituency for better trade and economic relations is still developing, and it faces real resistance from those who see India and China as strategic and commercial competitors; who believe that there can only be one great power in Asia and both China and India are destined to compete for that status; who may have long been socialized into seeing a strategic rivalry between the two countries as inevitable, including those in the foreign affairs, military, and intelligence communities in the two countries; and finally, those who fundamentally find the political system and values of the other unacceptable and threatening.

Notes 1 The trade to GDP data for both China and India are from the World Bank website: https:// data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS?locations=CN-IN. 2 India’s financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March of the following year. 3 Data extracted from the website of the Directorate General of Trade Remedies in the Indian Ministry of Commerce: www.dgtr.gov.in/anti-dumping-cases.

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Bibliography Business Today (2019) “Naspers to Sell Stake in MakeMyTrip, Ctrip to Become Biggest Shareholder” (27 April), available online at www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/naspers-tosell-stake-in-makemytrip-ctrip-to-become-biggest-shareholder/story/341046.html. Cain, R. (2017) “No Hollywood Film Has Topped ‘Dangal’ in China Since May Except ‘Transformers 5’,” Forbes (14 October), available online at www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/ 2017/10/14/no-hollywood-film-has-topped-dangal-in-china-since-may-but-transformers5/#3e0567f1198b. Deng, X. (1988) Deng Xiaoping’s Remarks to Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping 3 (December) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press). Department of Commerce, Government of India (2019) Export Import Data Bank, available online at https://commerce-app.gov.in/eidb/. DPIIT (Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade) (2019) “Fact Sheet on Foreign Direct Investment, Annexure-A” (27 May), available online at https://dipp.gov.in/sites/ default/files/FDI_Factsheet_27May2019.pdf. Dunseith, B. and Cyrill, M. (2018) “Chinese Investment into India Confirms Key Market Dynamics,” India Briefing (13 June), available online at www.india-briefing.com/news/chineseinvestment-india-digital-market-dynamics-14383.html/. Embassy of India (2019) “Fourth Advisory for Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Doing/Interested in Doing Business with Chinese Companies,” No. Pek/Com/208/1/2019, available online at www.eoibeijing.gov.in/pdf/4th-Trade-Advisory-Revised%202019-April08-05.pdf. Flannery, R. (2018) “Localization, Disruption Boost India’s Infosys in China,” Forbes (20  September),  available online at www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2018/09/20/ localization-disruption-boost-indias-infosys-in-china/#10443034382e. Gooptu, B. and Chanchani, M. (2016) “China Consortium Buys Ad-Tech Venture Media.net for $900 million,” The Economic Times (23 August), available online at https://economictimes. indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/china-consortium-buys-ad-tech-venture-media-net-for900-million/articleshow/53818452.cms. Hindustan Times (2017) “OPPO Digital Strikes Rs 1079 Crore Deal as India National Cricket Team Sponsor” (7 March), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/cricket/oppo-toreplace-star-india-as-india-cricket-team-sponsor/story-2ppB6LBy6doZYCZZK6dSvN. html. Khanna, T. (2007) “China+India: The Power of Two,” Harvard Business Review (December): 60–69, available online at https://hbr.org/2007/12/china-india-the-power-of-two. Kou, J. and He, Z. (2019) “Cultural Cooperation between China and India Should Be Strengthened: Aamir Khan,” People’s Daily Online (17 May), available online at http://en.people.cn/ n3/2019/0517/c90000-9579195.html. Krishnan, A. (2012) “Chinese Commerce Minister Coming Amid Trade Strains,” The Hindu (16 August), available online at www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/chinese-commerceminister-coming-amid-trade-strains/article3780924.ece. Luo, Z. (2019) “Dragon-Elephant Tango,” The Indian Express (4 April): 12, available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/dragon-elephant-tango-india-chinarelations-narendra-modi-xi-jinping-5657281/. Pathak, T. (2019) “India Imported $13 Billion Worth of Mobile Phone Components in 2018,” Counterpoint (blog) (22 February), available online at www.counterpointresearch.com/ india-imported-13-billion-worth-mobile-phone-components-2018/. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2011). “China Looks for Alternatives as India Falters in Iron Ore Trade,” The Economic Times (18 November), available online at https://economictimes. indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/china-looks-for-alternatives-as-india-faltersin-iron-ore-trade/articleshow/10779986.cms.

302  Pradeep Taneja Tare, K. (2018) “Mining in a Mess,” India Today (29 March), available online at www.indiatoday. in/magazine/the-big-story/story/20180409-goa-ban-iron-ore-mining-jobless-workersmanohar-parrikar-1201187-2018-03-29. Thakkar, K. (2018) “M&M to Return to China, Tap $25-Billion Agri Equipment Market,” The Economic Times (8 June), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ industry/auto/auto-news/mm-to-return-to-china-tap-25-billion-agri-equipment-market/ articleshow/64502644.cms. The Hindu Business Line (2018) “Sundram Fasteners’ China Arm Clocks ₹250 cr Revenue” (9 May), available online at www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/sundram-fasteners-chinaarm-clocks-250-cr-revenue/article23828356.ece. The World Bank (2019) World Bank Development Indicators, available online at http://datatopics. worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/. TNN (Times News Network) (2002) “Zhu Clears Infosys Request on the Spot,” The Times of India (18 January), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/ Zhu-clears-Infosys-request-on-the-spot/articleshow/961454261.cms. United Nations (2019) United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database, available online at https://comtrade.un.org/. Venture Gurukool (2018) “2nd Startup India Investment Seminar 2018, Beijing” (30 November), available online at www.venturegurukool.com/blog/second-india-investment-seminar-2018beijing. World Economic Forum (2018) Readiness for the Future of Production Report 2018, available online at www3.weforum.org/docs/FOP_Readiness_Report_2018.pdf.

18 China, India, and Asian connectivity China’s view Lin Minwang

In 2013, China’s president Xi Jinping proposed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to run through the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Enhancing connectivity within Asia is one of the most fundamental goals of the BRI. In parallel, India has been promoting various initiatives to improve connectivity among South Asian countries as also in other neighboring countries. However, China’s BRI does not easily fit with India’s strategy on regional connectivity and its broader geopolitical vision. This chapter attempts to explore the interaction between China and India on the BRI and how different geopolitical views pose potential hurdles for China–India cooperation in South Asian connectivity. The paper proceeds in three sections. The first part provides a brief overview of China’s BRI plan on Asia connectivity, especially focusing on South Asia. The second section explores India’s response toward the BRI under the Modi government. The third part analyzes Chinese views of India’s stance on the BRI.

Is China reshaping South Asia through connectivity? The United States, Japan, and other countries had already tried to sell the idea of “Silk Road Cooperation” before the BRI, which may inspire China’s thinking on regional connectivity. In 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had proposed “The New Silk Road … as a means for Afghanistan to integrate further into the region by resuming traditional trading routes and reconstructing significant infrastructure links broken by decades of conflict” (DOS 2011). Japan had used the term “Silk Road diplomacy” for its Central Asia policy since 2004 (MOFA 2004). China’s political leaders also frequently mentioned the Silk Road in their speeches before the BRI. When meeting with Central Asian countries, Arab countries, and Central and Eastern European countries, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao repeatedly mentioned the “Silk Road” and the “Maritime Silk Road” in history. At the opening ceremony of the Second China-Eurasia Economic Development and Cooperation Forum held in 2012, he made a speech “Towards New Glory of the Silk Road” which emphasized connectivity and economic cooperation between China and Eurasian countries (Wen 2012). How did the China’s leaders transform a historical concept, “the Silk Road,” into official policy? The specific processes and reasons for adopting the BRI are still not definitively known. Various policy and intellectual communities in China have different views on the motivations for the initiative. The economic community believes that BRI is economically rational. For example, famous economist Justin Yifu Lin and others maintain that, after more than thirty years’ high-speed economic growth, China needs

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to change its economic development model. China’s future economic growth should be based on a careful plan in which its surplus capital and industrial capacity are geared toward global projects in order to maximize returns. In this view, the BRI is a vehicle for a more internationalized Chinese economy (Lin 2018). On the other hand, the diplomatic and strategic community in China links the BRI to the “Westward Strategy”.1 Before President Xi Jinping took office, the “Westward Strategy” had been hotly debated within strategic circles in 2012. This debate may have been one of the original sources for the birth of the BRI (Cao 2015). At that time, China–Japan relations were tense due to the Diaoyu Islands dispute, and the United States was implementing its “rebalance to Asia” policy. In this context, the new Chinese government under Xi chose a version of the “Westward Strategy.” As part of the strategy, President Xi visited Russia for his first state visit and Premier Li Keqiang visited India for his first overseas trip as premier in 2013. Nonetheless, when President Xi Jinping first proposed the BRI, there was no absolute clarity on the aims of the initiative. At the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth CPC Central Committee, held in November 2013, the Chinese government decided to adopt the BRI as a key new measure to build a more open economic system. At this meeting, it was clearer that the initial goal of the BRI was to promote a new round of economic development for China (The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China 2013). One year later, at the beginning of 2015, China set up a Steering Group for the BRI headed by Zhang Gaoli, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council. The mission of the Steering Group of the BRI is “to study important issues related to planning, policy, and projects, and to provide guidance and coordination in the implementation of the initiative” (Xinhuanet 2017). In March 2015, the document “Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road” was officially launched, setting a clear direction for the BRI. Since the BRI was first proposed, its specific content has changed slightly, but its core has remained unchanged. The Silk Road Economic Belt focuses on bringing together China, Central Asia, Russia, and Europe (the Baltic); linking China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia and West Asia; and connecting China with Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean. The 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road is designed to go from China’s coast to Europe through the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean in one route, and from China’s coast through the South China Sea to the South Pacific in the other. (NDRC 2015) On land, the Initiative will focus on jointly building a new Eurasian Land Bridge, China– Mongolia–Russia economic corridors, China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridors, China-Indochina Peninsula economic corridors, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor. The BRI is an ambitious plan for the opening-up of and cooperation among Asian countries. South Asia is an important region for the BRI. President Xi emphasized the position and role of South Asia. He noted that the region is located at the intersection of the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” (Xinhuanet 2015). In

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September 2014, he delivered a speech entitled “In Joint Pursuit of a Dream of National Renewal” to the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi. In the speech, he stated that the BRI is aimed “at strengthening connectivity among countries along the routes of the traditional land and maritime Silk Roads, with a view to achieving common prosperity, complementarity in trade, and closer people-to-people ties.” The speech expressed the hope that, “propelled by the two ‘wings’ of the ‘Belt’ and the ‘Road’,” China’s economy would “take off together with those of the South Asian countries” (Xi 2014). With the exception of India, most South Asian countries actively embraced the BRI. Through it, China has increasingly expanded its economic presence in the region. From 2013 to 2017, China’s trade with South Asia grew from $91.3 billion to $126.8 billion (An 2018). Although China is not a top export destination for South Asian countries, it is nonetheless one of the top sources of imports for these countries—the largest for Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the second largest for Nepal, and the third largest for Maldives (Samaranayake 2019: 5). At the same time, in 2012–2016, China exported more arms than Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, pushing it up to third place among arms exporting nations. It is now a major supplier of military equipment to India’s neighbors, with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar receiving over seventy percent of its exports between 2012 and 2017 (Matthews and Ping 2017). In South Asia, the CPEC has made rapid progress. As of 2018, there are twenty-two projects under the framework of the CPEC, nine of which have been completed and thirteen of which are under construction, with a total investment of $19 billion that is expected to drive up the annual economic growth of Pakistan by one to two percentage points. In addition, the CPEC has created 70,000 jobs for Pakistan (Liu 2018; Xinhuanet 2018). The early harvest projects of the economic corridor are dominated by energy and transportation infrastructure, and these are intended to help break the bottlenecks holding back Pakistan’s economic development (FMPRC 2018b). China and Nepal too have made important progress in the construction of the BRI. On 19–24 June 2018, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli of Nepal paid an official visit to China, and the two sides agreed to build a three-dimensional connectivity network across the Himalayas. In particular, they signed a number of cooperation agreements such as a memorandum of cooperation on the construction of a cross-border railway from Jilong (Gyirong in Tibet) to Kathmandu (FMPRC 2018a). In 2018 they signed the Transit Transport Agreement. China allowed Nepal to use four Chinese ports to trade with other countries. According to the agreement, Nepal can use the ports of Tianjin, Shenzhen, Lianyungang, and Zhanjiang in China, as well as the ports of Lanzhou, Lhasa, and Shigatse to trade with other countries (Huanqiu 2018). The construction of the BRI between China and Bangladesh is also making rapid headway. During President Xi’s visit to Bangladesh in 2016, China promised to provide $21.5 billion in loans to help Bangladesh’s domestic modernization (Zhang and Lu 2018). The twenty-seven agreements and memorandums of understanding signed by the two sides cover various areas of the national economy such as trade and investment, marine economy, road and bridge construction, power and energy, maritime cooperation, and communication technology. Cooperation in these fields is aimed at greatly enhancing Bangladesh’s domestic industrial production and level of social governance. China and Bangladesh also plan to connect Kunming, Myanmar, and Chittagong by strengthening road and railway networks and forming an international traffic corridor across Southeast Asia–South Asia in order to facilitate regional interconnection and economic and trade development (Zhang and Lu 2018).

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Myanmar is particularly prominent in the development of the BRI. On 19 November 2017, Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Burmese State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi. They announced that China proposes to build a China–Myanmar economic corridor. In September 2018, the two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the Joint Construction of the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor and convened the first meeting of the Corridor Joint Commission. They signed the framework agreement for the Yangon Industrial New City and China– Myanmar Border Economic Cooperation Zone. China’s presence in the Indian Ocean has become more visible as a result of its anti-piracy operations and port construction, especially with the construction of a naval logistics supply base in Djibouti. After the Abdulla Yameen government of Maldives took office in 2013, India–Maldives relations went into a downward spiral. Abdulla Yameen was thought to have acted in a “pro-China” way when the Maldives Parliament passed a constitutional amendment on 22 July 2015 allowing foreigners to buy land provided they invest more than $1 billion and provided that seventy percent of the land is reclaimed from the Indian Ocean (BBC 2015). Sri Lanka has always been a key country in the construction of the BRI. However, following the 2015 Sri Lankan general election, the Colombo Port City project was suspended in March of that year and resumed only in March 2016. China and the Sri Lankan government reached a new agreement in August 2016: twenty hectares of land used by China under the previous agreement were now given to it in a ninety-nine-year lease in the new agreement (Huanqiu 2016). The Hambantota Port project also experienced several twists and turns. Eventually, on 29 July 2017, the Sri Lankan government signed a franchise agreement with the China Merchants Group Holdings. The Chinese company will hold a seventy percent stake in a joint venture with the state-run Sri Lanka Ports Authority in order to run the Hambantota port. On 9 December 2017, the franchise agreement came into effect, and Sri Lanka officially handed over the port to the China Merchants Group Holdings (China.com 2017). China has undoubtedly expanded its economic influence in South Asia through the BRI. At present, the impact has been primarily at the economic level, while the impact at the strategic level has been relatively limited. In the long run, the BRI in South Asia will have geopolitical implications. Through CPEC, China–Pakistan economic ties have strengthened. The construction of Gwadar Port has caused India to be very worried about China’s possible military presence in the North Indian Ocean and the Strait of Hormuz, which will change the complex geopolitical situation in this region. At the same time, India is worried that China’s project in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir will further insert Beijing into the disputes between India and Pakistan and strengthen Islamabad’s territorial claims. The Sino-Nepalese Transit Transport Agreement and the cross-border railway construction from Jilong to Kathmandu may also have geopolitical impact. Because of the geographical constraints of the Himalayas, Nepal is highly dependent on India, which constitutes an important source of influence for New Delhi. When Nepal adopted a new constitution in September 2015, India deliberately implemented a virtual embargo to force the Nepalese government to give the Madhesi people, who are ethnically linked to northern Indians, greater political power. With the construction of the cross-border railway with China, Nepal would be able to reduce its complete dependence on India. With the strengthening of China–Bangladesh economic cooperation under the BRI, coupled with the already deeper security and defense ties between the two countries, India has become increasingly anxious about the possibility of its eastern neighbor being

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developed into another “all-weather strategic partner” like Pakistan. Most worryingly, between 2009 and 2013, Bangladesh sourced over eighty percent of its arms from China, to rank in the top three customers of Chinese arms (Miglani 2015). As the “land bridge” connecting South Asia and Southeast Asia, Myanmar occupies an important geopolitical position. China–Myanmar relations have developed rapidly since 1988. One of the most troubling issues for India is that China may expand its presence around the Bay of Bengal. Indian analysts have long speculated that China wants to have military bases around the Bay of Bengal (Khurana 2008). For India, the ability to control the maritime traffic-lines that cross the Bay of Bengal to the Andaman Sea and through the Straits of Malacca into the Pacific Ocean is its bargaining chip in dealing with competitors, especially China. With respect to the Maldives, India is worried that China may be invited to carry out land reclamation there. Anand Kumar, an Indian analyst based at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi has noted said, “[t]he constitution has been amended for the benefit of the Chinese … [i]t is only China which has capacity to acquire seventy percent of the land [for land reclamation]” (as quoted in Kumar 2015). In December 2017, during the state visit of Abdulla Yameen to China, the two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding and a Free Trade Agreement for the joint promotion of the BRI. These agreements were regarded as signs of the Maldives moving even closer to China. However, Abdulla Yameen was defeated by Ibrahim Mohamed Solih in the 2018 presidential election held on 23 September 2018, which cast into doubt the prospects of the BRI in the Maldives. New Delhi remains concerned though that China will continue to make strategic inroads in the island nation. China’ acquisition of Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka has been seen by some Indian commentators as a clear indication of Beijing’s “string of pearls” strategy to surround India and contain it in the Indian Ocean (See Dutta 2017; Singh 2018). While Sri Lankan officials have publicly stated that the port would not be used for military purposes, this does not seem to have allayed New Delhi’s concerns (Lo 2018). In 2018, India paid $300 million for a forty-year lease over Hambantota airport, dubbed “the world’s emptiest airport.” The move has been seen as a means to prevent Hambantota Port from being developed into a Chinese naval port since it would lack the relevant air surveillance capabilities (Brewster 2017). In another move to counter Chinese influence, India entered into an agreement with Japan and Sri Lanka to develop a deep-sea container port at the Port of Colombo (PTI 2019). The geopolitical impact of the BRI for South Asia mentioned earlier is speculation for now, not reality. While the BRI will have long-run geopolitical implications, the Chinese government emphasizes that the BRI is a means of furthering Chinese strategic interests. For China, the main goal of the BRI at present is to take China’s domestic economic development to the next stage. As China’s domestic market competition is already intense, China’s infrastructure construction companies need to expand into the global market.

India’s response to the BRI Clearly, India does not welcome China’s expanding economic role in South Asia, and it has responded negatively to the BRI. On the other hand, China sees India as an important partner in the initiative. Before China formally announced the launch of the BRI, China and India had already reached an agreement to build the BCIM Economic

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Corridor in 2013. At the seventeenth round of the Border Meeting of the Special Representatives of the two countries on 10–12 February 2014 in New Delhi, China’s Special Representative Yang Jiechi invited India to join China in building the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road.” The Indian representative, National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon, accepted the Chinese invitation and made a positive comment on the project (PTI 2014a). However, when Indian Vice President Mohammad Hamid Ansari participated in the commemoration of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence Colloquium in Beijing in May 2014, the Chinese side raised the issue of India joining the BRI. In response, Ansari said that, “BCIM (Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar) is a good and positive initiative [and] we will be supportive of it” and as for the BRI, “We have asked for more details to be able to study the proposal in all its fullness” (PTI 2014b). In other words, by then, India had already come to believe that China’s BRI lacked transparency. In September 2014, when President Xi visited India, India’s response to the BRI was to counter-propose similar projects. One such project is “Project Mausam,” which will promote cooperation among countries in the Indian Ocean region. The other is the “Spice Route,” through which India will expand economic and cultural exchange between India and Southeast Asian countries. India has however not made any substantial investments in either project so far. In 2015, India began to gradually make clear its opposition toward the BRI. In February of that year, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj attended the China– India–Russia Tripartite Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Beijing. In response to the Indian media’s question on why India would not join the BRI, she said that New Delhi saw no need to give “a blanket endorsement” to the plan, adding that it would work with Beijing where there was synergy. India’s official position was that it was awaiting further details from China on the plan (Krishnan 2015). In the run up to the first BRI International Cooperation Forum held in Beijing in May 2017, China invited India to attend. Liu Jinsong, minister and deputy chief of mission at the embassy of the People’s Republic of China in India, explained that the connectivity between China and Pakistan will unavoidably pass through the Kashmir area on the Pakistan side … the China-Pakistan Karakorum-Kunlun Road was built in the 1960s and put into use in [the] 1980s. Therefore it’s no fresh news for India that China and Pakistan’s transportation connections and related cooperation surpass [sic] the Kashmir region. (Liu 2017) He also assured his hosts that “China has no intention to interfere in the territorial and sovereignty disputes between India and its neighbors” (Liu 2017). Luo Zhaohui, the Chinese ambassador to India, asserted during a speech to the United Service Institution (USI) on May 5 that “[t]he CPEC is for promoting economic cooperation and connectivity. It has no connections to or impact on sovereignty issues” (Embassy of the PRC in the Republic of India 2017). Luo said that China is even willing to consider renaming the CPEC (Mitra 2017). This is the first time ever that a Chinese official had publicly talked of re-naming the CPEC project. These assurances from the Chinese side have not fundamentally addressed India’s core concerns. India continues to regard China’s efforts as cosmetic. On 13 May 2017,

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responding to a query on the participation of India in the BRI Forum, the official spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said: connectivity initiatives must be based on universally recognized international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality. Connectivity initiatives must follow principles of financial responsibility to avoid projects that would create unsustainable debt burden for communities; balanced ecological and environmental protection and preservation standards; transparent assessment of project costs; and skill and technology transfer to help long term running and maintenance of the assets created by local communities. Connectivity projects must be pursued in a manner that respects sovereignty and territorial integrity. (MEA 2017) New Delhi indirectly implied that the BRI did not meet these critical standards. India urged China “to engage in a meaningful dialogue on its connectivity initiative” and noted it was “awaiting a positive response from the Chinese side” (MEA 2017). This statement by India’s foreign ministry received wide attention in the international media. Prior to the statement, the Indian media had prepared the ground with negative reports on the BRI. Before the first BRI forum in May 2017, it began to report that the initiative had led to an unsustainable debt burden for Sri Lanka and serious ecological damage in Nepal. These negative reports correlated with the content of the 13 May statement. The timing of India’s statement was also a clear signal to the international community that New Delhi was not positive about the BRI: India wanted to boycott the CPEC and wanted the world to know why. India thus became the first and most prominent country to oppose and question the initiative. China also seems to have given up on its efforts to invite India to participate in the BRI. At the second BRI International Cooperation Forum held in 2019, reference to the BCIM Economic Corridor was deleted from the BRI projects list, which indicates that China has abandoned all projects involving India.

Chinese views and reactions to India’s position China and India are both regional powers. Their rise at the end of the Cold War has intensified the competition between the two countries in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. India is increasingly worried about its dominant position in both areas. With the rapid advancement of the BRI, India is particularly concerned that the smaller South Asian countries will turn away from their traditional reliance on India as they draw closer to China. In India’s view, the BRI has significant geopolitical implications. As Indian Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi, “In the absence of an agreed security architecture in Asia, it [connectivity] could give rise to unnecessary competitiveness. Connectivity should diffuse national rivalries, not add to regional tensions” ( Jaishankar 2016). He also pointed out that “if we seek a multi-polar world, the right way to begin is to create a multi-polar Asia” ( Jaishankar 2016). His view undoubtedly parallels the thinking of many Indian strategists who see the BRI as China’s instrument to construct a Sino-centric global order. When Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited India in December 2010, the joint statement issued by China and India mentioned that there was “enough space in the world for both China

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and India to grow” (MEA 2010). But the tone has changed. For Indian strategists, China promotes the construction of the BRI around Indian’s neighboring countries to squeeze India’s geopolitical space so that “all roads lead to Beijing”.2 China understands India’s strategic concerns. To address them, Beijing had at first invited India to participate in the BRI projects in South Asia. Earlier, China had invited India to join the BCIM Economic Corridor and China–Nepal–India Economic Corridor (FMPRC 2015). However, China found that it was difficult to achieve much progress in these projects due to India’s negative attitude. It therefore stopped making the effort to persuade India, and no longer took measures to include India-related projects under BRI. As noted earlier, China even omitted mention of the BCIM Economic Corridor (BCIM) in the annex of the Joint Communique of the Leaders’ Roundtable of the 2nd Belt and Road forum (Xinhuanet 2019). In the meantime, India’s attitude toward the BRI has affected the small South Asian countries’ participation in BRI projects. Nepal and Bangladesh were hesitant initially to formally accept the BRI and have subsequently proceeded slowly. As a response to the BRI, the Modi government has placed higher priority on South Asia’s connectivity. Soon after China and Nepal signed an agreement to build the China–Nepal railway, India too signed an agreement with Nepal to build a railway. More broadly, New Delhi has made a series of moves to counter Chinese BRI-linked influence. It proposed the “Neighbour First” policy for South Asia, the “Act East” policy for Southeast Asia, the “Link West” policy for the West Asian and Persian Gulf countries, and the “Connect Central Asia” policy in Central Asia. Indian connectivity projects may well affect the construction of BRI projects and thus are seen in Beijing as countermeasures to BRI. For example, India’s efforts to construct the Chabahar Port in Iran may affect the CPEC. Chabahar is less than 100 kilometers from Gwadar Port in Pakistan. Both Afghanistan and Central Asian countries can bypass Pakistan because of Chabahar, reducing their dependence on it. India is also building the Sittwe Port and the inland water terminal in Paletwa which is not far from the Chinese-built Kyaukpyu deep-sea port and Kyaukpyu Special Economic Zone in the Rakhine State of Myanmar. India’s stance on the BRI is a serious obstacle for China. Nevertheless, Beijing places great strategic importance on China–India relations and maintains a larger view of its ties with New Delhi. India is a big country which is rising rapidly. It is in fact moving from being a regional power to being a global power. Sino-Indian relations will have extensive regional and global implications and may even become one of the most important bilateral relationships in world politics. In the Chinese view, India is different from other regional powers. India pursues a balanced diplomacy, does not follow the United States unlike Japan, and does not have a big ideological quarrel with China. Since both China and India have had a history of being colonized and are rising powers in an international system dominated by the United States and Europe, they have more consonant views on the current international system and could be “natural allies” on many global issues. They also share a common interest in peace and development. These foundations make it possible for the two countries to explore and develop better relations. During the informal Wuhan Summit in May 2018, President Xi and Prime Minister Modi reached a consensus on the BRI. China now understands that India cannot express its formal support for the initiative. Its current stance is to promote cooperation between the two countries in regional connectivity and in the economic sphere and no longer seek India’s formal acceptance of the BRI. As a result, at the

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summit, both sides announced that they would pursue a path of “China-India plus” for deeper cooperation in the surrounding region. One of the “China-India Plus” cooperation programs is jointly conducting a training program for Afghan diplomats. The two sides also discussed “China-India Plus” cooperation on the Rohingya issue in Myanmar and the Iranian nuclear issue. For China, this new model of cooperation can also be extended to South Asian countries including Nepal and Bhutan on some projects of mutual interest. In the long run, India’s enhanced connectivity with its neighboring countries should be welcomed by China, because New Delhi’s efforts to promote connectivity in and around South Asia have increased the level of connectivity and interoperability across the region, providing opportunities for linking up projects in various schemes including the BRI in the future.

Conclusion The BRI proposed by China has caused negative reactions in India. The perception gap between two countries has added to the geopolitical competition between the two Asian giants. However, with the ups and downs of the Sino-Indian relationship during Modi’s first term in office behind it, the Indian government seems to be moving toward a more rational, practical approach to the BRI and connectivity. Although China has given up its efforts to include India in the BRI, it has not given up on cooperation with India on some connectivity projects. The future prospects are relatively bright, even though the road to deeper cooperation may be tortuous.

Notes 1 The so-called “Westward Strategy” was widely discussed in China’s strategic circles. Professor Wang Jisi of Peking University is one of the leading exponents of it. The core idea is that China should pay more strategic attention to the western and northern parts of China. Since the reform and opening up in 1978, China has mainly developed economic and diplomatic relations with the United States, Europe, and East Asian countries. In the future, China should expand its economic and strategic relations with its western and northern neighboring countries. 2 Former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal sees the goal of the BRI as the establishment of a “China-centric system in Asia” which would lead to the marginalization of other powers like India (Sibal 2017). This view is shared by noted Indian strategic analyst C. Raja Mohan who believes that the BRI would serve to strengthen China’s influence in “India’s neighbourhood and marginalize Delhi’s regional primacy” (Mohan 2017).

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312  Lin Minwang China.com (2017) “Han ban tuo ta gang jingying quan jin yijiao zhongfang fouren jiang yong zuo haijun jidi” (9 December), available online at https://military.china.com/import ant/11132797/20171209/31785952.html (accessed 10 June 2018). DOS (United States Department of State) (2011) “U.S. Support for the New Silk Road” available online at https://2009-2017.state.gov/p/sca/ci/af/newsilkroad/index.htm (accessed 25 August 2019). Dutta, P. K. (2017) “Can China Really Encircle India with Its String of Pearls? The Great Game of Asia,” India Today (15 June), available online at www.indiatoday.in/india/story/ china-encircle-india-string-of-pearls-982930-2017-06-15. Embassy of the PRC in the Republic of India (2017) “Remarks by H.E. Ambassador Luo Zhaohui at the United Service Institution of India” (5 May), available online at http://in. china-embassy.org/eng/embassy_news/t1459430.htm (accessed 25 August 2019). FMPRC (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China) (2015) “Wang Yi: Zhongyin jiu Gongtong Canyu Niboer Chongjian yi ji Tantao Zhong Ni Yin San Guo Jingji Zoulang Dacheng Gongshi” (25 June), available online at www.fmprc.gov.cn/web/ gjhdq_676201/gj_676203/yz_676205/1206_676812/xgxw_676818/t1276059.shtml (accessed 26 August 2019). FMPRC (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China) (2018a) “Joint Statement between the People’s Republic of China and Nepal” (22 June), available online at www. fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng//wjdt_665385/2649_665393/t1570977.shtml (accessed 10 November 2018). FMPRC (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China) (2018b) “Wang Yi: Zhong ba jingji zoulang jianshe changguo shi shizai zai, meiyou jiazhong ba zhaiwu fudan” (8 September), available online at www.mfa.gov.cn/web/zyxw/t1593417.shtml. Huanqiu (2016) “Zhong qi fangqi zai sililanka kelunpo gangkou cheng xiangmu di tinggong suopei” (3 August), available online at http://w.huanqiu.com/r/MV8wXzkyNTcwODNfMTM4XzE0NzAxNjgwMDA= (accessed 10 June 2018). Huanqiu (2018) “Zhongguo he niboer qian ‘lishi xing’ gangkou xieyi yin mei hen suan” (10 September), available online at http://mil.huanqiu.com/world/2018-09/12973419.html (accessed 10 October 2018). Jaishankar, S. (2016) “Speech by Foreign Secretary at Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi,” Ministry of External Affairs (2 March), available online at www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements. htm?dtl/26433/Speech_by_Foreign_Secretary_at_Raisina_Dialogue_in_New_Delhi_ March_2_2015 (accessed 19 June 2017). Khurana, G. S. (2008) “China’s ‘String of Pearls’ in the Indian Ocean and Its Security Implications,” Strategic Analysis 32(1): 1–40. Krishnan, A. (2015) “China Asks India to Put Aside ‘Maritime Silk Road’ Concerns,” India Today (12 February), available online at www.indiatoday.in/world/story/china-india-aseansushma-swaraj-maritime-silk-road-concerns-240048-2015-02-12 (accessed 22 August 2019). Kumar, S. (2015) “This Will Make the Country a Chinese Colony,” The Diplomat (25 July), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2015/07/this-will-make-the-country-a-chinesecolony/ (accessed 1 July 2019). Lin, Y. (2018) Yidaiyilu 2.0: Zhongguo Yinling Xia de Silu Xingeju (Beijing: Zhejiang University Press). Liu, J. (2017) “‘Belt and Road’: Sharing Opportunities,” Speech by Ambassador Liu Jinsong at the Belt and Road Initiative Conference at Observer Research Foundation (Mumbai), Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of India (21 April), available online at http:// in.china-embassy.org/eng/embassy_news/t1455781.htm (accessed 1 September 2018). Liu, Z. (2018) “China, Pakistan Can Resolve Investment Problems, but ‘Belt and Road’ Concerns Should Not Be Ignored, Experts Say,” South China Morning Post (10 September), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2163624/china-pakistancan-resolve-investment-problems-belt-and-road (accessed 2 September).

China’s view of Asian connectivity  313 Lo, K. (2018) “A Chinese Flag Flies over Sri Lanka as China Extends Its Reach into India’s Backyard,” South China Morning Post (5 January), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/ diplomacy-defence/article/2126897/chinese-flag-flies-over-sri-lanka-china-extends-its. Matthews, R. and Ping, X. (2017) “Why the World Should Fear China’s Military,” The National Interest (27 September), available online at https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/whythe-world-should-fear-chinas-military-exports-22494 (accessed 22 August 2019). MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) (2010) “Joint Communiqué of the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China” (16 December), available online at https://mea.gov.in/ bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/5158/Joint+Communiqu+of+the+Republic+of+India+and+ the+Peoples+Republic+of+China. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) (2017) “Official Spokesperson’s Response to a Query on Participation of India in OBOR/BRI Forum” (13 May), available online at https://mea.gov. in/media-briefings.htm?dtl/28463/Official+Spokespersons+response+to+a+query+on+part icipation+of+India+in+OBORBRI+Forum (accessed 1 September 2018). Miglani, S. (2015) “Indian Leader Heading to Bangladesh with China on His Mind,” Reuters (28 May), available online at www.reuters.com/article/india-bangladesh-china/indian-leaderheading-to-bangladesh-with-china-on-his-mind-idUSL3N0YG2QG20150527 (accessed 25 July 2019). Mitra, D. (2017) “To Meet Indian Concerns, China Offers to Re-Name China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,” The Wire (8 May), available online at https://thewire.in/diplomacy/ china-pakistan-india-obor (accessed 25 August 2019). MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2004) “‘Central Asia + Japan’ Dialogue/Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, Relations between Japan and Central Asia as They Enter a New Era,” Joint Statement between the Foreign Ministers of Japan, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Tajikistan, and the Republic of Uzbekistan in Astana on 28 August, available online at www.mofa.go.jp/region/europe/dialogue/joint0408.pdf (accessed 25 August 2019). Mohan, C. R. (2017) “Network Is the Key,” The Indian Express (9 May), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/network-is-the-key-4646728/. NDRC (National Development and Reform Commission) (2015) “Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road” (28 March), available online at http://en.ndrc.gov.cn/newsrelease/201503/t20150330_669367.html. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2014a) “China Invites India to Join Its Maritime Silk Road Initiative,” The Economic Times (14 February), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ news/economy/infrastructure/china-invites-india-to-join-its-maritime-silk-road-initiative/ articleshow/30400642.cms?from=mdr (accessed 24 August 2019). PTI (Press Trust of India) (2014b) “India Okay with BCIM, Wants Details on China Maritime Silk Road,” The Economic Times (30 June), available online at https://economictimes. indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/india-okay-with-bcim-wants-details-onchina-maritime-silk-road/articleshow/37529279.cms (accessed 10 March 2019). PTI (Press Trust of India) (2019) “Sri Lanka Signs Port Deal with India, Japan,” The Economic Times (28 May), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/srilanka-signs-port-deal-with-india-japan/printarticle/69547981.cms. Samaranayake, N. (2019) “China’s Engagement with Smaller South Asian Countries,” United States Institute of Peace, Special Report 446 (April), available online at www.usip.org/publications/2019/04/ chinas-engagement-smaller-south-asian-countries (accessed 22 August 2019) Sibal, K. (2017) “The Belt and Road Forum: India Hits the Nail,” Indian Defence Review (7 June), available online at www.indiandefencereview.com/the-belt-and-road-forum-india-hitsthe-nail/. Singh, A. (2018) “China’s Strategic Ambitions Seen in the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka,” ORF Commentaries (27 July), available online at www.orfonline.org/research/chinas-strategicambitions-seen-in-the-hambantota-port-in-sri-lanka/.

314  Lin Minwang The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China (2013) “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu quanmian shenhua gaige ruogan zhongda wenti de jueding” (15 November), available online at www.gov.cn/jrzg/2013-11/15/content_2528179.htm (accessed 1 September 2018). Wen, J. (2012) “Towards New Glory of the Silk Road,” Speech at the Opening Session of the Second China-Eurasia Expo and the China-Eurasia Economic Development and Cooperation Forum at Urumqi on 2 September, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2 September), available online at www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/ t977466.shtml (accessed 17 August 2018). Xi, J. (2014) “In Joint Pursuit of a Dream of National Renewal,” Speech at the Indian World Affairs Committee on 18 September, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (19 September), available online at https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/topics_665678/zjp cxshzzcygyslshdsschybdtjkstmedfsllkydjxgsfw/t1194300.shtml (accessed 1 September 2018). Xinhuanet (2015) “Xijinping zai bajisitan yihui fabiao zhongyao yanjiang” (21 April), available online at www.xinhuanet.com//world/2015-04/21/c_1115043804.htm (accessed 25 January 2017). Xinhuanet (2017) “Backgrounder: Keywords on Belt and Road Initiative” (6 May), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-05/06/c_136261504.htm. Xinhuanet (2018) “Pakistan Committed to Completing CPEC, Supports China on Core Issues: Senate Chairman” (29 September), available online at www.zjlieyan.com/english/201809/29/c_137500870.htm. Xinhuanet (2019) “Gong jian ‘yidai yilu’ kaichuang meihao weilai,” Joint Communique of the Leaders’ Roundtable of the Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing (27 April), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/world/2019-04/27/c_1124425237. htm (accessed 22 August 2019). Zhang, R. and Lu, C. (2018) “‘Yidaiyilu’ menjiala fazhan zongsu: Duo ge zhongda xiangmu luodi shenggen,” Xinhua Silk Road (5 January), available online at www.imsilkroad.com/ news/p/78071.html (accessed 25 January 2019).

19 China, India, and Asian connectivity India’s view Jabin T. Jacob

Physical connectivity across borders is not a new idea in Asia. Even following Partition in the Indian subcontinent, it was only after some decades and as a result of increasing tensions in the respective bilateral relationships that many connections or networks were blocked or gradually fell into disuse. For example, it was not until the India–Pakistan war of 1965 that riverine transportation between India and then East Pakistan ceased completely. In other areas, however, especially along India’s northeastern borders, border communities and trade in both traditional goods as well as more modern products continued freely no matter the legal regimes in place governing such flows. This was equally true of China, for example, in its south along the borders of the ethnic minority-dominated provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi with Indochina. And, it was not until after the March 2008 protests in Tibet that the Chinese government was able—owing to both its rising global political influence and economic capacity—to clamp down on the flow of Tibetan refugees southward with the cooperation of the Nepalese government.1 Nevertheless, it could also be argued, especially in the case of China, that much of the contemporary expansion of physical connectivity projects is based at least notionally on the idea that such connectivity existed in the past. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, yidai yilu), for example, has been explicitly advertised as being a revival of the ancient Silk Roads as is evident from the names of the two primary prongs of the project—the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB, sichouzhilu jingjidai) and the Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR, ershiyi shiji haishang sichouzhilu). But the reference to the ancient Silk Roads should also remind us of the fact that it is also more readily understood—if not always easily accepted or admitted—that physical connectivity is accompanied by potential connectivities of other sorts, be they economic, cultural, or ideological. This chapter focuses on aspects of connectivity that go beyond just physical connectivity. China in particular is beginning to redefine the concept of connectivity from one that has largely been limited to physical, and to some extent financial, connectivity for purposes of trade and commerce to one that encompasses wider political, ideological, cultural, military, and social linkages. The chapter is divided into five sections. The first section provides a brief historical overview of Indian and Chinese objectives behind their physical connectivity projects whether at home or abroad, while the second attempts to conceptualize the notion of “connectivity,” especially how China has redefined it under the rubric of its BRI. The third section looks at some of the domestic consequences of engaging in ambitious connectivity projects, however they are defined, for India and China, while the fourth offers some case studies on how Chinese connectivity projects work in practice in South

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Asia. This is followed by a section on India’s responses to Chinese connectivity initiatives. The chapter closes with a brief conclusion.

Physical connectivity historically In the immediate aftermath of India’s independence and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, the emphasis on physical connectivity was focused within each country’s borders. It was about knitting each country’s peripheries more closely to the center or the mainland. The Chinese communists started a major road-building campaign in the west which allowed, among other things, the occupation of Tibet in 1950. Not long after, in India, an Indian army major hiked his way through thick jungle and high passes to claim Tawang in present-day Arunachal Pradesh, much smaller than Tibet but of significant political and religious import to the Tibetans and by extension to the Chinese. In 1951, and in response to China’s action in Tibet, the Government of India would constitute the Himmatsinhji Committee—the first of many through the decades—to identify problems with infrastructure connectivity along its northern borders and to come up with recommendations to resolve them. It was thus evident that both governments were cognizant of the strategic significance of physical connectivity and how connectivity itself was understood as ensuring control and protecting and promoting national sovereignty and national interests. This underlying principle would eventually carry over into foreign policy, where both India and China understood the value of physical connectivity projects in countries where they offered development assistance. India engaged in such projects in Nepal and Bhutan, while the most famous such Chinese project outside its borders was the Tazara railway project connecting Tanzania and Zambia between 1970 and 1975. At the same time, limited hard capital also encouraged the promotion of new forms of connectivity in the form of scholarships and training programs for foreign students and officials, respectively. In the immediate post-colonial era, this is how India and China— with ambitions to return to their “rightful” place in the world order—understood and deployed connectivity in their neighborhood and further afield. As a result, foreign visits to smaller neighbors by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru or by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai were exercises not so much in offering economic largesse but in showing solidarity and communicating that these countries counted for New Delhi or Beijing. By virtue of their ambition for their countries and the force of their personalities, Nehru and Zhou managed for a time to overcome a lack of economic resources and provide leadership at the regional and global levels. The apogee was reached at the Bandung Conference of 1955, before India’s defeat in the 1962 conflict with China ended its pretensions and the radical turn of Chinese communism in the 1960s under Mao Zedong undermined Zhou’s carefully cultivated image of China abroad. Today, however, with fast-paced economic growth, both countries have revived not only their physical connectivity projects within their borders but also abroad and have refashioned past patterns of international outreach for the twenty-first century.

Connectivity defined and reimagined Issues related to physical connectivity have long been examined in the literature coming out of India’s think tanks and research institutions. In China, there has been an uptick in attention to the subject since the 2013 launch of the BRI (previously known in English

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as “one belt, one road” or OBOR). The concept of “connectivity” itself is seldom defined in the policy literature. It is normally assumed as encompassing road, rail, and air routes with the objective of economic development and/or integration. This is evident from simply looking at the subjects that are generally covered; they are usually about transport corridors or economic corridors built on the backs of new or expanded transport networks. On the Indian side, much work on connectivity-related issues (usually in the nature of physical networks of road and rail transport and of economic corridors) has been carried out by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs’ think tank, the Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries (see for example, RIS 2016a, 2016b). Scholars at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi have addressed issues related to economic development, diplomacy, and culture as well as institutionalization ( Jacob 2012, 2013, 2014; Rana and Uberoi 2012). In terms of ambition or scope, policy elites do understand that other forms of “connectivity” exist and can be useful. In the Indian case, it is usually the lack of resources and, therefore, the prioritization that this necessitates that has led to connectivity generally being understood as a matter of physical infrastructure projects. Such projects are more easily measurable in terms of both progress (foundation stones laid, construction begun, lengths completed) and results (volume of vehicles, of passengers, of trade carried on). By contrast, “softer” or cultural forms of connectivity, such as scholarships for students, vocational training courses as well as other forms of training for civil servants, military officials, and so on, all of which also India carries out in substantial measure, are more difficult to quantify or assess in terms of impact. Further, unlike roads and railways which are physically non-transferable and are easily identified as being built by a particular entity or country, the same students or officials can be targeted by multiple countries for scholarships or training courses and thus, the purpose of the investment in them might potentially fail.2 It is for this reason that despite their heavier capital costs, physical infrastructure development occupies a large part of overseas assistance for countries such as India. India’s immediate neighbors, Nepal and Bhutan, receive the lion’s share of India’s overseas development assistance, as part of efforts to build up and strengthen their economic linkages with India. Afghanistan also receives a considerable level of assistance, even though it is not physically linked to India. Of course, in the case of each of these smaller countries, India also expends considerable amounts in terms of scholarships and technical training courses. It is worth noting that the big physical infrastructure projects get greater air-time and attention from Indian and foreign political elites. Consider, for instance, Indian Prime Minister Modi’s inauguration of the Salma Dam in Afghanistan in 2016 (Swami 2016). And of course, the Chinese media keeps up a constant stream of news about the BRI, with these projects advertised and promoted as successes of China’s foreign policy and of its leader Xi Jinping. It is not surprising then that “connectivity” by and large is associated with hard physical infrastructure in the public imagination in India and China. At the same time, China’s actions under the rubric of the BRI also make clear the widening ambit of connectivity. This will be evident from the several factors at play when examining China’s many international physical infrastructure projects linking its territory with that of its neighbors. First, consider the economic logic or the lack thereof of such projects. China’s new transport services by land across large distances might be considered surprising because these only make economic sense up to a certain point, and only in the case of certain

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kinds of goods (as compared with transportation by sea). In October 2018, for example, a new rail and road cargo service was inaugurated linking Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province in western China, with Islamabad in Pakistan as part of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) (Kerry Logistics Network Limited 2018). While the route apparently saves fifteen days from the regular sea route to Pakistan—the 4,500-km trip takes thirteen days—and service is expected to become regular in 2019 (Port Technology 2018), it is difficult to understand what daily necessities or time-sensitive products China can sell currently whose volume would also generate sufficient returns to justify the expense of a multimodal overland transport link through difficult terrain to Pakistan. The same argument applies to other major BRI initiatives like a proposed Lanzhou link to Kathmandu in Nepal. The fact that an international firm of some repute, namely Kerry Logistics, is involved in the transportation along the Lanzhou–Islamabad axis does not necessarily mean that the route (or any of China’s other long-distance freight routes) is profitable for the producer, i.e. China, only that Kerry Logistics finds it profitable.3 Physical connectivity projects such as roads and railways and even airports to an extent are judged differently in terms of their economic value depending on whether these are domestic projects or trans-border projects. Domestically, there are economic development, political, and sometimes military imperatives to implementing such trans-border projects. In other words, returns on investment are not always calculated in monetary terms. Thus, Chinese projects connecting the mainland with Tibet or Xinjiang may not have any great economic logic but rather a political logic of “unifying” the country. A second aspect, therefore, is the political one. Cross-border international projects run into considerably higher bureaucratic opposition from an economic viewpoint when the returns are uncertain. In the case of China, however, any infrastructure connectivity project that is sold under the rubric of the BRI will be implemented as a priority project. But that still does not explain why some projects take shape while others do not. What is the political logic of cross-border projects when they obviously do not have commensurate economic returns? While all of South Asia is a large market in terms of population, this does not necessarily translate into an equal number of consumers given the state of economic development and poverty in South Asia. It is possible, therefore, that the region or country in question to which China wishes to build a link has a certain degree of priority in China’s long-term political calculations. In the case of Pakistan, the sheer lack of economic logic of the CPEC paradoxically makes it all the more necessary to keep up actions that appear to suggest that there is indeed economic merit to the whole enterprise—the equivalent, perhaps, of a Potemkin village in a self-sustaining loop. In the case of Nepal, however, it could be asked if India’s fuel blockade in 2015, and the Nepalese actively courting Chinese alternatives on the occasion, might not have speeded up the extension of Chinese connectivity projects focused on the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) alone to across the border in Nepal as well. While currently the links remain by road, there are active plans afoot for railway connections between TAR and Kathmandu (Giri and Giri 2018). Part of the political logic in these instances is also the visual imagery or the propaganda value of China announcing such physical linkages to South Asia—a region with a history of poor connectivity and with the regional hegemon India’s comparatively poor track-record in implementing physical connectivity projects both within and outside its borders. Therefore, no matter the profitability of current Chinese connectivity projects to South Asia, they show Beijing as being willing to take risks and bear economic losses

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in the interests of its smaller neighbors, and undermining India’s image by comparison. It might also be noted that there is currently some concern in Bhutan over the delays in construction of hydropower plants and how this would affect Bhutan’s economic growth prospects (Haidar 2017). As India is Bhutan’s most important partner in this sector—both in terms of building hydropower projects and buying power from India— it is more likely than not that the blame will be pinned on India, offering yet another chance for China to push its case and interests in the Himalayan kingdom, with which it does not yet have official diplomatic relations. The third aspect is, of course, the military one. All physical infrastructure, when built to certain specifications, is dual use. The true import of the Lanzhou–Islamabad and Lanzhou–Kathmandu links, however, might not be so much that they will be used for troop or military equipment movements but that such physical infrastructure projects come with their own security requirements. Thus, it is now a regular part of the conversation around CPEC that it is threatened by India (see, for example, Ahmad 2016; Ahmed 2017; Marwat 2018). This then creates the “precedent” and, therefore, the “necessity” over time for China to also scale up its security ties with the countries in question. In the case of Nepal, as noted earlier, there is considerable Chinese pressure for such cooperation. In the case of Pakistan, it might be argued that a stronger Chinese security presence in Pakistan undercuts the Pakistan Army’s raison d’etre. However, where India can be shown as a common enemy, the Pakistan Army could justify its cooperation with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and cede some space to the latter. Connectivity, however, is not limited to only promoting economic or military interests. Political interests in connectivity projects must also take into account the notion of the “ideological,” especially in the case of China, or more precisely with respect to the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ideology currently officially references Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and Xi Jinping Thought as well as several non-eponymous concepts such as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” In practice, though, this ideology is about one-party rule by the CCP based on an economic model that uses the tools of capitalism, including private enterprise and technological innovation to continually strengthen Party/state capacity vis-à-vis individual rights. In terms of how ideology operates in the connectivity sphere, one need only consider how the United States or Europe has used their superior economic situation in the past as a way of communicating notions of “good governance” or “accountability” as part of bailout or aid packages to Third World economies either directly or through either of the Bretton Woods institutions. China has taken a similar tack in its connectivity projects using the power of its purse, except that it has shown little concern with democracy or popular accountability in countries that host its investments. Rather, it is interested precisely in undermining what it sees as an international order or legal regime based on Western norms and ideals and finding space for Chinese approaches and views. The fact that Xi Jinping’s two-volume collection of speeches, titled Governance of China, is being translated into multiple languages and easily available, often for free, in countries around the world—even those that are not part of the BRI—is a case in point. In many ways, therefore, “connectivity” in Asia, especially as driven by China under the CCP, should be understood much more broadly than as something enabling physical access or economic development. It should be seen as an instrument of politics and influence, of communicating ideas and ideology.

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Connectivity and its consequences It is important to underline that there are consequences to how connectivity is conceived and understood at the policy and popular levels in India and China. For instance, there are at least two consequences of the emphasis on physical infrastructure as the focus of connectivity. First, the huge capital expenditures that physical infrastructure projects involve are also the reason why they get delayed because bureaucrats back in the aid-giving country—and this is especially true of developing countries like India and China—have to balance a number of commitments that the political elites have made, and the money and personnel required often come from or have to be cleared from a different ministry(ies) than the foreign ministry. Of course, this is just as true of commitments involving scholarships and training programs, with India providing multiple cases over the years of foreign students not receiving their scholarships on time or foreign officials not being able to make it to courses on time or at all because the funds did not come through.4 In one instance that involves China, Indian scholarship students studying in China who received stipends from both governments often faced delays in receiving their money from the Indian government.5 Two, physical infrastructure being built by the government for other countries also raises questions among citizens, especially of countries like India and China, about why this is a priority when there is a lack of adequate physical infrastructure at home. In particular, since the BRI has taken off, there has been disaffection at least in some sections in China for precisely this reason.6 In both cases, there is a political challenge for the governments that are involved in executing connectivity projects in other countries. For one, if the objective is public diplomacy, then delays in getting things off the ground or to completion do not look good for the country executing the infrastructure project. India has an unfortunate reputation across the Third World for precisely such delays. By contrast, the Chinese have, especially in recent years, a very strong reputation in relation to India, at least for timely completion of projects.7 China’s problems are different, however, with questions about the lack of transparency on contractual terms and the rather too close ties to ruling elites and the whiff of corruption that is generally associated with anything the Chinese do. Examples abound in South Asia. The rather tortured path of the Budhi Gandaki hydroelectric project in Nepal, in which different governments in Kathmandu have alternatively invited or kicked the Chinese out, is one example (New Spotlight 2017; Thapa 2017). Another is the case of the Sri Lankans being forced to lease out their Hambantota port to China for ninety-nine years because they could not repay their debt (Schultz 2017). In fact, the Sri Lanka case has been highlighted within Pakistan by those concerned about the terms and feasibility of the CPEC (Husain 2018). Sri Lanka also offers a well-documented case of Chinese bribing political elites (Abi-Habib 2018). For another, if the Indian and Chinese governments have to face opposition from their own population for their overseas development assistance, then this too becomes politically untenable beyond a point. While India as a democracy should be rather more sensitive to this issue, the fact is that foreign policy, including foreign assistance, is not generally an issue that exercises the Indian public imagination. Knowledge of these matters is limited to the policy and academic elites where there is a greater understanding of the need for such activity. Such consensus also exists in elite circles in China. The aforementioned ideological aspect to Chinese connectivity projects means that the CCP’s interests are now closely identified

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with China’s national interests. Whatever their personal views of the CCP, members of the elite in the country can be willing to accept this melding of Party and state interests since it also helps to promote—for the moment, at least—the image and position of China as a whole in international affairs. However, there are also problems here. For one, quite apart from the political, business, or intellectual elites, there is a sizable educated and increasingly world-aware population in China who can reach a different cost-benefit analysis of connectivity projects than their government. The other issue is that with the limited avenues for dissent in China, even at elite levels, raising questions about Chinese foreign policy in general and about the BRI in particular offers another way of channeling dissatisfaction— including toward Xi Jinping given the BRI’s close association with him. At the same time, it might be argued that given Xi’s current degree of power in the political system and the fact that the concept of BRI itself became a part of the CCP’s constitution in October 2017 (Xinhua 2017), any opposition to the BRI also comes with high costs.

Chinese connectivity projects in practice The content of the BRI, its strategic implications, and its consequences have been much discussed.8 This section will focus on just two examples in South Asia from Nepal and Pakistan from the point of view of how expanded physical connectivity leads to other consequences. In fact, physical connectivity is not the most important form of connectivity for the Chinese, even if it is the most visible. This could explain why economic viability is seldom put forward as a major argument in Chinese discourse on the BRI. Instead, there is much emphasis on positive economic development outcomes—“winwin” and “common destiny” as well as, more importantly, people-to-people connectivity, “strategic partnership,” and “iron friendship.” These are somewhat more intangible and less open to quantification than other aspects of connectivity. The first example is China–Nepal connectivity cooperation in the form of port, road, railway, aviation, and communications networks under the “overarching framework of trans-Himalayan Multi-Dimensional Connectivity Network” (MOFA 2018). In addition to the proposed China–Nepal railway line between Shigatse, Tibet, and Kathmandu expected to be completed by 2022, Chinese analysts are also highlighting the Sichuan–Tibet railway, which is expected to boost Tibet’s connectivity with the rest of China and its integration with South Asia by increasing the flow of both commodities and tourists to Nepal (and to India) (Li 2018). Nepal’s fledgling aviation sector is also depending on buying Chinese aircraft to increase capacity and routes served (Xinhua 2018). In January 2018, China Telecom Group Corporation and the Nepalese Ministry for Information and Communication inaugurated the Nepal–China cross-border optical fiber link in Kathmandu, providing an alternate Internet gateway to the Himalayan nation in addition to those through India (Yuan 2018). Contrast all of this to the Nepalese decision to pull out of the BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) joint military exercises in September 2018 while going ahead with bilateral military exercises with China the following month. While the case should not be overstated—each exercise was organized differently, with the Sino-Nepalese engagement planned months in advance and also quite small in nature with just twenty Nepalese soldiers participating (Lo 2018)—it certainly is a significant development. Note also New Delhi’s unhappiness and difficulty accepting the suggestion that the Nepalese decision over BIMSTEC had much to do with Nepal’s internal political dynamics ( Jha 2018; Lo 2018). Meanwhile,

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the Nepalese insistence that Indian proposals to Nepal be routed through the so-called 2+1 mechanism proposed by the Chinese confirms a concern with India’s overbearing dominance in Nepal’s foreign policy choices.9 The efficiency of the Chinese outreach in Nepal is evident when Nepalese Prime Minister K. P. Oli practically sings from the Chinese hymn sheet, calling the BRI “a visionary initiative launched … by Chinese President Xi Jinping” and repeats key phrases such as the “community of common interest” and “community of common destiny” (MOFA 2018). It bears highlighting that the personal praise of Xi—whose most powerful position is General Secretary of the CCP, not President of the PRC—also helps the CCP back in China to fuse its goals to that of the state. The second example comes from the growing depth of the China–Pakistan relationship based on the development of the CPEC. Road and energy infrastructure in the case of CPEC has provided avenues for the expansion of other forms of connectivity between the two countries, including what might be called “emotional connectivity.” For instance, following the attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi by Baloch separatists in November 2018 (BBC News 2018), donations were collected from Chinese embassy staffers and citizens to support the families of the Pakistani policemen killed in the attack. The publicity given to this effort by both the Pakistani and Chinese sides showcases a new form of messaging around connectivity projects as well as a new kind of connectivity itself (Dawn 2018; Pakistan Today 2018). The messaging is of a piece with CCP political practice—including of its United Front Work Department (UFWD, tongzhanbu)—where a target for suborning is approached or dealt with at the level of each of its constituents. It is for this reason that the Sino-Pak joint statement signed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in Beijing in November 2018 is bookended by sections on “Political Relations and Strategic Communication” and “People-to-People and Cultural Linkages” (FMPRC 2018). Pakistan is not too far behind in learning this art as evident from the August 2018 proposal by its Army Chief, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, to reopen the Kartarpur Corridor with India to mark Guru Nanak Dev’s 550th birth anniversary (Sethi 2018). It would have been impossible for the Narendra Modi government in New Delhi to turn down this offer with general elections due in mid-2019 (PTI 2018a). The corridor runs from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district to the Darbar Sahib Kartarpur in Pakistan’s Punjab, the final resting place of the first Sikh guru. That there might be some Pakistani learning from the Chinese is evident from the fact that while they accepted an Indian proposal to revive the corridor earlier in 2000, the project never actually took off (Sethi 2018). Such a reopening creates “emotional connectivity” of any significance only on the Indian side, where the Sikhs are a political force to reckon with, and not on the Pakistani side of Punjab. It might also not be too far off the mark to say that Pakistan is attempting to use the goodwill generated by the opening of the Kartarpur Corridor with India by inviting Prime Minister Modi for a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit in Pakistan (PTI 2018b). This Pakistani “learning” from China then invites the question of whether China is reimagining the idea of connectivity itself and how India, too, can do the same. That such political/ideological and/or cultural connectivity is important to the CCP should not be surprising given the nature of the CCP and its domestic and international ambitions—which have been ever more evident since Xi came to power.

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Consider, in this regard, the “soft” infrastructure accompanying the “hard” aspects of connectivity. One is the increasing strength of Chinese diplomatic missions, including consulates in each South Asian country, and the wide range of expertise available within these missions. These strengths are in terms of numbers of staff, academics specializing in the region or country serving on deputation within the missions, the local language capability of the diplomatic personnel, conference and scholarship diplomacy that funds scores, if not hundreds of elites and students from host countries to China for the short and long term, and the active military diplomacy in terms of visits, training exchanges, and equipment sales. Two, there are also concerted efforts by CCP agencies such as the UFWD and the International Department (zhonglianbu) to extend their work in neighboring countries, including in the form of contacts with political elites and parties as well as attention to not just the central government level but also the provincial/sub-national levels in South Asian countries. Thus, there is specific attention to the provincial governments in Pakistan to ensure that they are on board the CPEC as well as to somebody like Ram Madhav in India who is seen as the Indian ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party’s point person on China and foreign policy outreach. It should be no surprise that Cheng Xueyuan, who took over as Chinese ambassador to Sri Lanka in January 2018, is a CCP apparatchik from the UFWD sent no doubt to retrieve the situation in the wake of the nearly worldwide controversy over the Chinese-leased port at Hambantota. Cheng was sent in just a month after Hambantota had been handed over (Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Sri Lanka 2018). An August 2018 report of the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission of the United States Congress described the work of the UFWD as “influence operations” and noted that the fact the UFWD’s work was “interwoven with sensitive issues such as ethnic, political, and national identity” made it difficult to prove its influence in the public domain and made those who sought to highlight “the negative effects of such influence vulnerable to accusations of prejudice” (Bowe 2018). It is telling that after years of inactivity, it was in 1979 that the UFWD was revived by Deng Xiaoping; clearly, there is a connection to the launch of China’s economic reforms and opening up policies. It should, therefore, not be surprising that the UFWD’s activities have once again picked up pace under Xi Jinping following the launch of the BRI (Smith 2018). Similarly, the CCP’s International Department, which is the Party’s unit responsible for managing foreign affairs, including engaging with fellow communist party-states such as North Korea and Vietnam, has also conducted research on the reasons for communism’s collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and focuses on learning from governance practices and methods in other countries through field trips, cadre training, and so on. The research on the fall of the Soviet Union and on dissimilar political systems suggests that survival of the regime is the foremost priority for the International Department. But this also suggests that during periods of confidence or relative strength—as China seems to be experiencing at the moment under Xi—the Department will also engage in promoting Chinese views and models to other countries. The International Department had, for example, a key role in organizing a consortium of over 130 Chinese think tanks and some 110 foreign think tanks under the rubric of the BRI (Ngeow forthcoming). The fact that this is a network of relationships with think tank and university scholars suggests that the goal is to promote discussion about China’s development model and foreign policy in a controlled environment that is expected to serve as an antidote to general and widespread images of China as a “threat” or “challenge” to local economic elites or to democratic governance models.

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Beijing’s objective, as evident in such standard phrases as “win-win” or “community of common destiny” used in language about Chinese projects, is to contrast them with Western or other infrastructure projects as somehow being better or more beneficial for the host country. While other countries too engage in public diplomacy, the way the Chinese have married public diplomacy to infrastructure development projects abroad while also promoting a particular ideological line is somewhat unique. At the Nineteenth CCP National Congress in October 2017, Xi stated: the path, the theory, the system, and the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics have kept developing, blazing a new trail for other developing countries to achieve modernization. It offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind. (Xi 2017) It is this worldview that drives China’s BRI and its foreign relations in general. The UFWD and the International Department together allow the CCP to reach out beyond the usual foreign ministry meetings or government elites in foreign countries to target other political groups and the intellectual and economic elites of these countries, as well as to an extent the ordinary populace, to push this “Chinese model” of development. Finally, the emphasis of both Chinese state-owned enterprises and private enterprises targeting services sector start-ups—e-commerce and fintech, especially in India—also forms part of this process of reframing connectivity. China’s rising stakes in Indian startups are exemplified by the fact that in 2017, Indian start-ups received some $2 billion of Chinese investment—three times as much as in the previous year. Major Indian digital platforms for payments, advertising technology, online travel, online marketplaces and gaming, among other things, now have significant Chinese capital stakes (Khan 2017; Moneycontrol 2018; Singh 2018). Investments in Indian tech start-ups potentially provide Chinese companies and, by extension, the Chinese state, access to the personal data and market behavior of Indian consumers—data that when added to that on the Chinese population allows them to achieve big data applications on a scale unavailable to individual Western or Indian companies themselves and sometimes even to their governments. Particularly important, of course, are the potentially political uses of such data as evident in scandals around elections in the United States and firms like Cambridge Analytica in Britain.

Indian responses to Chinese connectivity projects It is easy to view India’s opposition to China’s BRI as a form of petulance, even envy, but the Indian foreign ministry’s terse explanation in May 2017 of why it was not participating in the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing actually encapsulates very well the Indian understanding of the uses of physical and economic connectivity as possessing strategic long-term objectives beyond mere physical access. In referring to the need for “financial responsibility … balanced ecological and environmental protection and preservation standards; transparent assessment of project costs; and skill and technology transfer,” among other things (MEA 2017), New Delhi was also reflecting an Indian tradition of standing up for the rights and interests of smaller, weaker countries, at least

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rhetorically, since it has not always been able to safeguard those interests for want of military and economic capabilities. China, too, of course, can legitimately claim to be looking after the interests of smaller, poorer countries by filling an infrastructure deficit—and, therefore, an economic growth deficit—through its BRI, but it naturally does not have the answer to the charge that India more or less openly lays at its door of physical connectivity being essentially an empire-building exercise. Both New Delhi and Beijing have engaged in this historically and, therefore, the former is possibly best placed to understand China’s strategic intentions, while the latter cannot conceal the uses it has put physical connectivity to even as late as the Western Development Strategy launched in the mid-1990s to further integrate the provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang into the national mainstream. Of course, were the roles reversed, it is quite possible that India would have been no different. Consider for instance, New Delhi’s criticism of the BRI for lacking accountability and good governance, a charge that is true also of India’s own internal connectivity projects in its under-developed border regions, particularly Jammu and Kashmir state and in its northeast. Projects in these areas have become opportunities for rent-seeking and have perpetuated a political economy of dependence on the central government for subsidies and support which, in turn, undermines local agency and strengthens central control. There have been several trans-border and multilateral connectivity projects that India has long been part of such as the Asian Highway and the Trans-Asian Railway, both of which have yet to reach fruition. Indian scholars have also fleshed out such ideas as a South Asian Economic Union (RIS 2015). But how has India responded to the BRI? For this it is necessary to go a little into how India has responded in the past to other Chinese connectivity initiatives. By far the most important case in this regard is the Bangladesh–China–India– Myanmar (BCIM) regional economic cooperation forum that took shape originally under the name Kunming Initiative, named after the capital of Yunnan province in China where the first formal meeting among academics from the four countries as well as officials from China and Myanmar took place in 1999. The progress (or the lack thereof ) of this connectivity project—focused on the underdeveloped sub-region where the borders of the four countries come together—tells two stories. The first is of China’s conception of a connectivity project, even though at this time the BCIM was initiated and primarily helmed by the Yunnan government, while the second is of India’s approach to projects that were driven by the Chinese.10 Almost from the start the BCIM was envisaged as a multipronged regional initiative that focused not only on physical connectivity by road between the four countries but also on increasing and improving people-to-people contacts. Largely a Yunnan provincial government initiative, it met strong opposition from official quarters in India almost from the beginning even though New Delhi did (often reluctantly) support visits and meetings of the forum in which some former Indian diplomats were also involved in conceptualizing and leading efforts from the Indian side. In many ways, the nature of the BCIM forum as envisaged by the Yunnanese and the Indian opposition was a sign of things to come. During a brief interlude from 2012 to early 2013, the Indian government appeared to be positively inclined to engage with the BCIM forum (see, for example, Mathai 2012). This openness was soon replaced by anger at the launch of the BRI, which not only violated Indian sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir because the CPEC passed through

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Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but also subsumed, without consultation with the Indians, the newly minted BCIM Economic Corridor launched during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to India in May 2013, several months before Xi launched the BRI. Since the BRI was launched, the most prominent Indian initiatives that have garnered attention have been the development of the Chabahar port in Iran as part of the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC) initiative together with Japan, and a smaller South Asian sub-regional initiative connecting the transport networks of Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal (BBIN). The INSTC is a multimodal network of maritime, rail, and road routes between India and Europe via Iran, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Russia that was initiated by Russia, India, and Iran in September 2000 in St. Petersburg with a formal agreement signed in May 2002. According to a statement by the then Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj at the opening of a conference on the INSTC in June 2015, the initiative, once fully operationalized, was expected to bring down transportation time by fifty percent and costs by thirty percent in comparison to other routes currently in use (Ministry of Commerce and Industry and Federation of Freight Forwarders’ Association in India 2015). Four years later, the 7,200-km-long corridor is yet to become fully operational, but New Delhi did finally receive its first cargo shipment from Afghanistan through Chabahar port in Iran in early 2019 (The Hindu 2019). The Chabahar port—managed by an Indian joint venture of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai and the Kandla Port in Gujarat—is the key hub connecting the maritime and land routes of the INSTC. However, while the INSTC has been called “India’s humble but important version of China’s One Belt One Road plan” ( Joshi 2017), it is by no means the case that Chabahar is an exclusively Indian zone of operations. The Iranians have actually invited both Pakistan and China to participate in further developing Chabahar. Calling Chabahar and the Chinese-funded Gwadar port in Pakistan’s Balochistan province about 170 km away, “sister ports,” Tehran has argued that the two could benefit from greater connectivity (Syed 2018). This Iranian position, of course, highlights both India’s limited ability to prevail upon Tehran given the close ties between Iran and China as well as the centrality that China has built up for itself in the infrastructure development realm and in terms of economic capacity more generally. India’s involvement in Chabahar also has to delicately balance its relations with the United States and take into account the latter’s relationship with Iran, even if Chabahar itself has been exempted from US sanctions. The AAGC, meanwhile, is a direct response to the BRI and aims to build up both physical and digital infrastructure on the African continent while adhering to “universally recognized international norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency and equality” ( Jaishankar 2017). It also has an explicit strategic agenda pushing as it does the idea of “realizing a free and open Indo-Pacific region” (RIS, ERIA and IDE-JETRO 2017), which, in turn, is a direct response and challenge to China’s violation of international law in the South China Sea (MEA 2015). The Japanese imprint is particularly sharp, extending as it does Japan’s own Partnership for Quality Infrastructure announced in May 2015 which is itself a response to the BRI. However, here too the aforementioned Chinese centrality in infrastructure and connectivity is in evidence. Tokyo has both officially participated in various BRI events conducted by the Chinese government from the beginning as well as agreed to increase its participation in the BRI after the launch of the AAGC (Aoyama 2018).

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In the case of the BBIN, meanwhile, the showpiece Motor Vehicles Agreement (MVA) was signed by the transport ministers of the four countries in Thimphu, Bhutan in June 2015. After over a year of trying to get the agreement ratified in the Bhutanese parliament, the previous Bhutan government finally threw in the towel in May 2018 (Bose 2017). The three other countries meanwhile managed to agree on the text of the operating procedures for passenger vehicle movement under the MVA but there remained “internal approval processes for signing of the passenger protocol” to be negotiated (PIB 2018). All three Indian projects, therefore, face challenges and while this in itself is not unexpected, the fact that India’s connectivity projects are invariably fewer in number, smaller in scale, and historically slower than Chinese infrastructure projects under the BRI mean that the delays or failures are far more consequential for India. The Indian government certainly understands the wide-ranging scope of China’s connectivity projects as going beyond just the objective of physical and financial connectivity to elements of ideology-peddling and influence accretion. Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear if New Delhi understands the wider political implications of the BRI for there does not seem to be a long-term Indian strategy or project that appears to incorporate such an understanding, a project that would necessarily have to match the BRI in scope, if not yet in scale, in order to mount an effective challenge. China’s access to or monopoly over digital infrastructure in other countries, for instance, creates problems for civil and political rights in these countries which result in nothing less than ideological conflict—of “Chinese wisdom” versus Western models of politics and economic development, and undermine an incipient “Indian model” of guaranteeing both civil liberties and economic development in a Third World country despite similar challenges of a huge population and administration and governance as in China.

Conclusion It is obvious that the BRI is being used by China as a means to test out various forms of “connectivity” that the CCP demands as part of its larger global ambitions. Beijing has used its participation in multilateral institutions as well as created new ones, and under the BRI deployed its diplomats, government officials, and academics in a whole-of-thesystem approach to build on physical connectivity projects and expand these to include other softer, subtler forms of connectivity. This is essentially a mutually reinforcing loop of hard power and soft power, and yet something more than just “sharp power” (Walker and Ludwig 2017) given that it has not just security, influence accretion, and behavior modification as goals but also profit maximization and regime survival. Given this reality, it will be necessary for the Indian government and analysts to shift their focus from the “hard” facts of growing Chinese physical connectivity projects involving South Asia to the “softer” reality of both Chinese “influence operations” and growing technology acquisitions and prowess. China’s hard infrastructure growth and its intentions in this regard should have been understood as a given by now and not surprise anyone anymore. Over at least the last two decades, Indian security agencies have witnessed first-hand the effects of Chinese infrastructure development and the eventual outcomes. These include the 2006 opening of the Qinghai–Tibet Railway as well as the rapid improvement of Chinese infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China that has resulted in increased incidents of

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Chinese transgressions across the LAC as well as a qualitative change in the nature of these transgressions as witnessed during the Depsang (2013), Chumur (2014), and Doklam (2017) incidents. Indian strategic attention, however, cannot remain riveted on the physical infrastructure that the Chinese are developing even when the availability of technology—spy satellites and drones, for example—gives enough warning of developments to undertake countermeasures. That there is a lack of resources for such counters is another matter, but there is also perhaps a comfortable predisposition in sections in India to observing and studying what appears to be the more easily comprehensible—miles of road and rail track built, strategic lift capability of aircraft—when the real Chinese battles of extending ideological influence and manipulation of narratives, and of acquisitions of enterprises, their data and technology, are now being fought well away from the LAC and inside India’s borders as well as in its near and extended neighborhood. The real story of connectivity projects, then, is that they are now multidimensional and multipronged in intentions and consequences.

Notes

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India’s view of connectivity  329 Aneja, A. (2018) “Nepal’s Decision on BIMSTEC Drill Does Not Signal Pro-China Stance: Official Source,” The Hindu (18 September), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/ international/nepals-decision-on-bimstec-drill-does-not-signal-pro-china-stance-officialsource/article24974322.ece. Aoyama, R. (2018) “Japan’s Balancing Act Tours Beijing,” East Asia Forum (25 October), available online at www.eastasiaforum.org/2018/10/25/japans-balancing-act-tours-beijing/. BBC News (2018) “Karachi Attack: China Consulate Attack Leaves Four Dead” (23 November), available online at www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46313136. Bose, P. R. (2017) “Bhutan Says Exit from BBIN Motor Vehicles Pact Is Temporary,” The Hindu Business Line (7 May), available online at www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/logistics/ bhutan-says-exit-from-bbin-motor-vehicles-pact-is-temporary/article9685062.ece. Bowe, A. (2018) “China’s Overseas United Front Work: Background and Implications for the United States,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission: Staff Research Report (24 August), available online at www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/China%27s%20 Overseas%20United%20Front%20Work%20-%20Background%20and%20Implications%20 for%20US_final_0.pdf. Dawn (2018) “Chinese Citizens Donate to Families of Policemen Martyred in Karachi Consulate Attack” (26 November), available online at www.dawn.com/news/1447767/ chinese-citizens-donate-to-families-of-policemen-martyred-in-karachi-consulate-attack. Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Sri Lanka (2018) “Biographical Note of H.E. Cheng Xueyuan” (24 January), available online at http://lk.china-embassy.org/eng/ambassador/ Biography/t940400.htm. FMPRC (Foreign Ministry, People’s Republic of China) (2018) “Joint Statement between the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan on Strengthening China-Pakistan All-Weather Strategic Cooperative Partnership and Building Closer China-Pakistan Community of Shared Future in the New Era” (4 November), available online at www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/t1610025.shtml. Giri, A. and Giri, S. (2018) “Nepal, China Agree on Rail Study,” The Kathmandu Post (24 August), available online at http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2018-08-24/nepalchina-agree-on-rail-study.html. Haidar, S. (2017) “Hydropower Debt, Delays Biggest Challenge in Ties with India, Say Bhutan Officials,” The Hindu (6 September), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/national/ hydropower-debt-delays-biggest-challenge-in-ties-with-india-say-bhutan-off icials/ article19630701.ece. Husain, K. (2018) “Lessons of Hambantota,” Dawn (28 June), available online at www.dawn. com/news/1416611. Jacob, J. T. (2012) “Institutionalizing the BCIM: The Next Steps,” Thinking about China in India (5 March), available online at https://indiandchina.com/2012/03/05/institutionalizingthe-bcim-the-next-steps/. Jacob, J. T. (2013) “Issues and Considerations in Connectivity Projects in the BCIM Region,” Thinking about China in India (28 February), available online at https://indiandchina. com/2013/02/28/issues-and-considerations-in-connectivity-projects-in-the-bcim-region/. Jacob, J. T. (2014) “People-to-People Connectivity in the BCIM Region: Principles and Practicalities,” Thinking about China in India (31 May), available online at https://indiandchina. com/2014/05/31/people-to-people-connectivity-in-the-bcim-region-principles-andpracticalities/. Jacob, J. T. (2017) “What Does India Think of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ Initiative?” ICS Occasional Paper, No. 19 (December), available online at www.icsin.org/uploads/2017/12/18/8664fcac0850b0af2c40791465301e17.pdf. Jaishankar, S. (2017) “Speech by Foreign Secretary at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries,” Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India (25 August), available online at https://mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/28888/Speech+by+Foreign+Secr etary+at+the+Research+and+Information+System+for+Developing+Countries.

330  Jabin T. Jacob Jha, P. (2018) “On Nepal’s Pull Out from BIMSTEC Military Drill, India Says Move ‘Not Convincing’,” Hindustan Times (11 September), available online at www.hindustantimes. com/india-news/as-nepal-pulls-out-of-bimstec-military-exercise-delhi-tells-kathmandu-its-not-done/story-xKivU9LSljqtcVViQQR3BJ.html. Joshi, M. (2017) “Relationship Goals: In an America First World, Pursuing an India First Policy Is the Logical Response,” The Times of India (4 February), available online at http://blogs. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/relationship-goals-in-an-america-first-worldpursuing-an-india-first-policy-is-the-logical-response/. Kerry Logistics Network Limited (2017) “Kerry Logistics Strengthens Rail Freight Capability through Acquisition of Shares in Lanzhou Pacific Logistics Ltd” (3 July), available online at www. kerrylogistics.com/press/press-release/kerry-logistics-strengthens-rail-freight- capabilitythrough-acquisition-of-shares-in-lanzhou-pacific-logistics-ltd/. Kerry Logistics Network Limited (2018) “Kerry Logistics Unveils Rail and Road Freight Service from Lanzhou to Pakistan to Reinforce Overland Transportation Network in South Asia” (20 November), available online at www.kerrylogistics.com/press/press-release/kerrylogistics-unveils-rail-and-road-freight-service-from-lanzhou-to-pakistan-to-reinforceoverland-transportation-network-in-south-asia/. Khan, T. (2017) “How Chinese Investors Are Helping Indian Startups,” The Economic Times (12 May), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/howchinese-investors-are-helping-indian-startups/articleshow/58635222.cms. Li, X. (2018) “New Railway Set to Fuel Tibet’s Economy, Trade with India and Nepal: Experts,” Global Times (11 October), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/1122636.shtml. Lo, K. (2018) “Did Nepal Snub India for China with Military Drill Decision, or Is It Just a Nation in Flux?” South China Morning Post (16 September), available online at www.scmp.com/news/china/ diplomacy/article/2164376/did-nepal-snub-india-china-military-drill-decision-or-it-just. Marwat, Z. K. (2018) “Attack on Chinese Consulate,” The News International (30 November), available online at www.thenews.com.pk/print/399944-attack-on-chinese-consulate. Mathai, R. (2012) “Speech by Foreign Secretary on India’s Look East Policy at the 10th Meeting of the BCIM (Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar) Cooperation Forum,” Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India (18 February), available online at www.mea.gov.in/ Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/18855/Speech+by+Foreign+secretary+on+Indias+Look+Eas t+Policy+at+the+10th+Meeting+of+the+BCIM+Bangladesh+China+India+Myanmar+C ooperation+Forum. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India) (2015) “Joint Statement on India and Japan Vision 2025: Special Strategic and Global Partnership Working Together for Peace and Prosperity of the Indo-Pacific Region and the World” (12 December), available online at www.mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/26176/Joint_Statement_on_India_and_ Japan_Vision_2025_Special_Strategic_and_Global_Partnership_Working_Together_for_ Peace_and_Prosperity_of_the_IndoPacific_R. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India) (2017) “Official Spokesperson’s Response to a Query on Participation of India in OBOR/BRI Forum” (13 May), available online at https://mea.gov.in/media-briefings.htm?dtl/28463/Official_Spokespersons_ response_to_a_query_on_participation_of_India_in_OBORBRI_Forum. Ministry of Commerce and Industry and Federation of Freight Forwarders’ Association in India (2015) “Exploring Opportunities on the INSTC,” INSTC Conference-India 2015, available online at http://commerce.gov.in/writereaddata/uploadedfile/MOC_635986655921421162_ INSTC_Conference_Report_Final.pdf. MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Nepal) (2018) “Inaugural Address by Rt. Hon. Prime Minister Mr. K. P. Sharma Oli at International Conference on Belt and Road Initiative: Opportunities and Implications for Nepal and the Region” (12 September), available online at https://mofa.gov.np/inaugural-address-by-rt-hon-prime-minister-mr-kp- sharma-oli-at-international-conference-on-belt-and-road-initiative-opportunities-andimplications-for-nepal-and-the-region/.

India’s view of connectivity  331 Moneycontrol (2018) “Indian Startups Need More Chinese Investments: Amitabh Kant,” (28 September), available online at www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/startup/indianstartups-need-more-chinese-investments-amitabh-kant-2997341.html. New Spotlight (2017) “Nepal’s Government-In-Waiting to Revive Scrapped Chinese Dam Project” (16 December), available online at www.spotlightnepal.com/2017/12/16/ nepals-government-waiting-revive-scrapped-chinese-dam-project/. Ng, E. (2018) “Botched Chinese Railway Project in Africa Is a Warning to Belt and Road Investors,” South China Morning Post (29 October), available online at www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/2170549/botched-chinese-railway-project-africa-warningbelt-and. Ngeow, C.-B. (forthcoming) “Expanding Elite Networks and Securing International Friendships: The International Department of the CPC and the Party-Based Diplomacy,” in J. T. Jacob and T. A. Hoang, eds., In Search of National Rejuvenation: Chinese Domestic and Foreign Policies in the ‘New Era’ (New Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan). Nikkei Asian Review (2017) “China’s Projects in Vietnam Earn Reputation for Poor Quality, Delays” (20 September), available online at https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/ China-s-projects-in-Vietnam-earn-reputation-for-poor-quality-delays2. Pakistan Today (2018) “Any Attempt to Undermine Pakistan-China Friendship Will Not Succeed: Chinese Foreign Ministry,” China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (28 November), available online at www.cpecinfo.com/news/any-attempt-to-undermine-pakistan-chinafriendship-will-not-succeed-chinese-foreign-ministry/NjMwOQ. PIB (Press Information Bureau) (2018) “BBIN Motor Vehicles Agreement Regains Momentum” (15 January), available online at http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=175638. Port Technology (2018) “The Lanzhou to Islamabad Road and Rail Service Completes Its First Journey,” China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (22 November), available online at www.cpecinfo. com/news/The-Lanzhou-to-Islamabad-road-and-rail-service-completes-its-first-journey/ NjI3MQ. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2018a) “India to Build Corridor from Gurdaspur to IB for Sikh Pilgrims Visiting Kartarpur Sahib,” The Times of India (22 November), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-to-build-corridor-from-gurdaspur-to-ibto-facilitate-sikh-pilgrims/articleshow/66748766.cms. PTI (Press Trust of India) (2018b) “Islamabad to Invite PM Modi for Saarc Summit, Says Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman,” The Times of India (27 November), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/pm-modi-to-be-invited-to-pakistan-for-saarcsummit-says-foreign-office-spokesman/articleshow/66828663.cms. Rana, K. S. and Uberoi, P. (2012) “India’s Northeast States, the BCIM Forum and Regional Integration,” ICS Monograph, No. 1 (December), available online at www.icsin.org/uploads/2015/06/03/9839efaafaf2dc1c32bea016fcdfc1c8.pdf. RIS (Research and Information System for Developing Countries) (2015) “Towards South Asia Economic Union: Proceedings of the 7th South Asia Economic Summit (SAES)” available online at www.ris.org.in/towards-south-asia-economic-union. RIS (Research and Information System for Developing Countries) (2016a) “ASEAN-India Air Connectivity Report” (May), available online at www.ris.org.in/asean-india-air-connectivity-report. RIS (Research and Information System for Developing Countries) (2016b) “BIMSTEC: The Road Ahead” available online at www.ris.org.in/bimstec-road-ahead. RIS, ERIA and IDE-JETRO (Research and Information System for Developing Countries, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia, and Institute of Developing Economies Japan External Trade Organization) (2017) “Asia Africa Growth Corridor Partnership for Sustainable and Innovative Development: A Vision Document,” ERIA, available online at www.eria.org/Asia-Africa-Growth-Corridor-Document.pdf. Sapkota, R. (2017) “China Proposes Joint Security Mechanism along Border with Nepal,” The Himalayan Times (26 December), available online at https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/ china-proposes-joint-security-mechanism-along-border-nepal/.

332  Jabin T. Jacob Sapkota, R. (2018) “Chinese Rider on Tatopani,” The Himalayan Times (14 January), available online at https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/chinese-rider-tatopani/. Schultz, K. (2017) “Sri Lanka, Struggling with Debt, Hands a Major Port to China,” The New York Times (12 December), available online at www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/srilanka-china-port.html. Sethi, C. K. (2018) “What Is the Kartarpur Corridor Issue that Made Navjot Singh Sidhu Hug Pakistan Army Chief?” The Print (23 August), available online at https://theprint. in/governance/what-is-the-kartarpur-corridor-issue-that-made-navjot-singh-sidhu-hugpakistan-army-chief/103257/. Singh, N. (2018) “How Indian Startups Are Grabbing a Larger Slice of Chinese Investments,” Entrepreneur (15 November), available online at www.entrepreneur.com/article/323331. Smith, G. (2018) “China: Magic Weapons and ‘Plausible Deniability’,” The Interpreter (30 April), available online at www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/plausible-deniability-andunited-front-work-department. Swami, P. (2016) “At Afghan Dam Inauguration, PM Promises: India Will Not Forget You,” The Indian Express (5 June), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/ narendra-modi-afghanistan-salma-dam-inauguration-ashraf-ghani-2834106/. Syed, B. S. (2018) “Iran Invites Pakistan to Participate in Chahbahar Project,” Dawn (13 March), available online at www.dawn.com/news/1394938. Thapa, K. (@Ktnepal) (2017) “The Budhi Gandaki Hydropower Project Agreement Has No Politics in Kharaji, It Is Not Against Any Institution/Person. Parliamentary Committees Have Been Directed to Keep the Country’s Highest Interest in Mind. Now the Energy Ministry and the Investment Board Will Make Necessary Changes to Ensure Transparent Policies and Procedures,” Twitter (13 November), available online at https://twitter.com/KTnepal/ status/930055093423972352. The Hindu (2019) “India Gets First TIR Shipment via Chabahar Port from Afghanistan” (13 March), available online at www.thehindu.com/business/india-gets-first-tir-shipment-viachabahar-port-from-afghanistan/article26525062.ece. Walker, C. and Ludwig, J. (2017) “The Meaning of Sharp Power,” Foreign Affairs (16 November), available online at www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-11-16/meaning-sharp-power. Xi. J, (2017) “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, Speech Delivered at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xinhua (18 October), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/english/download/Xi_Jinping’s_ ­ report_at_19th_CPC_National_Congress.pdf. Xinhua (2017) “Full Text of Resolution on Amendment to CPC Constitution” (24 October), available online at www.xinhuanet.com//english/2017-10/24/c_136702726.htm. Xinhua (2018) “Nepali Airline’s Team to Take Delivery of Two More Chinese-Made Planes” (31 January), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-01/31/c_136938579.htm. Yuan, J. (2018) “Lijing san nian ban Zhong-Ni kuajing hulianwang guanglan zhengshi kaitong” (China-Nepal Cross-Border Internet Cable Officially Opened after Three and a Half Years), Renmin Wang (People’s Daily Online) (15 January), available online at http://ydyl.people.com. cn/n1/2018/0115/c411946-29764122.html.

20 Divergent capitalism in China and India A historical institutionalist approach Ye Min

The rise and globalization of China and India, the world’s first and second most populous nations, have raised important questions and engendered many research publications on them in the recent era (Huang and Khanna 2003; Khanna 2007; Miller 2010; Ye 2014; Duara and Perry 2018). These diverse works, by business scholars, economists, and political scientists respectively, have presented nuanced comparisons between the countries’ histories and political-economic institutions that have shaped their divergent capitalist experiences. Some even seek to predict which power will surpass the other in the future (Huang and Khanna 2003). From a historical-institutional perspective, however, how far back should such a comparative analysis of China and India start? What institutions in the two nations should such a comparative approach focus on? This chapter focuses on one salient difference between capital globalization of the two giants—their relative openness to foreign direct investment (FDI)—and provides a historical-institutional analysis of this divergence. It observes that different capitalist institutions are rooted in the two Asian giants’ divergent socialist construction, and furthermore, their divergent capitalist experiences are embedded in political institutions forged in the previous period, including local government activism and ideational preference to FDI as a means to domestic development. The local government-FDI coalition has played an important role in China’s industrialization and globalization and is likely to shape future trajectories as well. The historical discussion in this chapter focuses on how local governments were strengthened in the socialist period and how FDI emerged as a preferable capital ally in China during the reform era. Local governments’ proactive developmentalism and preference toward FDI continue to shape development and globalization in China today. In contrast, in India, the socialist construction and capitalist transition have reinforced the roles of national bureaucracies and indigenous big business. These two sets of powerful actors have shaped India’s globalization in the last decades, which has been more skeptical of FDI inflows than in China. The contemporary discussion introduces and compares two ongoing regional strategies in the Asian giants: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in China and Project Mausam in India. Both strategies have been presented as foreign policy platforms to expand the regional influence of the countries, but they have been conducted very differently. In China, the political leadership launched the BRI using nebulous terms and political mobilization. Chinese local governments then took the strategy into their own hands and improvised new globalization measures that facilitated local development. In India, Project Mausam became popularized and gained global fame as a counter measure to China’s regional diplomatic expansion. Although Prime Minister Modi endorsed

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the importance of the strategy, Project Mausam was really an initiative by the Ministry of Culture and its associated experts. Its activities and projects were devised by professionals and relevant associations, primarily the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and the project’s implementation did not expand to include other interest groups and political forces in India. In short, starting from the early days of socialist construction, the Chinese state employed a political mobilization model that has depended on mobilizing the support and participation of local governments. This political mobilization and the role of local governments were both renewed and enhanced during China’s capitalist transition. Since economic development was a predominant state priority in the reform period, FDI from the Chinese diaspora became critical to the growth of local governments. Local developmentalism and a preference for FDI have continued to shape the implementation of the BRI. In India, the process of policymaking is full of debate. The historical periods of socialism and capitalist transition show that, compared to China’s mobilization model, India has employed a bureaucratic model in which professionally trained economic bureaucrats devise policies according to expert opinions and the jockeying of interest groups. Which of these two models is better and more effective in helping achieve development and globalization outcomes? A rational policy thinker would undoubtedly rank policymaking in India more advantageous. Take Project Mausam as an example. The Project was devised by the Ministry of Culture with the proper expertise and designated resources to achieve well-defined agendas. The funding sources, mechanisms, and procedures were clearly spelled out, and its goal of building research networks across neighboring countries has been clearly stated. The Chinese BRI, in contrast, is extremely vague and ambitious, making it vulnerable to policy “capture” and misuse of public funds. The countless actors involved present numerous opportunities to undermine the diplomatic agenda that the strategy was intended to serve. From a political perspective, however, the BRI is superior to Project Mausam. It has incorporated major stakeholders in the Chinese system—in particular, powerful and resourceful local governments and companies—which will help sustain the strategy in the future and will help the strategy achieve goals beyond diplomacy. By contrast, Project Mausam involved only a few agencies and professional groups. It has designated very little funding for implementation, and it is unlikely to incentivize more participants in India or in the region. Its narrow focus, and much clearer geostrategic mandate, prevented it from building fruitful cross-national business coalitions. This chapter uses the lens of historical institutionalism to explain the historical and institutional conditions for the divergent strategic policy frameworks in China and India. It does not rank their feasibility or appeal. Rather, it demonstrates that decision-makers are situated in different historical-institutional contexts and choose policies in accordance to their rational and political calculations; policy implementation is decisively shaped by the political-economic systems in which they are embedded. The BRI is a product of China’s historical institutions, in particular the local developmentalism and FDI preference. Thus, even when the BRI was promulgated as a strategic policy, it was implemented as a development and globalization program inside China. This helped expand the domestic popularity of the BRI, but also weakened its diplomatic achievement. Project Mausam, by contrast, is rooted in India’s technocratic and professionally led policy environment. The goals and mechanisms are clearly spelled out, which help

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the strategy achieve its diplomatic mission, but at the same time make it less fungible both inside and outside the country.

Comparative history in China and India China and India make compelling comparative cases in world development. Their experiences before independence were similar enough that the penetration of foreign capital and governance problems was quite comparable on the eve of independence (1947 in India; 1949 in China). After independence, the two new regimes (the Indian National Congress in India; the Communist Party in China) adopted isolationist economic policies; democratic India’s socialist construction was relatively peaceful while authoritarian China’s was quite violent. Upon their transition to capitalism (China in 1978; India in 1980), the level of economic openness was extremely low in both giants, with China being even lower than India. In the following two decades, however, China galloped ahead as it embraced FDI; India took a step ahead, another step back. The key positive force, or active engager of foreign capital in China, has been local governments, which have proactively formed coalitions with external investors (Ye 2014, 2016, 2018). In India, with few exceptions, FDI liberalization has been dominated by central economic agencies and shaped by domestic business groups who have protectionist interests in domestic markets. This section on comparative history of FDI has two goals. First it investigates the socialist constructions in China and India to demonstrate how local governments became critical and powerful developmental agents in China, but not in India. Second, it compares their capitalist transitions to show how local governments facilitated FDI inflows in China, but not in India. Mao versus Nehru: pre-reform political economy in China and India There were many similarities between pre-reform China and India. First, there was a strong emphasis on building state-owned enterprises (SOEs), thus making the state the main force in the economy. Second, there was a clear preference for heavy industries, compared to light industries, channeling finance toward capital-intensive sectors. Third, there was a clear distrust of foreign capital and international trade. Both countries implemented an import-substitution industrialization strategy. There were also marked differences. Most importantly, the Chinese system was radically socialist and violently anti-market. Only SOEs and rural collectives were allowed to operate; private entrepreneurs were eliminated. In India, existing private businesses were allowed to continue but operated under stricter government controls. New entrants and expansion were discouraged. Mobilization and campaigns in Mao’s socialism Before 1949, traditional China had what Barry Naughton (2007) described as a “household-based, bottom-heavy” economy that was efficient and suitable for China at the time. Socialist China turned its back on this tradition and ignored China’s labor advantage. New leaders set out to develop a massive socialist industrial complex through direct government control. Instead of investing in labor-intensive sectors, they poured

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resources into capital-intensive factories producing metals, machinery, and chemicals— an expensive socialist industrialization strategy. During the period of socialist construction, Beijing established a “command economy” and almost entirely eliminated market mechanisms. The state allocated resources directly through state-controlled prices. The system had the following characteristics: • • • •

The government owned all large factories and transportation and communication enterprises. In the countryside, agricultural collectives took over ownership of the land and management of the farm economy; Planners issued commands that assigned production targets to firms and directly allocated resources and goods among different producers; Finances were used to audit and monitor performance, not to drive investment decisions. The government controlled the price system and set relative prices to channel resources into government hands and into the socialist industrialization; The government and the Communist Party reinforced their control of the economy through a hierarchical personnel system, in which the Communist Party controlled managerial career paths.

The system of “command and control” effectively mobilized individuals and households to defer to the overall national development strategy and allowed the central government to devise desirable industrialization policies. With planners pouring resources into heavy industry, rapid industrial growth resulted. Between 1952 and 1978, industrial output grew at an average annual rate of 11.5 percent. Moreover, industry’s share of total gross domestic product (GDP) climbed steadily over the same period from eighteen to forty-four percent, while agriculture’s share declined from fifty-one to twenty-eight percent. New industries were created such as those producing electricity generating equipment, chemical fertilizers, and motor vehicles. With recurrent political mobilizations and campaigns, however, the Chinese socialist period was highly unstable. Among the instabilities, the Great Leap Forward (GLF 1958–1961) stands out as “the most peculiar, and the most terrible” (Naughton 2007: 56) of all these episodes, overshadowing even the Cultural Revolution (CR 1966–1976), which purged scholars, officials, and even members of the military. The CR, however, was more profound from a political perspective. Although it was concentrated in cities and thus did not affect the economy and population at large, the CR destroyed much of China’s state planning and its top-down “command and control” system. As Beijing and other major cities were engulfed in recurrent political crises, lower-level governments were thrust into self-governance and required to make independent economic decisions. In addition, because of the elimination of private business before 1956, Chinese economic decision-making occurred predominantly in the “middle”, i.e., by the local governments. In short, China’s socialist construction left three historical legacies that were critical to the FDI liberalization in the reform era. First, the violent and absolute “command and control” wiped out private entrepreneurship and market mechanisms. Second, the self-inflicted political movements, often led by the revolutionary impulses of Chairman Mao, weakened economic planners within the command system. In particular, during the CR, the central government’s role in decision-making at the local level was sharply reduced. Thus, before the economic reform, Chinese local governments had already been engaged in independent decision-making in the development and economic

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activities of their localities. Third, the command economy wiped out private business and channeled resources indiscriminately to SOEs, which made SOEs extremely inefficient. With no private capital and inefficient SOEs, local governments in China entered the reform era with almost no internal capitalist allies to help growth. Mixed economy in socialist India After winning independence, the Nehru administration set out to build an Indian version of socialism. Like many post-colonial economies, the Indian new regime aimed to introduce and enhance the import substitution industrialization strategy, to reduce and eliminate market mechanisms and private economic agents, and to extend the government into more and wider economic activities. New Delhi passed several core documents to outline these economic priorities. In 1948, the Industrial Policy Resolution (IPR1948) laid out the basic industrial system, separating industries into four categories: (1) state monopolies in defense, atomic energy, and railways; (2) a mixed sector comprising aircraft, ship building, telecom equipment, mineral oil, coal, and iron; (3) government control over eighteen industries; and (4) private enterprises. In 1952, the Industries Act gave the state legal power to implement this approach, and in 1955, the Import Control Order increased the government’s roles and reduced India’s exchange with external markets. Finally, in 1956, the Industrial Policy Resolution (IPR1956) systematically consolidated the socialist system in India. Under IPR1956, the government reduced the number of industrial categories from four to three. Schedule A, the State Monopoly, was applied to over seventeen industries, among which four were exclusive to government (defense, atomic energy, railway, air transport) and thirteen new units were to be set up by the government; existing private units could continue to operate. Schedule B, the mixed sector, had twelve industries, where the state would increasingly establish new units and increase participation, but the private sector could also set up new units. Schedule C comprised private enterprises. The state’s roles were further expanded with the nationalization of industries and financial institutions, the reservation of sectors for government investment, and legislative measures to control and direct private activity. India’s socialist construction was much milder than China’s. Private entrepreneurs were allowed to exist in India; wealthy Indian families continued to grow. By “dislodging” multinationals and limiting new entrants into the economy, the socialist state helped private business to grow. Preexisting business families were so successful in the socialist “mixed economy” that they created what was often called “tycoon capitalism” (Chaudhuri 1980). In the meantime, under the state’s support, public units grew and monopolized many sectors. These public units then became a hotbed of socialist ideas and interests, and their voices were influential in government policymaking. In contrast to China, India’s national planning system was continuous and penetrated deeply into economic decision-making at the local level, although not in a pro-growth manner. In addition to the top-down state roles, business actors were influential in the localities as well. Thus, compared to China, the “middle”—local governments operating between the federal state and grassroots businesses—did not develop independent and developmental capacities. This outcome, however, was not a “choice” of state building, but rather an “unintended consequence” of political development in the new regime.

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Institutions, however, are sticky and lead to subsequent development that sets the two Asian giants apart. In China, for example, even when central bureaucracies were professionalized and rebuilt in the 1990s, local governments continued to play independent and developmental roles in the national economy. As of today, Chinese local governments are remarkably agile in leveraging political programs and slogans and reinterpreting them to their own advantage. Despite the fact that the Chinese central coffer has accumulated much wealth in recent decades, local governments in China are generally quite self-reliant in economic development. Central transfers in China are usually targeted at poverty alleviation, ethnic politics, border security, and large, cross-regional infrastructure projects. In India, central bureaucracy exerts a strong impact on local governments. At the grassroots level, private capital and traditional social organizations tend to have considerable influence and shape local development. In short, compared to China, it is “the middle” power that is less developed in India. Unpacking the different layers of state institutions, it is clear that the typical distinction between strong state and weak state, or between autocracy and democracy, is too simplistic to capture the divergent state roles in China and India. Reform divergence: FDI versus domestic opening In the 1980s, strong leaders in both China and India heralded major changes in the countries’ economic systems. Deng Xiaoping, after tumultuous political and government experiences, consolidated power in late 1978. Under his rule, China announced the beginning of reform and openness. In India, Indira Gandhi, daughter of one prime minister and mother of another, returned to the top position in 1980, after a devastating electoral defeat and political marginalization for three years. When both leaders regained power, they were ready to shift their national economies away from socialism to more market-oriented systems. The directions of change and state–business relations established in the two countries, however, diverged significantly. In China, it came to be dominated by the local state and FDI alliance; in India, it was led by national bureaucracies yet conditioned by domestic business interests. Leadership, local state, and diaspora FDI in China Deng, at the age of seventy-five, was eager to develop China in 1979. He made friends with leading businessmen from Hong Kong and Macao such as Y. K. Pao, Gordon Wu, Lee Ka-Shing, and Stanley Ho. He invited them to Beijing and asked for their contributions and advice on developing China. These overseas Chinese businessmen had mostly been born on the mainland, migrated during their youth, and made their fortunes during the East Asian high-growth era. When they returned to visit their homeland in 1979, their sentiments were profound. They were struck by the poverty and underdevelopment in China and responded to Deng’s request. With the leader’s encouragement, local governments, whose economic capacity was enhanced during the socialist period, became critical to China’s reforms in the 1980s. In Guangdong and Fujian, the two southern provinces, local officials were eager to tap on their connections to Hong Kong and Macao, where capital, technology, and global markets were abundantly available. In late 1978, the Hong Kong Merchants Group collaborated with the Guangdong government and the minister of communications to build an export-processing zone in Shekou, a small island in today’s Shenzhen. In their

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bid to the central government for approval, they pledged to use no government funding and to develop the zone entirely with investments from Hong Kong. Once the Shekou zone had been approved, the larger Shenzhen special economic zone (SEZ) was also approved by the central government. Keep in mind that at the time of opening and reform, Chinese SOEs were capital-scarce, and private capital was utterly lacking. External capital became major sources of investment in these zones and helped bring visible development success. Shenzhen, previously consisting of fishing villages, emerged as one of the most modern cities in China in 1984. More than eighty-five percent of investment in its infrastructure came from FDI; domestic funds, including national and local government allocations and bank loans, amounted to less than fifteen percent. Furthermore, FDI in Shenzhen and Shekou predominantly came from the Chinese diaspora: more than ninety percent of FDI in Shenzhen from 1979 to 1983 was from Hong Kong, and in Shekou, in 1984 alone, Hong Kong and Thailand contributed to more than sixty percent of FDI (China Special Economic Zones Yearbook Compilation Office 1985: 231, 202). The special zones, openness to foreign capital, and practice of market mechanisms spurred ideological resistance from leftist politicians in Beijing.1 Interestingly, SOEs did not raise resistance to SEZs, because they were shielded from competition while monopolizing the newly emerging trade and foreign exchange. In both Shekou and Shenzhen, foreign capital built the infrastructure and industries that hired people and manufactured products for export. In the 1980s, drawing on connections with FDI, rural entrepreneurs emerged in this area. Therefore, new economic actors in China joined, rather than resisted, the FDI-led development in south China. Ideational change from Shenzhen’s rapid success was remarkable and led local governments elsewhere to copy the measures adopted there, including the use of FDI and the mechanisms of the market. In other words, because of Shenzhen’s experiment with FDI, Chinese local governments were not only developmental; they also came to define development with FDI inflows. Shanghai served as a good example. Mayor Zhu Rongji successfully lobbied the central government in 1988 to approve the development of Pudong, a vast rural area east of old Shanghai. Eager to draw FDI, Shanghai local officials used the slogan “to develop Pudong into a little Hong Kong” and embraced diasporas strongly. In the 1990s, globalization in China intensified; the political leadership, local governments, and diaspora FDI worked together throughout the decade. In 1992, frustrated with a reform impasse in Beijing, Deng Xiaoping launched the Southern Tour to mobilize local governments’ developmentalism. Working under Deng’s banner, local governments aggressively adopted measures to attract foreign investment in various local economic zones. Action by local governments resulted in a sustained period of “zone fever” in China, with thousands of economic development zones being newly approved in the localities and sweeping preferential policies to incoming FDI implemented in this period. Local developmentalism was clear in Shanghai. The city received the national government’s authorization to develop Pudong in 1988, only to see its construction severely disrupted by the Tiananmen crisis. Even so, the local government made plans for far-reaching reforms in the city. Once the Southern Tour reignited the trend of globalization, proactive local governments played critical roles in attracting diaspora capitalists. To attract Hong Kong’s textile king Tang Xiangqian, the Shanghai government appointed Tang’s father as vice chairman of Shanghai’s Chinese People’s Political

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Consultative Conference (CPPCC). To attract Taiwan business leader Tang Junnian, Shanghai’s senior officials traveled to Beijing to meet with Tang. Similarly, Kunshan, a township-level city near Shanghai modeled after ex portprocessing zones in Taiwan, invited Taiwanese businessmen to visit the city. In 1992–1993, among the fourteen major FDI projects in Kunshan, twelve were by overseas Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan (Kunshan City Compilation Office 1994). In 2000, Kunshan’s export-processing zone was approved by the Jiangsu government; more than 760 Taiwanese firms were already operating there (Kunshan City Compilation Office 2001). By 2005, Kunshan had attracted one-tenth of all Taiwanese investment in China, making itself the hub of components manufacturing and exports for companies such as Apple, Sony, Compaq, and Hewlett Packard. Bureaucracy, domestic business, and FDI in India Indira Gandhi’s years out of office (1977–1980) significantly strengthened her ties to private business and distanced her from traditional leftist groups. Reliant on her son Sanjay’s business connections, Indira Gandhi campaigned to return to power. When she won the elections in 1980, there were clear signals of a “changed priority” for the government and for the new prime minister. Indira Gandhi promoted new political and economic advisors with ample experience in private business and global organizations, among them L. K. Jha, P. C. Alexander, and Arjun Sengupta. In contrast with China’s pro-FDI transition, India’s economic shift in the early 1980s favored domestic business; no external liberalization was seriously considered. Indira Gandhi’s new initiatives fell into four categories: first, deregulate private business (decontrolling steel and cement prices, manufactured imports, and firms’ entry and expansion, delicensing twenty industries, and diluting the antimonopoly act); second, support private industries by offering incentives, credits, and tax reliefs to big business; third, suppress labor by discouraging labor activism; and fourth, limit the public sector by cutting subsidies and investment in public units. In 1984, Gandhi was assassinated and her elder son, Rajiv Gandhi, came to power. Different from his mother, Rajiv Gandhi was a new kind of politician that had exposure to world technology. He was therefore eager to support domestic entrepreneurs in growing new technology sectors and inviting foreign players from the United States. Rajiv Gandhi’s new budget in 1985 reduced taxes, cut duties, and eliminated licensing restrictions in twenty-five industries; it also sought to reduce investment in the public sector. The support for private business was warmly welcomed, but the cuts in the public sector were opposed by thinkers, politicians, and managers on the left. Rajiv Gandhi wanted more Western investors to promote technology and industry in India, but domestic producers feared competition from foreign products and foreign producers and thus pressured the government to limit access to imports and foreign investment in India. Established domestic capital sought deregulation but not external opening. The influence and voice of domestic businesses were amplified by leading business associations that lobbied the government on their behalf. In the 1980s, three national-level business associations were shaping the policy debates and rallying support or opposition to specific policies. These associations included the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), which in particular represented technology-related new industries and rose to prominence under

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Rajiv Gandhi. Across the board, the industries’ common call to the government was to “build Indian private business” before opening to foreign competitors. The trend to globalization also accelerated in India in the 1990s. The mechanism of acceleration, however, was different from that in China. Rather than combining autocratic programs and local developmentalism, India’s opening was orchestrated by national bureaucracies who seized the opportunity of the 1991 financial crisis to wage aggressive liberalization. Once the crisis’s effect waned, however, the liberalization was challenged by domestic businesses and was partially reversed. In 1991, India experienced an abrupt debt crisis. Against that background, the government rolled out the June 1991 Union Budget which provided an integrated strategy for trade, tax, and foreign exchange reforms. The July 1991 Industrial Policy then detailed measures to reduce the public sector, promote private industry, and encourage external trade and foreign investment. In the following two years, liberalization continued and deepened. The government eliminated import licenses for most capital goods, raw materials, and other intermediates and reduced the maximum tariff from 400 percent to eighty-five percent (MOF 1994). The government passed policies of export-oriented units and allowed foreign investors in those units to hold up to 100 equity shares (MOF 1994). The politics that had prevented opening to FDI in the 1980s continued to shape FDI policy in this decade. As new foreign investors came, opposition from domestic producers mounted as well (Ye 2016: 126–129). The abovementioned industrial associations, FICCI, ASSOCHAM, and CII, advocated protectionist measures to push back against the threats from foreign goods and investments. In the mid-late 1990s, it managed to partially reverse the policy opening in the early 1990s. On 2 May 1998, Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee officially adopted a “carefully calibrated approach” to globalization. In December 1998, the new Bharatiya Janata Party government required that foreign firms wishing to set up a new Indian operation obtain a “no-objection” certificate from all Indian partners. This move gave Indian indigenous companies an effective voice in checking the roles of foreign investment in India and was widely seen as a reversal in India’s liberalization of FDI inflows. To summarize the historical comparison, it is useful to underscore a few trends that cut through a comparison of globalization in China and India. First, Chinese socialism eliminated private entrepreneurs, while in India private entrepreneurship not only continued but also grew. Second, China’s party control resulted in more thorough socialist construction in the country. Socialist construction was both helped by and further strengthened political mobilization and capacity building in local governments. Compared to powerful party and local governments, the business actors, even SOEs, were relatively weak in influencing policies and development in China. The various campaigns and movements in the socialist period further weakened the public sector’s grip on local politics and development. Ironically, the power of the Indian public sector might be even stronger in economic policymaking than in China. Public units and leftist organizations were built during socialism and were protected. They enjoyed relative autonomy from state bureaucracies and emerged as influential political forces that shaped India’s democratic politics. Different socialist legacies in China and India resulted in different politics of reform and globalization. In China, which lacked internal business forces, top leaders and local government embraced external capital, in particular from returned overseas Chinese, and China developed FDI-reliant industrialization and globalization. In India, domestic business became immediate allies of capitalist reform; domestic business, however, was

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opposed to external opening. Even when the country was forced open by a major crisis, domestic business managed to persuade the government to limit and delay the entry of FDI once the effects of the crisis wore off. Thus, from a historical point of view, the Chinese and Indian capitalisms were hostages of their respective states and society makeups, forged during their socialist periods. Reform-era governments in both countries proactively attempted to reform the socialist systems and to install more market-oriented mechanisms in order to achieve economic growth. Due to their large land mass, potential market, and cheap labor, each country drew the attention of global investors, but they were met with different responses. China’s lack of domestic capital permitted the government to open the country to returning Chinese investors, whereas India’s strong domestic business sector prevented more wholehearted opening. Historical institutionalism also shapes contemporary policy in China and India. Local developmentalism and a preference for FDI have influenced key economic policies in China in the recent decades. Even in the central, state-led electrical vehicle (EV) policy, local governments have been key promoters and implementers in various localities. Furthermore, foreign brands and partnerships were systematically coveted in local implementation, although much of the partnerships were based on technology sharing. Another example is China’s “Make in 2025” industrial policy, devised by the central bureaucracy but incorporating local and corporate ideas and interests. The implementation was again taken over by local governments, who, in order to develop the new, prioritized industries, chased foreign companies for collaboration and joint ventures. In India, the Modi administration launched “Make in India” and “Skill India.” Both policies were rolled out and devised by economic bureaucracies. Business associations, professional organizations, and private business were the main implementers of the two policies. Foreign tech companies and global expertise were involved in implementation of the schemes, but most of the actions took place at the national level, or in key tech clusters in Mumbai and Bangalore. Unlike in China, neither schemes were able to mobilize a close alliance between local governments and FDI in local development. In short, the Chinese “mobilization” model has tended to broaden a central policy to include many actors and allow local governments to “hijack” a national policy. Working with foreign partners, local governments can turn the policy in directions that are not necessarily in the intent of the central policy. India’s “technical” model, in contrast, puts central bureaucracy and experts in the leading position. Although such centralized policy appears to be more “rational” and “scientific,” it also tends to be limited to an exclusive group of “professional” actors, and often fails to impact local development on a broader scale. The following section analyzes how China’s “centerpiece” grand strategy, the BRI, supports the “mobilization” model in which local developmentalism and preferences to FDI prevailed, while India’s counter strategy, Project Mausam, supports the “technical” model, in which local states and business interests are largely absent.

BRI versus Project Mausam The Chinese leadership launched the BRI in late 2013, and by 2015, the strategy had rallied support from all important members in China—central agencies, state capital, local governments, and scholars. Underneath the effort at inclusiveness, however, BRI implementation has been fragmented and divergent from the political ambition shown in the Chinese rhetoric.

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Project Mausam was India’s response to China’s BRI. Led by the Ministry of Culture, the project spells out the covered countries and avenues for joint efforts. Unlike the BRI, however, it does not involve groups with resources inside India. Its “technical exclusivity” prevents it from becoming a business-oriented platform to draw financial resources. In other words, the BRI was primarily a political mobilization that incentivizes lower-level units to improvise projects inside China; Project Mausam was a diplomatic effort to draw neighboring countries into its orbit. Local governments and the BRI The BRI has been viewed as the “centerpiece” foreign policy of the Xi administration (Liu et al. 2017; Economy 2018); yet local governments have been key players in its implementation (Ye 2019). Chinese policy scholars and central agencies, to be sure, are aware of local initiatives; yet their views tend to be critical and negative, as they believe that local projects distort the BRI’s strategic intent and undermine its external ambition. From a historical institutionalist perspective, however, Chinese local governments’ reinterpretation and self-interested implementation are consistent with China’s reform experiences in the last four decades. Local developmentalism has been the bedrock of China’s speedy and successful globalization. Furthermore, because local conditions differ widely across China, localized BRI implementation has been diverse and has helped revive economic development and globalization in Chinese localities. This section discusses how local governments representing different economic regions, economic structures, and state capacities have been active in implementing the BRI. Ningbo is an eastern city that is close to Shanghai and Hangzhou; it has vibrant private economy and a significant presence of foreign and state capital. Local bureaucracies are well-trained and development-savvy. When the BRI was launched, Ningbo was facing challenges to upgrade its manufacturing industries in a globalized market. The local government identified attracting high-tech FDI as a top priority and aimed to improve the city’s status as a global city in China. Leveraging the BRI, Ningbo conducted three measures: first, it expanded its central and eastern European goods exhibition to a routinized, multilateral initiation called the Central-Eastern Europe Consortium; second, it sponsored the creation of a Maritime Silk Road Shipping Index to rival the global Baltic Index; third, it expanded and upgraded its new Plum Mountain economic zone to attract foreign investors. In late 2017, Ningbo successfully became Zhejiang BRI Experiment Site and pledged to achieve new rounds of industrialization and globalization under the BRI. In the same province, Wenzhou belonged to the southern “economic region” (Naughton 2018: 31). Different from Ningbo, it had dominant private capital and active entrepreneurs, and the local government has been less strategic and strong-handed. Nonetheless, Wenzhou implemented the BRI proactively, with two major programs led by private entrepreneurs. The first program, the Belt and Road Goods Expo, was financed by one or two companies and showcased many Chinese brands in Europe. The Expo was held annually in Italy and received endorsement from five central ministries. Its main effect was to expand the Chinese export market in Europe. The second program was led by the largest power device maker in Wenzhou. The company was active in following the leaders’ footsteps along the BRI, but its largest BRI project was in China. It constructed a massive manufacturing site near Xi’an, the famed origin and

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pillar city of the Silk Road Economic Belt. In time, the company expects to relocate and expand production from coastal cities (Wenzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai) to interior China, where labor, land, and other costs are lower and it will have greater access to broader continental markets around China. If Ningbo represents a combination of mixed economy and strong state and Wenzhou represents a strong private economy and weak state, Chongqing in western China represents the dominance of state capital. Here, SOEs have majority shares in industrial output and state revenue, and there is consensus among interviewed actors that SOEs are the leading development agents in the city. In Chongqing, state capital improvised two types of BRI implementation. First, it leveraged the BRI to spin off new e-commerce businesses and profited from imported high-end consumer goods. The most important such spinoff is the Yu-Xin-Ou E-commerce Company, a subsidiary of Chongqing’s largest SOE, Chongqing Foreign Trade Group. Second, the SOEs collaborated to find external markets for their excess production capacities. One scheme is called 3+N, consisting of three main actors—Chongqing Foreign Trade Group, Chongqing Ex-Im Bank, and China Development Bank (Chongqing Branch), and one or several other partners to expand business overseas. There is an obvious continuity between BRI implementation and China’s earlier FDI liberalization. First, at the local level, the government has clearly prioritized FDI. Based on past experiences, when the Ningbo government faced challenges in upgrading local industry, it rapidly concentrated its efforts on attracting “high-tech” foreign capital. Although the BRI nominally targets less-developed Asian economies, Ningbo’s BRI implementation has focused on boosting the city’s global profile so that it can be more effective in attracting FDI from advanced capitalist societies. Ningbo’s pattern is consistent with other cities that have similarly strong involvement of local governments such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and other cities in the Yangtze River Delta region. With entrepreneurial private capital in the lead, Wenzhou’s BRI project was based on the incentives and needs of the contributing companies. In Chongqing, with state capital in the lead, the city’s BRI projects have been driven by the need to stimulate business and revive SOEs. That agenda was supported by state banks and preferential policies. Professionalism and Project Mausam in India Project Mausam, officially launched at the Thirty-Eight Session of the World Heritage Committee meeting in Doha, Qatar in June 2014, is considered as the most important policy under Prime Minister Modi to counter China’s Maritime Silk Road. It seeks to reconnect India with countries in the region where India has a unique role and identity based on shared cultural heritage. It also seeks to provide a platform to nations in the Indian Ocean region to jointly present cultural sites and historical narratives and put together a transnational nomination under the World Heritage (MIC 2013, 2015). Should the project achieve its goals, it would increase the visibility and collective identity in the region as a whole, while bolstering India’s multilateral and regional leadership. Project Mausam’s implementation mechanisms, key actors, and outcomes have presented interesting contrasts to China’s BRI. From the beginning, it primarily involved bureaucrats, research institutions, and scholars related to culture and historical heritages in the Indian Ocean. It was led by India’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation, which delegated the ASI as the top agency. In November 2014, the ASI collaborated with the State Government of Kerala and organized a National Conference on

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Project Mausam in Kochi. Furthermore, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, a government funded professional organization, has established an Academic Committee and organized a lecture series in the name of the Project (Sharma 2016a). Overtime, the Project organizers seek to establish a Research Unit in New Delhi, from where it could coordinate research activities in the member states and coordinate narratives on the Indian Ocean maritime routes (IGNCA 2019). Project Mausam has received positive response from countries near the Indian Ocean, including China, UAE, Qatar, Myanmar, Iran, and Vietnam. By 2016, forty countries signed on as partners of India’s Project Mausam. China, in the context of the BRI launch, even proposed to link Project Mausam with the BRI in order to boost bilateral commercial collaborations (MIC 2016). However, key differences exist between the BRI and Project Mausam. The BRI, explained earlier, is led by local governments and companies that have strong developmental and commercial interests. Project Mausam, by contrast, has been focused on “research on themes related to the study of maritime routes and landscapes through international scientific seminars and meetings and by adopting a multidisciplinary approach” (Sharma 2016b). Unlike the ambiguous and ambitious BRI, the near-term objective of Project Mausam was clear and well-defined: to prepare a dossier for multinational nomination of the Indian Ocean region as a World Heritage site. In its first stage, Indian Government approved the Project to run from April 2015 to March 2017, with a budget of Rs.150 million (equivalent to US$ 2.1 million). The Project also has clear diplomatic and strategic motivations. One of Project Mausam’s early activities was a joint sail voyage by Indian Navy Sail Training Ship Tarangini and Royal Navy of Oman Sail Training Ship Shabab Oman, conducted from 24 November to 3 December 2015 to commemorate sixty years of diplomatic relationship between Oman and India. This voyage was seen as counterbalancing to China’s expansion under the name of Maritime Silk Road. Project Mausam’s focus on multilateral archaeology studies that present a diplomatic counterweight to China resulted in China’s vehement opposition to its application for World Heritage status in 2017. Beijing’s argument was that, should the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) award the World Heritage status to India’s Maritime Route & Landscape, it would hamper Chinese efforts to revive the Maritime Silk Route (Sharma 2017). Following the defeat, the Indian Ministry of Culture extended Project Mausam until 2020, with pre-approved funds of Rs. 60 million (equivalent to US$ 840,000). The question remains why Project Mausam refused to involve China further in the context of BRI. There were two reasons. First, India was concerned that China’s participation in Project Mausam would hijack the project’s multilateral significance and neutralize India’s leadership in the Indian Ocean world (Lal 2015). Second, the motivations and forces behind Project Mausam were just different from those behind China’s BRI. Hence, the nodal agencies and scholarly communities leading Project Mausam have little incentive to link up with the Chinese strategy. Instead, they focus on cultural research and historical heritage in the Indian Ocean world, not business expansion, as the hallmark of success. From an international and multilateral point of view, Project Mausam can be viewed as rational and efficient. It has a cost-efficient budget and yet managed to involve many research and public initiatives. Certainly, a successful bid to the UNESCO World Heritage List would be a diplomatic victory for India and Project Mausam. Even if it failed to get the multilateral UN stamp of approval, it has started fruitful collaborations

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across the Indian Ocean region. For example, the project has provided Indian Ocean regional nations a platform to connect and catalogue shared cultural landscapes, as well as jointly promoting activities of UNESCO in preserving art, curating museums, collecting funds, and performing cultural events.2 In summary, irrespective of foreign policy controversies, from a comparative development point of view, Project Mausam is fundamentally different from China’s BRI in its implementation and the policy actors involved. The BRI, as shown earlier, was implemented by local governments and companies as a development project to help growth. Project Mausam is a politically driven and professionally run regional initiative. The BRI is about mobilizing as many actors, inside and outside China, to be part of the initiative, even when the actual projects may diverge from the BRI’s stated intent. Project Mausam, by contrast, is about securing an “exclusive” status that establishes India’s special position in the history of maritime Asia.

Conclusion China and India’s economic renaissances are historic events in world history. Yet since the 1980s, their trajectories of resurgence have been markedly different, leading to questions such as which model is better and can last longer. From a global perspective, given their remarkable successes in the recent era, another important question is what policy practices in these countries can be adopted elsewhere. This chapter adopts an historical institutionalist approach to examine the consistent divergence between the two Asian giants, despite similar traditional and geographical legacies. The divergence was forged in both countries’ early socialist constructions, continued during their capitalist transitions, and has remained salient in today’s domestic and external policies. Chinese policy follows a mobilization model that is political and developmental. Major policies are typically announced by the party leadership, which has the highest political power. Policy promotion occurs through top-down mobilization based on ambiguous incentives to lower-level state units. During implementation, policy implementers have the leeway to interpret and deviate from the stated policy in accordance with their own developmental needs and preferred measures. In other words, even when central policies are framed strategically, local governments typically become major implementers and manage to turn a central policy into a local development initiative, using their own instruments. FDI preference has been central to many local government initiatives, which has led to a general liberalization toward incoming investment. By contrast, India’s policy making is typically led by well-trained bureaucracies. The “professionally devised” policies have a clear agenda, leading/nodal agencies, an explicit budget, and spelled-out activities and measures. The political leadership may confirm and support a policy, so as to increase the policy’s visibility and possibility of success. Leadership endorsement does not fundamentally change the scope and key actors involved in the policy. The downsides to such a bureaucratic approach are its exclusive nature and the difficulty of including broader political-economic groups. As a result, resources (financial and organizational) available for implementation are inevitably narrow. Unlike in China, India’s local governments are less targeted and seldom used as key implementers. As to the question of which model is better, it depends on what policy perspective is employed for evaluation. A political coalitional perspective would rank China’s

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ambitious and ambiguous policies as more effective and more resilient, as broadening support to key domestic interest groups allows for greater sustainability and larger effects. A rationalist approach would rank the Indian policy dynamic as more efficient, with trained professionals using a calculated budget to achieve pre-defined goals. It is also safer in that it is less likely to be hijacked by interest groups and overextend its resources and commitments. Historical institutionalism shows that the two policy models were forged in their respective socialist period, if not earlier, strengthened throughout the capitalist transition phases, and continued to shape contemporary policies. They are products of macro-institutions in the two Asian giants.

Notes

Bibliography Chaudhuri, A. (1980) “Conglomerate Big Business Groups in India: Some Traits of Tycoon Capitalism,” Social Scientist 8(7): 38–51. China Special Economic Zones Yearbook Compilation Office (1985) Yearbook of China’s Special Economic Zones, 1984 (Hong Kong: China SEZ Yearbook Publisher). Duara, P. and Perry, E. (eds.) (2018) Beyond Regimes: China and India Compared (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Economy, E. C. (2018) The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press). Huang, Y. and Khanna, T. (2003) “Can India Overtake China?” Foreign Policy (1 July), available online at http://foreignpolicy.com/2003/07/01/can-india-overtake-china/. IGNCA (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts) (2019) “Project Mausam: Objectives and Goals” available online at http://ignca.gov.in/project-mausam-3/project-mausam/ objectives-and-goals/. Khanna, T. (2007) Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press). Kunshan City Compilation Office (1994) Kunshan Nianjian, 1988–1993 (China: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe). Kunshan City Compilation Office (2001) Kunshan Nianjian 2000 (China: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe). Lal, N. (2015) “Trade Ambitions Shadow Annual India, China Defence Talks,” South China Morning Post (7 April), available online at www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1758337/ trade-ambitions-shadow-annual-india-china-defence-talks. Liu, W., Tian, J. and Ou, X. (2017) Yidai yilu zhanlue yanjiu (Study of the Belt and Road Strategy) (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan). MIC (Ministry of Culture, Government of India) (2013) “Mausam/Mawsim: Maritime Routes and Cultural Landscapes” (15 December), available online at www.ignca.nic.in/PDF_data/ Mausam_Concept.pdf. MIC (Ministry of Culture, Government of India) (2015) “Government to Establish Cross Cultural Linkages with 39 Indian Ocean Countries under Project Mausam,” Press Information Bureau (9 March), available online at http://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=116554. MIC (Ministry of Culture, Government of India) (2016) “Project Mausam of M/O Culture,” Press Information Bureau (25 April), available online at http://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease. aspx?relid=141133.

348  Ye Min MIC (Ministry of Culture, Government of India) (2018) “Project ‘Mausam’ Extended Up to 2020 with the Pre-Approved Fund of Rs 60,039,297: Dr. Mahesh Sharma,” Press Information Bureau (17 December), available online at https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease. aspx?relid=186490. Miller, M. C. (2010) Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). MOF (Ministry of Finance, Government of India) (1994) Economic Survey, 1993–1994 (New Delhi: Ministry of Finance). Naughton, B. (2007) The Chinese Economy: Transition and Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press). Naughton, B. (2018) The Chinese Economy: Adaptation and Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press). Sharma, M. (2016a) “Project ‘Mausam’ of M/O Culture Aims to Explore Multi-Faceted Indian Ocean ‘World’,” Press Information Bureau, Government of India (9 March), available online at http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=137516. Sharma, M. (2016b) “Project Mausam of M/O Culture,” Press Information Bureau, Government of India (25 April), available online at http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=141133. Sharma, R. (2017) “Project Mausam Hits a Chinese wall,” The New Indian Express (8 January), available online at www.newindianexpress.com/thesundaystandard/2017/jan/08/projectmausam-hits-a-chinese-wall-1557291.html. Ye, M. (2014) Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (New York: Cambridge University Press). Ye, M. (2016) “Utility and Conditions of Diffusion by Diasporas: Examining Foreign Direct Investment Liberalization in China and India,” Journal of East Asian Studies 16(2): 261–280. Ye, M. (2018) “Comparative Foreign Direct Investment in China and India: History, Economics, and Politics,” in P. Duara and E. Perry, eds., Beyond Regimes: China and India Compared (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center): 294–330. Ye, M. (2019) “Fragmentation and Mobilization: Domestic Politics of China’s Belt and Road,” Journal of Contemporary China 1–16, doi: 10.1080/10670564.2019.1580428.

21 Contested partnership China and India in a changing BRICS Gu Jing and Neil Renwick

China and India are not only leading emerging economies but are increasingly important as drivers of international development, both nationally and multilaterally, in forums such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Since the first BRICS Heads of State Summit in 2009, the evolution of BRICS has been characterized by two elements of change. First, the goals, work, and institutionalization of the group have widened, deepened, and intensified. The range of BRICS activities has grown substantially, evidenced in the numerous structures and processes of dialogue, deliberation, and decision-making that are now central to the group (BRICS Information Centre 2018). This cooperation now involves in excess of hundred sectoral meetings across three “tracks” of inter-governmental diplomatic relations; government-affiliated institutions; and civil society and “people-to-people” engagement. Second, the economic trajectory of the BRICS economies has also changed, bringing new challenges and responses. Clearly, the group has established itself as an important economic force in the global economy: in 2017, the gross domestic product (GDP) of all BRICS states amounted to approximately $18.25 billion (Statista 2019). Following an initial period of prolonged high GDP growth, however, in recent years all the BRICS economies, with the exception of India, have experienced slower growth rates and the introduction of national adjustment strategies to manage the “new normal” (as it is termed in China). At the same time, BRICS transitioning involves establishing an institutional fabric, including the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and a BRICS regional office in South Africa. The Bank is also establishing an office in Latin America. This process of solidification and a trajectory as a unified body has been subject to question by some commentators. For example, Andrey Movchan (2015: 1), a scholar in the Economic Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Center, has cautioned against over-expectation: While a union of BRICS is undoubtedly positive, its role as the ‘third economic power’ should not be overestimated. For most members the bloc represents a means to discuss opinions and perhaps take a joint position on any areas of mutual interest. This chapter examines and assesses relations between China and India within the context of the BRICS at this transitional and highly contentious moment. It asks three questions about this relationship. First, what led these two countries to join in the BRICS project? Second, what kind of relationship have they had within BRICS? And finally, what have been the achievements and challenges of BRICS, especially the NDB? Clearly, the relationship between China and India is highly complex, bringing with it

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all the historical ties and tensions of centuries of involvement as well as continuing tensions over territorial border disputes, wider regional geo-security issues, terms of trade and India’s asymmetrical trade balance, and the wider aspirations of the two countries to increase their regional, inter-regional, and global influence. Before we deal with these questions, we state our broad analytical perspective.

Analytical perspective The chapter’s analytical perspective is human security. Human security focuses on the developmental and emancipatory needs of individuals rather than societies or states. Thus, human security “aims to protect people from critical and pervasive threats to human lives, livelihoods and dignity, and thus to enhancing human fulfilment. For these objectives, human security tries to integrate and strengthen initiatives that emphasize human-centered perspectives” (MOFA 2009: 3). Human security and sustainable development are deeply entwined and mutually constitutive. During his time as United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, the late Kofi Annan was a strong advocate of human security, explicitly relating sustainable development, security, and human rights to ensure freedom from fear and want and freedom to live in dignity. Annan’s (2000) report to world leaders defined the concept in the following way: Human security in its broadest sense embraces far more than the absence of violent conflict. It embraces human rights, good governance, access to education and health care and ensuring that each individual has opportunities and choices to fulfill his or her own potential. The relationship between human security and sustainable development is central to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which “calls for development strategies that result in resilient societies where people are safe from chronic threats such as abject poverty, hunger, disease, violence and repression, and protected from sudden and hurtful disruptions in their daily lives” (United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security undated: 1). The 2030 Agenda’s vision is for a world free of poverty, hunger, disease and want, where all life can thrive. … free of fear and violence. A world with universal literacy. A world with equitable and universal access to quality education at all levels, to health care and social protection, where physical, mental and social well-being are assured. A world where we reaffirm our commitments regarding the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation and where there is improved hygiene; and where food is sufficient, safe, affordable and nutritious. A world where human habitats are safe, resilient and sustainable and where there is universal access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy. (United Nations 2015: 3–4) Human security is most clearly understood, therefore, as more than a “negative” absence of a personal sense of security in the face of multiple, inter-locking “threats.” It is also about embracing, most critically, a “positive” understanding of security. In the latter sense, it connotes the challenges of providing the most effective means for individual and collective empowerment to overcome multiple, mutually constitutive insecurities forming critical barriers to the realization of personal aspirations and goals or even

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of a self-awareness of the possibility of a different, “better” life. There is much in this “people-centered” approach that is informed by Johan Galtung’s distinction between “negative” peace, which is “the search for the conditions for the absence of negative relations,” and “positive” peace, which is “the search for conditions that facilitate the presence of positive relations.” Nationally and internationally, human security in this sense implies cooperation, freedom from fear, freedom from want, economic growth and development, the absence of exploitation, and the presence of equality, justice, freedom of action, pluralism, and dynamism (Galtung 1967: 14). This understanding of human security intersects with Amartya Sen’s concept of “development as freedom.” Sen’s concept focuses upon identifying and overcoming the range of mutually constitutive economic, socio-cultural, gendered, and political barriers to individual and collective societal development experienced by peoples most in need (Sen 1999). Human security’s emancipatory and “capabilities” approach provides a useful critical evaluative instrument to gain a closer explanation and understanding of the complexities of India–China relations within BRICS, in particular their potential as new providers of international development assistance and the wider official and private sustainable developmental partnerships they are undertaking with low-income economies. There are two specific points of saliency here: first, the stress placed by both India and China on sustainable development (understood as an inclusive process grounded in a people-centered development philosophy and characterized by principles and practices of inclusivity, equity, mutuality, and reciprocity); and second, a shared conception of sustainable development that is holistic and aimed at freeing citizens by strengthening their capabilities through technical assistance, knowledge-sharing, and project know-how. For example, in addressing the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Modi argued that we [the global community] must pursue a more stable and inclusive global development. … Each country must of course take its own national measures; each government must fulfill its responsibility to support growth and development. At the same time, we also require a genuine international partnership. At one level, it means a better coordination of policy so that our efforts become mutually supportive, not mutually damaging. It also means that when we craft agreements on international trade, we accommodate each other’s concerns and interests. (Modi 2014: 1) In similar vein, in his January 2017 speech to the World Economic Forum (WEF), President Xi (2017) argued in a viewpoint that finds common ground with Indian Prime Minister Modi and the other BRICS members that Development is ultimately for the people. To achieve more balanced development and ensure that the people have equal access to opportunities and share in the benefits of development, it is crucial to have a sound development philosophy and model and make development equitable, effective and balanced.

Building BRICS: Chinese and Indian drivers of participation The support of China and India was central to the forging of BRICS. The two countries came to support the idea and then creation of the group for two primary reasons. First, they identified specific national interests that could, potentially, be promoted and possibly

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met by developing closer cooperation and coordination through such a group. Second, they saw utility in establishing a new forum to address a complex range of critical international economic, political, and developmental issues, the effective resolution of which necessitated multilateral cooperation. This cooperation, they determined, could not be accommodated satisfactorily within the existing international institutional architecture. Over the course of the life of BRICS, the China–India relationship has demonstrated a steady willingness to sustain their cooperation. Nonetheless, the politics of the relationship has moments of both convergence and agreement and, as one might expect given the complexities of intra- and extra-BRICS economic, political, and strategic challenges, divergence, and disagreement. This is not simply attributable to the economic disparity and trade imbalance between China and India or to border tensions, but also reflects the reality that the countries are simultaneously BRICS partners and national competitors. Reference to a concert of BRICS emerging economies was initially coined as a shorthand term, often associated with a 2001 paper written by the then Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, to refer to economies offering a potentially higher return for global investors (O’Neill 2001: 1; Gu et al. 2016: 1). In terms of diplomacy, BRICS has origins in the informal discussions between Russia, India, and China (RIC) held alongside the UN General Assembly meetings since 2003, in yearly meetings of their foreign ministers from 2005, in informal discussions involving the RIC and Brazil’s Foreign Minister in 2006, in ensuing formal meetings of the BRIC foreign ministers in 2006 and 2007 leading to the first BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) Heads of State Summit in Yekaterinburg in July 2009, and in the invitation to South Africa to join the group and attend the 2011 summit held in China which reconstituted the group as BRICS. As one recent study recounts, “The idea of establishing a BRICs grouping came as a carefully thought-through Russian initiative worked out by Foreign Minister Lavrov and President Putin” (Gu et al. 2016: 1, 7). This initiative presented a diagnosis of the principal forces of change in the global system, the associated turbulence and unpredictability, and the utility of a new forum for dialogue on, and advocacy for, their shared interests in a transforming global system. Why was the idea of a BRICS grouping attractive enough for China and India to agree to participate? In short, both governments saw the need for, and the potential opportunities in, such a grouping as a forum of cooperation to their mutual benefit and as a fulcrum for change in the global economic and political landscape. The key factors were both general and specific. The general factors, shared with the whole group, were as follows: •

•

The lessons of crisis. The 2008 global financial crisis exposed the frailties, inadequacies, and unpredictabilities of the global economy. For emerging and developing economies, including India and China, the crisis underlined the urgent need to look beyond the perceived exclusivity and partiality of the Western-centric institutional house of cards upon which the system had been built since the end of World War II; The trajectory of projected economic power of China and India through the first half of the twenty-first century. In 2016, the combined economic output of the BRICS group of economies accounted for around twenty-two percent of global GDP, exactly double their share in 2005. By 2017, the combined GDP of BRICS economies in (Purchasing Power Parity) PPP terms exceeded that of the G7. Together, these five economies are a major engine of the global economy, contributing around forty-five percent of global growth (NDB 2017: 32). The World 2050

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•

• •

report projects China and India to be the two largest economies in the world by 2050. It is estimated that Emerging Markets (E7) could grow around twice as fast as advanced economies (G7) on average. As a result, six of the seven largest economies in the world are projected to be emerging economies in 2050 led by China (1st), India (2nd), and Indonesia (4th) (PwC 2017); Frustration with the failure of the UN and the major global financial institutions established at Bretton Woods in 1944 to undertake substantial and meaningful reform. This reform was needed to account for the steady shift in the economic center of gravity in the global economy toward the emerging economies and their growing political significance. The 2018 BRICS Summit Communiqué, as in previous statements, reiterated the group’s commitment to the “2005 World Summit Outcome document and reaffirm the need for a comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council, with a view to making it more representative, effective and efficient, and to increase the representation of the developing countries so that it can adequately respond to global challenges” (BRICS 2018); Concern over an unbalanced global economy and intensification of economic globalization, and the recognition of a need for new inclusive, equitable approach that brought in the developing and low-income economies; and New global and regional challenges and commitments driving the need for global cooperation, most notably the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (COP21), but also the 2008 Accra Accord and Declaration and the 2011 Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation.

More specific factors for India and China joining the BRICS project reflected each country’s self-perception of its roles in the global and regional economic, political, and strategic systems. For India, BRICS offered a fresh path by which it could seek to hold a more prominent position on the global stage. India’s aspiration to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council had stalled by China’s opposition and lackluster practical support from the United States and Russia (despite declarations to the contrary), and regional multilateral organizations presented little or no alternative pathways. BRICS provided a new, relatively unencumbered opportunity to extend India’s diplomatic and economic standing and influence. The Carnegie Moscow Center’s Petr Topychkanov has argued that BRICS is attractive to India for a number of reasons. First is BRICS’ “informal character that allows the country to further its agenda on the international stage with little political and so far little economic costs” (Gabuev et al. 2015: 1). Second is the fact that BRICS provides a useful mechanism by which India is able to mask its efforts to build closer relationships with China and Russia, whilst also maintaining its partnership with the United States at a time of heightened inter-governmental tensions between the governments in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. Third, significant residual anti-colonial, anti-Western sentiment within India made rapprochement with the United States subject to heavy domestic criticism; membership in BRICS could demonstrate even-handiness in its foreign relations. Fourth, to sustain its economic growth, India recognized that it needed much higher levels of investment than it was acquiring and could reasonable anticipate gaining from one-by-one individual national sources; BRICS offered a potential new source of multilateral investment, a view that was confirmed in the later creation of the NDB (Gabuev et al. 2015).

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The creation of BRICS is often, mistakenly, attributed solely to China and its pursuit of its own national interests and objectives. China, as the largest economy among the five BRICS members and, in 2009, already on the road to becoming the world’s largest economy, would have found the idea of BRICS appealing as a distinctive multilateral platform for advocating root and branch reform of global financial institutions, one that provided a means to make its own claim for reform, through a shared stance, and thereby avoid a direct China–US confrontation. Alexander Gabuev has argued that participation in BRICS would add to China’s knowledge and practical experience of international development projects (Gabuev et al. 2015). In addition, BRICS presented an opportunity to elaborate a strategic political and economic partnership with other key emerging economies (Gu 2017).

China–India relations in BRICS It is remarkable that the intra-BRICS relationship of the association’s two largest economies has demonstrated sustained durability over the past decade given the economic, political, and strategic challenges they have experienced in their bilateral relationship, including the possibility of border conflict as recently as June 2017. The China–India relationship within BRICS has endured and formed a central pillar for the development of the group despite well-documented differences and tensions between the countries. This durability reflects an acceptance by successive leaderships in both countries that the benefits of participation and cooperation inside BRICS outweigh their differences outside BRICS. One feature of China–India relationship during the Modi–Xi leadership era is the mutual acceptance that the wider global and regional uncertainties and instabilities must remain the priority rather than the border dispute, the so-called “reset” in India–China relations. This point was most recently reiterated by India’s former foreign secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in Singapore in April 2018 (Chaudhuri 2018: 1). Prime Minister Modi’s keynote address to the June 2018 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore included cooperative comments about the India–China relationship, set within the context of India’s “Act East” policy (Modi 2018). Much is made of their differences. However, their evolving BRICS relationship has been built on the elements that form a common ground and shared interest between them. These include key principles of Indian foreign policy articulated by Modi, namely सममान (respect); समवाद (dialogue); सह्ोग (cooperation), शां ण ि (peace), and समृ ण धि (prosperity). These principles are also central to China’s stated outlook and approach to external relations and are explicit in all the BRICS summit statements. These have deep common roots in the principles enunciated in the 1955 Bandung Declaration. Moreover, China– India relations within BRICS have been characterized by a shared reading of the instability and unpredictability of the post-2008 global economic and political system and the dangers posed to stability and peace; the imperative for global institutional reform, inclusivity, and equity; and the need for a re-alignment of the institutional architecture to more closely reflect the critical economic role now played by the emerging economies. The durability of cooperative China–India relations within BRICS also reflects the important role that BRICS itself may play as a moderating and mediating agency and process. In part, this ameliorating influence arose simply from China and India’s embeddedness in the multiple work streams of the group’s program. In part, too, BRICS may

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exercise a moderating influence simply by virtue of its existence. In this latter aspect, there was speculation in a Washington Post report that the de-escalation of the Doklam military standoff between China and India in June–August 2017 was due to the fact that the Xiamen BRICS summit was to take place in the first week of September. China and India withdrew troops from both sides of the disputed territorial border on 28 August. The article surmised that the Chinese government may have wanted to avoid hosting the summit with a standoff continuing and with the possibility that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi might not attend (Denyer and Gowen 2017). Whilst this may be, in part, a plausible explanation for the China–India reset, a firmer evidential basis would be to take note of the attempts to build a closer, more cooperative relationship, evident in the April 2018 meeting of the two leaders in Wuhan, their June meeting in Qingdao on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, their meeting at the 10th BRICS summit in Johannesburg in July 2018, and their fourth meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires in November 2018. Such cooperation does not, of course, preclude differences over policy matters. For example, there has been divergence over China’s proposal for “BRICS Plus,” the issue of expanding the membership of BRICS. China proposed “BRICS Plus” by inviting leaders from Egypt, Mexico, Thailand, Tajikistan, and Guinea for a dialogue on the sidelines of the 2017 Xiamen summit at the new Dialogue of Emerging Market and Developing Countries. China has argued that a group of ten will be stronger than one of five members. India argues that the focus should be on developing current members rather than inviting other economically weaker economies and that bringing in new members would cause the group to lose focus and momentum and even threaten the association’s future. A further area of contention between China and India within the context of BRICS is that of terrorism. This is indicative of the influence of wider, contextual, factors upon BRICS and the China–India relationship. At one level, there is a shared concern with terrorism and agreement to counter the threat, and this is quite clearly evident in BRICS statements on the issue. At another level, however, India and China have different perspectives and positions on terrorism. Central to this is India’s relationship with Pakistan. When India hosted the Eighth BRICS summit in Goa in 2016, India proposed that the BRICS joint declaration include the names of terrorist groups headquartered in Pakistan such as Jaish-e-Mohammed. The proposal was perceived by China and the other members to be of a clearly narrow political national self-interest. They were opposed to this use of BRICS which they felt was inconsistent with BRICS conventions and practices. India also used its role as Goa summit host to invite BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation), an international organization focused on economic cooperation between Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nepal, and Bhutan, to attend. As one assessment has concluded, “The inclusion of BIMSTEC bore geopolitical connotations, and it was interpreted that India was using their power as host country to isolate and condemn Pakistan” (Moross 2016). Whilst it is a feasible proposition that the BIMSTEC invitation had a geo-strategic rationale and may have been perceived negatively by the other BRICS members, an alternative reading can be found in the well-established Indian commitment to BIMSTEC itself. It is quite possible that India considered its role as host as an additional mechanism by which to consolidate its multilateralism and inter-institutional networking goals in its transition from its “Look East” policy to a reformulated “Act East” policy. It may also have identified the Goa summit as an opportunity to pursue the

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BRICS “outreach” aims of mainstreaming and integrating developing and low-income economies into the BRICS dialogue. China in particular mounted strong opposition to India’s proposal to name what it alleged to be Pakistan-domiciled terrorist groups, with Chinese officials arguing that Pakistan too was subject to terrorism and had made a great effort to fight it. China’s official position was that it was opposed to linking terrorism with any one country, ethnicity, or religion. In this, China was supported by Russia. Both China and Russia had particular national self-interests at play in seeking to avoid naming organizations as “terrorist.” Clearly, for China, this lay in its core relationship with its “iron brother” Pakistan, a critically important strategic partner for China. Pakistan is an important component of the Chinese government’s BRI project, and the flagship China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is held up as a symbolic and practical example of the success of the BRI. Pakistan is also a key partner in terms of China’s own security environment for three main reasons. First is the fact that a strong Pakistan provides a regional political and military balance to India on China’s borders. Pakistan is the largest buyer of Chinese military armaments: in the period 2008–2018, China was reported to have sold Pakistan arms valued at over $6.4 billion, well in excess of the US sales to Pakistan worth $2.5 billion. The weaponry is increasingly sophisticated, and the embedding of Chinese weapons is establishing a new degree of interoperability. In addition, China is the main partner for Pakistan’s military training (Pubby 2019). Second, Pakistan provides a South Asian counterweight to the India–US relationship that has been a high priority for the Modi government in New Delhi. Third, Pakistan is critical to meet China’s concerns over “Islamic” extremism in Xinjiang, and the continuing instability and potential military vacuum in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, if the Goa BRICS summit was marked by differences between India and China, one year later, the declaration of the Xiamen summit demonstrated a counter-swing of convergence and agreement in the India–China relationship within BRICS. The Xiamen Communiqué departed from previous declarations by explicitly naming groups such as the Haqqani Network, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, and the Pakistani Taliban that have targeted Afghanistan and China. The declaration went on to state that: “We reaffirm that those responsible for committing, organizing or supporting terrorist acts must be held accountable.” This was taken as a thinly veiled reference to Pakistan and the Pakistan government issued a robust rejection and criticism of the BRICS statement (Reuters 2017). Whilst the convergence of views was presented by some observers as a success for Indian diplomacy (Hindustan Times 2017), according to Chinese officials, the change in its position reflected in the naming of these organizations was because BRICS countries have “shown their concerns to the violent activities raised by these organisations…These organisations are all sanctioned by the UN Security Council and have a significant impact for [the] Afghanistan issue” (Patranobis 2017). China signed security and economic agreements with Afghanistan in 2012, but a growing concern by the Chinese government about terrorist violence against China and a deepening concern about the stability of Afghanistan saw movement and convergence with India on the issue of naming terrorist groups. As is well documented, the $1 trillion global project that is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) remains a substantive and substantial issue of divergence between New Delhi and Beijing. At the heart of the issue is China and India’s dispute over the territorial sovereignty of Kashmir and the BRI’s economic corridor (CPEC) through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), with its concomitant China–Pakistan internal security agreement for joint patrols

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issue. The 3,000-km CPEC is aimed at connecting China and Pakistan with rail, road, pipelines, and optical fiber cable networks. The disagreement has seen India refrain from attending the BRI forum or entering into BRI-related project arrangements. The issue is further complicated by the role of the United States in the region and its approach to the BRI. The Trump administration sees the BRI as a tool for China’s global ambitions to become the world’s leading state and believes that it is severely detrimental to the needs and interests of the countries that sign up for membership. The US stance was articulated bluntly by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a Washington conference on 28 March 2019 as the Chinese government made its final preparations to host the Second Belt and Road Forum (BRF): They’re moving into the South China Sea is not because they want freedom of navigation. Their efforts to build ports around the world aren’t because they want to be good shipbuilders and stewards of waterways, but rather they have a state national security element to each and every one of them. The BRI is no different. … [W]e are happy to compete on a fair, transparent basis under rule of law with the Chinese anywhere in the world. We’ll win more than our fair share, but we’ll lose some to them too … But when you’re showing up with a non-economic offer, whether that’s through state-facilitated, below-market pricing or handing someone something knowing that you can foreclose on their nation shortly, so predatory lending practices, that’s not straight and we are working diligently to make sure everyone in the world understands that threat. (US State Department 2019)

Achievements and challenges of BRICS: the NDB As indicated in the introduction to this chapter, the BRICS agenda has expanded exponentially. From the early engagement the agenda was centered on building official diplomatic relations for the grouping through high-level leadership summits and separate foreign ministerial meetings—the practical work of the group one decade on covers a vast swath of policy with regular meetings held for finance ministers and central bank governors; national security advisors; ministers of science and technology, agriculture, environment, health, and labor; and disaster response authorities; as well as a business council, a think tanks council, a parliamentary forum, a culture festival, and a “Friendship Cities and Local Governments Cooperation Forum” (BRICS 2018). One of the signal achievements of BRICS is the establishment of the NDB, to which we now turn. With its core focus on financing infrastructure capacity-building and supporting sustainable development and growth in the BRICS membership and developing economies, the ultimate objective of the NDB is to strengthen human security, empower and free individuals, communities, and societies, and end poverty, social deprivation, and exclusion. Human security, understood as Amartya Sen’s emancipatory and capabilities approach encapsulated in the notion of “development as freedom,” finds current focus in the priority being placed on sustainable growth and development being facilitated by meeting the challenge of the “infrastructure gap” in emerging and developing economies, overcoming the trade and investment barriers to national and international growth and wealth creation, and reducing the multiple and mutually constitutive insecurities of food, water, sanitation, shelter, nutrition, health, education and training, clean energy,

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decent work, income, gender, and cultural identity. The stated purpose of the NDB is to address this critical core of human security. From its inception in 2015, the NDB was to be different from other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in what it was intended to do and how it would do it. The bank’s funding process, commensurate voting power, and focus for the disbursement of its finance would signal the BRICS’ intention to move from principled discourse to demonstrably principled, transparent, accountable, and equitable practice: The creation of NDB reflects the desire of the BRICS countries to strengthen their cooperation and complement the efforts of multilateral and regional financial institutions to promote global development and help realise the commitment of the BRICS members to strong, sustainable and balanced economic growth and sustainable development. NDB’s primary focus is to mobilise resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in the BRICS countries as well as in other emerging economies and developing countries, to promote global growth and seek solutions for sustainable development. (NDB 2017: 12) The Bank’s subscribed capital is $50 billion, with each of the five founding member countries subscribed equally to shares worth $10 billion. The voting power of each member is equal to the proportion of its subscribed shares in the capital stock of NDB; thus all the founding members have equal voting power. It is to India that this subscription contributions-voting weighting formula is attributed, with India opposing China’s initial proposal that subscriptions and voting rights reflect a member’s contribution. Under this formula, China would contribute $41 billion to the NDB, giving it the largest share of voting rights at 39.5%. Brazil, India, and Russia would each have contributed $18 billion, and South Africa would have contributed $5 billion. This formula raised concerns due to the disparity between China’s economy and those of the other members: at the time of the formulation of the Bank, China’s economy was four times the size of India’s and larger than the rest of the BRICS economies combined (Maini 2014: 1). The NDB represents one of the most substantive outputs from the BRICS process. In 2017, the Bank formulated and approved the NDB’s 2017–2021 General Strategy and establishment of the Project Preparation Fund (PPF); and PPF Contribution Agreements were signed with China, Russia, and India. The Bank made its first loans in April 2016 to finance projects in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa with a combined total value of $811 million. This was followed in July 2016 with a $100 million loan to Russia. Notable for helping to meet the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals, the NDB had its first Green Bond Issue in July 2016; by July 2018, some $4.1 billion had been contributed. In addition, 2016 and 2017 saw the first issues of local currency bonds in Renminbi and Rupee/Masala and, in mid-March 2019, Bank President K.V. Kamath indicated that the NDB would issue Rand bonds in South Africa and commercial paper in US dollars in the first half of 2019 (Xinhua 2019). In 2017, the NDB committed $1.85 billion to funding new projects, more than doubling its portfolio. In all, the NDB’s portfolio in 2018 stood at twenty-seven projects (totaling $6.7 billion) across the BRICS membership. In 2018, $10 billion of the Bank’s subscribed capital of $50 billion was paid-in capital, and $40 billion was callable, as

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required. The Bank’s aim is now to sustain NDB’s rapid growth rate. New initiatives to extend the NDB are expected to help contribute to this aim, most notably the opening of the Africa Regional Centre (ARC) in South Africa in 2017 and the opening of the Americas Regional Office in Brazil. In addition, the Bank has signed Memorandum of Understanding with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Eurasian Development Bank, and the International Investment Bank and, at the Xiamen BRICS summit, with the China Development Bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and the Agricultural Bank of China. India and China have a shared interest in continuing to cooperate in the NDB based on their respective national interests and the evident synergies of these interests. As Miquel Vila Moreno has pointed out in a thoughtful and perceptive analysis, the NDB offers China important benefits as an organizational instrument that Beijing can use to increase its influence among developing countries; as a means of improving the dynamics of cooperation among BRICS and the cohesion of the group; as “an opportunity to improve its know-how in managing international institutions; as the first materialization of BRICS multipolar ideology in institutional practice”; and “to demonstrate its capacity to provide alternative ways of dealing with international issues” (Moreno 2018: 1). For India, the initiator of the idea of a BRICS MDB, the NDB promises an additional means by which to meet India’s domestic and international needs, aims, and objectives. Despite high rates of annual GDP growth and expectations that this will be sustained through the next three decades and possibly beyond, and achievements in its social agenda of “reform-to-transform,” India has high levels of poverty, growing economic, and social inequalities, weak health and education systems, poor fresh water access and sanitation, and many challenges relating to societal divisions, urbanization, environmental pollution, and governance. The “New India” envisaged by Prime Minister Modi has explicitly targeted these human security challenges, for example in the commitment (whether deliverable or not) to provide homes for the poorest and dispossessed by 2022; the need to tackle energy access not only as an issue of energy justice, but also because “energy is the key driver of socio-economic growth” (PIB 2019); and the “HIRA model of development” centered on the construction of integrated “Highways, i-Ways, Railways, and Airways” to create vital connectivity across the country. In addition, the Modi government has emphasized the importance of engaging with the imperatives of the fourth industrial revolution, including the digital economy, a feature of the Ninth and Tenth BRICS summit communiqués and the BRICS’ Science and Technology and Business Council work streams, and driven within India itself through the Digital India program. Externally, the Modi government’s priorities are global institutional reform, inclusive sustainable development, greener and more inclusive growth driven by the catalyst of infrastructure investment, and greater connectivity within the context of the fourth industrial revolution and digitization. According to the NDB, India has invested more than $1 trillion on infrastructure over the past decade (NDB 2017: 36). However, India has the second highest infrastructure deficit in the world, and it retains a critical need for infrastructure investment. To date, the NDB has provided substantial investment in Indian sustainable development projects. The NDB’s current projects approved in India total more than $1.4 billion for transportation, water and sanitation, and renewable energy, and the Bank has stated that “For the NDB, India presents a host of possibilities

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in transportation, renewable energy, water and sanitation, urban infrastructure and pollution reduction. India may also benefit from resources from the PPF, once it becomes operational” (NDB 2017: 36).

Conclusion It is over forty years since the adoption of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (TCDC); and the beginning of the process of South–South and Trilateral Cooperation, marked by the Second High-level UN Conference on South–South Cooperation held in Buenos Aires, Argentina in late March 2019. The calling of this second conference by the UN General Assembly resulted from a recognition of “the need to strengthen and further invigorate South-South cooperation” (UNOSSC 2019). BRICS represents a significant contribution to South–South cooperation, global sustainable development, the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals by providing a major new voice for the advocacy of reform and change in the global institutional fabric and in turning BRICS words into practical action. The BRICS project has contributed to changing the parameters of the global development policy narrative, culture, and practice. BRICS has taken a principled stand on reform of the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization, and on the necessity for a more inclusive, equitably balanced, innovative, and green global economy with a central place for emerging, developing, and low-income economies. BRICS is positioning itself to grasp the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution and the potential of the digital economy, and on the need to move “beyond aid” to a people-centered development philosophy grounded in partnerships and mutuality that delivers practical, emancipatory benefits for human security within BRICS economies and globally. This contribution is evident in the strong BRICS commitment to African development and the creation of the NDB as a means of actively supporting sustainable development projects and green growth through, for example, financing renewable energy capacity-building in member states such as India. In this context of an evolving BRICS, China and India have sustained a working partnership within the organization, despite their complex bilateral relationship. This partnership is based on the perceived synergies of their national interests. BRICS provides a useful diplomatic mechanism for both governments whereby certain issues such as terrorism can be negotiated and mediated outside of the political constraints that exist in their bilateral relationship. The durability of the China–India relationship in BRICS, despite heightened tensions over their border dispute, indicates that there is practical substance to their political declarations of cooperation. The relationship has an evident touchstone in the similarity of the political principles they bring to BRICS and the synergies these have with the other BRICS members, their shared historical roots (including in the Bandung Declaration), and the consensus-building they commit to through membership. Clearly, too, the relationship is dynamic with agreement and disagreement, consensus and dissensus ebbing and flowing through the evolution of their involvement in the group. BRICS is now a multidimensional policy forum, but the respective policy domains contain the essence of human security and its emancipatory imperatives. With China and India projected to be the first and second ranked economies in the world, their continued commitment and cooperation are essential to the future success of the

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BRICS project, for example through joint development initiatives in Africa, as BRICS moves through its second and, most likely, more challenging decade as the organization contemplates and calculates BRICS Plus enlargement.

Bibliography Annan, K. (2000) “Secretary-General Salutes International Workshop on Human Security in Mongolia,” Two-Day Session in Ulaanbaatar, Press Release SG/SM/7382, United Nations (8 May), available online at www.un.org/press/en/2000/20000508.sgsm7382.doc.html. BRICS Information Centre (2018) BRICS in Africa: Collaboration for Inclusive Growth and Shared Prosperity in the 4th Industrial Revolution, 10th BRICS Summit Johannesburg Declaration, Johannesburg, South Africa (26 July), BRICS Information Centre, University of Toronto, available online at http://brics.utoronto.ca/docs/180726-johannesburg.html (accessed 19 March 2019). Chaudhuri, P. P. (2018) “India’s China Reset: An Unstable World Brings Modi and Xi Together, For Now,” Hindustan Times (23 April), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/ world-news/india-s-china-reset-unstable-world-brings-modi-and-xi-together-for-now/ story-H9F8l1tHKsj53X2QNpXjPL.html (accessed 27 March 2019). Denyer, S. and Gowen, A. (2017) “Who Blinked in the China-India Military Standoff ?”The Washington Post (30 August), available online at www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/ wp/2017/08/30/who-blinked-in-china-india-military-standoff/?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.cca815b1070c (accessed 17 March 2019). Gabuev, A., Movchan A., Topychkanov, P. and Vasiliev, S. (2015) “Why Do Brazil, Russia, India, and China Need BRICS?” Carnegie Moscow Centre (8 July), available online at https:// carnegie.ru/commentary/60636 (accessed 16 February 2019). Galtung, J. (1967) Theories of Peace: A Synthetic Approach to Peace Thinking (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute). Gu, J. (2017) “China and the Emerging Economies,” in P. A. Haslam, J. Schafer and P. Beaudet, eds., Introduction to International Development: Approaches, Actors and Issues, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 240–260. Gu, J., Carey, R., Shankland, A. and Chenoy, A. (2016) “Introduction: International Development, South-South Cooperation and the Rising Powers,” in J. Gu, R. Carey, A. Shankland and A. Chenoy, eds., The BRICS in International Development (London: Palgrave Macmillan): 1–24. Hindustan Times (2017) “Highlights: India Scores Diplomatic Victory, BRICS Names LeT, JeM, al Qaeda among Groups Causing Violence” (5 September), available online at www. hindustantimes.com/india-news/brics-summit-live-xi-jinping-welcomes-pm-narendramodi-in-xiamen/story-S3kULRerNwrs0O9MDT4VcK.html (accessed 21 March 2019). Maini, T. S. (2014) “India Will Play Decisive Role in BRICS Bank,” Global Times (24 July), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/872428.shtml (accessed 23 March 2019). Modi, N. (2014) “FULL TEXT: Narendra Modi’s Speech at United Nations General Assembly,” DNA (27 September), available online at www.dnaindia.com/world/report-full-textnarendra-modi-s-speech-at-united-nations-general-assembly-2022062 (20 March 2019). Modi, N. (2018) “PM Modi’s Keynote Address at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore,” Narendra Modi (1 June), available online at www.narendramodi.in/pm-%20modi-%20 to%20-deliver%20-keynote-%20address%20-at%20-shangri-la-%20dialouge-%20in%20singapore-540324 (accessed 21 March 2019). MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2009) The Trust Fund for Human Security: For the “Human-Centered” 21st Century (August), available online at www.mofa.go.jp/policy/human_ secu/t_fund21.pdf (accessed 18 February 2019). Moreno, M. V. (2018) “China and the BRICS’ New Development Bank: Towards an Alternative to Bretton Woods?” L’Istituto di Alti Studi in Geopolitica e Scienze Ausiliarie (IsAG)

362  Gu Jing and Neil Renwick (4  March), available online at https://isagitalia.org/china-and-the-brics-new-developmentbank/wp_8846263/ (accessed 17 February 2019). Moross, S. (2016) “BRICS Caught between India and China,” Global Risks Insight (24 November), available online at https://globalriskinsights.com/2016/11/brics-caught-india-china/ (accessed 21 March 2019). Movchan, A. (2015) “5 Factors Limiting the Impact of the BRICs Nations,” World Economic Forum (8 July), available online at www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/5-factors-limiting-theimpact-of-the-brics-nations/ (accessed 23 March 2019). NDB (New Development Bank) (2017) Developing Solutions for a Sustainable Future-Annual Report 2017, available online at www.ndb.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NDB_AR2017.pdf (accessed 23 March 2019). O’Neill, J. (2001) “Building Better Global Economic BRICs,” Global Economics Paper 66 (30  November), available online at www.goldmansachs.com/insights/archive/archive-pdfs/ build-better-brics.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). Patranobis, S. (2017) “BRICs 2017: Summit Declaration Names Pak-Based Lashkar, Jaish as Terror Concerns,” Hindustan Times (5 September) available online at www.hindustantimes. com/india-news/in-win-for-india-brics-statement-names-let-jaish-as-terror-concerns-clubsthem-with-islamic-state/story-Yage9hN02IWLnwXt9twFeK.html (accessed 27 March 2019). PIB (Press Information Bureau) (2019) “‘Energy is the Key Driver of Socio-Economic Growth’: PM in PETROTECH 2019” (11 February), available online at https://pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1563758. Pubby, M. (2019) “China Backs ‘Iron Brother’ Pakistan with Primary Weapons and Complex Exercises,” The Economic Times (15 March), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes. com/news/defence/china-backs-iron-brother-pakistan-with-primar y- weapons-andcomplex-exercises/articleshow/68418192.cms (accessed 29 March 2019). PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) (2017) The World in 2050 (1 April), available online at www. pwc.com/gx/en/issues/economy/the-world-in-2050.html (accessed 21 March 2019). Reuters (2017) “Pakistan Rejects BRICS’ Statement on Militant Groups” (5 September), available online at www.reuters.com/article/us-china-brics-pakistan/pakistan-rejects-bricsstatement-on-militant-groups-idUSKCN1BG1GL (accessed 25 March 2019). Statista (2019) “Gross Domestic Product, GDP, of the BRIC Countries from 2012 to 2022,” available online at www.statista.com/statistics/254281/gdp-of-the-bric-countries/ (accessed 22 March 2019). United Nations (2015) “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” General Assembly 70th Session, A/RES/70/1 (21 October), available online at www. un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_ RES_70_1_E.pdf (accessed 21 March 2019). United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security (undated) “Agenda 2030,” available online at www.un.org/humansecurity/agenda-2030/ (accessed 3 January 2016). UNOSSC (United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) (2019) “BAPA+40 the Second High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation” available online at www.unsouthsouth.org/bapa40/about/ (accessed 29 March 2019). US State Department (2019) “Conversation with Rich Lowry at the National Review Institute’s 2019 Ideas Summit” (28 March), available online at www.state.gov/conversation-with-richlowry-at-the-national-review-institutes-2019-ideas-summit/ (accessed 9 July 2019). Xi, J. (2017) “President Xi’s Speech to Davos in Full,” World Economic Forum (17 January), available online at www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/full-text-of-xi-jinping-keynote-at-theworld-economic-forum (accessed 7 July 2018). Xinhua (2019) “BRICS New Development Bank to Issue Bonds in South Africa, Commercial Paper in U.S. Dollar” China.org.cn (6 March), available online at www.china.org.cn/china/ Off_the_Wire/2019-03/06/content_74540401.htm.

Part 6

Relations with third parties

22 The China–India–US triangle A view from Washington Jeff M. Smith

Few today would dispute that the triangular relationship between China, India, and the United States will profoundly shape the geopolitics of the twenty-first century. The relationships between, and the relative power balance among, these three countries are destined to have a disproportionate impact on global security trends and the geopolitical landscape. Forecasting decades into the future is an imprecise science, but in some cases the trends are so large, so fixed, and so undeniable that they can be accepted as fact. By mid-century, and possibly a good deal sooner, China, India, and the United States will be the world’s three largest economies. They are also likely to be the three most populous countries, with the three most formidable militaries.1 Already the China–US relationship is widely considered the world’s most geopolitically consequential. In recent years, the escalating strategic competition between China and the United States has cast a pall over the Indo-Pacific as it has begun to assume characteristics of a generational competition reminiscent of, but quite distinct from, America’s Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. As was the case with that struggle, the China–US rivalry will be shaped by the conduct of other influential power centers, including Europe, Russia, and Japan. But no country has greater long-term potential to impact the rivalry, China’s rise, and global politics writ large than India. In 2019 Indian defense spending likely outpaced Saudi Arabia’s to become the third largest defense budget on earth. The same year the Indian economy almost certainly leapfrogged France and the UK to become the fifth largest economy in the world. Based on International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates, India has a reasonable chance of surpassing the German and Japanese economies by 2030 to become the third largest economy in the world. Well before then, India’s population is expected to eclipse China’s (Ritchie 2019). In short, sometime this century, China, India, and the United States will stand in a class of their own.

A simple logic The conventional wisdom about the trilateral relationship is driven by a simple but persuasive logic. China and the United States, the world’s two largest economies, have found themselves in an intensifying and systemic rivalry that is likely to grow sharper in the years ahead. India, whose post-independence foreign policy has largely been guided by the philosophy of non-alignment, is likely to serve as a “balancing power” in this triangle.

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However, India is not equidistant from the two poles. While maintaining extensive levels of engagement with Beijing and remaining deferential to Chinese sensitivities, India has been, and is expected to continue, selectively aligning with the United States to mitigate threats from China to its own interests and the rules-based order it has grown increasingly invested in. When threat perceptions vis-à-vis China rise, so too does the lure of closer security ties with the United States and its partners and more overt balancing initiatives. When Indian threat perceptions decline, the pull of the Indo-Pacific democracies loses some of its potency, and Delhi is more inclined to assume more neutral positions while avoiding antagonizing Beijing. In this case the conventional wisdom about the three powers is largely correct. The China–US rivalry is indeed growing sharper, and this trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. India has indeed moved closer to the United States since the turn of the century, while simultaneously growing increasingly wary of China’s expanding power and influence. Yet, within this framework lies a wide range of future possibilities and scenarios, particularly as it relates to India’s position in this strategic triangle. The range of future trajectories for the China–US relationship seems relatively limited. Long gone are the days of envisioning China and the United States united in a “G2” to solve regional and global problems through cooperation. The question now is not whether the two are destined for some form of rivalry, but rather what form of rivalry that will take and whether it grows intense enough to push the countries to conflict. The more dynamic variable in this triangle, and the object of the most attention and speculation, is precisely how far India will go in aligning with the United States and balancing Chinese power and influence. More aggressive Chinese behavior paired with growing Indian insecurity could well push Delhi toward more collective and determined balancing efforts, resulting in alliance-type relationships with the United States and security partners like Australia and Japan. On the other hand, it is possible to imagine the momentum propelling the historic India–US partnership stalling, with India losing confidence in America’s reliability as a security partner, or China making more meaningful efforts to resolve longstanding irritants in bilateral relations. And while it is difficult to see China and India overcoming their longstanding differences in a strategic embrace, it is possible to envision India charting a more independent course and assuming a more impartial geopolitical disposition.

A unique triangle Each leg of the China–India–US triangle is comprised of a bilateral relationship that has been on a relatively stable trajectory since the turn of the century, following some volatile shifts in the latter half of the twentieth century. The post-World War II relationship between China and the United States lurched from open antagonism early in the Cold War to cautious tactical alignment by the late 1970s, when both countries came to view the Soviet Union as their greatest threat. That arrangement proved durable but neither China nor the United States was able to overcome deep suspicions of the other and a sense of inevitability about a future competition. Since 2008, an uptick in Chinese assertiveness abroad and repression at home has put bilateral relations on a deteriorating slide toward sharper, more overt rivalry. Friction has only intensified since President Xi

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Jinping became chairman of the Communist Party in 2012 and China’s president the following year. The election of President Donald Trump in 2016 also heralded a more confrontational posture toward China from the US government. In speeches and strategy documents, Trump administration officials have clearly identified China as a “strategic competitor,” one that is “leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage” (US Department of Defense 2018). The 2017 National Security Strategy accuses China of “challeng[ing] American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” It further blames China for stealing US intellectual property while seeking to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests” and “displace the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific region” (The White House 2017). As a result, the Trump administration has launched a series of punitive measures toward China, including a wave of escalating tariffs on Chinese imports that has evolved into a full-blown trade war. India’s relationship with China is also heavily characterized by elements of rivalry, though it has assumed a much different character than China’s rivalry with the United States. The two countries’ legacy disputes and conflicts of interest are much older and deeper than any divisions in China–US ties, but on the surface the relationship often appears less observably contentious. Following a brief honeymoon in the 1950s, India’s relationship with China has been colored with antagonism since the 1962 war across their disputed border (Smith 2014). A period of trust and confidence building in the 1980s and 1990s helped place ties on more solid footing, creating a framework to manage the border dispute and promote cooperate amid competition. That framework has proven quite flexible but has failed to engender greater trust or prevented growing (and possibly unavoidable) conflicts of interest and elevated tensions across several critical fault lines. Since their 1962 conflict, the China–India relationship has been plagued by three legacy disputes: a disputed border and competing territorial claims; China’s patronage toward Pakistan, India’s rival; and India’s harboring of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exile community, whom China regards as separatists that undermine its sovereignty in Tibet. Since the turn of the century the China–India relationship has assumed new layers of rivalry. A substantial expansion of China’s interests and presence in the Indian Ocean and among key South Asian capitals has contributed to a sense of encirclement in Delhi. India’s movement toward alignment with the United States and Japan, and an expansion of its ties in East and Southeast Asia, has led some in Beijing to conclude that India is aligning with the Indo-Pacific democracies to contain Chinese power and influence. Finally, India’s relationship with the United States has, in a way, been a reflection of America’s relationship with China: when the United States and China were hostile early in the Cold War, India welcomed American military aid following the Chinese invasion across their disputed border in 1962 (Smith 2012). When the United States, already closely aligned with Indian rival Pakistan, began pursuing a diplomatic opening with China in the 1970s, India sought the protection of America’s superpower rival. In 1971 it signed a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet Union, which by that time had grown alienated from Beijing. The move effectively froze India’s relationship with the United States in a state of estrangement until the end of the Cold War. By the turn of the century, however, India and the United States were nurturing a historic rapprochement amid growing shared

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concerns about China’s expanding power and influence. Begun during the Clinton administration, the courtship of India was considerably accelerated by the George W. Bush administration. It was then sustained and expanded upon through the Obama and Trump administrations. Today, India and the United States not only stand closer together, they also face a similar set of concerns and paradoxes in their respective relationships with China. However, the two approach China from very different positions. In terms of economic weight, military power, and international influence, China still remains the junior partner in its relationship with the United States. And despite their intensifying competition, China and the United States have no history of direct conflict or competing territorial claims. By contrast, India is the junior partner in its relationship with China, whose gross domestic product and military spending dwarf India’s by a factor of five. India and China do have a history of conflict, and China still claims as much as 90,000 sq. km in India’s northeast. Unlike the United States, India cannot rely on the protection offered by the tyranny of distance. It doesn’t have the luxury of thousands of miles of ocean and a vast network of allies and overseas military bases separating it from its principal rival. To the contrary, not only is India bound to China by the longest disputed border in the world, it is sandwiched between China and its nuclear-armed rival, Pakistan, the closest thing Beijing has to a military ally. This has created a very different approach to balancing Chinese power and influence than that taken by the United States. India and the United States also have their own unique sets of concerns indigenous to their relationship with China. For India, the aforementioned legacy disputes and China’s growing influence in the Indian Ocean and South Asia top the list. The United States, meanwhile, has been more critical of China’s espionage and intellectual property theft activities, its attempts to export elements of authoritarianism abroad, and its efforts to militarize the South China Sea and restrict freedom of navigation there. Despite these differences, India and the United States also confront the same paradox in their approach to China: for both countries it is simultaneously their largest trading partner and their principal external security threat. Both have grown increasingly anxious about China’s more assertive behavior, its expanding influence and physical footprint abroad, the negative consequences of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and Beijing’s increasingly brazen challenges to the rules-based order. Both are struggling with how best to reap the economic benefits of engagement with China and avoid provoking a security dilemma while mitigating threats to their own interests and the global order.

The curious case of non-alignment Proponents of the realist theory of international relations believe India faces a clear choice in this strategic triangle. China’s neighbors “are certain to fear its rise” and “will do whatever they can to prevent it from achieving regional hegemony,” concludes realist scholar John Mearsheimer. This includes joining “an American-led balancing coalition to check China’s rise much the way Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and eventually China, joined forces with the United States during the Cold War to contain the Soviet Union” (Mearsheimer 2014). Yet, despite its growing proximity to the United States, India has largely resisted this logic. For most of India’s contemporary history, its guiding foreign policy philosophy was not the realpolitik of Mearsheimer but rather the now-infamous Cold War

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philosophy of non-alignment. At its core, non-alignment cautioned against aligning too closely with either the United States or USSR, in order to provide India with the space to chart an independent course. Often derided as a quasi-socialist philosophy, non-alignment was arguably more pragmatic than it is given credit for. Confronting herculean development challenges at home and an intense rivalry with neighboring Pakistan, Indian policymakers felt they could ill-afford to devote scarce resources to a global ideological conflict they had little investment in. India didn’t view the United States and USSR, or their struggle, in black and white terms. They were neither friend nor enemy—neither “good” nor “evil.” They were two flawed superpowers pursuing their own interests that would gladly enlist India to fight their battles for them. India wanted instead to maintain autonomy in its foreign policy decision-making, pursuing working relationships with both superpowers while doing its best to remain aloof from their ideological competition. When realities on the ground and strategic imperatives forced its hand, however, India was more than willing to embrace either superpower to advance its interests and balance Chinese power and influence. It welcomed emergency aid and military supplies from the United States when Chinese forces crossed the disputed China–India border in 1962. And it signed a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971 when the United States began a diplomatic opening to China. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, India lost its superpower bulwark against China. Since then, non-alignment has gradually given way to a more flexible conception of “strategic autonomy,” as India has taken several meaningful steps toward alignment with the United States and more robust strategic engagement with a host of others, not least Japan. Gestures of “alignment” with the United States that were unthinkable twenty years ago have become commonplace. India has signed several key “foundational” military cooperation agreements with the United States, crafted joint vision statements on the Indo-Pacific with Washington, and revived a highly symbolic biannual Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) with Australia, Japan, and the United States. On several occasions Prime Minister Narendra Modi has referred to the United States as a “natural ally” (Gibbs, Abdoolcarim and Kumar 2015). India is now a major purchaser of US arms, and the two countries are sharing intelligence on naval activity in the Indian Ocean. It has inaugurated a network of cooperative dialogues with the United States on everything from counterterrorism to cyber security.

The Wuhan spirit Despite the maturation of India–US ties, and the considerable confluence of interests among the United States and India vis-à-vis China, Delhi remains reluctant to pursue any formal alliance with the United States and continues to pursue subtler elements of alignment with caution. It was initially hesitant to upgrade the QSD with Australia, Japan and the United States to a ministerial level and has resisted allowing Australia to participate in quadrilateral naval exercises. It shares a vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” with the United States and Japan but stresses the inclusive nature of its vision and insists it is not aimed at any one country. India, according to former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, has struggled to adjust to an increasingly polarized world with U.S.-China relations entering a phase of open and probably irreversible confrontation … Even though

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the geopolitical relation landscape is heading towards greater polarization, India’s interests at this time are best served by avoiding overt alignment with either of the emerging poles. (Saran 2019) At a diplomatic level India has continued to emphasize the importance of stable and productive ties with China, particularly since Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping held an informal summit meeting in Wuhan, China in April 2018. That summit was designed to put ties on a more secure footing following an unprecedented standoff between Chinese and Indian forces along the disputed Line of Actual Control near the tri-border area connecting Bhutan, China, and India in the summer of 2017 (Smith 2017). The supposed Wuhan “reset” of relations was further supported by the intensification of the China–US rivalry under the Trump administration. After the two sides failed to reach a trade deal that would address longstanding US economic grievances with China, the Trump administration imposed a wave of escalating tariffs on Chinese imports. It also introduced new restrictions and punitive measures on Chinese technology companies that the Trump administration argues pose a national security threat, including Huawei. Indian observers noted that the more benevolent approach adopted by China since 2019 reflected “China’s need to keep its western flank neutralized while it copes with a more aggressive and openly adversarial United States” (Saran 2019). Possibly as a result, reported Chinese border incursions across the disputed Line of Actual Control, which number several hundred annually, were reportedly down twenty percent in 2018 (Gupta 2018). The same year India and China signed their first intelligence sharing pact on counterterrorism (Chaudhury 2018b). At a time when the United States and many Western countries are seeking to prevent Huawei access to their emerging fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, India has “struck an independent course by allowing Huawei to participate in field trials of 5G equipment, despite reservations” ( Joshi 2019). Meanwhile, in 2019, Indian energy firm Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) was reportedly looking for ways to vacate a politically contentious oil exploration bloc off Vietnam’s coast which falls within China’s “Nine Dash Line” claims in the South China Sea (Bhaskar 2019). In its first term, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrated a certain level of deference to Chinese sensitivities in a number of arenas. India opted not to join a project launched by Australia, Japan, and the United States designed to offer Indo-Pacific capitals high-quality infrastructure alternatives to China’s BRI (Chaudhury 2018a). Even as it remains staunchly opposed to the BRI, India has become the largest customer of loans from the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), accounting for twenty-eight percent of the funds lent by the AIIB in its first two years (Lo 2018). The Modi government has also kept the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exile community at arms-length. In 2018, Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale circulated a note advising Indian officials to stay away from Tibetan events given the “very sensitive times” in India’s relationship with China (Firstpost 2018). During the 2018 Wuhan summit, Prime Minister Modi reportedly “apprised President Xi of the Dalai Lama’s health and the Indian position on Tibet after his death.” The Dalai Lama has described his relationship with Modi as “awkward,” and claims he requested to meet President Xi Jinping while he was in Delhi in 2014 but the Indian government denied his request as it was “a little cautious” (Haidar 2019).

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Trouble in paradise If the push of China weakened a bit in 2018 and 2019, so too did the pull of the United States. China wasn’t the only country whose trading practices invoked the Trump administration’s ire and a wave of punitive economic measures. In 2017, the administration opened negotiations with India on an economic agreement that would address longstanding US grievances over Indian barriers to investment and trade. In March 2018, the administration announced that India would be among a handful of countries whose steel and aluminum imports would be subject to new tariffs (Swanson 2018). With no trade deal in sight, in the spring of 2019 the Trump administration revoked duty-free treatment for certain Indian exports under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). India, the largest beneficiary of the GSP program, saw $6.3 billion (or eleven percent) of its exports to the United States impacted by the decision (Stracqualursi and Borak 2019). In retaliation, and after a year of delays, in June 2019 India imposed tariffs of up to seventy percent on twenty-eight products imported from the United States (BBC 2019). Meanwhile, India has been threatened with two sets of US sanctions in recent years that could further strain ties. In August 2017, the US Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) (2017), which directs sanctions on any entity conducting a “significant transaction” with Russia’s defense industry, the principal supplier of military equipment to India for decades. While the US president has waiver authority, CAATSA sanctions could impact India’s $5.5 billion purchase of the S-400 system from Russia in October 2018 and several arms deals with Russia currently in the pipeline. In addition, in November 2018, the Trump administration signaled it would impose new sanctions on any country importing oil from Iran. It issued India, and several other countries, a six-month waiver but refused to extend that waiver when it expired in the spring of 2019. Bolstered by surging US oil exports to India, which reached forty-eight million barrels in 2018 and could double in 2019, Indian oil importers appear to have found alternative suppliers. India is therefore in a position to stop importing Iranian oil and avoid sanctions (US Energy Information Administration 2019). Meanwhile, a new fault line has emerged with the United States over policies that the Indian government is developing on e-commerce and data localization, which are strongly opposed by the US government and private sector. In 2019, the Office of the US Trade Representative (2019) issued a report criticizing a myriad of Indian trade practices, including everything from ethanol import restrictions to food-labeling requirements and Indian agricultural subsidies. If the Trump administration is unable to reach a trade and economic deal with the new Modi administration, it may consider pursuing a “Section 301” investigation against India that could open the door to a wave of new tariffs on Indian exports to the United States. In tandem, the trade and sanctions disputes have fueled doubts in Delhi about America’s reliability as a strategic partner and reservations about aligning too closely with the United States or foreclosing options for greater engagement with China. In January 2019, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale explained that “India has moved on from its non-aligned past. India is today an aligned state—but based on issues” (Basu 2019). The same month, at the annual Raisina Dialogue in Delhi, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director David Petraeus suggested that countries would have to choose sides in the emerging China–US rivalry. Former Indian Foreign Secretary

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(later External Affairs Minister) S. Jaishankar demurred, indicating that India would instead be guided by its own national interests: “Sure, we have taken a side. I have taken my side” (Bhaumik 2019).

An obvious choice? To US policymakers, India’s “lingering reluctance to choose” (Trivedi 2019) is perplexing. From their perspective, the choice should be obvious. After China invaded India in 1962, the United States came to India’s defense. China still claims as much as 90,000 sq. km in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and incursions by Chinese border patrols have sparked several mini-crises in bilateral relations. The United States has recognized Indian sovereignty over Arunachal since 1959 (Smith 2012), and today the US government is “committed to ensuring that India has the military capabilities it needs to uphold its territorial integrity and to confront 21st-century challenges” (Pompeo 2019). The United States has been distancing itself from Indian rival Pakistan, with the Trump administration suspending aid to Islamabad and significantly downgrading bilateral relations in 2018 (Smith 2018). For its part, China’s military and economic ties with Pakistan have only grown stronger since China unveiled the $50 billion China– Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in 2015.2 Whereas China has repeatedly protected Pakistani-based terrorists targeting India from international sanctions, the United States has led the charge by imposing unilateral sanctions, garnering support for multilateral sanctions (Hashim 2018), and censuring Pakistan at the Financial Action Task Force, an international terrorism financing watchdog (Thomas 2019). And while China has repeatedly sought to block India’s attempts to become an accepted member of the international nuclear order, the United States has gone to great lengths to reshape it to accommodate India (Kerr 2012). The United States also supports a permanent seat for India at the United Nations Security Council and membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group whereas China opposes both. China is viewed by many Indian elites as the country’s greatest external security threat and by the Indian public with suspicion and hostility. In contrast, the Indian public views the United States more favorably than most Indo-Pacific capitals. A 2017 survey by the Asian Research Network found that clear majorities in India support stronger ties with the United States and an increased US presence in the region. A majority of Indians polled also believed that America’s best days were ahead of it and America’s influence was still growing ( Jackman et al. 2017). And, in a March 2019 survey of India’s strategic community by Brookings India, seventy-five percent of respondents identified the United States as India’s most important partner, while only twelve percent said the same for India’s longtime patron, Russia ( Jaishankar 2019). Economically, whereas China accounts for India’s largest trade deficit, which reached $58 billion in 2018 (Krishnan 2019), the United States is responsible for India’s largest trade surplus, which reached $24 billion in 2018 (Office of the United States Trade Representative 2019). For the United States, India’s aversion to alignment is arguably more perplexing since Delhi has effectively lost the superpower patron it relied on for decades to balance China’s power and influence. Today, Russia and China enjoy a robust tactical partnership (Trenin 2019). India once counted on advanced Soviet and Russian military hardware to maintain a qualitative edge over the Chinese military, and later a degree of parity. Russia now sells its most advanced defense platforms for export to China, sometimes before India.

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Russia was once a reliable defender of India’s interests vis-à-vis China at prominent international fora, but its disposition is now more measured and impartial, as evidenced during the China–India border crisis on the Doklam plateau in 2017 (Dasgupta 2017). “With Russia drawing closer to China, Moscow no longer appears to be in a position to help Delhi balance Beijing,” argues Indian analyst C. Raja Mohan (2017).

The veil of non-alignment Within the strategic China–India–US triangle, India is struggling with competing, sometimes contradictory interests and objectives. It recognizes that the United States provides the greatest insurance against Chinese aggression, but fears that moving too closely and too quickly toward the United States would alienate China and provoke a punitive response. It wants to reap the benefits of a closer partnership with the United States while maintaining complete autonomy in its decision-making. It wants to purchase advanced US military hardware to narrow the growing gap in military capabilities with China but is hesitant to grow too dependent on US platforms. As I have previously argued, the world has gradually seen India’s geostrategic impetus to align with the United States increase and the perceived costs of alignment decrease … [however, ] there continues to exist a general fear [in Delhi] that alignment could draw India into unnecessary foreign conflicts, force it to assume diplomatic positions against its interest, or otherwise restrict flexibility in foreign policy decision-making. (Smith and Berry 2018) It is also quite clear, however, that as much as India might benefit from maintaining the perception of some equidistance between China and the United States, in many ways it has already made a choice. While it has joined the AIIB and been reluctant to partner with the United States on connectivity issues, Delhi has actively opposed China’s BRI and in 2018 worked in tandem with the United States and several European countries to remove the last endorsements of the BRI from UN resolutions (Sirohi 2018). As it buys new advanced military hardware from the United States, India is adding new military outposts along the disputed border with China (Chauhan 2018). While Indian military commanders praise the growing operational cooperation with the United States, China is framed in openly competitive terms. “We can match what forces China can bring to bear in the [Indian Ocean Region],” explained India’s naval chief in 2018. “But in the South China Sea, the dice is loaded in their favor” (Unnithan 2018). Shortly before he was appointed External Affairs Minister in Prime Minister Modi’s second term, Ambassador S. Jaishankar (2018) insisted: “If there is any account that needs to be done differently, it’s China.” Even Ambassador Shyam Saran (2019), who has cautioned India against aligning too closely with the United States, believes that “if the asymmetry of power with China remains unaddressed, India will move closer to the countervailing coalition represented by the ‘Quad.’” If the 2018 Wuhan summit succeeded in putting China–India ties on more stable footing after several contentious years in bilateral relations, to date the reset has had no discernible impact on the two countries’ underlying conflicts of interest or changed their positions on the most salient fault lines. “Other than a few trade concessions and perhaps gentler rhetoric,” Atman Trivedi (2019) notes, “China has not been reciprocating

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India’s gestures and is in fact continuing to thwart India’s ambitions on the regional and global stages.” Ultimately, longstanding structural impediments to a closer India–US partnership (Pakistan, nuclear issues, India’s relationship with the USSR) are shrinking while the barriers to a rapprochement with Beijing are growing. Even if China and India lacked a history of animosity, competing territorial claims, and outstanding legacy disputes, the lure of rivalry would be considerable. China’s southwestward push into South Asia and the Indian Ocean was destined to generate friction with India even if the two countries were aligned on regional priorities and Beijing respected Indian sensitivities in regional capitals. That has not been the case: in countries like Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives—Indian neighbors once sheltered from Chinese influence but now expanding ties with Beijing—India and China are openly backing competing factions and often working at cross-purposes. What’s more, this new layer of rivalry has not been balanced by any resolution or improvement in their legacy disputes. Negotiations on a resolution to the border dispute have been effectively frozen since the mid-2000s. At the time, China’s informal negotiation position moved from tacit acceptance of a “package deal” that would enshrine the status quo along the Line of Actual Control to insisting that India cede territory around the sensitive Tawang district in Arunachal Pradesh. Delhi has made it clear that this a non-starter. In November 2018, former Indian National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon told the South China Morning Post: “Nothing is impossible in politics. What is impossible is a settlement [of the China-India border dispute] on the terms the Chinese have announced in public, which include Tawang and significant Indian concessions in the eastern sector in Arunachal” (Krishnan 2018). The second legacy dispute, China’s support for Pakistan, has grown more contentious, and stands in starker contrast now that Pakistan’s relationship with the United States has frayed. The CPEC has led to a significant increase in China’s footprint in Pakistan, including involvement in the Gwadar port in Baluchistan and construction projects in Indian-claimed portions of Kashmir. In 2019, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar (2018) lamented that China had “qualitatively enhanced its collaboration with Pakistan, discarding even the limited balance it had shown in the past.” And while Tibet may not be as divisive as it once was in China–India relations, there are looming challenges on the horizon—namely, the fact that the eighty-four-year-old Dalai Lama has begun discussing possibilities for naming his successor. The Chinese government has stated that it will not recognize any successor named by the Buddhist leader, and insists the next Dalai Lama will be found inside Tibet, ostensibly chosen by government-appointed Buddhist monks. If the Dalai Lama identifies a successor in India, this risks creating substantial friction in China–India relations (Smith 2014).

Conclusion To date, India’s hedging strategy within the China–India–US triangle has proven relatively effective at maximizing the country’s gains and minimizing its costs, but the approach carries risks that could increase in the medium term. The less likely, less compelling risks derive from the possibility that India has been balancing too vigorously in response to China’s rise—moving too closely to the United States too quickly and alienating Beijing in the process. To date, there is little evidence that suggests that China has sought to impose direct costs on India for its growing proximity to the United

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States. Indeed, many Indian analysts are convinced that its partnership with the United States has strengthened the country’s hand with Beijing and enhanced its capabilities to defend itself. It is possible, however, to envision scenarios in which Beijing deploys more overtly coercive and punitive measures toward India in an attempt to dissuade it from further aligning with the United States and its democratic partners. That China has not yet sought to do so may reflect assumptions in Beijing that such an effort would likely strengthen the hand of China’s critics in Delhi and the general impetus to move closer to the United States. The greater risks derive from the possibility that India is not balancing forcefully enough; that in its aversion to provoking a security dilemma with China, it fails to sufficiently appreciate the Chinese threat and take the requisite steps to defend its territory and interests. That includes failing to seize the opportunities offered by a United States uniquely disposed and equipped to help India balance China’s growing power and influence. India is in the enviable position of having been energetically courted by the world’s superpower for nearly two decades. There is a risk that the constant affections of US policymakers may lead Delhi to conclude that “Washington needs us more than we need them.” This approach could prove a misreading of the relative power balance and the potential downside risks of China’s rise, should Chinese foreign policy turn more aggressive in the years ahead. As one Indian daily has warned: some strategic analysts in India are still debating the utility of the Indian partnership with the US and Japan, leave alone Australia, Britain or France. They argue that India is needlessly dragging itself into the US-China rivalry. There cannot be a more misleading argument. As the world’s biggest military and economic power, the US is more than capable of meeting the China challenge without New Delhi’s helping hand. But can the same be said of India? Facing a huge power deficit, India needs partnerships to balance China. (Livemint 2017) If mismanaged, recent trade and sanctions disputes in India–US relations could weaken the durable coalition that has sustained the partnership in both capitals and threaten the preferential treatment India has grown accustomed to from the United States. In Washington, that coalition is remarkably resilient and bipartisan, stretching across the think tank community to the Pentagon and US military, both houses of Congress and both major political parties. It has effectively, sometimes effortlessly, defended the strategic partnership from critics. However, under the Trump administration, the coalition has begun to show some signs of vulnerability. Long-suppressed economic grievances have reached the surface. India’s persistent hedging and quest for strategic autonomy have raised questions about its utility as a partner in the competition with China. Inflated expectations about what the India– US partnership was supposed to deliver, and how quickly, are leading some lawmakers to ask: what is the United States getting in return for all its efforts to support India’s rise? Even in the worst-case scenarios, however, a slowing of the pace of progress is more likely than a reversal of India’s gradual alignment with the United States. The vast institutional framework underpinning the relationship has already been established and will not be easily undone.

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Ultimately, the scope to further improve relations with the United States is wide, and there are compelling interests and powerful interest groups preventing the relationship from deteriorating too far. By contrast, there is a great deal of room for the China–India relationship to grow more contentious in the years ahead—and relatively limited scenarios that would produce a fundamental improvement in relations or a resolution to the legacy disputes. For these reasons, the trajectory the strategic triangle has assumed since the turn of the century is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Notes 1 Some estimates predict Nigeria may overtake the United States in population by 2050 (UNDESA 2017). 2 See China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), http://cpec.gov.pk/.

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378  Jeff M. Smith Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesperson (26 June), available online at https://translations. state.gov/2019/06/26/secretary-of-state-michael-r-pompeo-and-indian-foreign-ministersubrahmanyam-jaishankar-at-a-press-availability/. PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) (2019) “India Likely to Surpass UK in the World’s Largest Economies Rankings, GDP Growth Expected to Be 7.6% in 2019: PwC” (21 January), available online at www.pwc.in/press-releases/2019/india-likely-to-surpass-uk-in-the-worldslargest-economies.html. Ritchie, H. (2019) “India Will Soon Overtake China to Become the Most Populous Country in the World,” Our World in Data (16 April), available online at https://ourworldindata.org/ india-will-soon-overtake-china-to-become-the-most-populous-country-in-the-world. Saran, S. (2019) “Positives for India in Its Backyard but China’s Leverage Unmatched”, The Economic Times (1 January), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ news/defence/positives-for-india-in-its-backyard-but-chinas-leverage-unmatched/articleshow/67332771.cms. Sirohi, S. (2018) “India-US-EU Combine Halts China’s Belt and Road Initiative at the UN,” The Wire (12 December), available online at https://thewire.in/diplomacy/indiachina-belt-and-road-united-nations. Smith, J. M. (2012) “A Forgotten War in the Himalayas,” Yale Center for the Study of Globalization (14 September), available online at https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/forgotten-war-himalayas. Smith, J. M. (2014) Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Lexington Books). Smith, J. M. (2017) “High Noon in the Himalayas: Behind the China-India Standoff at Doka La,” War on the Rocks (13 July), available online at https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/ high-noon-in-the-himalayas-behind-the-china-india-standoff-at-doka-la/. Smith, J. M. (2018) “Trump Just Cut Aid to Pakistan. Why This Long-Overdue Move Could Have a Real Impact,” The Heritage Foundation (5 January), available online at www. heritage.org/middle-east/commentary/trump-just-cut-aid-pakistan-why-long-overduemove-could-have-real-impact. Smith, J. M. and Berry, M. (2018) “Alignment with Autonomy: India’s Evolving Foreign Policy in Light of China’s Regional Ambitions,” The Heritage Foundation (8 May), available online at www.heritage.org/node/14508037/print-display. Stracqualursi, V. and Borak, D. (2019) “Trump Removes India from Special Trade Status,” CNN (2 June), available online at www.cnn.com/2019/06/01/politics/trump-india-tradestatus/index.html (accessed 27 June 2019). Swanson, A. (2018) “Trump to Impose Sweeping Steel and Aluminum Tariffs,” The New York Times (1 March), available online at www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/business/trump-tariffs. html (accessed 28 June 2019). The White House (2017) “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (December), available online at www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSSFinal-12-18-2017-0905.pdf. Thomas, L. (2019) “Global Watchdog Give Pakistan until October to Curb Terror Financing,” US News (21 June), available online at www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2019-06-21/ global-watchdog-give-pakistan-until-october-to-curb-terror-financing. Trenin, D. (2019) “Russia, China Are Key and Close Partners,” Carnegie Moscow Center (5 June), available online at https://carnegie.ru/2019/06/05/russia-china-are-key-and-closepartners-pub-79262. Trivedi, A. (2019) “One Year on, Should India Rethink Its Reset with China?” War On the Rocks (17 April), available online at https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/one-yearon-should-india-rethink-its-reset-with-china/. UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) (2017) “World Population Projected to Reach 9.8 Billion in 2050, and 11.2 Billion in 2100” (21 June), available online at www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2017.html.

The China–India–US triangle  379 Unnithan, S. (2018) “Exclusive: We Can Match China in the Indian Ocean Region, Says Navy Chief Sunil Lanba,” India Today (17 November), available online at www.indiatoday.in/ magazine/interview/story/20181126-we-can-match-china-in-the-indian-ocean-region-ad. US Department of Defense (2018) “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America” available online at https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/ pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf. US Energy Information Administration (2019) “Petroleum & Other Liquids: U.S. Exports to India of Crude Oil” ( July 2015–January 2019), available online at www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/ hist/Leaf Handler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCREX_NUS-NIN_1&f=M (accessed 28 June 2019). US Trade Representative (2019) “2019 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers” (29 March), available online at https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2019_National_ Trade_Estimate_Report.pdf (accessed 28 June 2019).

23 Russia A balancer in India–China relations? Vidya Nadkarni

The interactions within the India–China, India–Russia, and China–Russia dyads and among all three countries in the Russia–India–China (RIC) trilateral are influenced by a shifting array of historical, structural, and domestic variables. India–China ties have displayed varying degrees of hostility, rivalry, and competition, leavened with limited engagement. India and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)/Russia have maintained largely cordial links, although geopolitical maneuverings in the second decade of the twenty-first century have added significant stressors to the relationship. The added factor of ideology helps account for the up-down-up trajectory of the China–USSR/Russia nexus. The RIC trilateral group that originated in 2002 has served largely as a dialogue mechanism. The end of the Cold War represented a watershed moment. The structural shift from bipolarity to unipolarity and then to a liminal phase characterized by an inchoate power structure undermined the certainties of the bipolar order and inaugurated a reassessment of erstwhile alliances and bilateral relationships among the major powers. China and India, as aspirants to global status, and Russia, as a claimant to resurgent influence, had to recalibrate their respective strategies to meet the challenges of a changed world. Their interactions in the future are likely to be affected by the ongoing power shift involving the United States and China and mediated by the Sino-Indian rivalry and Russian jockeying for influence in Asia. Domestic predilections, such as an increase in nationalist fervor and the near-worldwide rightward shift ideologically, have resulted in grave challenges to the US-sponsored post-World War II liberal economic and security order. The intricate ways in which past legacies intersect with interstate and intrastate pressures will help shape bilateral and trilateral relationships among Russia, India, and China. This chapter examines the extent to which the respective bilateral relationships of India and China with the USSR/Russia affect their mutual ties. The first section considers the historical, domestic, and structural variables affecting interactions during the Cold War. The second section explores the nature of these relationships in the postCold War period. The third section assesses the salience of the RIC grouping. The conclusion summarizes the main arguments.

Shifting alignments: the Soviet Union’s influence during the Cold War During the Cold War, the USSR had a significant effect on the Sino-Indian relationship. As one of two Cold War protagonists, the USSR had major military and

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ideological resources to bring to the battle for global influence in a world undergoing a protracted process of decolonization that was inherently anti-Western. In general, as the narrative here will show, over the period 1949–1989, when China and the Soviet Union shared strong affinities, ties between India and the USSR were attenuated; when Indo-Soviet ties were robust, the Sino-Soviet relationship was weak. In addition to the effects of the Cold War bipolar competition, ideological and domestic political developments affected the trilateral interrelationship among Russia, India, and China. India shed the carapace of colonialism in 1947. China, after erasing the last vestiges of indirect colonialism, launched a successful communist revolution in 1949. Born into an ideologically polarized world, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru adopted nonalignment as a foundational principle of India’s foreign policy; Chairman Mao Zedong saw no feasible alternative to alignment with the USSR. For Nehru, non-alignment between ideologically polarized blocs would assure the foreign policy flexibility needed to advance India’s economic development and the moral standing to play an influential role in a decolonizing Asia and Africa (Nehru 1988: 350). Nehru’s socialist predilections led him to adopt a mixed-economy model as the best way to promote industrialization and modernization in an impoverished and young democracy. His stature in the country and within the Congress Party allowed his views to prevail over those of intra-party critics and opposition politicians (Sagar and Panda 2015). Unsupported by material power, however, Nehru’s idealistic aspirations regarding global leadership in an Afro-Asian movement for solidarity crumbled under the impact of geopolitical realities; his decision to steer clear of bipolar divisions isolated India internationally at a time when both the United States and the USSR spurned the notion of neutrality in what each considered a morally defining conflict between communism and capitalism. Notwithstanding Nehru’s insistence on non-alignment, his socialist inclinations and anti-colonial stance, as well as Pakistan’s membership in the US alliance system (SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] and CENTO [Central Treaty Organization]), gradually moved India into the Soviet orbit after the death of Stalin in 1953. Despite his animus toward Stalin, reaching back to the time when the Soviet leader counseled communists in China to make common cause with the nationalists in order to stave off US intervention, Mao made a pragmatic decision to align with the Soviet Union (Kim 2010: 186). Recognizing the vulnerability of a fragile communist victory and the urgent necessity for economic and technological assistance, he saw the ineluctable need to “lean to one side” (as quoted in Chen 1992: 5). The February 1950 SinoSoviet alliance was designed not only to safeguard Chinese communism against malign Western designs but also to strengthen Mao’s hand in the domestic political debate between those who advocated the “doctrine of the mean” against his own view that any accommodation with the West that the former strategy entailed would efface the distinction between revolution and counterrevolution (Chen 1992: 7). The alignment with the USSR resulted in Sino-Soviet cooperation during the 1950 Korean War, creating a specter in the West of a unified communist front arrayed against the “free world.” The Sino-Soviet alliance began to disintegrate soon after Stalin’s death, when Mao repudiated the ideological revisionism in Khrushchev’s offer of peaceful coexistence with the West and the acknowledgment of different paths to socialism (Mao 1959). The first tangible sign of trouble came when Khrushchev summarily recalled Soviet advisers from China in 1960. Coming amid the dislocation caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), this move severely disrupted Chinese economic development plans. While personal pique served as a catalyst for the recall, weightier realpolitik considerations

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were at the heart of the dispute: leadership of the communist world; tactical questions nested therein of how much dissent to tolerate in the communist movement; and disagreements over how best to deal with the United States (Klochko 1971: 565). A festering border dispute added fuel to this combustible mix of competing interests. At the height of Chinese tensions with the USSR, Zhou Enlai offered to negotiate a compromise with India over the disputed border. Facing a nationalist outcry in India, Nehru refused a swap that would have legitimized Chinese control over the disputed section of the northwestern sector in return for Indian control over the disputed area of the northeastern sector (Zhou 1959; Wolff and Ostermann 1996: 269). In the midst of the Sino-Soviet dispute, two near simultaneous crises—the 1962 Sino-Indian war and the US-Soviet Cuban missile crisis—competed for Soviet attention. The 1962 war began after high-level Sino-Indian diplomatic exchanges, begun in 1959, failed to bridge a fundamental disagreement on the delineation of the disputed boundary. In the face of irregular armed skirmishes occurring in the western and eastern sectors, China launched a full-scale war on 20 October 1962 across the entire front. Chinese forces overran the outnumbered and outgunned forces in the eastern sector, entering deep into Indian territory while holding to their claimed line in Aksai Chin in the west. A month later, China declared a unilateral ceasefire and retreated completely from the eastern sector but retained territory that linked their restive provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet in the western sector (Guha 2011: 54–55). The Sino-Soviet ideological conflict and the unfolding Cuban missile crisis led to oscillating Soviet positions on the Sino-Indian war. In late 1961, Khrushchev’s line of “peaceful coexistence with the West” came under withering attack. The Chinese leadership argued that imperialism could be defeated only through force. When the Sino-Indian conflict began in 1959, the USSR was attempting to balance two objectives: refraining from public criticism of China in order to retain some measure of unity in the communist movement while simultaneously seeking to check Beijing. Thus, after the first casualties occurred in border skirmishes in August 1959, the USSR publicly adopted an even-handed approach, calling on both sides to resolve the conflict peacefully while privately holding China culpable (Zubok 2001: 266). Beijing excoriated the Soviet position as tantamount to support of the Indian bourgeoisie and Western imperialists, putting Moscow on the ideological defensive (Prozumenschikov 1996: 251). Beginning in 1955, Khrushchev had sought Indian friendship in an effort to enlist decolonized countries to join the Soviet Union in a vast anti-imperialist zone of peace. Hence, the USSR futilely sought to influence China to moderate its position on India. In the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, the Sino-Soviet conflict took on global overtones as China accused the USSR of capitulating to the United States. Hemmed into an ideological straitjacket, the Soviet Union opted for a harder line on India, questioning the validity of the McMahon Line in the eastern sector (Soviet Memorandum 1962). This new Soviet position disappointed Nehru. With the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, the USSR returned to an even-handed appraisal of the Sino-Indian border conflict (Prozumenschikov 1996: 252–256). Moscow’s ambivalence was in full display during the 1962 war. Reluctant to jettison an ideological fellow-traveler for fear of losing to China in a debate over fighting imperialism, Khrushchev suspended the August 1962 deal with India for the supply of MiG fighter jets until after China had attained its objectives on the ground and called a halt to hostilities. However, Moscow publicly did not take sides, angering Beijing (Mastny 2010: 61).

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The Indian debacle in the 1962 war set India and China on an adversarial path. Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet alliance disintegrated under the pressure of divergent domestic interests and doctrinal differences. By contrast, Indo-Soviet relations showed a warming trend. Soviet economic aid for Indian public sector enterprises had begun to flow in the mid-1950s. As Moscow used its veto in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to block anti-India moves on Kashmir in February 1957 and June 1962 and on Goa in December 1961, New Delhi reaped diplomatic dividends as well. Until the mid1980s, India could count on automatic Soviet support in the United Nations (UN) and in chancelleries across the world for the Indian position on Kashmir and other strategic matters. The first licensed production of MiG-21 aircraft had begun in 1963 (Mukerji 2018). India’s almost total reliance on Soviet arms was underway by the mid-1960s. Soviet-supplied weapons helped India win the 1965 war with Pakistan. Expecting Chinese assistance in that war, Pakistan initiated hostilities in August, sending thousands of trained infiltrators into Indian Kashmir with the hope of inciting an anti-Indian uprising. When the anticipated insurrection did not occur, a full-scale armed attack followed in September. The war escalated as Indian troops engaged Pakistani soldiers and moved deep into Pakistani territory. China not only offered strident rhetorical support for Pakistan but also sought to divert New Delhi’s attention with spurious charges of Indian violations along the Sikkim–China border in the northeast. The Soviet response in this instance was unequivocal: an offer to assist India in case of a Chinese attack and to mediate an end to the war (Pringsheim 1965: 173–174; Pradhan 2015). Sino-Soviet relations continued to deteriorate in the late 1960s. Repeated border clashes culminated in an open border war in 1969 even as China was reeling from the paroxysms of the decade-long Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 (King 2012). Faced with increasingly implacable Soviet hostility, an economically beleaguered China sought to escape global isolation. By 1970, as the most turbulent period of the Cultural Revolution was winding down, the Chinese leadership considered reaching out to the United States. At about the same time, the United States, seeking an honorable end to an increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, and frustrated with an unrelenting flow of Soviet aid to North Vietnam, was looking for a way to bring external pressure to bear on the USSR to induce a change in Moscow’s behavior. The concatenation of these two developments paved the path to Sino-US rapprochement, Indo-Soviet alignment, and an irrevocable rupture in Sino-Soviet relations. Two events in 1970–1971 represented important turning points: an unfolding political crisis in Pakistan in 1970 that hastened the signing of an Indo-Soviet treaty, and the incipient process of Sino-US rapprochement, with Pakistan acting as an intermediary. As the domestic crisis in Pakistan spiraled out of control, New Delhi sought diplomatic cover before intervening militarily to stop atrocities against civilians in East Pakistan and to deal with the flood of refugees into India. The Soviet Union was eager to oblige. The USSR had, since 1969, been unsuccessfully wooing India to join a Soviet-sponsored Asian Collective Security system with the unstated aim of checking the spread of Chinese influence after the eventual US withdrawal from Indochina. The speed with which this treaty was produced and signed in August 1971 provides support for Zhou Enlai’s assertion that a draft of the document had been tucked away for two years in a drawer in the Soviet foreign ministry. Then Indian External Affairs Minister Swaran Singh corroborated Zhou’s account in parliamentary debate when he conceded that secret talks on the treaty had been going on for two years (Blood 1976: 2–3).

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Soviet backing in this conflict allowed New Delhi to prevail in the face of opposition from both China and the United States. To allow India to achieve its strategic objectives, the Soviet Union cast vetoes in the UNSC on 4, 5, and 13 December 1971 to defeat passage of three resolutions designed to force India to stop its military intervention in East Pakistan. China’s support of Pakistan was unmistakable, with Beijing casting China’s very first veto in the UNSC to block the admission of Bangladesh to the UN (Mukerji 2018). The emergence of the US–USSR–China strategic triangle in the early 1970s served to fortify the Indo-Soviet relationship and deepen Sino-Soviet estrangement as both India and the USSR viewed the resultant security implications of the US–China rapprochement with deep concern. Sino-US diplomatic engagement, mediated by Pakistan and underlined by President Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing, occurred as domestic protests in the United States led to mounting concern in Washington over an unpopular Vietnam War. Declassified Chinese documents reveal that in the wake of the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, four Chinese marshals recommended that Mao “play the American card” to push back against the USSR (Burr 2004). The triangular US–USSR–China power configuration of the 1970s crystallized the broad contours of great power alignments until the Gorbachev-era reforms initiated in the mid-1980s set the stage for an end to the Cold War. Between 1971 and the end of the Cold War, while India’s alignment with the USSR reaped the dividends of unqualified Soviet support for India’s positions in the UN, the supply of advanced weapons platforms not available from any other source, and a studied refusal to provide offensive weapons to Pakistan in a nod to India’s sensibilities, the Soviet Union also worked actively to frustrate Sino-Indian rapprochement. In the 1970s, India and China made tentative moves toward a normalization of relations, exchanging ambassadors in 1976. Three factors underscored Chinese interest in engaging India: the fact that India was a pre-eminent power in South Asia, particularly after Pakistan’s 1971 dismemberment and India’s successful 1974 nuclear test; Chinese recognition that India was not a Soviet puppet, having repudiated Soviet efforts to sign an Asian collective security treaty; and an expansionist Soviet Union, which would threaten China’s interests in Asia after United States withdrawal from Vietnam (Garver 1991: 55–56). Deng Xiaoping was interested in enlisting Asian countries to withstand Soviet “hegemonism.” Hence, when Prime Minister Morarji Desai, elected in March 1977, sought to balance India’s pro-Soviet tilt by signaling readiness to accept de facto borders with China, Beijing invited India to develop specific proposals. Progress was torpedoed when China attacked Soviet-backed Vietnam in February 1979. Moscow was displeased with Desai’s refusal to label China as an aggressor and to recognize the Vietnamesesupported and Soviet-backed government in Cambodia. An angry Soviet leadership undertook to undermine Desai’s position domestically. Partly due to these efforts, Desai lost a no-confidence vote in parliament in July 1979 (Garver 1991: 57–61). The December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan raised alarm in New Delhi and Beijing. While India publicly withheld criticism, China expressed vocal opposition. China and the United States discussed supporting mujahideen forces in Pakistan to fight against the USSR. After New Delhi’s initial criticism of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, reelected in January 1980, sought to repair the Indo-Soviet relationship—without relinquishing efforts at improving ties with China. To bolster Beijing’s anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnam positions and prevent a strengthening of Indo-Vietnamese bonds, China offered India a hand of friendship even while

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increasing its military support of Pakistan (Garver 1991: 65–66). Beijing, meanwhile, eager to win India over, announced the re-opening of India–Tibet border trade, backpedaled from the call for a plebiscite in Kashmir, and upheld the Indian position that the Kashmir dispute should be bilaterally resolved. During May–June 1981, Chinese officials once again raised the prospect of a “package solution” on the border (Garver 1991: 68). In order to scuttle these talks, the Soviet Union started a disinformation campaign about Chinese border incursions, thereby halting the forward momentum of Sino-Indian relations (Garver 1991: 69–70). In 1982, Beijing adjusted its India strategy, softening its anti-Soviet criticism partly to ease the path toward a smoother Sino-Indian relationship (Garver 1991: 73). Slow improvement in the Sino-Indian relationship continued until Gorbachev’s ascent to the Soviet leadership and prospects for improved Sino-Soviet ties weakened the urgency in China for rapprochement with India. India viewed Gorbachev-era changes with unease. As Sino-Soviet relations showed promise of improvement, China resumed skirmishes across the Sino-Indian border. A full-blown armed confrontation at Sumdorong Chu occurred in June 1986, when New Delhi’s decision to push back against the Chinese incursion surprised Beijing. During the prolonged confrontation, Gorbachev carefully avoided either criticizing the Chinese provocation or offering support to New Delhi. This studied attitude of neutrality served to undermine Indian trust in the relationship (Garver 1991: 80–81). To add insult to injury, Gorbachev’s USSR was also more willing to call New Delhi to account on human rights violations in Kashmir and to take less openly pro-India positions in disputes involving India’s rivals in Asia (Nadkarni 1995: 25; Topychkanov 2018: 251–253). China’s Beijing Review wrote favorably of these Soviet diplomatic stances (Garver 1991: 82–83). A year after the diplomatic resolution of the Sumdorong Chu crisis, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi made an ice-breaking visit to Beijing in December 1988 during which the two sides decided to decouple negotiations on the border from non-security issues of common interest and agreed to establish two joint working groups—one on the boundary and one on economic relations, trade, science, and technology (PTI 2017). However, Sino-Indian relations remained in stasis. In late 1988, the USSR announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan by 1989 and began drawing down the number of military divisions in Mongolia. This visible manifestation of Soviet retrenchment in Asia inaugurated an easing of Soviet-American tensions and incentivized the Chinese leadership to seek better ties with Moscow, especially after Vietnam announced a planned withdrawal from Cambodia by September 1989. Gorbachev’s May 1989 Beijing visit, the first by a Soviet leader in thirty years, coincided with large-scale student protests in Tiananmen Square calling for democratic reforms. Gorbachev prudently avoided comment then, or later, and Deng called for the opening of a new chapter in Sino-Soviet relations (Zubok 2017: 138). Beijing’s brutal repression of the uprising stopped the revolt in its tracks but arrested the thawing trend in US–PRC relations. The United States suspended military sales to China and froze diplomatic relations. From Beijing’s perspective, the timing of the Soviet opening could not have been more welcome, as unanimous condemnation of China from the West in response to the Tiananmen events led to many years of frostiness. Sino-Russian relations continued their upward trajectory even after rising nationalist movements in the Soviet republics unleashed centrifugal forces that led to the implosion of the USSR. After the Soviet collapse in December 1991, the easing of the bipolar conflict gradually undercut the strategic and economic rationale for strong Indo-Russian ties. Russia’s

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precipitous decline in global power, Moscow’s demand for hard currency payments for Russian arms, and New Delhi’s strategic tilt toward the United States complicated a previously tight relationship. By contrast, the Sino-Russian relationship flourished as ideological differences became irrelevant, negotiations on unresolved border issues proceeded smoothly, and both Beijing and Moscow united to resist US hegemony.

Post-Cold War realignments: Russia and the Sino-Indian relationship Since the end of the Cold War, Russia’s ability to influence the India–China relationship has steadily waned. The dyadic relationships among India, China, and Russia are instead framed and affected by two twenty-first century structural trends: the strategic competition between the United States and China for primacy; and Beijing’s aspiration for hegemonic influence in East and South Asia that is impeded by China’s strategic rivalry with India. Between 1992 and 2000, the Russia–China relationship burgeoned, India–Russia engagement stabilized, and India–China ties found a new equilibrium. Sino-Russian ties, underpinned by a shared strategic interest in opposing US hegemony, improved further as outstanding border issues were resolved. After a few years of dormancy, Indo-Russian amity was rekindled when vexing issues of Soviet-era debt were ironed out, the continuing value of the arms relationship was recognized in both capitals, and the mid-1990s Taliban takeover of Afghanistan reunited both countries in fighting against the menace of terrorism. The template for a constrained Sino-Indian cooperative– competitive dynamic was undergirded by a mutual agreement not to hold the bilateral relationship hostage to the border conflict and by China’s interest in preventing India’s defection to the United States. A preoccupation with domestic concerns also helped inject a measure of equilibrium in all three dyads. Russia’s energies were turned inward to cope with difficult economic and political reforms, develop a new post-communist national identity, and adjust foreign policy to deal with fourteen independent countries in the post-Soviet space. Shaken by the Tiananmen protests, Chinese leaders linked the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with economic performance indicators and topdown “constructed” nationalism rather than Marxist-Leninist ideology (Zhao 1988). In India, an acute balance of payments crisis in 1991 compelled the government to embark on a series of liberal economic reforms that spurred economic growth and by the end of the decade contributed to New Delhi’s growing aspirations to global status. Related external developments generated concern, particularly in Moscow and Beijing, as the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries intervened in the Balkans, expanded the alliance, and sought to project influence in the post-Soviet space. In Asia, the United States was occupied with the North Korean nuclear program, tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and Indo-Pakistan tensions. Moscow and Beijing feared that untrammeled US power and its policies in Asia could undermine their regional and global interests. Three developments during the 1990s illustrated the diminishing role of the Russia factor in the India–China relationship: the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan; the fallout from India’s decision to test nuclear weapons; and the Kargil War. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 followed a decade of armed struggle against mujahideen fighters funded by the United States. In the wake of the Soviet

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defeat, Washington largely abandoned engagement with Afghanistan, which fell into internecine fighting among rival mujahideen factions until the Taliban, created and funded by the Pakistan military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), took control in 1996. Fearing the spread of Islamic radicalism from neighboring Afghanistan, India and Russia supported the opposing Northern Alliance. Beijing benefited from these joint Indo-Russian efforts without incurring costs. China’s alliance with Pakistan allowed Beijing to attain its objectives without risking direct involvement. Lu Shulin, China’s ambassador to Pakistan, accepted a quid pro quo from Taliban leader Mohammed Omar: formal Chinese recognition of the Taliban government and help in counteracting the impact of Western sanctions in return for insulating China from Uighur use of Afghan territory to launch attacks. While this arrangement was not fully observed by either party, China maintained a channel of communication with the Taliban, which has made Beijing an important interlocutor in the unfolding Afghan peace process that began with the 2014 US decision to withdraw troops (Small 2013). New Delhi’s 1998 decision to abandon a posture of nuclear ambiguity and become an openly declared nuclear weapons power invited the sharpest criticism from the United States and China and sanctions from Washington. The UNSC passed a non-binding resolution condemning the tests by India and Pakistan (UNSC Resolution 1998). Russia, along with France and the United Kingdom, publicly refused to back US sanctions. A joint communiqué released by the permanent members of the UNSC urged India and Pakistan to agree to a negotiated fissile material cutoff and accede to a strategic restraint regime that, according to Michael Krepon, unmistakably revealed Beijing’s imprint as these “would not just curtail New Delhi’s options against Pakistan but would also significantly constrain India from countering China’s strategic modernization programs.” The communiqué also called on India and Pakistan to “resume dialogue to address the root cause of the tensions between them, including Kashmir” (Krepon 2008). The absence in the communiqué of any reference to Pakistan’s role in supporting cross-border terrorist attacks again showed the influence of China and the inability or unwillingness of Russia to offer India strong diplomatic backing. The 1999 war in the Kargil sector of Kashmir, initiated by Pakistan, had far-reaching effects. President Bill Clinton leaned heavily on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for an early and unconditional withdrawal. He also condemned the infiltration of Indian territory by Pakistani soldiers, pushed back against the Pakistani account that the infiltrators were separatist guerrillas, and threatened to withhold a $100 million International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan if the troops were not pulled back. Sharif embarked on an unsuccessful visit to Beijing for diplomatic support and financial assistance, after which he flew to Washington and under US pressure agreed to restore the status quo ante (Talbott 2004). In this conflict, Russia and the United States stood by India. China’s lack of support for Pakistan in the face of a strong US pushback demonstrated the limits of the “all-weather friendship.” The seminal developments of the opening decade of the new millennium centered on the al Qaeda-led 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States and the related events that ensued: the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The articulation of the Bush Doctrine, which made democracy promotion a central plank of US foreign policy, raised suspicions in Russia and China over US motives and affected how Moscow and Beijing interpreted the causes of the color revolutions in the post-Soviet space. These revolutions stemmed from protracted domestic political struggles and, in Georgia, culminated in the Russo-Georgian War. The 2008 global financial crisis came near the close of the

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decade. In different ways, these events reinforced the Indo-US and Sino-Russian alignments, attenuated the US-Pakistani and Indo-Russian relationships, and heightened the competitive aspects of the Sino-Indian relationship. Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, offering Pakistan’s leaders the difficult choice of joining the fight or continuing to support their Taliban protégé. In agreeing to support the US war effort, Pakistan emerged both as an incubator of terrorism and a front-line state in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban. As Pakistan’s ally, Beijing watched these developments with concern, especially in view of a rising India. A decade after the adoption of liberalizing reforms in 1991 that had significantly increased economic growth rates, the attainment of nuclear weapons status in 1998 that had narrowed China’s military options vis-à-vis India, and the US–India alignment that complicated the achievement of China’s Asian and global ambitions, Beijing could no longer rely solely on a Pakistan-oriented strategy to check India’s rise. China’s leaders therefore moved to engage India economically while using intermittent coercive diplomatic and military pressure to constrain New Delhi’s ambitions. China, Russia, and India generally shared US concerns regarding terrorism. However, while India received diplomatic support from Russia on this issue, China’s special relationship with Pakistan meant that Beijing tacitly supported Islamabad’s strategy of cross-border terrorist attacks in India. The 2003 US-led war in Iraq fractured the international community: Russia and China voiced vocal opposition, while India scrupulously avoided direct criticism but balked at the US request to contribute troops to the war effort. The color revolutions (2003 Rose Revolution, Georgia; 2004 Orange Revolution, Ukraine; and 2005 Tulip Revolution, Kyrgyzstan) pitted pro-Western and somewhat liberal political forces against authoritarian leaders, troubling Moscow and Beijing and leading to increasing authoritarianism and rising nationalism in Russia and China (Korsunskaya 2014). In People’s Daily, the CCP paper, a series of articles attributed the revolutions to the spread of Western, especially US, ideology and cautioned against the blind adoption of Western-style reforms (Lau 2015). The leadership in both Russia and China fashioned a domestic strategy of dirigiste market reforms while strictly monitoring and repressing civil society activism. Their shared position on the external causes and domestic consequences of the color revolutions for their own countries united Moscow and Beijing against US “hegemonism.” New Delhi, while generally silent on the color revolutions, joined Russia in the call for respecting state sovereignty, especially in light of India’s insistence that the Kashmir issue be decided bilaterally with Pakistan. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, nationalist and assertive leaders helmed governments in Russia, China, and India: Putin’s third term as president began in March 2012; Xi Jinping was anointed party leader in November 2012 and president in March 2013; Narendra Modi became prime minister in May 2014. China rose as a peer competitor to the United States, relegating Russia to the role of a junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship. This reversal of roles reduced the ambit of Russia’s influence in the Sino-Indian relationship, especially after 2010, when Beijing’s global assertiveness signaled a marked departure from Deng Xiaoping’s earlier low-profile international strategy. With the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, Moscow initiated an assertive foreign policy that sought to re-establish Russia’s pre-eminence in the post-Soviet space. The 2014 annexation of Crimea, active support of rebels in eastern Ukraine, and the 2015 military intervention in Syria signaled the global scope of Russia’s ambitions. The Arab Spring revolts in the intervening years only served to validate suspicions in Moscow and

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Beijing about Western intentions. The demonstration of Western and American economic enfeeblement during the 2008 global financial crisis seemed to confirm Beijing’s view that China had become a great power nearly on par with the United States, while the US decision to accommodate India’s rise vindicated New Delhi’s policy of strategic engagement with all centers of power. During this period, the Sino-Russian nexus deepened while the Indo-Russian and Sino-Indian relationships came under stress. The Vostok 2018 Sino-Russian military drills demonstrated a new degree of closeness. For the first time in over four decades, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces joined Russia’s largest war games. Apart from sending a signal to the West, these exercises allowed Beijing to test the PLA’s “capacity building and operational readiness” and benefit from the “military doctrine and lessons learned from [Russia’s experience of ] wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria” (Zhou 2018). Strong Sino-Russian ties are undergirded by a shared aspiration to undercut US global predominance and to counter a deepening Indo-US nexus. Russia has been reluctant to sever its decades-long cordial and mutually beneficial ties with India but has limited ability to tether New Delhi to Moscow alone. India’s economic appeal as a destination for investment and trade and its strategic attraction as a partner in the unfolding global and regional geopolitical competition have expanded New Delhi’s range of partners, and Russia is no longer India’s sole ally or exclusive supplier of hightechnology weapons. While Indo-Russian ties have come under strain, New Delhi too is unlikely to jettison a decades-old relationship. India’s October 2018 decision to purchase five S-400 (Triumf ) long-range surface-to-air missile squadrons despite the threat of US sanctions illustrates the continuing salience of the relationship for both parties. This $5.43 billion contract brought India into the crosshairs of the US sanctions regime (PressTV-India 2019). The Almaz-Antey Air and Space Defense Corporation, which manufactures the S-400, was targeted for sanctions in legislation (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA) passed by the US Congress in 2017. Beijing, which had purchased the same system in 2014, was slapped with secondary US sanctions upon delivery in September 2018 (The Times of India 2018). New Delhi applied for a sanctions waiver in July 2018, arguing that without the weapons platform, the country’s military capabilities would be severely degraded; that the system was not targeted against the United States; and that India was already in process of diversifying arms supplies. In view of the September 2018 inaugural 2+2 India– US dialogue between the Indian ministers of defense and external affairs and the US Secretaries of State and Defense and the signing of the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) as also agreements on interoperability, then US Secretary of Defense James Mattis suggested the likelihood of such a waiver (Smith 2017; US Department of State, Office of the Spokesperson 2018). The case of the S-400, while a bilateral Indo-Russian defense arrangement, impinges on several other important bilateral relationships. The S-400 is designed to enhance the ability of the Indian Air Force to counter threats from Pakistan and China. The deal is a signal to Moscow that India’s arms diversification program and close ties with the United States will not undermine New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. Russia’s sale of the system to both China and India indicates that Moscow is unlikely to sacrifice the close embrace of China or to jeopardize ties with India. Meanwhile, the Sino-Indian relationship has experienced sharp downward spirals. India has been troubled by China’s display of coercive military pressure against Japan

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in the East China Sea and by island-building and base construction activities in the South China Sea that, by mid-2018, allowed the deployment of significant military assets (O’Rourke 2019). Beijing has also engaged in a steady drumbeat of angry rhetoric cautioning New Delhi against injudicious actions such as allowing official visits either of the Dalai Lama or other Indian officials to Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state in the northeast within disputed borders. Aggressive Chinese moves such as undertaking infrastructure projects in Bhutanese territory contested by Beijing led to the June 2017 standoff on the Doklam plateau at the trijunction of the India–Bhutan–China border. This episode, which turned into a military confrontation between India and China, with New Delhi supporting Bhutan’s claim, was eventually defused through diplomatic negotiation. Russia adopted a position of neutrality on the Doklam issue, seeking not to disrupt ties with either China or India (Dasgupta 2017). India’s quest for membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and China’s aspiration to create a Sino-centric world through the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) illustrate both the limits of Russian influence and the likelihood of a sharpening Sino-Indian divide. In June 2016, India formally applied for membership to the NSG—a consortium of forty-eight participating governments founded in 1974 in response, ironically, to India’s nuclear tests that year. The primary aim of the NSG is to control the spread of nuclear technology, thereby preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. NSG members are also signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). After the United States made a strategic decision to accommodate India’s rise, the NSG in 2008 lifted the nuclear trade embargo against India and a few years later began to consider admitting India as a member. New Delhi’s rationale for membership was detailed in a 300-page application that called attention to India’s impeccable non-proliferation record, provided an account of NSG-relevant capabilities, described export-control systems, and outlined extant disarmament and nuclear policy (Mitra 2016). China and several other countries opposed India’s bid, citing process-related concerns and arguing for the development of a set of criteria to be applied to non-NPT countries. China also argued that if India were to be admitted to the NSG as a non-NPT member, Pakistan’s application should be similarly accepted (Hutt 2017; The Economic Times 2018). Apart from suggesting an equivalence between India and Pakistan, Beijing’s overt opposition to New Delhi’s bid stemmed from a desire to thwart India’s strategic ambitions. Until 2000, when Beijing publicly committed to refrain from aiding in the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology, China’s record was spotty ( Jones 2000; DeSutter 2003; Arms Control Association 2017). China’s opposition to New Delhi’s bid has kept India out of only one of four export control mechanisms. India joined the Missile Technology Control Regime in 2016, the Wassenaar Arrangement in 2017, and the Australia Group in 2018 (Arms Control Association 2018). India’s bid for NSG membership enjoys the strong support of the United States and Russia as well as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Beijing’s obdurate stance on India’s NSG membership may be designed to send a signal to New Delhi over its BRI, as China has bristled at India’s pointed refusal to participate in Xi Jinping’s ambitious infrastructure program of road/rail networks and sea links designed to make China a connecting hub with spokes extending to all continents. A signature BRI project is the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) linking China’s Xinjiang Province to the Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. Beijing has urged India to participate in the BRI and especially in CPEC. To India’s

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more general concerns over the non-transparency of BRI projects and the fear that many of them are debt traps is added the anger over the fact that CPEC traverses an area of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir that is claimed by India. Both India and China have sought to get Russia to promote their respective NSG and BRI causes with the other. However, Moscow has few resources to exercise such influence vis-à-vis two countries that are simultaneously rising asymmetric powers in Asia—with China unwilling to accept India as a peer rival or even a great power and India no longer a country that China can easily confine within the subcontinental space.

A chimera: the RIC trilateral In a period of flux between 1989 and 1991, the Soviet approach to India and China resembled Moscow’s ambivalence of the 1960–1964 period. On the one hand, Gorbachev wished to remove China as an irritant in Soviet foreign policy. On the other hand, he was keenly aware of two other trends: the long-term historical shift of global power in China’s direction and the short-to-medium term tilt in the fulcrum of power toward the United States as a result of Moscow’s cession of superpower status. He therefore sought unsuccessfully to cast Moscow as the leader of a putative trilateral (Moscow–Beijing– New Delhi) grouping against a unipolar world of unchecked US power. Moscow was thus an early proponent of the effort to bring together the three major powers of Asia/ Eurasia, first under President Gorbachev and then under Foreign Minister and later Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov. According to Sergey Radchenko, Gorbachev was enamored of the notion that a USSR–China–India trilateral could serve as an important vehicle for Asian stability and a counter to the US–Europe–Japan alliance networks. He suggested the idea to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in November 1986 and again in November 1988, and to Foreign Minister Qian Qichen in December 1988 (2014: 100–102). Neither India nor China showed much interest. India, after the Cold War, had no moral or material interest in joining an antiWestern grouping. During his 1985 trip to Washington, Rajiv Gandhi had offered President Reagan a hand of friendship that sought to erase the Cold War era estrangement between the two democracies. In a conversation at the Press Club, he stated: “I don’t think we are more attracted to the Soviet Union than to the US … We are not going to be tied to the apron strings of any major power.” India and the United States moved tentatively to initiate talks on US arms sales under conditions acceptable to India (Badhwar and Trehan [1985] (2013)). The forward momentum in Indo-US ties continued. By 1987, Washington was ready to green-light high-technology sales to India of jet engines for Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) and Cray supercomputers (Rajghatta 2004). Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov revived the idea of a trilateral during his December 1998 visit to India and during Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji’s February 1999 visit to Moscow (Nadkarni 2010). In 1998, New Delhi’s ties with the United States had been temporarily disrupted after India’s nuclear tests, but Beijing’s open and strident condemnation of India—when juxtaposed with China’s history of surreptitiously aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program—was hardly designed to foster support in New Delhi for a putative anti-Western alliance. Beijing’s cool reception to the idea both in the mid-1980s and late 1990s mirrored the same distrust of New Delhi joined with a disinclination to consider India in the same league of great powers as China. Moreover, China coveted US technology and valued trade and investment as a necessary adjunct to the country’s economic development. While China joined Russia in decrying US

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“hegemonism,” Russian efforts to promote an Asian/Eurasian united front against US predominance foundered on the shoals of disinterest in India and China. The palpably unilateralist thrust in US foreign policy under George W. Bush prompted the first RIC meeting of foreign ministers in 2002. These meetings have been held annually (with a few exceptions) and allow the three countries an opportunity for dialogue on matters of pressing regional and global concern. But beyond serving as a talking shop, the RIC format has not registered any gains on the global diplomatic stage and has yielded very little by way of strategic clout or meaningful policy coordination. RIC summits have been held twice: in St Petersburg on the sidelines of the 2006 G-8 summit and in Buenos Aires on the sidelines of the 2018 G-20 summit. The Buenos Aires summit closed with the release of three independent statements from the leaders, signifying a lack of cohesion among RIC interlocutors (Official Website of the President of Russia 2018). Cooperation on devising a peaceful dénouement in Afghanistan, based on shared concerns over regional stability and terrorism, would have been one of the issue-areas most amenable to effective coordination within the RIC framework. However, the competing interests of each have rendered the contemplation of a joint solution nearly impossible. India and Russia had supported the Northern Alliance, which served as the backbone of US support during the 2001 invasion. But after the 2014 US announcement of withdrawal from Afghanistan, the decision of Russia, China, and Pakistan to include the Taliban in the peace process left India isolated. Were the RIC format more vigorous, Afghanistan would be the ideal issue on which the three sides could coordinate as China has influence with Pakistan—and the latter with the Taliban. A concerted effort could have allayed India’s concerns over a Taliban return to Afghanistan by giving New Delhi, an important stakeholder, a voice in the peace process. A strong RIC has been made even more unlikely in the face of an asymmetric Sino-Russian alliance favoring China and of a growing Indo-US alignment.

Conclusion The one consistent pattern during the Cold War was that Beijing’s willingness to accommodate India came at moments when China felt beleaguered internationally and when Sino-Soviet competition for influence was acute. This augurs ill for Sino-Indian comity in the twenty-first century, as a rising China is no longer constrained by Russian power or influence and Russia instead plays the role of a junior partner. The more probable checks on China’s global rise are likely to come either from domestic challenges or from an aggressive overreach internationally that hems in India and in doing so generates momentum toward a formalized Indo-US alignment.

Bibliography Arms Control Association (2017) “Arms Control and Proliferation Profile: China,” Fact Sheets & Briefs ( July), available online at www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/chinaprofile#nw (accessed 9 February 2019). Arms Control Association (2018) “Arms Control and Proliferation Profile: India,” Fact Sheets & Briefs ( January), available online at www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/indiaprofile (accessed 9 February 2019). Badhwar, I. and Trehan, M. [1985] (2013) “Rajiv Gandhi’s Visit Proves a ‘Turning Point’ in Indo-US Ties” (15 July), reprinted in India Today (23 December), available online at www.

Russia: balancer in India–China relations?  393 indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/stor y/19850715-rajiv-gandhis-visit-proves-aturning-point-in-indo-us-ties-770198-2013-12-23 (accessed 9 February 2019). Blood, A. (1976) Through the Looking Glass: The Indo-Soviet Treaty (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Military Issues Research Memorandum, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College) (9  November), available online at https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a033008.pdf (accessed 9 February 2019). Burr, W. (ed.) (2004) “National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 145,” The National Security Archive, Document 3 (21 December), available online at https://nsarchive2.gwu. edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB145/index.htm (accessed 28 January 2019). Chen, J. (1992) “The Sino-Soviet Alliance and China’s Entry into the Korean War,” Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 1 ( June), Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, available online at www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFAE7. pdf (accessed 17 December 2018). Dasgupta, S. (2017) “Russia Refused to Toe China Line on Doklam,” The Times of India (2 September), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/russiarefuses-to-be-influenced-by-china-on-doklam-issue/articleshow/60328019.cms (accessed 17 February 2019). DeSutter, P. A. (2003) “China’s Record of Proliferation Activities,” Assistant Secretary for Verification and Compliance, Testimony before the US-China Commission, Washington, DC (24 July), US Department of State Archive, available online at https://2001-2009.state.gov/t/vci/ rls/rm/24518.htm (accessed 9 February 2019). Garver, J. W. (1991) “The India Factor in Recent Sino-Soviet Relations,” The China Quarterly 125 (March): 55–85. Guha, R. (2011) “An Asian Clash of Civilizations? Revisiting the Sino-Indian Conflict of 1962,” Economic and Political Weekly 46(44/45) (5 November): 51–61. Hutt, D. (2017) “Why Russia Won’t Choose Sides between China and India,” Forbes (16 November), available online at www.forbes.com/sites/davidhutt/2017/11/16/why-russiawont-choose-sides-between-china-and-india/#1721bdca6d7a (accessed 1 February 2019). Jones, R. (2000) “China’s Proliferation Record,” Proliferation Analysis (25 July), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, available online at https://carnegieendowment.org/2000/07/25/ china-s-proliferation-record-pub-367 (accessed 12 February 2019). Kim, D. (2010) “The Crucial Issues of the Early Cold War: Stalin and the Chinese Civil War,” Cold War History 10(2) (May): 185–202. King, G. (2012) “The Silence that Preceded China’s Great Leap into Famine,” Smithsonian (26 September), available online at www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-silence-thatpreceded-chinas-great-leap-into-famine-51898077/ (accessed 8 February 2019). Klochko, M. (1971) “The Sino-Soviet Split: The Withdrawal of the Specialists,” International Journal 26(3) (Summer): 556–566. Korsunskaya, D. (2014) “Putin Says Russia Must Prevent ‘Color Revolution’, ” Reuters (20 November), available online at www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-securityidUSKCN0J41J620141120 (accessed 6 February 2019). Krepon, M. (2008) “Looking Back: The 1998 Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Tests,” Arms Control Today (11 June) Arms Control Association, available online at www.armscontrol.org/ act/2008_05/lookingback (accessed 3 February 2019). Lau, M. (2015) “People’s Daily Attacks Spread of US Ideology and Warns of ‘High Price to Pay’ for ‘Falling in Trap’,” South China Morning Post (15 June), available online at www.scmp.com/ news/china/policies-politics/article/1822063/communist-party-paper-sees-red-over-colourrevolutions (accessed 6 February 2019). Mao, Z. (1959) “Outline for a Speech on the International Situation,” Wilson Center Digital Archive (December), available online at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/118893 (accessed 16 February 2019). Mastny, V. (2010) “The Soviet Union’s Partnership with India,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12(3) (Summer): 50–90.

394  Vidya Nadkarni Mitra, D. (2016) “Exclusive: India’s 300-Page Application for NSG Membership,” The Wire (1 July), available online at https://thewire.in/diplomacy/revealed-indias-300-page-applicationfor-nsg-membership (accessed 9 February 2019). Mukerji, A. (2018) “India-Russia Ties: 70 Years and Counting,” The Pioneer (20 May), available online at www.dailypioneer.com/2018/sunday-edition/india-russia-ties-70-years-andcounting.html (accessed 7 February 2019). Nadkarni, V. (1995) “India and Russia: The End of a Special Relationship?” Naval War College Review 48(4) (Autumn): 19–33. Nadkarni, V. (2010) Strategic Partnerships in Asia: Balancing Without Alliances (London: Routledge). Nehru, J. (1988) “Speeches, 1949–1953,” in S. Hay, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition: Modern India and Pakistan, Second ed., volume two (New York: Columbia University Press): 400–402. Official Website of the President of Russia (2018) “Russia-India-China meeting” (1 December), available online at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59278 (accessed 9 February 2019). O’Rourke, R. (2019) China’s Actions in South and East China Seas: Implications for US Interests— Background and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service (31 January), available online at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42784 (accessed 6 February 2019). Pradhan, S. D. (2015) “The Indo-Pak War 1965 and the Tashkent Agreement: Role of External Powers,” The Times of India (24 October), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/blogs/ChanakyaCode/the-indo-pak-war-1965-and-the-tashkent-agreement-role-ofexternal-powers/ (accessed 10 February 2019). PressTV-India (2019) “India Will Receive S-400 Systems without Delay: Russia” (10 January), available online at www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/01/10/585395/Russia-India-S400-USsanctions (accessed 9 February 2019). Pringsheim, K. H. (1965) “China’s Role in the Indo-Pakistani Conflict,” The China Quarterly 24 (October–December): 170–175. Prozumenschikov, M. Y. (1996) “The Sino-Indian Conflict, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet Split, October 1962: New Evidence from the Russian Archives,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9 (Winter): 251–257, available online at www.wilsoncenter. org/sites/default/files/CWIHPBulletin8-9_p4.pdf (accessed 10 February 2019). PTI (2017) “Rajiv Gandhi’s Visit to China Broke the Ice, Says Chinese Diplomat Zeng Xyyong,” The Indian Express (13 October), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ rajiv-gandhis-visit-to-china-broke-the-ice-says-chinese-diplomat-zeng-xyyong-4888822/ (accessed 9 February 2019). Radchenko, S. (2014) Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rajghatta, C. (2004) “Reagan and India: Great Expectations,” The Times of India (6 June), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Reagan-and-India-GreatExpectations/articleshow/722192.cms (accessed 9 February 2019). Sagar, R. and Panda, A. (2015) “Pledges and Pious Wishes: The Constituent Assembly Debates and the Myth of a ‘Nehruvian Consensus,’ ” India Review 14(2): 203–220. Small, A. (2013) “Why Is China Talking to the Taliban?” Foreign Policy (21 June), available online at https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/21/why-is-china-talking-to-the-taliban/ (accessed 3 February 2019). Smith, J. M. (2017) “COMCASA: Another Step Forward for the United States and India,” The Heritage Foundation (13 September), available online at www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/ comcasa-another-step-forward-the-united-states-and-india (accessed 9 February 2019). Soviet Memorandum (1962) “Soviet Memorandum on the Sino-Indian Border Issue,” Wilson Center Digital Archive (22 October), available online at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/ document/121895 (accessed 10 February 2019). Talbott, S. (2004) “The Day a Nuclear Conflict Was Averted,” YaleGlobal Online (13 September), available online at https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/day-nuclear-conflict-was-averted (accessed 3 February 2019).

Russia: balancer in India–China relations?  395 The Economic Times (2018) “China Won’t Let India Go Past Pakistan in Race for Nuclear Suppliers Group Membership” ( July 12), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes. com/news/defence/china-wont-let-india-go-past-pakistan-in-race-for-nuclear-suppliersgroup-membership/articleshow/52620186.cms (accessed 9 February 2019). The Times of India (2018) “India Russia S-400 Missile Deal: All You Need to Know” (5 October), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-russia-s400-missile-deal-all-you-need-to-know/articleshow/66066460.cms (accessed 9 February 2019). Topychkanov, P. V. (2018) “U.S.-Soviet/Russian Dialogue on the Nuclear Weapons Programme of India,” Strategic Analysis 42(3) (May): 251–259. UNSC Resolution (1998) “Security Council Condemns Nuclear Tests by India and Pakistan,” Resolution 1172, United Nations Organization (6 June), available online at www.un.org/ press/en/1998/sc6528.doc.htm (accessed 3 February 2019). US Department of State, Office of the Spokesperson (2018) “Joint Statement on the Inaugural US-India 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue” (6 September), available online at www.state.gov/ joint-statement-on-the-inaugural-u-s-india-22-ministerial-dialogue/ (accessed 17 February 2019). Wolff, O. C. and Ostermann, C. (trans.) (1996) “Record of Conversation (from East German archives) between Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and Mongolian Leader J. Zedenbal, Beijing, 26 December 1962,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9: 265–269, available online at www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/CWIHP_Bulletin_8-9.pdf. Zhao, S. (1988) “A State-Led Nationalism: The Patriotic Education Campaign in PostTiananmen China,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 31(3) (September): 287–302. Zhou, B. (2018) “Why China-Russia Military Exercises Should Provoke Soul-Searching in the West” (18 September), South China Morning Post, available online at www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2164632/why-china-russia-military- exercisesshould (accessed 6 February 2019). Zhou, E. (1959) “Premier Chou En-lai’s [Zhou Enlai’s] Letter to Prime Minister Nehru,” Wilson Center Digital Archive (7 November), available online at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter. org/document/175959.pdf?v=1e8bdb140ea9671eecba1c252bca0865 (accessed 16 February 2019). Zubok, V. (trans.) (2001) “Document No. 3: Memorandum of Conversation of N. S. Khrushchev with Mao Zedong, 2 October 1959, Beijing,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 12–13 (Fall): 262–270, available online at www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ CWIHPBulletin12-13_p2_0.pdf (accessed 11 February 2019). Zubok, V. (2017) “The Soviet Union and China in the 1980s: Reconciliation and Divorce,” Cold War History 17(2): 121–141.

24 India, China, and Japan’s policy of Asian regionalism Izuyama Marie

India was marginalized in Japan’s Asian policy in the period 1958–1966 and continued to be peripheral till the turn of the century. But India “came back” to “East Asia” when Japan lobbied for Indian membership in the East Asia Summit (EAS) in 2005. How are the processes of marginalization and resurgence of India in Japan’s Asian policy to be explained? Existing literatures cite a power shift especially the rise of China in the region ( Jaishankar 2018; Yoshimatsu 2019). Situating Japan–India bilateral relations, which used to be treated in a vacuum into the regional strategic context, is a welcome trend. However, it is too simplistic and ahistorical to see contemporary Japan–India bilateral relation as representing a move from estrangement to rapprochement caused by China’s rise. This chapter tries to place Japan’s triangular relations with India and China in the context of Japan’s policy of Asian regionalism.1 Instead of using the overall power configuration in Asia as an explanatory variable, this chapter uses both economic and ideational factors to explain Japan’s perception of the relationship between the region and itself. This approach allows for greater agency on the part of Japan and perhaps also of India. The Cold War in Asia in the 1950s and 1960s revolved around tensions and conflicts with China. Japan could hardly resist the structuring effect of the Cold War, but it had relative freedom of choice in articulating a regional architecture although most of its preferences could not be realized in the short term. India also advocated regionalism in Asia in the early post-World War II period when communist China was still struggling to get diplomatic recognition. Both Japan and India had desired to take a leadership role in “bridging” Asia and the West, but their idea of “Asian solidarity” differed. Their policy orientation too was different, as Japan’s approach was commercial while India’s approach was political (Murthy 1968: 41). These differences shaped their bilateral relations when they faced the China problem in the early years after World War II. Shared concern about China did not help Japan and India cooperate in building regional mechanisms. However, forty years on, the renewed China problem worked the other way around, that is, shifting India from the periphery to the center of Japan’s Asia policy. This chapter examines how India exited Japan’s strategic calculations during the 1950s and 1960s and re-entered those calculations in the 2000s. Japan, India, and China are all major powers that want to be at the political, economic, and cultural center of Asia. Contemporary International Relations studies regard the rise of China and India as a key development just as the rise of Japan in the 1980s drew attention. The preoccupation with rising powers reflects a Western view that Asian states might challenge the international status quo. The reason why Japan

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used to be, and China is now, taken seriously as rising powers is that they represent models of non-Western economic development. Japan’s state-led export-oriented model (the so-called flying geese model) and China’s mixture of political authoritarianism and market economy (the so-called Beijing consensus) pose challenges to the Western model. Whether the Japanese and Chinese models are powerful enough to attract followers in Asia and whether their existence has diminished the appeal of Western values is debated. In the case of Japan, its policy of regionalism that promotes both export-led economic growth and linkages with Japan was carefully crafted not to challenge US global and regional preferences (Hoshiro 2008).

India and Japan in post-World War Asia In the past decade, studies based on Japanese primary sources have shed light on the origins of Japan’s regionalism in Asia (Oba 2004; Hoshiro 2008). They reveal the opportunities and constraints, both external and internal, facing Japan in the 1950s. However, India’s place in Japan’s diplomacy at the time has not been fully researched. This seems odd, as India occupied the center of Japan’s “return to Asia” policy at least through the 1950s. In the early post-World War period, Japan greatly regarded India’s leadership in Asian regionalism and tried to make Japan–India cooperation a test case of Asian comradeship. However, there were fundamental differences between India and Japan on the nature of Asian cooperation. Those differences were clearly revealed at the Bandung Conference. In this section, we will first look at why Japan regarded India as a valued partner in Asian regionalism. It will then turn to the Bandung Conference from the Japanese perspective. Finally, it will analyze Japan–India relations during Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke’s time in office when Japan needed India for recovering its self-confidence as an Asian state. India’s centrality in Japan’s return to Asia In 1951, Japan regained its sovereignty with the signing of the Peace Treaty at San Francisco. It simultaneously signed a security treaty with the United States which effectively tied its security and diplomacy to the United States. From the beginning, Japanese leaders contemplated regionalism in Asia as a way of constructing a sense of belonging. The geographic scope of the region for Tokyo at the time was Asia minus two China and two Korea where Cold War was fought.2 India’s centrality in Japan’s regionalism policy had ideational and economic roots both of which were related to the “loss of China” after the communist victory there. Ideationally, India was the partner that could help expiate Japan’s World War guilt. Relations with India were relatively free from Japan’s wartime guilt as India had renounced its reparation claims soon after the San Francisco Treaty. Moreover, Indian leaders had praised the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War as the first triumph of Asia over the West which helped restore devastated national pride (Kwon 2008: 115–116). It was natural that Japanese leader felt a sense of relief when India accepted Japan as a legitimate member of international society. Economically, India was expected to compensate for the “loss of China,” that is, the loss of markets on the mainland. Trade with mainland China was strictly regulated by the US’s CINCOM policy (Inoue 2010: 77). Also, Japan had to find an alternative supplier of natural resources especially iron ore. Japanese politician, bureaucrats, and

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business alike felt the urgency to build economic linkages with India and Southeast Asia in order to restore the Japanese economy. The Japanese steel industry rushed into India in search for iron ore and in 1951 provided a project loan for India’s Goa mines. This was one of the first Japanese develop-and-import schemes (Yamanouchi 2003: 65). In 1958, Japan’s first Overseas Development Aid (ODA) was made available for the development of the Bailadila Iron Mine in India (Tanaka 2015: 6). However, Japan’s attempt to go beyond extracting resources and building a steel plant in India failed. The initiative had come from Takasaki Tatsunosuke, who later led the Japanese delegation to Bandung and promoted Japan–China business cooperation. With his experience of heavy industry in Manchuria during World War II, he believed that combining Indian natural resources and Japanese technology could help develop the steel industry in India. In November 1952, Takasaki, who was head of the public sector Electric Power Development Company, negotiated with India. The Indian side was represented by C. C. Desai, P. C. Bhattacharya, and B. K. Nehru. India soon opted out of the negotiations (Inoue 2018: 228–233). The Indian side did not understand Japan’s urgency in looking for external economic links and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cautioned his colleagues to be “very careful not to get entangled” with Japanese “customers” (Nehru 1952: 94–95). While the attempt to forge Japan–India steel cooperation exemplifies Tokyo’s enthusiasm for building economic link with India, the Japanese learnt that its economic re-entry into Asia was liable to be seen as not so different from its past record in Manchuria (Takasaki 1953: 42–43). Bandung Conference, 1955 Why did Japan participate in the Bandung Conference? How did the Bandung experience shape Japan’s foreign policy? Why did India and Japan differ at Bandung? Recent studies of Bandung reaffirm India’s attempts to make the gathering a success. Analysis of Nehru’s speech there, in which he made every effort to avoid divisions among participants on Cold War lines, suggests that India’s priority was to promote non-alignment within Asia and Africa (Abraham 2008; Huei 2009, although he refers to “neutralism”; Singh 2011). Also, India’s role of engaging China, evident in earlier studies, is not refuted (Huei 2009). Subimal Dutt, a Foreign Service officer who accompanied Nehru, writes that the prime minister was keen to get the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence which had prominently featured in the India–China agreement on Tibet, embodied in the final communiqué (Dutt 1977: 100). On China, he testifies to Nehru’s efforts to have China better accepted by Asian countries by advising Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai on what its smaller neighbors feared about China (Dutt 1977: 98–99). This older account of India’s leadership in propagating the non-aligned principle as well as its effort to engage China is upheld in the more recent literature on the Bandung Conference. However, seen from Japan, the conference appears very differently. To understand Japan’s perspective, it is important to note that Japan was insecure about its place in Asia, with no leader as established as Nehru. As a result, Tokyo took a more reactive and lowkey approach. Its experience of Bandung shaped Japanese diplomacy (Miyagi 2001). Japan’s diplomatic thinking around Bandung can be summarized as follows. First, there was debate over the degree of “diplomatic autonomy” from the United States. For Prime Minister Hatoyama, Bandung was an opportunity to show policy independence from the United States. On the other hand, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) did

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not support this view. The dependency-autonomy debate, or cooperative-autonomous debate, has been a big issue ever since in both policy circle and academic circles (Soeya 1992; Hoshiro 2007). Second, Bandung had implications for Japan’s burgeoning “economic diplomacy.” The Hatoyama government had appointed Takasaki, then minister of the Economic Council, as head of delegation to Bandung. Hatoyama and Takasaki had decided to focus on the economic agenda at the meeting. Their thinking was that rather than walking the tight rope between the United States and Asian countries sympathetic to communism, Japan should make an effort to expand its economic engagement in Asia (Miyagi 2001: 89–90). This too has remained an enduring element of Japanese diplomacy. The India–Japan encounter at Bandung was quite revealing as well. Nehru’s evaluation of the Japanese delegation was either critical or at least far from positive. “The Japanese … did not play an important role,” wrote Nehru. He further observed that they were “anxious to push Japanese trade and commercial interests” (Nehru 1955: 137). In saying this, Nehru may have been aware of the constraints on Japan as he also referred in this context to the “pressures from the United States.” But he did not fully understand that Japan’s economic diplomacy came from a conjuncture between “diplomatic autonomy” and “Asianness.” What we can note here is Nehru’s disdain on economic matter or, more fundamentally, the low priority accorded to economics in Indian diplomacy. This is confirmed in the memoirs of B. K. Nehru, an Indian delegate at Bandung, who prepared the economic brief. Bandung was “the first time the Ministry of External Affairs showed some interest in such lowly matters as the increase of Indian foreign trade,” he wrote. He continued sarcastically that the “brahmins” of the foreign office believed that “their function was to maintain peace in the world and to ensure social justice for the entire human race” and that economic matters should be left to “banias” of the finance and commerce ministries (Nehru 1997: 261). Evidently, the Indian brahmins and Japanese banias could not connect either. This was a fundamental difference in Indian and Japanese foreign policy that was revealed at the Afro-Asian gathering and that affected their views of each other in the decades ahead. On the other hand, on engaging China, India and Japan happened to be on the same side. According to Miyagi, Zhou Enlai had repeatedly been supportive of Japan during the conference. When debate on neo-colonialism got heated, Zhou suddenly referred to the Japanese proposal as a focal point for compromise. In fact, the Japanese proposal had been intended to counter the Five Principles, but it was too vague to draw attention as such (Miyagi 2001: 133–139). Bandung also provided the opportunity for bilateral meeting between Zhou and Takasaki who expressed their hope for diplomatic normalization. Nothing came of the meeting because of external constraints including US policy on Taiwan. But Takasaki and Liào Chéngzhì, the Chinese delegate, later negotiated the landmark Sino-Japanese Long-Term Comprehensive Trade Agreement, so called “LT Trade Agreement,” an acronym for Liao and Takasaki. Prime Minister Kishi and hope for India Although India did not have a high regard for Japan at this juncture, Tokyo still had high expectations with respect to the prospects of India–Japan economic cooperation in the regional setting.

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Basically, Japan’s idea of regional economic cooperation was to mobilize funds from the United States and to build plants with Japanese technical assistance. It tried to sell this idea at the Colombo Plan (established in 1950), which was the first regional institution to admit Japan after World War II. India was the only country which accepted the idea of an “Asian development agency for Asians” at least in principle. Other members were more inclined toward bilateral aid or indifferent to Asianness with regard to the source of funding (Hoshiro 2008). For its part, Japan saw India as the country most capable of utilizing the aid in its economic planning (Okita 1955: 73). Prime Minister Kishi, who pushed “Asian Diplomacy,” believed that Japan could be an equal alliance partner with the United States only if it consolidated its status in Asia (Sato 1993: 154). India was the entry point of this venture for him. He attached special importance to his Southeast Asian, including India, trip in 1957. The origin of Kishi’s tilt toward India was in his ideological closeness to the Japanese political thinkers, Kita Ikki and Okawa Shumei. Socialist-nationalist Kita and pan-Asianist Okawa inspired Kishi to believe in Japan’s destiny of leading Asia. Some scholars point out that Kishi’s Asianism had an affinity with the wartime Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Hoshiro 2008: 141–145; Kwon 2008: 33–35). But Kita and Okawa’s great interest in India might also have had influence on Kishi’s policy.3 Later in 1957, Nehru visited Japan and was welcomed enthusiastically. Kishi could now be shown on an equal footing with a great Asian leader. However, neither a concrete proposal for an Asian development fund nor a shared perception of the communist threat resulted. Instead, Kishi and Nehru negotiated Japan’s first ODA to India (Sato 1993: 158–160; Hirose 1999). Ushiba Nobuhiko, who negotiated a trade agreement with India and later led Japan’s economic diplomacy, recalled that the first ODA to India was an epoch-making event for Japan as it turned Japan from being a recipient to a donor country (Ushiba and Yamamoto 1984: 17). An official from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) explained the significance of ODA to India as a contribution to Indian development on the one hand, and an opportunity to export Japanese capital goods on the other hand. He hailed the first ODA as fulfilling the vision of “Asian mutual assistance” (Hayashi 1957: 127).

India’s marginalization in Japan’s vision of regionalism Given Kishi’s negative view of communist China and his effort at cooperation with democratic countries was at the heart of Japan’s diplomacy, the India–China war in 1962 should have promoted India–Japan cooperation in the region. Ironically, though, India and Japan just changed strategic sides vis-à-vis China. India moved to the confrontation side and Japan moved to the engagement side. This strategic gap would be the last blow to India’s status in Japan’s regionalist policy. When the border dispute developed into massive armed attack from China, Nehru asked for assistance from Japan. This was a complete reversal from 1957 to 1958, when Kishi had tried to persuade India to cooperate with the democratic camp. At the time, Nehru had insisted to Kishi that the real threat stemmed from the expansionism of the great powers rather than from communism (DAMOFA A’-0152). In response to India’s request for moral support, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato wrote to Nehru that it was a deep “regret” that communist China had resorted to large-scale military action. The government and people of Japan expressed their “sympathy” with India. However, his letter carefully avoided to take a position on the disputed border

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and made no commitment to assist India. The Japanese ambassador in Delhi had been pushing for material assistance as he felt it was vital to help India in concert with the United States and other Western countries to check China (Takahashi 2005: 50). But this view was a minority in MOFA. MOFA rejected his proposal arguing that “Japan should be the last to assist India” and should refrain from “enhancing Indian capability” (DAMOFA A’-0372). Some scholars suggest that Japan’s response to the India–China war was an exceptional case of the country’s dependent diplomacy and its role as a “surrogate of the US” (Pardesi 2018: 20–21). What was the cause of Japan’s taking an independent line from the United States and rather aloof attitude toward India at this critical moment? In retrospect, the answer lies in Japan’s attachment to China. First, at the political level, the relationship with China had begun to gain importance in Japan’s domestic politics. A pro-China group was emerging even in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) around 1960. The group was linked to factions opposed to Kishi (Inoue 2010: 232–236). Soon after Ikeda’s letter to Nehru, politicians from the Socialist Party persistently questioned the government in the Diet on its attitude to the dispute until the government admitted that Japan was not endorsing the McMahon Line (Committee on Foreign Affairs, The House of Representatives, 41th Session 1962). Second, at the intellectual level, sympathetic views of China were also dominant. Japanese intellectuals were disappointed at the downfall of the Five Principles and the ideals of peaceful coexistence that India and China had adopted. They were confused over which side was right in the dispute, but few criticized China. One commentator even thought that the Tibet uprising was a plot by domestic anti-China elements in India. Only one Japanese journal referred to the Tibetan issue, but its report endorsed the “normalization” and “liberation” of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Japanese intellectuals did not conceive of the Tibet issue as the problem of an ethnoreligious minority (Baba 2010: 206). Third and most importantly, at the policy level encompassing bureaucrats, politicians, and businesses, promoting trade with China was a priority. Takasaki, former Minister of Commerce and head of the delegation at Bandung, still had a strong interest in deepening economic relations with China. He worked vigorously toward a trade agreement, persuading Ikeda as well as the Chinese side and coordinating business interests. Takasaki first visited China in October 1960, but it was in August 1962 that China turned positive on the proposal (Inoue 2010: 243–258). As the LT trade negotiation was in the final stages, Japan was anxious not to upset China on the border conflict with India. By this time, India was losing attractiveness both in economic and ideational terms. Official and semi-official reports observed that India was not fertile ground for economic cooperation. Japanese officials and businesses encountered many stumbling blocks in India and felt that Indian planners neglected rural development, were overly supportive of large-scale factories, and were insisting on local content in manufacturing (Nichiin Keizai Kyoryoku Chosa Iinnkai 1967: 34–37). The report urged India to clarify its policy on fostering indigenous private business which could be at the core of economic cooperation (Nichiin Keizai Kyoryoku Chosa Iinnkai 1967: 67). The widening gap between the Indian development model based on a “socialist pattern of society,” which prioritized the public sector and heavy industrialization, and the Japanese development model, which encouraged private sector and export orientation, made Japanese more hesitant to engage in economic cooperation.

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Another factor accounting for the fading interest in India was Japan’s perception of the decline of Indian diplomatic leadership after the defeat to China. The Southwest Asian Bureau of MOFA observed that, post-Nehru, India was isolated in international society, with its prestige diminishing not only in Afro-Asian groups but also in the Non-Aligned Movement (DAMOFA A’-432). This view was widely shared among business leaders and intellectuals. As Okita Saburo, another key person for Japan’s economic diplomacy, stated: “Our interest in India seems to have cooled down recently. It might be a reflection of the fact that Indian glory represented by Gandhi and Nehru has declined in the real world” (Nihon Keizai Chosa Kyogikai 1965: foreword). The exit of nationalist leaders like Nehru and Sukarno marked the end of nationalism as a reference point for Japan’s diplomacy in Asia. Rapid economic growth in the 1960s boosted Japan’s confidence in its economic diplomacy in Asia. Tokyo proposed a Ministerial Conference for the Economic Development of Southeast Asia in 1966 which was Japan’s first initiative for a regional institution. India and Pakistan were intentionally excluded from the group (Takahashi 2005; Hoshiro 2008). Instead, Japan–India bilateral consultations at the secretary level were instituted.

India’s entry to East Asia After drawing the line of regionalism at Southeast Asia in the middle of 1960s, India’s marginalization in Japan’s plans proceeded irrevocably. India’s isolation from East/ Southeast Asian growth was both cause and consequence of the diplomatic and economic differences between Japan and India. The end of the Cold War did not bring drastic change to Japan’s India policy, though two fundamental reorientations in India paved the way for change. The first was the opening up of the Indian economy after the currency crisis in 1991, and the second was rapprochement with the United States. However, it was only in the middle of the 2000s that Japan’s changing perceptions of China triggered a turn to India. The resurgence of India in Japan’s regionalism policy was visible at the inauguration of the EAS. Japan’s promotion of the EAS was a major initiative in its Asian regionalism. This was the first time that Japan’s concern for China was directly reflected in a policy debate. It was also the first time that Japan adopted “value diplomacy” while negotiating the criteria for membership. Many scholars have pointed that Japan’s pursuit of India’s involvement in East Asia community-building is an outstanding example of institutional balancing (Yamamoto 2011) or multilateral hedging against China’s increasing influence in regional institutions ( Joshi and Pant 2015). This author shares the view that the China factor worked in this new regional architecture-building. However, India-as-balancer theory does not explain why India was chosen for this role. Our tentative answer is that rising China required a reinterpretation of regional order. Facing China’s leadership challenge, Japan had to search for a new set of values other than “development” and “separation of politics and economics” as the basis for its reassertion of leadership in Asia. The inclusion of India in the EAS was the piece which was lacking in Japanese diplomacy: evoking a universal value of regional inclusivity. To better understand how Indian involvement in East Asian regionalism fitted Japan’s value diplomacy, it is necessary to describe China– Japan relations at the bilateral, regional, and global levels and to contrast them with India–Japan relations. Table 24.1 gives a short summary of Japan’s relations vis-à-vis China and India.

India, China, and Japan’s policy  403 Table 24.1 Japan’s partnership with China and India China Bilateral relations

India Cooperation/conflict in the region

Economic Interdependence Competing factor (Trade, FDI) in ASEAN →Friction →mutual denial as “hegemony” Ideational History issue as Defining East Asia factor vulnerability as ASEAN+3 for Japan versus ASEAN+6

Bilateral relations

Cooperation/conflict in the region

Substantial relations Connecting India thin →Opportunity with ASEAN as (India as candidate good for Japan for China plus one) and the region Shared value of “Rule-based democracy as order” and strength to take “inclusiveness” global role evoked to embrace India

Source: Author’s own.

Weighing China and India in Japan’s policy of regionalism in Asia Japan’s bilateral relations with China and India have different trajectories.4 This is clearly visible in the nature of Japan’s “strategic partnerships” during the period 2000–2005. Strategic partnerships are largely a feature of post-Cold War Japanese foreign policy. Originally, they were meant to consolidate bilateral relationships with countries outside the “Western camp” or “liberal camp” that are particularly important for Japan. Indonesia is an early example. Later, with the transformation in the US–Japan alliance, enhancing partnerships with India became a common strategic objective of both Japan and the United States (MOFA 2007). In India’s case, Japan established a “Global Partnership” in August 2000 when Prime Minister Mori visited India. In 2005, it acquired a more strategic orientation and was raised to the level of a full-fledged “strategic partnership” in December 2006. There are three important points to be noted. First, the partnership with India started with a “global” focus although the bilateral substance was relatively thin. This is strikingly in contrast to the Japan–China partnership. Second, the Japan–India partnership became more strategic when a regional focus was added. Third, shared values had to be invoked for the Japan–India partnership to be raised to a strategic partnership (MOFA 2005, 2006b). In China’s case, Japan was more cautious in using the term “strategic partnership.” This is because strategic partnership was used by China in opposition to the term “alliance” (Masuda 2007: 101). However, Japanese scholars interpret a “mutually beneficial strategic relationship” as an arrangement that goes beyond the traditional China–Japan peace and friendship treaty of 1978. For Japan, the strategic relationship with China means that both parties are committed to cooperation in the East Asia framework as well as the six-party talks on North Korean nuclearization. Japanese scholars see the significance of the strategic relationship in transforming Japan–China relations from a purely bilateral construct to one embedded in regional and global society (MOFA 2006a, 2008). Mutual recognition of role at the global level The difference between the Japan–India strategic partnership and the Japan–China strategic partnership is that the former in essence comfortably accepts mutual recognition of a global role while the latter does not.

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In India’s case, bilateral differences over issues such as India’s nuclear tests of 1998 and Japan’s de facto sanctions in the wake of the tests did not become an obstacle to working together for nuclear disarmament or any other multilateral issues at the global level. The Japan–India strategic partnership can be traced back to Prime Minister Mori’s visit to India in August 2000. It was the first Japanese Prime Minister’s visit after 1990. The central agenda for the Japanese government was inducing India into Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which ultimately was in vain. Despite their disagreement on the test ban treaty, both leaders agreed to cooperate on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) reforms which later featured in the Joint Declaration of December 2001. The Declaration envisaged Japan and India “being in a position to play a significant role in the international community of the twenty first century” (MOFA 2001). In China’s case, bilateral issues, especially the history issue, became a stumbling block for Japan–China cooperation after Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s consecutive visit to Yasukuni Shrine from August 2001 on. Anti-Japan feeling was spread in China and developed into non-governmental activities such as Chinese non-governmental organizations (NGO) landing on the Senkaku Islands or anti-Japan agitations at Football Asia Cup in China in the summer of 2004. The Chinese government also started natural resources development in the East China Sea where the maritime boundary delimitation is in dispute. What is even more important here is that China opposed Japan’s initiative for UNSC reform. In September 2004, Japan, Germany, India, and Brazil (G4) formally made a collective bid for permanent membership of the Security Council. China vehemently opposed to the move. After UN General Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a statement clearly recommending expansion of the Security Council in March 2005, a group of Chinese Americans in the United States started an internet signature campaign against Annan’s recommendation. The e-campaign then elicited ten million signatures in mainland China. The campaign was clearly not without official Chinese backing (Kokubun et al. 2013: 217; Miller 2013: 109). In sum, around 2005, Japan and India came to recognize a global role for each other and tried to conjunct their efforts to play that role. In contrast, China sought to prevent Japan from playing a larger role. Mutual recognition of role at the regional level From at least 1977, under the Fukuda Doctrine, Japan had searched for a larger role in the construction of peace and stability in Southeast Asia. However, its status as ASEAN’s (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) leading partner was shaken in November 2002 when China and ASEAN agreed on a free trade agreement (Oba 2017: 57). China’s attempts to engage the region deepened with the China–ASEAN Expo in Nanning begun in 2004, which soon grew into a major business event (Oba 2017: 58). Beijing also challenged Tokyo’s leadership of the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) when in 2009 China attempted to become the largest financial contributor to the CMI (Oba 2017: 59). Japan may have been overly sensitive to China’s challenge, but Beijing’s explicit denial of Tokyo’s role at the global level had contributed to growing fears in Japan and strengthened its determination to compete with China in the region. This culminated in Japan’s recognition of India as a trustworthy strategic partner and its decision to push for Indian inclusion in the EAS (Sato 2012).

India, China, and Japan’s policy  405

The idea of East Asian community-building was first articulated by Prime Minister Koizumi in January 2002 in Singapore in a speech titled “A Sincere and Open Partnership.” Initially, the “community” in Koizumi’s proposal meant ASEAN plus three, i.e. Japan, China, and Korea. He recognized the “active role China is willing to play in regional cooperation.” He also nominated Australia and New Zealand as “core members,” but “future cooperation with India” was just referred to as an example of nonexclusivity in a putative East Asian community. Friction at the bilateral level revolving around trade and the history issue as well as China’s denial of Japan’s global role between 2002 and 2005 affected Japanese perceptions deeply. Another factor that encouraged Japan–India cooperation was Chinese and Indian interactions with ASEAN at this time. The parallel processes of India–China competition (Acharya 2017; Jaishankar 2018) and Japan–China competition in Southeast Asia encouraged the idea of India–Japan cooperation in the region. Once the decision to launch the EAS had been taken, Japan worked hard for India’s membership in the grouping. Instead of competing with China to host the first summit, Japan focused on submitting ideas through a series of concept papers. Departing from a functional and building-block approach, Japan instead promoted the notion of respect for universal values and global norms as the basis for membership (CEAC 2005: 8, 10). Yamada Takio, an MOFA officer involved in the EAS negotiations, concluded that Japan had made a persuasive case for “inclusiveness” which opened the door for India (CEAC 2005: 25). India represented “transparency” and “inclusiveness” in Japanese policy circles, although some officials were not convinced about the advantages of an Indian presence (Tanaka 2009: 167).

Conclusion In the early post-World War period, Japan looked to India as an ideal partner in Asian regionalism. Ideationally, India did not look upon Japan as an enemy state after World War II. It was therefore more approachable diplomatically and was thought to be more willing to be seen in the company of Japan. Economically, India could compensate for the loss of China as a market and investment destination. Prime Minister Kishi especially tilted toward India and cultivated a friendship with Nehru under the banner of Asian diplomacy. He believed that Tokyo could carve out some degree of autonomy from the United States only if Japan was accepted as a trusted leader in the economic development of Asia. His premise was that Japan understood fellow Asian states better than the United States. However, India did not fit into Japan’s vision of regionalism where the economic logic was presented as transcending the Cold War in Asia. Japan believed Asia could opt for regional economic cooperation autonomously from the Cold War even if it was allied with the United States. However, India’s non-alignment and speaking up on behalf of Peaceful Coexistence made its presence in Asian regionalism awkward. In addition, India looked down on Japan’s merchant-like approach in Bandung: the India–Japan relationship was like the relationship between a brahmin and bania. The India–China war of 1962 set in motion the further marginalization of India in Japan’s regionalism policy. Thereafter, Japan concentrated on building an architecture in Southeast Asia, east of the Arakan. The China factor was crucial in the marginalization process, though in a subtle way. Prime Minister Ikeda expressed sympathy with India in his letter to Nehru. But there was no material assistance although there was

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debate over supplying aid in line with the Western countries. Ideational and economic factors worked differently from Kishi’s time. Politician who felt guilty about Japans’ actions in China opted for a conciliatory approach toward Beijing. Intellectual sympathy was also with revolutionary China and tended to ignore communism’s violent record. Bureaucrats and businesses were more interested in trade agreements with China. There were no equivalent champions of India. It is quite revealing to see the reverse trend in Japan’s perspectives on India and China in the 2000s. Basically, by this time, Japan–China enjoyed a thick interdependence at the bilateral level However, China’s retrieval of the issue of historical wrongs and, as a consequence, denial of Japan’s global role made Tokyo insecure about its position in Asia. Also, China’s massive economic expansion in ASEAN was eroding Japan’s leadership role in Asia. At this juncture, Japan turned to India. Under “China plus one,” an economic strategy to diversify foreign direct investment (FDI) in order to move some manufacturing facilities out of China, Japan saw India and Vietnam as ideal locations for hedging the China risk. Negotiating for an expanded membership of the EAS, Japan argued vigorously for a rule-based order and inclusiveness. This approach had the effect of distancing Japan from China on the one hand and bringing it closer to India on the other hand. Whether India’s regaining of centrality in Japan’s Asia policy should be seen as the outcome of just another ad hoc policy which treats India as derivative of China or whether it represents a fundamental transformation of Japan’s foreign policy toward a value-based approach which ends the exceptional treatment of China and reevaluates India’s principled stand will only become clearer in the years ahead.

Notes 1 Oba defined regionalism as policy orientation to constitute “region” with countries which have geographical proximity and shared norm and value, delimiting “we” and “them.” Inside such “regions,” policy coordination and cooperation is to be pursued (Oba 2004: 2). On Japan’s ideas of Asian regionalism, see Inoguchi (2011). In this article, I use the terms Japan’s “regional policy” and “regionalism” interchangeably. 2 Japan did not have diplomatic relations with mainland China and both Koreas in this period. 3 On Okawa and India, see Okawa ([1939] 1993) and Otsuka (1995). 4 Recent literatures on Japan–India bilateral relations in English are Mukherjee and Yazaki (2016), Basrur and Kutty (2018), and Horimoto (2016).

Bibliography Abraham, I. (2008) “From Bandung to NAM: Non-Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–65,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 46(2): 195–219. Acharya, A. (2017) East of India, South of China: Sino-Indian Encounters in Southeast Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Basrur, R. and Kutty, S. N. (eds.) (2018) India and Japan: Assessing the Strategic Partnership (Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan). Dutt, S. (1977) With Nehru in the Foreign Office (Calcutta: Minerva Associations Publications). Horimoto, T. (2016) “Japan-India Rapprochement and Its Future Issues,” Japan’s Diplomacy Series, Japan Digital Library, JIIA, available online at www2.jiia.or.jp/en/pdf/digital_library/ japan_s_diplomacy/160411_Takenori_Horimoto.pdf. Huei, P. Y. (2009) “The Four Faces of Bandung: Detainees, Soldiers, Revolutionaries and Statesmen,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 39(1): 63–86. Inoguchi, T. (2011) “Japanese Ideas of Asian Regionalism,” Japanese Journal of Political Science 12(2): 233–249.

India, China, and Japan’s policy  407 Jaishankar, D. (2018) “A Confluence of Two Strategies: The Japan-India Security Partnership in the Indo-Pacific,” in R. Basrur and S. N. Kutty, eds., India and Japan: Assessing the Strategic Partnership (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan): 43–64. Joshi, Y. and Pant, H. V. (2015) “Indo-Japanese Strategic Partnership and Power Transition in Asia,” India Review, 14(3): 312–329. Masuda, M. (2007) “China—Quest for a ‘Responsible’ Power,” in J. Tsunekawa, ed., East Asian Strategic Review 2007 (Tokyo: National Institute for Defense Studies): 93–128. Miller, M. C. (2013) Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2001) “Japan-India Joint Declaration” (10 December), available online at www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/india/joint0112.html. MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2005) “Japan-India Partnership in a New Asian Era: Strategic Orientation of Japan-India Global Partnership” (29 April), available online at www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/india/partner0504.html. MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2006a) “Japan-China Joint Press Statement” (8 October), available online at www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/china/joint0610.html. MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2006b) “Joint Statement towards Japan-India Strategic and Global Partnership” (15 December), available online at www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/india/pdfs/joint0612.pdf. MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2007) “Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee: Alliance Transformation: Advancing United States-Japan Security and Defense Cooperation” (1 May), available online at www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/ security/scc/pdfs/joint0705.pdf. MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) (2008) “Joint Statement between the Government of Japan and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on Comprehensive Promotion of a ‘Mutually Beneficial Relationship Based on Common Strategic Interests’” (7 May), available online at www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/china/joint0805.html. Mukherjee, R. and Yazaki, A. (2016) Poised for Partnership: Deepening India-Japan Relations in the Asian Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Murthy, P. A. N. (1968) “India and Japan,” in J. D. B. Miller, ed., India, Japan, Australia: Partners in Asia? (Canberra: Australian National University Press): 29–58. Nehru, J. (1952) “To Nabakrushna Chaudhuri,” in S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, 20 (6 November) (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2001): 94–95. Nehru, J. (1955) “Note to Chief Ministers,” in S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, 28 (28 April) (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2001): 129–138. Nehru, B. K. (1997) Nice Guys Finish Second: Memoirs (New Delhi: Penguin Books India). Oba, M. (2017) “Sino-Japanese Competition over Regional Institutions in Asia,” in J. Reeves, K. L. Nankivell and J. Hornung, eds., Chinese-Japanese Competition and the East Asian Security Complex: Vying for Influence (New York: Routledge): 53–70. Pardesi, M. S. (2018) “Evolution of India-Japan Ties: Prospects and Limitations,” in R. Basrur and S. N. Kutty, eds., India and Japan: Assessing the Strategic Partnership (Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan): 13–42. Singh, S. (2011) “From Delhi to Bandung: Nehru, ‘Indian-ness’ and ‘Pan-Asian-ness,’ ” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 34(1): 51–64. Tanaka, A. (2015) “Resource Nationalism and the Supply of Iron Ore to the US and Japanese Steel Industry,” in Shigen Sodatusen Jidai ni okeru Toransunashionaru Kigyo no Hikaku Keieishi: Tekkosekino Jirei (Business History of Transnational Enterprises for Iron Ore), Kyoto University, Graduate School of Economics Discussion Paper Series, No. J-15-002: 2–9, available on www.econ. kyoto-u.ac.jp/dp/papers/DP_ J-15-002_2.pdf. Yoshimatsu, H. (2019) “The Indo-Pacific in Japan’s Strategy towards India,” Contemporary Politics 25(4): 438–456.

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India, China, and Japan’s policy  409 Takahashi, K. (2005) “1960 nendai ni okeru ‘Nichigoin Teikei Koso’ to Ajiataiheiyo no Kokusaikankei ( Japan-Australia-India Trilateral in the 1960s and International Relations in the Asia Pacific),” Gaikoshiryokanpo ( Journal of the Diplomatic Archives) 19: 47–87. Takasaki, T. (1953) “Haigun no Sho Hei o Kataru (A Defeated General Talks of Battle),” Jitsugyo no Nihon 56 (7): 42–43. Tanaka, H. (2009) Gaiko no Chikara (The Power of Diplomacy) (Tokyo: Nippon Keizai Shinbun Shuppansha). Ushiba, N. and Yamamoto, T. (1984) Ushiba Nobuhiko: Keizai-gaiko e no Shogen (Ushiba Nobuhiko: Witness to Economic Diplomacy) (Tokyo: Diamond). Yamamoto, Y. (2011) “Ajiataiheiyo no Anzenhosho Akitekucha (Security Architecture in the Asia Pacific),” in Gaimusho Kokusaimondai Chosakenkyu Teigenjigyo Hokokusho (Research and Policy Recommendation Report, Ministry of Foreign Affairs) (Tokyo: The Japan Institute of International Affairs): 111–135, available online at www2.jiia.or.jp/pdf/resarch/h22_chiki_togo/all. pdf. Yamanouchi, T. (2003) Kitugan (Fighting Cancer) (Tokyo: Ronsosha).

Archival documents DAMOFA (Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan). A’-0152, “Kishi Sori Daiichiji Tonan Ajia Homon Kanke Kigiroku (Prime Minister Kishi’s Visit to Southeast Asia, Record of Meeting)”. DAMOFA (Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan). A’-0372, “Chukyo Indo Kokkyo Funso, Kakkoku no Taido (Communist China-India Border Conflict: Response of Major Countries)”. DAMOFA (Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan). A’-432, “Nichiin Teiki Kyogi ( Japan-India Consultations)”.

25 India and the China–Pakistan relationship De-hyphenation and re-hyphenation Andrew Small

“De-hyphenation” is a familiar concept in the context of US policy in South Asia, undergirding the deepening of the US–India relationship over the last two decades. As the seminal RAND study of 2001 argues, de-hyphenation is an approach in which “U.S. relations with each state would be governed by an objective assessment of the intrinsic value of each country to US interests rather than by fears about how US relations with one would affect relations with the other” (Tellis 2001: 88). In the period following Xi Jinping’s landmark 2015 visit to Pakistan, China attempted to pursue its own version of de-hyphenation. The argument for doing so took similar form: that China’s relationship with Pakistan should be pursued autonomously rather than being subject to the constraints imposed by concerns about Indian reactions. The starting points for China’s calculations in 2015 and the United States in the years following the Indian nuclear tests were evidently very far apart: where the United States was looking to transcend a fraught history, the longstanding, close relationship between Beijing and Islamabad already amounted to perhaps China’s strongest international friendship. Yet there were genuine limitations that Beijing respected, partly out of hesitation about the risks of deeper entanglement with a partner that was prone to adventurist behavior and partly out of concern for the need to maintain a stable relationship with New Delhi. These limitations were largely suspended during a period that saw an all-fronts upgrade in the China–Pakistan relationship, with the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as its centerpiece. This chapter argues that Beijing’s attempt at de-hyphenation has already been abandoned and is unlikely to be restored. The traditional rationale for maintaining at least a modicum of balance to Chinese policy in South Asia has been newly reinforced by developments since 2015. The acceleration of competitive dynamics in the region, partly (but not solely) stimulated by China’s policy adjustment, was seen by Beijing after the Doklam crisis to represent an unacceptable level of security risk that needed to be mitigated. There was little payoff for China’s attempt to double down on its commitments to Pakistan through CPEC; furthermore, the imbalance that CPEC caused in the relationship and the greater exposure to Pakistan’s internal challenges that China faced arguably had a detrimental impact on Chinese interests even without taking broader regional security dynamics into account. The result is that a relationship that once seemed set to enter a qualitatively different phase is now on a trajectory that more closely resembles the one that it was on before CPEC started: deep, close, but with clear limitations.

The China–Pakistan relationship in context The roots of China’s relationship with Pakistan are unquestionably India-centric. In the absence of the sharp deterioration in relations between China and India and the 1962

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Sino-Indian war, it is unlikely that China–Pakistan relations should have evolved in the manner that they did, including the speedy Sino-Pakistani border settlement, the supportive role that China played in the 1965 India–Pakistan war, and the subsequent military relationship between the two countries. Yet even in the early years, Beijing’s concerns about Pakistan’s eagerness to draw China into conflict with India elicited trepidation about how to handle the security dynamics in the region. Chinese backing for Pakistan in 1965 was rhetorically strong and logistically helpful, but it remains unclear whether China was really willing to intervene on Pakistan’s behalf (Gauhar 1993: 352–353). In 1971, while Pakistan and the United States were eager to see China take on a direct role in Bangladesh’s war of independence, China did not contemplate it seriously, given the risks of being drawn into confrontation with the Soviet Union (as well as India) and the fragile domestic political situation in Beijing (Sisson and Rose 1990: 216). In the aftermath of that conflict, Indian planners have still perceived the need to prepare for a potential two-front war, but Beijing’s view was that they should not be maneuvered into conflict with India as the result of spillover from an Indo-Pakistani confrontation. The Chinese role was rather to be a stepped-back one. China would continue to provide the weapons supplies that Pakistan needed, including support to its nuclear program. It would also help Pakistan to establish an indigenous militaryindustrial capacity for many of its defense needs and joint production processes for those that could not or should not be fully indigenized. But Pakistan was led to understand that it should no longer assume there was any realistic prospect of direct military intervention by China if war were to break out. The fundamentals of this arrangement remained in place amid many other shifts in the relationship itself and the external environment. China continued to support the development of Pakistan’s military capabilities in order to maintain its counterbalancing role in South Asia, ensuring that India’s military remained primarily focused on the country’s western borders. Beijing sustained these commitments regardless of external pressures, most notably the US sanctions of the 1990s. Beyond that, political and security cooperation was subject to specific exigencies and to broader adjustments in Beijing’s strategy. For instance, coordination on support to militant groups in India stopped after Deng Xiaoping came to power and cut off various Cultural Revolution-era programs for spreading Mao’s revolution. Following the normalization of Sino-Indian ties, China also backed away from its forceful defense of the Pakistani position on Kashmir and the focus, during the Jiang Zemin era, was a foreign policy rooted in Chinese economic goals. The symbolic high point of Chinese efforts to develop a more balanced policy in South Asia was Jiang’s 1996 visit to Pakistan, in which he argued in a speech unmistakably referring to Kashmir that Pakistan should look at disputes “from a long perspective” and that “if certain issues can not be resolved for the time being, they may be shelved temporarily so that they will not affect the normal state-to-state relations”— comments made as China also sought to set aside or resolve many of its own land border disputes ( Jiang 1996). In the subsequent decade, despite unhappiness about India’s waiver at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), Beijing acquiesced reluctantly so as not to be the sole actor blocking the deal. Even during live or potential conflicts, China took care not to lean too far in Pakistan’s direction and typically coordinated with the United States to ensure that the risks of war were contained. In some cases, China’s role was restricted to generalized diplomatic support; others elicited specific actions by Beijing to put pressure on Pakistan or to help defuse tensions. For example, during the Kargil conflict, Beijing conveyed a strong view to Pakistan that it should pull its troops back, and after the Mumbai attacks of 2008, China made clear that it would no longer

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provide protection to Jaish-e-Mohammad at the United Nations (UN) Security Council’s 1267 Committee. China treated the Sino-Pakistani relationship on terrorism and militancy with particular ambivalence. The close military and intelligence ties between the two countries meant that Pakistan played an invaluable role in helping Beijing to navigate the darker corners of the militant world, whether brokering China’s dealings with the Taliban, discouraging groups operating under ISI influence from targeting China, or putting the squeeze on Uighur militants in the wider region. Yet China had limited trust in Pakistan’s willingness to pursue the Uighur agenda with full conviction and was critical of the fact that the militant group that Beijing saw as its chief external terrorist threat, the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), continued to operate in North Waziristan. Beijing also grew increasingly concerned about the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan itself, which had direct implications for China’s own personnel: for a period of time in the mid-2000s, attacks from Baloch groups and the Pakistani Taliban made Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world for overseas Chinese workers. Particularly after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, China also saw real risks that Kashmiri militant groups would precipitate an Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange. All of Beijing’s anxieties reflected uncertainties about the extent and nature of Pakistan’s control over groups operating from its territory and the sympathy and support that parts of Pakistan’s security establishment had for jihadi agendas. While China was willing to provide diplomatic protection to favored militants at Pakistan’s request, it was always clear that this was provisional and only offered as an explicit favor, which could be withdrawn if circumstances required it. Economic relations between the two sides were also weak. Trade flows between China and Pakistan were modest by comparison not only with India but with countries with comparable economic or population size to Pakistan. Even as Chinese investments accelerated elsewhere, those in Pakistan fell far short of the public promises. Of the $66 billion worth of financial assistance pledged from China to Pakistan between 2001 and 2011, only six percent of it came through (Wolf, Wang and Warner 2013: 37–38). Most of the projects that were pursued were of a politico-strategic nature rather than strictly economic in scope, including the Karakoram Highway, which provided a direct road linkage between the two countries and extended Pakistan’s writ in GilgitBaltistan; the nuclear power plants; the military-industrial cooperation; and the initial development of Gwadar port. None of this was helped by the dire security situation in Pakistan from 2007 onward, by Pakistan’s repeated economic cycles of boom, bust, and balance of payments crises, or by the energy crisis that seriously impinged on companies’ ability to operate within the country. The net result of all this was a relationship where, although the nature and scope of the security ties had achieved a high level of trust when it came to the strategic essentials (earning China the moniker of Pakistan’s “all-weather friend”) and consistently high levels of political support in Pakistan, the limitations were also clear. The lack of broader economic ties, let alone cultural ties, meant that the relationship was managed by a relatively small number of security and political figures on both sides. There was little mutual depth of exposure among elites or the wider public. China did try to be as accommodating of Pakistan’s interests as possible—putting them at the front of the queue for commercial deal approvals, offering political cover in international organizations, and trying to navigate any differences behind closed doors. But most elements of the bilateral relationship, beyond the basic structural calculus that underpinned the two

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sides’ ties, were also subject to negotiation, outside pressure, and pragmatic, case-bycase appraisals on Beijing’s part. India was well aware that while the fundamentals of the Sino-Pakistani relationship may have remained unchanged, it was a far from fruitless endeavor to place Pakistanrelated issues on the bilateral agenda with China. In many ways, New Delhi had sought to ensure that Beijing saw their relationship in more expansive terms than the context and confines of South Asian security. This ranged from the Sino-Indian economic relationship—vastly larger than China’s commercial relations with Pakistan—to India’s role as China’s major developing world counterpart in negotiations on issues ranging from World Trade Organization (WTO) deals to climate change, India’s dominant regional maritime position and influence in China’s own neighborhood, and its broader trajectory as a global power (where Pakistan was far more regionally bound). On matters of security sensitivity, however, India felt obliged to raise its concerns, not least given the protective diplomatic role that China so often played for Pakistan. While Beijing was not always willing to move on issues such as terrorism listings, ensuring that China was at least required to spend political capital in this area meant that it may be prepared to shift at an opportune moment, to press Pakistan through its own channels, or to offer trade-offs elsewhere. Raising India’s sovereignty concerns over Kashmir served to remind China that New Delhi’s stance on questions such as Taiwan, Tibet, or Xinjiang may also be subject to revision if China tilted too far in Pakistan’s direction. The very conduct of the China–Pakistan relationship reflected an awareness of all these sensitivities, with Beijing exhibiting a degree of sheepishness about how such a security-centric set of ties were perceived, particularly by India. Sino-Pakistani ties were generally kept discreet and low-profile, with relatively few major visits that were invariably tied to broader regional trips; India typically appeared to be the primary destination and Pakistan the adjunct.

The de-hyphenation experiment The turning point for China’s approach to Pakistan was Xi Jinping’s April 2015 visit. Beijing sought to take advantage of what should otherwise have been a hit to the relationship: the postponement of Xi’s previous attempt at a visit in 2014, which was derailed by large-scale protests in Islamabad (on matters unrelated to Xi’s appearance). The original trip itinerary saw Pakistan paired, as usual, with India. The revised date would be a stand-alone. In addition, the Chinese side was convinced that with the launch of CPEC, they now had a different story to tell—even to India. As the SinoPakistani relationship moved beyond its traditional security parameters and questions of regional balance, there was now an opportunity to embrace it more openly. Several considerations fed into China’s approach. First, given Beijing’s need for reliable partners to facilitate its global power projection capabilities, ties with friends and quasi-allies needed a qualitative upgrade (Zhang 2012). Not only would this be useful in its own right, it should also achieve a demonstration effect, encouraging others to see the benefits of such a relationship themselves. Second, more openly displaying the Sino-Pakistan relationship would require casting off various prior inhibitions. Where China had once trodden with greater care on issues that included the scale and scope of its nuclear plants, investments in sensitive locations, more visible forms of military cooperation (such as an expansion in naval activities), and more robust forms of diplomatic support and protection, these restrictions would be quietly abandoned. As in other areas

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of Chinese foreign policy, this was also a byproduct of Xi Jinping’s broader shucking off of old constraints: a more powerful China, it was believed, should be able to deepen ties with its “friend” without having to worry so much about others’ sensitivities (interviews, Beijing, Islamabad, Washington DC, 2014/2015/2016). Third, the shift was a necessary corollary to India’s own upgrading of ties with the United States. For many years, as governments and administrations changed in New Delhi and Washington, Beijing had hoped that there would be an opportunity to prise the two sides apart. Modi’s own problematic relationship with the United States before becoming Prime Minister appeared to present precisely such a moment. His forward-leaning embrace of the strategic logic of US–India ties looked like it might finally represent a level of consolidation too far to walk back. While China would seek to portray CPEC itself as neutral or even beneficial for India, Beijing was aware that the broader upgrade would be perceived by New Delhi as a reflection of deepening strategic competition (Krishnan 2014; Tellis 2018). The most visible manifestation of the de-hyphenation was the large package of investments announced during Xi Jinping’s visit, under the auspices of CPEC. Not only was the initial figure of $28 billion the largest commitment made to date in the framework of the recently launched Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it promised to run as high as $46 billion, and was explicitly dubbed the BRI’s “flagship” by China’s foreign minister. The symbolism of CPEC outran the substance, even at an early stage. The investments themselves were very heavily focused on the energy sector and a more limited set of road and rail projects in Pakistan itself, with few cross-border projects: there was no railway line, pipeline, or even significant road upgrades beyond those agreed prior to CPEC, and no major investments in Gilgit-Baltistan (Rafiq 2017). Only the resumption of the Chinese presence at Gwadar and the fiber-optic cabling took the form of projects that might have direct security ramifications. Nonetheless, the language of the “corridor” evoked the notion, both in Pakistan and internationally, of a flow of energy, trade, and transportation links between Xinjiang and Balochistan via a set of physical connections. Few commentaries on the subject failed to mention China’s “access to the Indian Ocean” or avoiding the “Malacca Dilemma,” despite the total absence of plans to attempt such an expensive and topographically challenging set of logistical connections. The development of greater strategic significance was the thoroughgoing effort on China’s part to involve itself across virtually the entire gamut of the Pakistani economy. The first infrastructure-focused phase of CPEC was intended to move into industrial cooperation, followed by an even wider array of joint activities laid out in the CPEC long-term plan, from agriculture to tourism. The political salience of CPEC for Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative also translated into considerably greater traffic between the two countries: political and economic delegations, ministries that had spent little time dealing with one another in the past, businesspeople, academic and cultural exchanges, and vastly greater attention in the two sides’ respective media. The presence of Chinese in Pakistan was, for the first time, tangible; the presence of China itself in Pakistani political, economic, and security debates moved from the margins to the center. China attempted to sell CPEC to India as a means of stabilizing its western neighbor and directing its attention toward economic concerns. Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang’s pitch to Modi was that it would “wean the populace from fundamentalism” (Gupta 2015). Yet India understandably saw the effort through the traditional security prism that had acted as an accurate guide to the two sides’ relationship for decades. It was

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skeptical both of the notion that an economically bolstered Pakistan would not be a more emboldened Pakistan and that there would not be direct security ramifications, whether an adjustment of material presence in Kashmir or the use of Gwadar for naval purposes. China’s new stance was also conjoined with a more forceful defense of Pakistani interests in other environments—blocking India’s membership of the NSG, making a more intractable defense at the UN when it came to 1267 committee designations—and a deepening of China’s economic presence in South Asia, where a military role in Colombo port in 2014, for instance, had swiftly followed the commercial one. As a result, not only was CPEC raised in critical terms in public, it was invoked directly by Modi in bilateral meetings with Xi, in meetings with senior US officials, and used as grounds for India to refuse attendance at the inaugural BRI forum in Beijing in 2015. India also made a point of turning what might otherwise have been private battles over terrorism listings into public ones, raising China’s handling of the Masood Azhar issue in the press rather than simply in discreet negotiations in New York. There were a number of other bilateral irritants in the relationship between China and India, but Pakistan-driven factors, all relating to Beijing’s upgrade and “de-hyphenation” push, occupied a more prominent role than they had in previous years. And where Beijing had previously shown flexibility, its position now seemed more intractable. Between 2015 and late 2017, both CPEC and the deepening Sino-Indian tensions continued along parallel—and occasionally overlapping—tracks. Elements of the original $28 billion package were being delivered at some speed, and the two sides moved into further negotiations on the long-term plan and on the modalities of the next phase of projects, with tens of billions of dollars in new investments under consideration. Meanwhile, with relations between Beijing and New Delhi deteriorating on multiple fronts, the two sides ultimately found themselves in one of the most serious border standoffs in decades over Doklam amid an atmosphere that was highly uncongenial to amicable resolution. The timing of the crisis was of high political significance for Beijing: with China going into a sensitive Party Congress meeting, where Xi was seeking to consolidate his long-term control of the Chinese Communist Party, a major, unexpected flare-up on China’s western borders was a serious problem and embarrassment. Militarily, strategically, and politically, the situation was perceived internally to reflect errors of judgment and miscalculations on China’s part that reflected poorly on its entire approach to the region (interviews, Beijing, November 2017). China’s broader geo-strategic environment was also becoming increasingly difficult as the Trump administration pursued a more explicitly competitive approach not only in the traditional military realm but also in areas of trade and technology cooperation that Beijing had expected would remain untouched. Not only was there believed to be a specific need to realign China’s South Asia policy, but also India became a focal point for Chinese efforts to stabilize relations with other major powers amid turmoil in US–China ties ( Japan and Europe being other prominent examples). Beijing’s public attempt to draw a line under Doklam and arrest the slide in relations culminated in the Wuhan summit, where both sides effectively committed to stabilize their relationship and manage their emerging competition in a more predictable and judicious fashion. But one of the obvious ways to bring this about was by abandoning the de-hyphenation effort. Instead, China would put elements of the relationship with Pakistan back on the negotiating table between Beijing and New Delhi. Late 2017 was also the point at which the more serious problems facing CPEC came into focus. China had already had to navigate a more complicated political environment

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than it had expected, including public criticism, heightened media scrutiny, and complaints about specific routes and projects, contract terms, and debt levels. But during the 2017 Joint Cooperation Committee meeting, the principal bilateral mechanism for managing CPEC, it was also clear that Pakistan’s economic and political situation was heading into even more difficult territory. The first indications that the country was facing a balance of payments crisis and a potential weakening of other economic indicators—fiscal, growth, and inflation—were combined with growing army pressure on Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). CPEC had been indelibly bound up with the PML-N’s own infrastructure agenda, and Beijing had question-marks over whether the lack of a second term would prove problematic for its investments. The second phase of CPEC—industrial cooperation—was also running into obstacles from Pakistani businesses, who lobbied to ensure that the proposed special economic zones (SEZs) would not impinge on domestic industry, whether in their overall scale or the concessions for SEZ investors. The net result was a virtual freeze of CPEC. While the existing projects that had been agreed continued to move ahead— totaling $19 billion—all other major infrastructure projects that had been under negotiation were no longer on the table, given that it appeared Pakistan could not afford them and that it was unclear whether they were politically feasible or desirable. The election in July 2018 of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) cemented this development. The PTI had been the political party that had taken the most publicly critical position on CPEC in opposition and maintained many of the criticisms—some of which were repeated in public—in government. In its base in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the PTI had also been the least enthusiastic about implementing CPEC on the ground. The new government also made clear that China would not occupy the same level of prominence as it did for its predecessor. This was partly a reflection of the fact that China was simply not as useful for an agenda focused on anti-corruption measures and socio-economic development as it had been for the PML-N’s infrastructure building agenda. But the political symbolism went well beyond this. The traditional protocol for Pakistani leaders is for China to be the location of their first overseas visit. Imran Khan, by contrast, visited the UAE and Saudi Arabia before finally paying an ill-prepared trip to China. Given that the PTI’s election was heavily assisted by the Pakistani army, Beijing has inevitably interpreted these developments as reflecting military views as well, even if they are not always directly expressed. The Pakistani army had specific reservations about its lack of oversight of the Sharif brothers’ CPEC-related financial dealings and also channeled much of the grassroots discontent that it experienced about China’s growing economic presence (interviews, Islamabad, Karachi, September 2018 and January 2019). A slowdown, or freeze, would suit both sides, even if the public narrative that CPEC was a success still needed to be maintained for the sake of the BRI’s wider image. At the April 2019 Belt and Road Forum, Imran Khan announced a modest new package of Chinese aid and progress on the stalled Gwadar projects, but it was a far cry from Nawaz Sharif ’s “game-changer.” With CPEC—the supposed vehicle for the China–Pakistan relationship upgrade— stalling and pressures to stabilize ties with India growing, Pakistan found itself facing a different political environment. The first evidence came during a BRICS summit, hosted by China in Fujian in September 2017, when China agreed to wording for the declaration that named a number of Pakistan-based terror groups as a security threat. While this mirrored wording that had been agreed upon at another foreign ministerial

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meeting where Pakistan was present, the absence of consultation on this occasion and the higher profile of a heads-of-state meeting meant that it was perceived at the very least as an indication that China’s desire to smooth relations with India might come at Pakistan’s expense (interviews, Islamabad, November 2017). Even more problematic for Pakistan was the Financial Action Task Force meeting in February 2018, where China agreed to a deal with India: it would not attempt to block Pakistan’s grey listing in return for Indian support to the Chinese candidate for the presidency of the body (Sharma 2018). This was followed in May 2019 by China finally acquiescing to the designation of Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar at the 1267 committee, which had been a subject of contention for years, following the Pulwama attacks. Notably, on each occasion where Beijing has been willing to adjust its position to reflect India’s concerns, it has been on terrorism-related questions, where Chinese sympathies with Pakistan were already limited. China had warned Pakistan that it should not harbor indefinite expectations that China would spend political capital on the issue, not only with India but also with other Western powers at the UN Security Council who ultimately took the lead on the Masood Azhar designation. And in the post-Wuhan environment, other political needs for China became more pressing.

Conclusion Some of the structural factors that led China to attempt its de-hyphenation experiment still hold true: the need for deeper partnerships and alliances for Chinese power projection, alongside a demonstration effect that China’s friends receive clear economic benefits. But the Sino-Pakistani military and intelligence relationship can arguably be better augmented without the level of public fanfare that accompanied CPEC, while Pakistan is one of a number of Chinese friends who have questioned whether large-scale BRI investment packages represent such an economic boon after all. Most of the benefits that China can extract from the China–Pakistan relationship are achievable without any de-hyphenation push, given that Pakistan’s counterbalancing role is one that it plays of its own volition and that an open door to a Chinese military presence and cooperation only serves to reinforce those objectives. If CPEC is not going to catalyze an economic take-off, the de-radicalization of Pakistan, a greater Pakistani focus on the economic dimensions of its national power, or any of the other more ambitious (and, in some case, implausible) goals that China contemplated, then the relationship can more sensibly be pared back to its prior fundamentals. Meanwhile, the factors that led to China’s rethink of its South Asia strategy in late 2017 also look set to hold. Beijing has little expectation of a benign Sino-Indian relationship but at least wants to mitigate the downside risks of an excessively contentious one, whether it comes to the depth and extent of Indo-US strategic cooperation in the region, the risks of escalation at the border, or the intensity of competition with India in third countries. As China prepares for a US–China relationship of a qualitatively more confrontational sort, the impetus to ensure at least some degree of stability among its other relationships and to avoid the development of a full-scale counterbalancing coalition will also necessitate careful management of ties with New Delhi. This confluence of considerations points to a different trajectory for the China– Pakistan relationship than many analysts had expected. From 2015 on, it appeared that the two sides were embarked on an open-ended set of upgrades on almost all fronts. At one level, there will not be a full reversal—$19 billion of investments is considerably

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larger than during the prior economic relationship, and these and other economic linkages will continue on a higher level than before. The level of exchanges among elites on the two sides is also likely to maintain its expanded form. But the last few years have been a chastening experience for those on the Chinese side that had advocated a more comprehensive tilt in Pakistan’s favor. Skeptics in the Chinese system pointed to the economic risk, the differences between the two sides on terrorism (and Islam itself, which many Chinese officials view with suspicion and even prejudice), and the value of a more cautious approach to the regional calculus. Such skeptics are now likely to be in the ascendancy, and China’s political leadership is likely to be wary of any calls for a repeat of the de-hyphenation push. If there is a precipitous plunge in Sino-US relations, with even more explicit need for “side-picking,” it might appear that China would then lean more heavily on its friends. But even then, the value of ensuring a more autonomous or quasi-neutral Indian position is likely to outweigh the benefits of a further tightening in what is already a tight Sino-Pakistani relationship in the areas that matter most to China. Many of the lessons that fed into Beijing’s approach to pre-2015 China–Pakistan ties had been learned over decades of experience in handling not only the relationship itself but also the delicate balance of relations in the broader region. These will now be internalized by another generation of Chinese officials and leaders. For India, which has sometimes been prone to see any talk from China about “balance” in its South Asia policy as so much fiction, the distinction between the 2015 and 2017 window and the prior dynamics is also likely to prove instructive. For Pakistan, this will represent another iteration of the periodic raising of hopes for the relationship with China and subsequent disappointment. But Pakistan also has to contemplate the counter-factual: if the Pakistani economy had not been steered into its usual boom-and-bust cycle, if the CPEC investments had been accompanied by a broader reform program, and if the opportunity had been seized to translate China’s enthusiasm for a relationship upgrade into more successful set of outcomes, would it be facing the same scenario? There is reason to believe that such developments would still have proved insufficient, but there will be lingering questions about whether a rare opportunity to consolidate a de-hyphenated relationship with China was squandered.

Bibliography Gauhar, A. (1993) Ayub Khan: Pakistan’s First Military Ruler (Lahore: Oxford University Press). Gupta, S. (2015) “Govt Makes It Clear: India Has Not Forgotten Pakistan-Occupied K ashmir,” Hindustan Times (24 May), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/india/govtmakes-it-clear-india-has-not-forgotten-pakistan-occupied-kashmir/story- uYgf Yuruxj4e YBfpGV0H7L.html. Jiang, Z. (1996) “Carrying Forward Generations of Friendly and Good-Neighborly Relations and Endeavoring towards a Better Tomorrow for All,” Speech at Islamabad, Pakistan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2 December), available online at www.fmprc. gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/t24909.shtml. Krishnan, A. (2014) “Has India-China Relations Reached an Inflection Point?” India Today (12 September), available online at www.indiatoday.in/magazine/the-big-story/story/ 20140922-india-china-relations-narendra-modi-805211-2014-09-12. Rafiq, A. (2017) “The China Pakistan Economic Corridor: Barriers and Impact,” United States Institute of Peace, Peaceworks No. 135 (October), available online at www.usip.org/sites/default/ files/2017-10/pw135-the-china-pakistan-economic-corridor.pdf.

India and the China–Pakistan relationship  419 Sharma, S. (2018) “US Wanted Japan for FATF Slot, India Backed Beijing,” The Tribune (4 March), available online at www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/us-wanted-japan-for-fatfslot-india-backed-beijing/552585.html. Sisson, R. and Rose, L. E. (1990) War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press). Tellis, A. (2001) “South Asia: US Policy Choices,” in F. Carlucci, R. E. Hunter and Z. K halilzad, eds., Taking Charge: A Bipartisan Report to the President-Elect on Foreign Policy and National Security (Santa Monica, CA: RAND): 83–91. Tellis, A. (2018) “Narendra Modi and US-India Relations,” in B. Debroy, A. Ganguly and K. Desai, eds., Making of New India: Transformation Under Modi Government (New Delhi: Wisdom Tree): 525–535. Wolf, C., Jr., Wang, X. and Warner, E. (2013) “China’s Foreign Aid and Government- Sponsored Investment Activities: Scale, Content, Destinations, and Implications,” RAND, available online at www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR100/RR118/RAND_ RR118.pdf. Zhang, F. (2012) “China’s New Thinking on Alliances,” Survival 54(5): 129–148.

26 Across the Himalayas China in India’s neighborhood Constantino Xavier

China’s recent rise in South Asia has been widely interpreted as leading to an inevitable clash with India, which has traditionally been the predominant power in the region. One popular approach refers to China’s alleged “string of pearls” strategy to surround and isolate India regionally (Dutta 2017). In fact, while India has refused to join China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), all of its neighbors embraced it, further fueling speculation about a regional rivalry. Such simplistic readings, however, ignore that beyond just competition and conflict, India and China share a far more complex relationship in South Asia’s third countries. Their past and present interactions also feature more benign modes of coexistence and cooperation across the region. There is no doubt, however, that India’s traditional role in the region is being increasingly challenged by China’s expanding presence. India’s central geographic location and asymmetric capability advantage over its neighbors have made it the regional hegemon for much of the past seven decades since its independence in 1947. One of the most quoted sources on India’s regional security competition with China in South Asia, the American scholar John Garver, thus notes that Beijing often saw India as a “regional hegemonist,” which “presumes to block the natural and rightful expansion of China’s relations with its [own] neighbours [Nepal, Bhutan]” (Garver 2001: 31). Critical narratives from the neighboring small states have frequently accused the Indian government of interference and “bullying” in its allegedly obsessive quest to control the region (De Silva 1996; Subedi 2005). Explaining such a posture, one scholar notes that “although it was never enunciated explicitly or officially, successive Indian governments have systematically pursued an active policy of denial in South Asia similar to that applied to the Western Hemisphere by the United States in the nineteenth century” (Hagerty 1991: 363). The most frequent comparison is between an alleged Indian “Indira [Gandhi] doctrine” and the American “Monroe doctrine” of the nineteenth century. Mohammed Ayoob thus interprets that India’s “quest for predominance” in South Asia, especially since the 1970s under Indira Gandhi, derives “from the Indian elite’s perception that it inherited the Raj’s strategic and political legacy” (Ayoob 1989: 109). Similarly, another scholar infers that as a “quintessential successor state, India is keen to retain the status quo which its leaders understand in terms of its relative power and territorial boundaries that it was privy to prior to the end of colonialism” (Mitra 2003: 400). Beyond such broad inferences, however, very little evidence-based work exists on how India has operated in the neighborhood and how it has dealt with China, in particular. Most of the literature has focused on the Pakistan angle, including the 1971 war in Bangladesh (Raghavan 2013). On the rest of the region, there is only sparse

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scholarship on Indian perceptions of China’s relations with its neighboring states until the 2000s, and mostly based on secondary sources ( Jain 1981; Garver 2001; Muni and Tai 2012; Lintner 2015). Recent years have seen a rising interest among a new generation of South Asian scholars to examine the history and sectors of China’s relations with their respective countries, but the output remains limited.1 There is also a new generation of Chinese scholars specializing in South Asia, but due to travel restrictions and language barriers, their work has had limited exposure and remains mostly focused on India and Pakistan.2 This limited pool of scholarship and evidence-based research about India–China relations in South Asia’s third countries—India’s South Asian neighbors—may also explain why simplistic narratives about conflict have dominated current analysis. Refuting this alarmist reading of Sino-Indian relations—allegedly from a dynamic of friendship and cooperation, in the 1950s, to today’s inevitable competition and future conflict— this chapter explores a more nuanced and diverse range of interactions. With reference to both historical and contemporary case studies in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, the following four sections examine four different modes of Sino-Indian interaction in South Asia: cooperation, coexistence, competition, and conflict. The concluding section argues that these four modes will continue to operate simultaneously but that China’s expanding presence in the region is fueling a logic of competition that risks escalating to conflict. Delhi and Beijing will, therefore, have to invest in managing their relationship more carefully, especially through greater communication that can enhance the chances for regional coexistence and cooperation.

Cooperation While much emphasis has been placed on the hostile relationship after the 1962 war, India and China also have a tradition of cooperation in the region. This shows that Delhi and Beijing have at times realized the importance of investing in a dialogue about developments in third countries. Such exchanges have seen occasional alignment of policies and even cooperation, especially in the 1950s and also since the 1990s. With today’s increasing focus on regional connectivity and interdependence, there is a renewed emphasis on exploring Sino-Indian joint initiatives involving third countries. While progress has been limited, there is a growing realization on both sides that competition in the security and political realms should not preclude both countries from engaging in economic cooperation in the region. The early 1950s saw India and China coordinating their policies in South Asia. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cultivated a cooperative approach to China, and in some cases even supported China’s diplomatic outreach to its neighbors. For example, while he emphasized India’s special relationship with Nepal, Nehru also recognized the importance of engaging China on key decisions, including the specific timing and objectives of bilateral visits to Kathmandu. Similarly, India was also supportive of Ceylon’s pursuit of a rubber-rice agreement with China, despite Western opposition. While India tried to fend off any extra-regional power from penetrating its sphere of influence, it recognized China’s special stakes due to geographic proximity (Xavier 2016: 110–135). Confiding to his ambassador in Kathmandu, in 1954, Nehru assessed that “[while] there is no present or near danger to Nepal from the so called [Chinese and Nepalese] Communists, a far greater danger is from the Americans.” A few months later, he would

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confide to his Chinese counterpart Zhou Enlai that “American agents are particularly active creating anti-India propaganda” and that “America is creating a lot of trouble [in Nepal]” (Bhasin 2005a: 47). The cooperative regional dynamic between India and China was formalized at the Bandung conference, in 1955, but then gradually weakened until breaking down with the war of 1962. Sino-India positive engagements in South Asia’s third countries returned in the 2000s, after bilateral relations normalized in the 1990s. One of the earliest attempts related to the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar economic corridor (BCIM-EC), which began informally as the Kunming Initiative in the late 1990s. Beijing and Delhi jointly adopted it as an inter-governmental project to increase connectivity between the four countries and link the Bay of Bengal region to Asia’s hinterland. The BCIM-EC has gone through several ups and downs in recent years, and despite rejecting it as part of the BRI, Delhi has continued to pursue the project in its bilateral relations with Bangladesh. A second cooperative dimension relates to how India and China have interacted in South Asian multilateral fora. In 2005, for example, India voted to approve China as an observer member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). As joint founders and largest subscribers of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), China and India have collectively been funding projects in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh since 2015. Finally, in 2016, India also hosted an outreach summit between the leaders from BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and neighboring leaders from countries that form BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation). The BRICS-BIMSTEC outreach summit also saw an unprecedented trilateral meeting between Prime Minister Modi, President Xi Jinping, and Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. A third and lesser known cooperative dimension relates to Sino-Indian political consultations about third countries. These are rarely acknowledged in public but reflect the existence of a silent cooperative mode between their diplomats. In January 2014, for example, India and China closely coordinated their positions to support the re-election of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, thus overriding American and Western pressure to call the elections null (Bhaumik 2017). Similarly, during the 2005–2006 regime crisis in Nepal, the Indian ambassador to Kathmandu recalls sharing Indian assessments with his Chinese counterpart and that Beijing “preferred to have India rather than any Western country, especially the US, playing the principal role in Nepal” (Saran 2017: 171). The prospects for China–India cooperation in South Asia have been increasing as both countries emphasize the economic dimension of their relations and pursue greater connectivity and interdependence. This has been particularly apparent in the aftermath of the Wuhan summit, in 2018, at which Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping normalized bilateral relations after a period of tensions. In its aftermath, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou thus emphasized that “when it comes to connectivity my impression is China and India do not have any principled disagreements” and that both countries will “enhance policy coordination in their neighborhood to discuss cooperation in the form of China India plus one or China India plus X” (Krishnan 2019). This new cooperative mode has been tested successfully in Afghanistan, where China and India jointly trained a batch of diplomats, but it is clear that Beijing wishes to replicate such initiatives in other South Asian countries, with Bhutan, Nepal, and the Maldives being identified publicly as options (Miglani 2018). One particular area in which

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China has been willing to work with India is the India–Nepal–China (INC) trilateral corridor, with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi emphasizing that “Nepal stands as a natural beneficiary from cooperation from China and India” (Varma 2018). While overall reluctant to engage China in third countries in the recent past, the cooperative approach has been gaining traction in Indian government and strategic circles. Analyst C. Raja Mohan, for example, has been advocating for many years that beyond strategic differences and the border dispute, India can work with China on a case-by-case basis, evaluating the merit of each specific connectivity or infrastructure project. In 2018, he thus argued that “Delhi and Beijing have an incentive to reduce their differences on the BRI and find ways to work together on at least a limited agenda of connectivity” (Mohan 2018). This view seems to guide the Indian government’s tentative openness to accept Chinese investments in its Northeast region to facilitate linkages with Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal (Dasgupta 2018). It also indicates that India is warming up to working with China on developing intra-regional and inter-regional connectivity for mutual economic benefit. Despite its opposition to the BRI, for example, an Indian official attended the China-South Asia Cooperation Forum, held in Yunnan, which fosters links between Chinese and South Asian business and industrial stakeholders (Moorthy 2018).

Coexistence Between the extremes of cooperation and hostility, India and China have also often learned to coexist in South Asia’s third countries. This contradicts the popular understanding that India always felt threatened by any Chinese presence and, by default, worked to deny Beijing space in South Asia. In fact, both countries often operated side by side in different sectors across the region, reflecting a surprising Indian degree of tolerance. These instances were not just reflections of Indian incapacity to prevent China from setting up shop in its regional backyard. Instead, in such instances Delhi could have used its diplomatic, military, or economic clout to deny or dislodge Chinese presence, but instead decided to permit it. In some cases, China’s presence was even encouraged because it was perceived to facilitate India’s own interests. The spirit of “peaceful coexistence” between both countries is at the heart of the Panchsheel agreement signed together with Burma in 1954. It prevailed through much of the 1950s, when India and China were invested in their respective spheres of influence which sometimes overlapped, as in the cases of Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Burma. Delhi and Beijing often saw these and other areas as frontier zones where either one or the other would have special but not necessarily exclusive prerogatives (Roy 2011: 194–252). This indicates that, at least in the 1950s before their relations deteriorated, India and China often coexisted peacefully in and around South Asia, rather than competing or conflicting with each other. Coexistence was based on the idea of reciprocity that tolerated the other country’s presence in spheres of influence that were not exclusive. On the Chinese side this included Tibet and Xinjiang, where India maintained diplomatic and commercial missions to pursue its interests well into the 1950s. On the other hand, India initially also tolerated limited direct contact between China and Bhutan and Sikkim (Mathou 2013: 392–396). With China and India normalizing their relations since the 1990s, the space for coexistence has, once again, opened up across South Asia. The most telling example relates to China’s predominant role in Bangladesh’s defense and security sectors over

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the past three decades. Beijing’s emergence since the 1990s as the country’s main military supplier defies the popular logic that India has determinedly opposed security and defense ties between its smaller neighbors and extra-regional powers, especially China (Bhattacharjee 2018). While India may have been unable to match Chinese defense supplies, it certainly uses its leverage to impede Bangladesh from developing close security links to China. The first-ever visit of an Indian defense minister in forty-five years of bilateral relations took place only in 2016, reflecting how Delhi had—at least until then—learned to coexist with a Chinese security presence in its immediate periphery. In other cases, Chinese defense and security relations are even seen as complementing Indian interests in neighboring countries. Beyond incapacity to deny, such instances do not only indicate Indian toleration but also positive acceptance. During the final phase of the civil war in Sri Lanka, between 2006 and 2009, India deferred to Sri Lanka’s request for Chinese military assistance to defeat the Tamil insurgents. While India was unable to deliver ammunition and other critical supplies requested by Sri Lanka, it cleared such extra-regional military support as long as Colombo kept Delhi informed about the nature and terms of such assistance (Chandraperuma 2012: 295–296, 428–430). By outsourcing to Beijing the “dirty job” of supporting the Sri Lankan military offensive against the Tamils, India was, at the same time, also effectively sanctioning China’s presence as a security actor in the region. Finally, India’s comfort levels with China’s political presence in the region can also be gauged from its silence about Beijing’s mediation between Myanmar and Bangladesh during the 2018 refugee crisis. Delhi has been traditionally wary of any external mediation attempts in the region, and in the 2000s had only reluctantly permitted Norway’s mediation in the Sri Lankan peace process, as well as a United Nations role in supporting disarmament and reconciliation in post-war Nepal (Martin 2012; Xavier 2016: 240–241). While India expressed its discomfort in both these cases, it did not express any public reservations about China’s involvement during the 2018 refugee crisis between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Delhi’s choice to stay away from political involvement and, instead, pursue a crisis response focused on relief and rehabilitation, may be seen as indicating its tacit approval of China taking on the burden of mediation and conflict resolution between its two neighbors. India and China have a history of overlapping presence in South Asia’s third countries. This mode of coexistence has gained ground in recent years, as China expands its footprint on the subcontinent. Coexistence should not be seen as a mere expression of Indian inability to oppose China’s expanding footprint. The cases discussed here indicate an Indian tolerance, and in some cases even encouragement, of China’s presence in the periphery. Such cases of coexistence are expected to increase and may include, for example, a growing Chinese presence in Bhutan, where China was largely excluded in the past. At the same time, there are only thin lines separating Sino-Indian coexistence from either cooperation or competition. Coexistence with coordination may be positive in that it enhances division of labor, reducing redundancies and encouraging India and China to focus on their respective comparative advantages. Coexistence with competition may, however, have negative repercussions on third countries, dividing their territory or sectors into separate Indian and Chinese spheres of influence. This would hinder national developmental strategies and weaken the governance structures of South Asian states.

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Informally, such arrangements are already influencing policymakers. In Nepal, India tends to see the Southern Terai plains as its primary area of operation and is often willing to concede the Northern border regions to China and its Tibet-focused security interests. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, Indian officials see the Northern and Eastern areas as critical and are conversely more willing to tolerate China’s presence in the South.3

Competition A third mode of Sino-Indian interaction in South Asia is marked by competition. As China stepped up efforts to intensify political, economic, and security relations with India’s smaller neighbors in the 2000s, Delhi has begun to respond with alternatives, seeking to match and counter Beijing’s inroads. Especially after the announcement of the BRI, India has upgraded its regional policies to increase interdependence with its neighboring states. This has created a competitive dynamic, often intentionally fueled by smaller states who seek to benefit from playing off Delhi against Beijing. Such small state balancing, however, has also increased the risks of greater rivalry and conflict between the two giants. Sino-Indian relations in the past were not always about just cooperation or conflict. Beyond coexistence, examined earlier, Delhi and Beijing also interacted through tacit competition, mutually adjusting their behavior reflexively. In the 1960s, for example, besides open hostility based on attempts to undermine each other, China was also involved in an implicit ideological competition that played out in South Asia’s smaller states. Driven by the Maoist zeal of its Cultural Revolution at home, China invested in a variety of outreach initiatives to attract India’s neighbors. In Sri Lanka, for example, Beijing cultivated the communist movement through political and cultural propaganda and also invested in public diplomacy, for example by supporting the construction of a new convention center in Sri Lanka in the 1960s (Navaratne 1976). In Nepal, China cultivated King Mahendra but, at the same time, also reached out to the communist movement in the country, leading to student protests in 1967 (Baral 2012: 197). India’s own outreach initiatives to the neighbors in the 1960s were at least partially shaped by the need to respond to such Chinese “soft” incursions and contributed to a Sino-Indian “Cold War” competition in the region. In 1963, India’s Ministry of External Affairs decided to reconstitute its external publicity division as an information division to better respond to “anti-Indian propaganda emanating from Peking and Karachi, singly and in collaboration” (MEA 1963: 67). In the specific case of Nepal, for example, the Indian Information Service’s annual report for 1964 called for more resources to counter what it described as an anti-India Nepali press “guided not only directly by China’s ‘silver pieces,’ but also by Pakistani agents who do not mind giving a helpful hand to China in this game” (NAI 1964: 27). Beyond this ideological competition for South Asian hearts and minds in the past, the current race for regional connectivity follows a similar dynamic. China has taken the lead by offering India’s neighbors vast grants and loans for infrastructure development under the BRI. Despite Delhi’s opposition, all of India’s neighbors except Bhutan have joined the BRI. China’s rapid incursions into the region forced Delhi to refocus its attention to the periphery it had neglected for so long. The new “neighborhood first” and “Act East” policies announced by Prime Minister Modi, in 2014, are driven by the understanding that India must offer an alternative to its neighbors. This is based

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on a set of principles that Delhi articulates as a different approach to “sustainable” connectivity (Baruah 2018). It is acknowledged openly by Indian officials and underlines the importance New Delhi attaches to “educating” neighboring countries about the dangers of Chinese connectivity plans as well as the advantages of working with India ( Jha 2018). India’s current competitive approach to China is often visible when it shapes decisions about its own infrastructure investments in the region. For example, Delhi’s interest in purchasing the Mattala airport, in Southern Sri Lanka, was reportedly influenced by its proximity to the port of Hambantota, leased out to a Chinese company for ninety-nine years. As reported by a senior journalist, the “leasing makes sense from a security/ strategic point of view as it will give India eyes on Hambantota” (Bagchi 2017). China’s expanding presence in Sri Lanka’s port sector has also rekindled India’s old interests in developing the Trincomalee port, on the island’s Eastern coast (Parashar 2017). Similarly, India’s public offer for a stake in the Dhaka Stock Exchange, in 2018, was reportedly driven by the need to stem China’s own bid, which ended up prevailing (Stacey 2018). Beyond infrastructure and finance, there are also growing indications that China and India’s focus on disaster response and relief to South Asian states is driven by an increasing competitive logic, as illustrated in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake, in 2015 (Chand 2017). China has also not shied away from exploring its role as a regional newcomer to its own advantage. When India pressured Nepal in 2015 to adopt a more inclusive and democratic constitution toward its minorities, and permitted an economic blockade on the landlocked country, Beijing came readily to Kathmandu’s rescue. While it did not want to directly challenge India in Nepal, according to one official, “it will not let an [anti-India] crisis in Nepal go to waste” (Baral 2016). China’s projection in South Asia has thus not shied away from exploiting anti-India sentiments in the region. Especially through timely and implicitly critical statements of India, Beijing has galvanized local support and further rubbed salt into Delhi’s many hegemonic wounds, some selfinflicted, as in the case of the 2015 blockade on Nepal (Gang 2016). Overall, however, the Sino-Indian competitive dynamic has been beneficial to all parties involved. China has been able to make inroads by focusing on connectivity, infrastructure, and economic development. At the same time, its economic entanglement has also allowed China to improve its image and increase political influence. India, on the other hand, has woken up from its regional slumber and been more focused on its immediate periphery. Under the “neighborhood first” policy since 2014, the Indian government prioritized issues of connectivity and development cooperation with its neighbors. Realizing its limitations to counter China individually, India has partnered with Japan, the United States, and several multilateral organizations that it had traditionally shunned in the region (Xavier 2017). No longer able to sustain its exclusivist and outdated policy of “right of first denial,” Delhi also moved to focus on expanding its capacity to deliver more, better, and faster to its neighbors. Finally, and maybe most importantly, Sino-Indian competition has benefitted the developmental agendas of South Asia’s smaller states, which have increased their bargaining power and alternatives. Countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, or the Maldives have been making the most of playing off China, India, and also other extra-regional powers against each other. Recognizing the advantages of a non-aligned policy that hinges on diversification, these states often proclaim an “India first” policy in public but, in practice, have effectively balanced Delhi and Beijing.

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At the same time, India–China competition can have unintended negative effects. Increasing competition will naturally reduce the scope for cooperation, with both countries embracing a reactionary posture, doing more of the same in parallel, and therefore is bound to increase redundancies. There is thus a fine line between a healthy Sino-Indian competition that benefits the economic development of South Asia’s third countries and a conflictual Sino-Indian rivalry that escalates into turf wars and destabilizes the region.

Conflict A final and fourth mode of interaction between India and China in South Asia’s small states is marked by conflict. These are cases where Delhi and Beijing adopt policies that clash or seek to undermine each other. This divergence, however, is not always pursued intentionally. Especially when third countries undergo regime crises and transitions, China and India will often find themselves on opposing sides, with initially subtle policy differences getting rapidly locked into antagonistic escalation and open conflict. Similarly, third countries can actively fuel Sino-Indian clashes by playing one off against the other. With China’s expanding presence across the subcontinent, and a variety of new sectors where India and China are coming into contact for the first time, the risk of conflict has thus increased in recent years. In the past, conflicts have occurred during the period of hostile relations from the 1960s to the 1980s. China used East Pakistan, and then Bangladesh after 1971, to fight a proxy war against India by supporting a variety of insurgencies operating across the Northeastern states (Bhaumik 2009: 157–163; Lintner 2015: 336–345). Beijing and Delhi sometimes also clashed during regime crises in the neighborhood. In Nepal, in the late 1980s, China supported King Birendra’s military modernization plans despite Indian opposition and then openly sided with the monarch against Delhi during the ensuing Nepal–India bilateral crisis. The Sino-Indian standoff in Kathmandu ended in 1990, with the king stepping back and caving in to Indian pressures to adopt a democratic constitution (Garver 1991). Despite bilateral normalization since the 1990s, China and India have on some occasions clashed again in the region. In a remake of the 1987–1990 crisis in Nepal, Delhi and Beijing adopted contrasting postures when King Gyanendra declared an emergency and absolutist rule to pursue a military offensive against the Maoist insurgency in February 2005. India immediately froze the bilateral relationship, stopped military assistance, and pressured the monarch to reinstate parliament, hold elections, and pursue negotiations with the insurgents. Delhi also pursued consultations with Beijing and initially agreed to coordinate and share information (Xavier 2016: 203–221). Just two months later, however, indicating growing divergences, India’s senior-most foreign policy official Shyam Saran expressed “hope that China as a good friend of Nepal will give the right kind of advice to the Nepalese” (Bhasin 2005b: 512). But just a few days later, the Chinese Foreign Minister became the first high-level foreign official to visit Nepal after the coup and did not make any effort to pressure the King to heed Indian advice. The Sino-Indian split became apparent in the following months, as Beijing rejected India’s policy to pressure King Gyanendra to democratize and, instead, engaged and supported his regime through a variety of diplomatic, economic, and military initiatives. China’s stance, in turn, factored in to India’s decision to get even further

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involved in pressing for regime change. An Indian government official recalls Delhi’s concern: “Here was someone who had trampled on democracy, deepened the conflict in his own country [and now] was playing strategic games [with China] that directly impinged our interests” ( Jha 2014: 101). The 2005–2006 policy conflict in Kathmandu did not escalate into open hostility, but it was a preview of a succession of similar South Asian regime crises where Indian and Chinese policies would clash more intensively. With China’s growing economic stakes in the region, it has naturally become more politically invested in certain political factions or governments to protect its investments. The Nepal crisis thus signaled the beginning of a period in which China and India found themselves on different sides during elections or regime transitions. First, during the 2013 parliamentary election campaign in Bhutan, India reportedly interfered to signal its displeasure with the incumbent prime minister’s attempt to foster closer relations with China. Delhi’s abrupt decision to cut subsidies on gas and kerosene exports to its neighboring country reportedly undermined the re-election prospects of the ruling Bhutan Peace and Prosperity Party (DPT) and stalled Chinese outreach initiatives to the kingdom (Stobdan 2014). Similarly, in the run up to Sri Lanka’s 2015 presidential elections, India allegedly facilitated the creation of a complex coalition to oust ruling Mahinda Rajapaksa because of his close links to China (Chalmers and Miglani 2015). In the 2017 elections in Nepal, China and India once again found themselves supporting opposing coalitions ( Jha 2017). While in these cases different preferences did not lead to escalation and conflict, they do indicate how India and China are increasingly working at cross-purposes when it comes to political change in South Asia. The tension became particularly apparent in early 2018, in the Maldives, when President Yameen declared an emergency and received Chinese support to stall Indian pressures to hold elections. In an implicit reference to Delhi, Beijing noted that “the international community should play a constructive role on the basis of respecting the sovereignty of the Maldives rather than take actions that may further complicate the situation” (Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN 2018). While China kept extending political, economic, and military support to Yameen’s increasingly autocratic rule over the next months, India’s pressure in coordination with United States and other partners eventually succeeded in forcing him to hold fresh elections, where he had to concede defeat (Bhuyan 2018). While the China–India border dispute is restricted to certain areas along the Himalayas, the 2017 military standoff between China and India in Bhutan further reflects how the relationship can play out in conflictual terms to affect third countries in the region. Responding to Chinese military incursions and roadbuilding to change the status quo in its disputed territory with Bhutan, Indian forces crossed the border to intervene in defense of the neighboring country. The Bhutanese government came under pressure from both Beijing and Delhi but tried to play safe and please both sides. It did not condemn the Chinese incursion and indicated willingness to make concessions to solve the border dispute through negotiations, but at the same time it also did not publicly acknowledge or condemn India’s military intervention ( Jaishankar 2017). Such border incidents could repeat themselves in the disputed trijunction points that China and India share with Nepal. Despite persistent attempts to strengthen bilateral relations between India and China, there are growing indications that their initiatives in third countries are clashing and

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leading to heightened risk of conflict. This antagonism was apparent when, in 2019, India reportedly communicated to Nepal that it was not going to purchase downstream electricity generated by any Chinese-supported hydro-power projects on the Himalayan slopes (Malhotra 2018). These are still intermittent and limited clashes, but one should not discard a worstcase scenario where India and China target each other’s infrastructure and other assets across the region. Such hostility could deeply destabilize the smaller states of South Asia and divide them into different spheres of Indian and Chinese influence. Beyond a territorial focus on third countries, Sino-Indian conflicts could also play out in regional and non-territorial commons that are becoming securitized, including the cyber, maritime, and space domains. As these areas remain mostly unregulated, clashes could have a devastating impact on South Asia’s stability and development prospects.

Conclusion: managing increasingly complex Sino-Indian interactions As the preceding examples show, India–China interactions in South Asia are not irreversibly locked into competition and conflict. Across different time periods, countries, and sectors in the region, Beijing and Delhi have interacted in a variety of ways. This contradicts linear narratives about India as a regional power always bent on excluding China from its periphery. Delhi’s circumstantial assessments have dictated different approaches, which have not always been hostile. At the same time, however, the space for coexistence and cooperation is decreasing. This is driven by the rising asymmetry in Chinese and Indian abilities to deliver support for infrastructure and other developmental projects in third countries. It is further complicated as interdependence increases across the Himalayas, with China establishing itself as a resident power in what used to be India’s predominant sphere of influence. China’s superior abilities in delivering infrastructure and development projects and its growing economic presence in South Asia are opening up new fronts for China–India interaction across the region, which will inevitably strain the relationship. Greater connectivity is shrinking the region and raising the risks of friction between the two countries across a variety of areas that require harmonization, from military assistance to railway gauge standards. Finally, while China emphasizes the strictly economic and “win-win” aspects of its deepening relations with India’s neighbors, it is naturally also increasingly involved in deepening political, security, and cultural ties with these countries. Whether it leverages these intentionally or not, Beijing’s regional presence in Asia is inevitably shaping the domestic balance of power and external security alignments of South Asian states. China and India have, therefore, become entangled in an increasingly complex relationship in third countries, which will have different and simultaneous levels of interaction, from cooperation to conflict. This will require careful management, including three sets of specific challenges for India and China. For India, a first challenge will be to give up its unsustainable hegemonic approach to its smaller neighboring states. The traditional policy of denial, based on a prerogative “right of first refusal,” is no longer enforceable and only fuels anti-Indian sentiment. Instead, Delhi will have to keep investing in increasing its institutional and financial capacity to deliver first, more, and better in terms of connectivity and economic

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assistance. Having an alternative in China and other powers, countries like Nepal will no longer wait for India to implement its promises and will, instead, adopt a “firstcome, first-served” policy. Second, while all forms of connectivity have strategic implications, India will have to refrain from defining Chinese projects as a blanket threat to its security interests. Unless there are substantiated reasons of concern, Delhi should not merely oppose a Maldives– China free trade agreement or a Chinese investment in electricity distribution in Southern Nepal because they are allegedly “sensitive” to its security interests. Instead of this zero-sum prism, India will have to do a better job at defining which specific projects pose a threat, communicate clearly why they affect Indian interests, and then offer reliable alternatives to the concerned neighbor. India’s third challenge will be to deepen cooperation with like-minded countries in the region without instigating a security dilemma with China. By working together with Japan, the United States, and other extra-regional actors to implement its different vision of “sustainable connectivity” and a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” Delhi may unintentionally fuel competition with China that risks escalating into conflict. While the India–China structural dynamics and India’s democratic identity are likely to further deepen its Indo-Pacific partnerships in South Asia’s third countries, Delhi must also take care to keep communicating with Beijing and explore opportunities for parallel partnerships with China in the region. For China, the first challenge will be to moderate its pace in South Asia and learn to avoid specific sectors where its involvement is bound to escalate negative Indian reactions and encourage competition. India remains the central and predominant player in the region and, due to geographic proximity and other factors, including an open border with Nepal, will always have greater stakes than China in the domestic affairs of its neighbors. To assuage Delhi’s concerns, Beijing must focus on economic connectivity and, conversely, seek to refrain from excessive military and security cooperation with India’s immediate neighbors. Second, Beijing will have to take special care not to let South Asia’s small states play China and India off against each other. In the past, countries like the Maldives or Nepal have attempted to use the “China card” to extract greater concessions from India, with some success. But in the current competitive environment this will increase the risk of conflict. To avoid these risks, China must invest in communication channels with India about regional developments, in particular to share information and assessments. While this will not automatically translate into cooperation, it will help avoid surprises and increase India’s comfort with China’s presence in the region. China’s final challenge in South Asia is to move beyond an idealistic “win-win” approach and show greater responsiveness to reducing the negative impact of its infrastructure development initiatives. The location, timing, and implementation of Chinese projects naturally reflect Beijing’s economic and strategic interests. They have also had a disruptive impact on the financial, political, ecological, and social balances in the host countries —the most notorious of which are known as “debt traps.” China cannot be held responsible for the lack of regulations or corruption surrounding some of its projects, but it will have to be more responsive to the domestic concerns and preferences of local actors. By focusing on the terms of its economic assistance, and stressing its openness to a dialogue to increase long-term accountability and good governance in South Asia’s small states, Beijing will also pave the way for a more cooperative relationship with India.

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Notes

Bibliography Ayoob, M. (1989) “India in South Asia: The Quest for Regional Predominance,” World Policy Journal 7(1): 107–133. Bagchi, I. (2017) “Lankan PM to Visit as India Eyes Leasing Airport Near Hambantota,” The Times of India (21 November), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/lankanpm-to-visit-as-india-eyes-leasing-airport-near-hambantota/articleshow/61732250.cms. Baral, B. (2016) “India’s ‘Blockade’ Has Opened the Door for China in Nepal,” The Wire (2 March), available online at https://thewire.in/diplomacy/indias-blockade-has-openedthe-door-for-china-in-nepal. Baral, L. R. (2012) Nepal—Nation-State in the Wilderness: Managing State, Democracy and Geopolitics (New Delhi: SAGE Publications). Baruah, D. M. (2018) “India’s Answer to the Belt and Road: A Road Map for South Asia,” Carnegie India (21 August), available online at https://carnegieindia.org/2018/08/21/ india-s-answer-to-belt-and-road-road-map-for-south-asia-pub-77071. Bhasin, A. S. (2005a) Nepal-India and Nepal-China Relations, 1947–2005 Documents, Volume 1 (New Delhi: Geetika Publishers). Bhasin, A. S. (ed.) (2005b) India’s Foreign Relations—2005 Documents (New Delhi: Geetika Publishers). Bhattacharjee, J. (2018) “India-Bangladesh Defence Cooperation: Coming of Age, at Last?” Observer Research Foundation (26 July), available online at www.orfonline.org/research/ india-bangladesh-defence-cooperation-coming-of-age-at-last/. Bhaumik, S. (2009) Troubled Periphery: The Crisis of India’s North East (New Delhi: Sage India). Bhaumik, S. (2017) “Behind the ‘RAW’ Tirade,” The Daily Star (18 March), available online at www.thedailystar.net/op-ed/politics/behind-the-raw-tirade-1377514. Bhuyan, M. P. (2018) “India Helped in Restoration of Democracy in Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom,” The Week (28 October), available online at www.theweek.in/wire-updates/ national/2018/10/28/del7-maldives-gayoom-interview.html. Chalmers, J. and Miglani, S. (2015) “Indian Spy’s Role Alleged in Sri Lankan President’s Election Defeat,” Reuters (18 January), available online at www.reuters.com/article/us-srilanka-election-india-insight/indian-spys-role-alleged-in-sri-lankan-presidents-electiondefeat-idUSKBN0KR03020150118. Chand, B. (2017) “Disaster Relief as a Political Tool: Analysing Indian and Chinese Responses after the Nepal Earthquakes,” Strategic Analysis 41(6) (24 October): 535–545. Chandraperuma, C. A. (2012) Gota’s War: The Crushing of Tamil Tiger Terrorism in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Ranjan Wijeratne Foundation). Dasgupta, S. (2018) “Govt Seeks China Role in Northeast Connectivity Plan,” The Times of India (16 August), available online at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/govtseeks-china-role-in-northeast-connectivity-plan/articleshow/65417648.cms. De Silva, K. M. (1996) Regional Powers and Small State Security: India and Sri Lanka, 1977–1990 (New Delhi: Vikas). Ding, G. (2016) “Blockade Shows Nepal’s Connectivity Dilemma,” Global Times (2 March), available online at www.globaltimes.cn/content/967223.shtml.

432  Constantino Xavier Dutta, P. K. (2017) “Can China Really Encircle India with Its String of Pearls? The Great Game of Asia,” India Today (15 June), available online at www.indiatoday.in/india/story/ china-encircle-india-string-of-pearls-982930-2017-06-15. Garver, J. W. (2001) Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Hagerty, D. T. (1991) “India’s Regional Security Doctrine,” Asian Survey 31(4): 351–363. Jain, R. K. (1981) China-South Asian Relations, 1947–1980 (New Delhi: Humanities Press). Jaishankar, D. (2017) “China Miscalculated How to Handle India, Allowed Face-Saving Exit,” NDTV Online (29 August), available online at www.ndtv.com/opinion/chinamiscalculated-how-to-handle-india-allowed-face-saving-exit-1743081 Jha, P. (2014) Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company). Jha, P. (2017) “Nepal Elections: An India-China Battle at the Ballot Box,” Hindustan Times (25 November), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/nepal-electionsan-india-china-battle-at-the-ballot-box/story-faKIVJINpqAqOkyPmLr0ZL.html. Jha, P. (2018) “How India Is Dealing with China: Improve Ties but Stay Alert,” Hindustan Times (21 July), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-india-is-dealingwith-china-improve-ties-but-stay-alert/story-ej6Dy9PArfncR5qhoxj4PI.html. Krishnan, A. (2019) “China and India Look to Cooperate Despite Belt and Road Disagreements,” South China Morning Post (25 April), available online at www.scmp.com/week-asia/ opinion/article/3007588/belt-and-road-differences-aside-china-and-india-agree-disagree. Lintner, B. (2015) Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (London: Yale University Press). Malhotra, J. (2018) “If China Builds Your Dams, India Won’t Buy Energy: PM Narendra Modi to Tell KP Oli,” The Indian Express (6 April), available online at https://indianexpress.com/ article/india/if-china-builds-your-dams-india-wont-buy-energy-pm-narendra-modi-totell-kp-oli-5125566/. Martin, I. (2012) “The United Nations and Support to Nepal’s Peace Process: The Role of the UN Mission in Nepal,” in S. V. Einsiedel, D. Malone and S. Pradhan, eds., Nepal in Transition: From People’s War to Fragile Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 201–231. Mathou, T. (2013) “Bhutan-China Relations: Towards a New Step in Himalayan Politics,” in K. Ura and S. Kinga, eds., The Spider and the Piglet: Proceedings of the First Seminar on Bhutan Studies (Thimphu: Centre for Bhutan Studies): 388–412, available online at http://crossasiarepository.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/2625/1/19_SpdrPglt.pdf. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) (1963) Annual Report 1963–1964 (accessed 15 May 2019), available online at https://mealib.nic.in/?pdf2490?000. Miglani, S. (2018) “India, China Launch Joint Training for Afghanistan, Plan More Projects,” Reuters (15 October), available online at https://in.reuters.com/article/india-china-afghanistan/ india-china-launch-joint-training-for-afghanistan-plan-more-projects-idINKCN1MP1KB. Mitra, S. K. (2003) “The Reluctant Hegemon: India’s Self-Perception and the South Asian Strategic Environment,” Contemporary South Asia 12(3): 399–417. Mohan, C. R. (2018) “Raja Mandala: India’s China Reset and BRI,” The Indian Express (10 April), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/indiachina-foreign-policy-trade-relations-xi-jinping-narendra-modi-doklam-5130866/. Moorthy, N. S. (2018) “SAARC in Coma, China Throws Another Challenging Regional Initiative,” Observer Research Foundation (10 July), available online at www.orfonline.org/ expert-speak/saarc-in-coma-china-throws-another-challenging-regional-initiative/. Muni, S. D. and Tai, Y. T. (2012) A Resurgent China: South Asian Perspectives (New Delhi: Routledge). NAI (National Archives of India) (1964) “Annual Reports from Kathmandu for 1964,” file number: HI/1011(45)/65. Navaratne, G. (1976) The Chinese Connexion: A Study of Sri Lanka-China Relations in the Modern Period (Colombo: Sandesa News Agency).

China in India’s neighborhood  433 Parashar, S. (2017) “Sri Lanka to Offer India Port Development to Balance Out China,” The Economic Times (19 April), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ politics-and-nation/sri-lanka-to-offer-india-port-development-to-balance-out-china/ articleshow/58253212.cms. Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN (2018) “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang’s Regular Press Conference” (7 February), available online at www.china-un.org/eng/fyrth/t1532736.htm (accessed 15 May 2019). Raghavan, S. (2013) 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Roy, N. (2011) “A Study of Deviant State Behavior: Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–62,” PhD dissertation, Carleton University. Samaranayake, N. (2019) “China’s Engagement with Smaller South Asian Countries,” United States Institute of Peace (10 April), available online at www.usip.org/publications/2019/04/ chinas-engagement-smaller-south-asian-countries. Saran, S. (2017) How India Sees the World: From Kautilya to Modi: Kautilya to the 21st Century (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books). Stacey, K. (2018) “India and China Groups Clash over Dhaka Stock Exchange Stake,” Financial Times (18 February), available online at www.ft.com/content/5d15b71e-12f 7-11e8-8cb6b9ccc4c4dbbb. Stimson Center (n.d.) South Asian Voices, available online at https://southasianvoices.org/ china-south-asia/. Stobdan, P. (2014) “India and Bhutan: The Strategic Imperative,” IDSA Occasional Paper No. 36 (September), available online at https://idsa.in/occasionalpapers/OP_IndiaandBhutan_ pstobdan_260914. Subedi, S. P. (2005) Dynamics of Foreign Policy and Law: A Study of India-Nepal Relations (London: Oxford University Press). Varma, K. J. M. (2018) “China moots India-Nepal-China Economic Corridor through Himalayas,” Livemint (18 April), available online at www.livemint.com/Politics/kUBM7SQiB8bbDsp26vWaAK/China-moots-IndiaNepalChina-economic-corridor-through-Hima.html. Xavier, C. (2016) “From Inaction to Intervention: India’s Strategic Culture of Regional Involvement (Nepal, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, 1950s–2000s),” Doctoral dissertation, John Hopkins University, School of Advanced Studies. Xavier, C. (2017) “India’s “Like-Minded” Partnerships to Counter China in South Asia,” India in Transition, Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania (11 September), available online at https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/constantinoxavier.

27 Unequal rivals China, India, and the struggle for influence in Southeast Asia Sheryn Lee

Both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India harbor expanding aspirations of great power status in the Indo-Pacific, and having the power to influence in Southeast Asia is part of that vision. Within Southeast Asia, however, the countries that form the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) share a common objective of retaining independent foreign and defense policies to “keep Southeast Asian states from becoming entrapped in great power rivalries” (Murphy 2017: 173). This objective is being challenged by Sino-US strategic competition, the perception of American decline and disengagement in Asia, long-standing maritime territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas, and increasing wariness among many countries of China’s capabilities and intentions. An increased Indian presence in Southeast Asia could provide a like-minded “counterweight” for some countries to balance the buildup of Chinese resources. Faced with increasing uncertainty, individual countries are strengthening politico-economic affiliations and shoring up their defense capabilities through security partnerships with larger powers. This has heightened the region’s vulnerability to “the actions of powerful external political and economic forces” (Beeson 2002: 549) and weakened ASEAN’s mandate of consensus and the principle of non-interference. An examination of China and India’s presence in Southeast Asia involves understanding how states wield power to influence the behavior of others for their own interests. As Robert Dahl (1957: 202–203) seminally argued, underlying these concepts is the intuitive idea that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Evelyn Goh (2016: 1) makes a definitive distinction that “power” should be understood as “resources and latent capability,” and influence is thus the “effective exercise of this power, or the act of modifying or otherwise having an impact upon another actor’s preferences or behavior in favour of one’s own aims.” For Beijing, influence in Southeast Asia involves, on the one hand, the “use of its geoeconomic leverage, which is largely gained through its trade and investment relationships” as a reward for favorable behavior (Congressional Research Service 2018). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has found particular success in using infrastructure projects and development assistance as mechanisms to gain political influence in developing economies. It also uses its military capabilities to intimidate and deter undesirable behavior and defend its maritime territorial claims (Congressional Research Service 2018). For New Delhi, influence involves evoking India’s historical and cultural ties to Southeast Asian civilizations and a sense of shared norms. This is a defensive response, as compared with the approach taken by China, and certain countries are encouraging India to engage more proactively with Southeast Asia. India does not have any disputes with the region and has a burgeoning economic and security potential. China’s

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encroachment into continental South and Southeast Asia has also necessitated that New Delhi upgrade political and security relations to conserve its great power ambitions. This chapter first discusses the geostrategic and politico-economic significance of Southeast Asia for China and India.1 Second, it examines the PRC’s strategy and politico-economic objectives for its Southeast Asian presence. Third, it examines India’s response and capabilities vis-à-vis China in contesting power and influence in Southeast Asia. Finally, it discusses the implications for evolving Sino-Indian relations in Southeast Asia. The PRC has accumulated significant resources and political influence in mainland Southeast Asia, and Beijing has found long-term success in undermining ASEAN cohesion. India’s power and influence in Southeast Asia relative to China will remain limited for the foreseeable future due to inconsistent investment and inadequate resources. Consequently, those Southeast Asian countries wary of Chinese intentions will continue to encourage other extra-regional major powers, such as Japan, to remain engaged.

The significance of Southeast Asia for China and India Although Chinese and Indian leaders play down any sense of competition, Southeast Asia presents a specific region to test whether China and India have enough space to both be great powers in the broader Indo-Pacific (Scott 2013: 52). The significance of Southeast Asia for China and India is twofold: the region’s geography; and their politico-economic stakes in the region. First of all, the region’s importance is in its maritime and continental geography. Southeast Asia’s sea-lanes constitute “the principal maritime corridors for energy supply and other commercial traffic between the Indian and Pacific Oceans” (Leifer 1983: 16). The Strait of Malacca is the key choke point in Asia. Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia are located along the strait. Southern Thailand and India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands are located at the northern entrance to the strait. The contested South China Sea is located to the north east of the strait. (Congressional Research Service 2018) China, India, and maritime Southeast Asia thus have vested interests in securing these sea lanes for the transport of oil and raw materials, as well as control of local resources in disputed territories, both of which are critical for economic growth (Ho 2006: 574). China and India are, respectively, the second and fourth-largest energy consumers in the world and are heavily reliant on oil, coal, and gas imports via Indo-Pacific sea lanes. Both China and India are also involved in offshore energy development projects in the South China Sea. Key South China Sea claimants—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—have all expressed concerns over developments in the South China Sea and the Chinese militarization of the Spratly Islands. This has not only impacted the major trading route through the Strait of Malacca but also tilted the regional military balance in the PRC’s favor. Consequently, India and certain Southeast Asian countries have increased the tempo of their defense cooperation and dialogue. In contrast, the majority of mainland Southeast Asian countries are concerned with the territorial integrity of shared land boundaries, which heighten a sense of strategic vulnerability between neighbors. One of the key countries is landlocked Laos, which

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shares borders with China, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The use of Laos’ pivotal location was demonstrated during the Vietnam War. For China, Thailand, and Vietnam obtaining influence over Vientiane would result in a safe buffer zone (Freedman 2000: 340–355). Similarly, the strategic value of mainland Southeast Asia to southwestern China and to the north and northwestern boundaries of India has led to increased Chinese and Indian investment in Myanmar. Beijing leverages its investments for political influence via large infrastructure projects and funding, broader international development financing (IDF), and overseas development assistance (ODA). It is important to note that despite the fact that China’s international development portfolio has grown to a similar size as that of the United States, the majority of its commitments are composed of commercially oriented projects with less concessional finance; it is unclear whether the finance is backed by the state or by private corporations (AidData 2017).2 Laos and Myanmar view Beijing’s expansive economic diplomacy as largely welcome. Myanmar maintains a distinct pro-China stance due to China’s willingness in providing assistance during the country’s international isolation. It would also be one of the main beneficiaries of the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor (Uberoi 2016: 19–44). Such infrastructure investments and economic inducements have provided Beijing with political influence in South and mainland Southeast Asia, thus maintaining a strategic buffer to China’s land borders. In turn, this has heightened New Delhi’s strategic vulnerability as Beijing’s increasing resources in Bangladesh, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka encircle India. India has thus announced rival infrastructure projects and upgraded existing partnerships in Southeast Asia to counter China’s influence in its immediate neighborhood. Second, China and India both have strong politico-economic stakes in Southeast Asia. ASEAN’s population of approximately 640 million makes the region a significant market for goods and services, destination for investment, and source of imports. In 2017, ASEAN had a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of almost $2.8 trillion and was ranked as the world’s fifth largest and Asia’s third largest economy (ASEAN Secretariat 2018a: 27). However, due to the individual nature of eleven sovereign foreign policies and significant variation in the countries’ geography, economies, population, and political systems, the region is highly vulnerable to major power interference and the institution of ASEAN has always struggled with an internal divide (Le Thu 2018: 21). This is demonstrated by the GDP per capita of individual ASEAN countries, in which Singapore and Brunei’s economies significantly outpace all their neighbors and are approximately three to four times larger than Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia (ASEANstats 2018). Singapore is the only Southeast Asian country to not have a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project; instead, it plans to cooperate in infrastructure and project financing. Moreover, Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia all have a GDP per capita higher than China (which was $7,755.00 in 2018) (The World Bank 2019). Despite significant developments in their industrial and modern service sectors, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam remain below China in terms of GDP per capita. In Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, post-independence economic development was severely affected by conflict with both internal and external enemies, and as a result, their economic growth comes from a very low base (Booth 2011: 3). Consequently, small and developing Southeast Asian countries have been unable to resist the PRC’s billion dollars of loans and investments on offer.

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Therefore, it is not surprising that Southeast Asian states have responded in differing ways. Countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam are increasing public and defense diplomacy to secure India as a possible counterweight to the increasing Chinese influence in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar, and to Chinese military developments in the South China Sea and adjacent waters. In the 2019 State of Southeast Asia Survey, a majority forty-three percent expect 2019 to be a time of uncertainty for Southeast Asia—however of these respondents, sixty-nine percent of Laotians polled viewed the region as stable or very stable, whereas sixty-seven percent of Singaporeans polled viewed the region as uncertain and increasingly turbulent (Tang et al. 2019: 4).

China’s strategy in Southeast Asia In examining the PRC’s strategy in Southeast Asia, it is important to first clarify the objectives of China’s ruling regime. The one-party system of the CCP is motivated primarily by a commitment to preserve its monopoly on domestic political power over mainland China. The majority of China’s banks, firms, and enterprises are state-owned, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the armed wing of the CCP. As argued by Friedberg, “it is impossible to make sense of the ambitions, fears, strategy and tactics of China’s present regime without reference to its authoritarian, illiberal character and distinctive, Leninist roots” (Friedberg 2010: 7). Under the banner of President Xi Jinping’s concept of “a community of shared future for mankind,” the CCP aims to transform the “international environment to make it compatible with China’s governance model and emergence as a global leader” (Tobin 2018). This involves exploiting gaps, ambiguities, and the lack of consensus in alliances, partnerships, institutions, and forums. Sino-US competition has further heightened China’s desire for influence and overt coercion in Southeast Asia (Huxley and Schreer 2015: 129). Therefore, Chinese objectives for Southeast Asia include maintaining a stable political and security environment along China’s periphery to facilitate China’s economic growth in the southwestern regions; maintaining and expanding trade routes transiting Southeast Asia; increasing influence in the region to defeat perceived attempts at strategic encirclement or containment by US partners and allies; and maintaining trade relationships for politico-economic purposes (Vaughn and Morrison 2006: 7–8). To achieve these objectives, China’s strategy is twofold. First, Beijing uses preferential economic agreements and large-scale infrastructure projects in developing countries. This charm offensive began in the wake of the 1997/1998 Asian Financial Crisis, when Beijing resisted pressure to devalue the yuan while the currencies of its neighbors were in free fall. In November 2004, ASEAN and China agreed to create the ASEAN–China Free Trade Area, which by 2011 was the largest free trade area in the world with a combined market of $1.94 billion and GDP of $9.5 trillion (ASEAN Secretariat 2019). China remains ASEAN’s top trading partner. In terms of foreign direct investment (FDI) into Southeast Asia, China came in third behind the European Union (EU) and Japan in 2017—on the back of a fifteen-fold increase since 2008 (ASEAN Secretariat 2018b: 142). Indeed, much of the strong economic growth in Southeast Asia has been powered by the Chinese economy. Preliminary data demonstrate that Chinese development and connectivity projects have reduced economic inequality within and between regions, with spillover effects apparent in both rural and urban areas (Bluhm et al. 2018: 30–31).Beijing’s current flagship mechanism is President Xi’s BRI, which finances infrastructure throughout Asia, Europe, Africa, and beyond in order to boost economic integration

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and connectivity. Domestically, such projects assist Chinese industries suffering from overcapacity, spark growth in the outlying regions of western and southwestern China, significantly expand export and investment markets, and assist Chinese technological development into dominant positions in areas such as high-speed rail. Regionally and globally, these projects are used for financial diplomacy purposes—that is, support with diplomatic intent. The PRC is targeting mainland Southeast Asian states via the “Maritime Silk Road” portion of the BRI (see Table 27.1), encouraging the perception that China’s rise as regional hegemon will, overall, benefit them too. In Cambodia, BRIbacked projects, including the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone, Phnom Penh– Sihanoukville Expressway, and the construction of a new airport in Phnom Penh, have provided the country with essential upgrades to aging infrastructure without imposing major conditions on improving the rule of law or its human rights record. However, such growth comes with concerns that access to Chinese capital and markets depends on political alignment with Beijing. Indeed, “China has a long history of using public diplomacy tools to bolster its status internationally,” through infrastructure, people-to-people exchange, cultural symposia, official visits, and information broadcasting (Custer et al. 2018: 1). As evidenced in parts of Africa, the South Pacific, and South Asia, Beijing uses its IDF, ODA, and infrastructure investments to extract diplomatic and security concessions. In addition, Chinese-backed loans often come at higher interest rates than loans from other major donors such as Japan, the EU, and the International Development Agency (IDA) and may burden host countries with unanticipated debt. Escalating costs and corruption may also hurt host countries. For example, the Chinese construction of Laos’ high-speed rail—conceived in 2001 and now part of the BRI—costs $6 billion, of which Beijing will pay $1.6 billion. It remains unclear how Vientiane will finance the remaining debt. Myanmar, despite close ties to China, has scaled back plans for a BRI-backed project to develop the Kyaukpyu deep-water port off Rakhine state, which was originally slated to cost $7.3 billion. Malaysia has also suspended three of its BRI projects, worth $22 billion, including the East Coast Rail Link. Chinese loans and two companies are also implicated in Malaysia’s “1Malaysia Development Berhad” money laundering scandal. Table 27.1 Chinese official finance with diplomatic intent, 2000–2016 (US$ million, deflated to 2014 constant US$) Rank

Recipient

Amount (US$ million)

1 2 3 4 5 7 8 15 17 18 No FD

Malaysia Cambodia Indonesia Laos Vietnam Myanmar Philippines Brunei Timor-Leste Thailand Singapore

13,400 9,100 9,000 4,700 3,700 1,900 1,100 200 100 15 0

Source: Based on data compiled from AidData (2017). FD = financial diplomacy.

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The second part of China’s strategy of politico-economic leverage is to decouple mainland countries from the maritime states’ concern over China’s behavior in the South China Sea. Beijing uses financial diplomacy to coerce neighboring countries into political acquiescence and acceptance of its growing military dominance. It utilizes the divisions between developed and developing states, and the maritime and mainland states, to drive a wedge through ASEAN. This was demonstrated when ASEAN failed to conclude any binding agreements to a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea with Beijing. Cambodia blocked ASEAN statements condemning Chinese actions in the South China Sea in 2012 and 2016, and both Cambodia and Laos backed Beijing in rejecting the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling, which sided with the Philippines and invalidated historic Chinese claims within China’s “nine-dash line.” Former Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, later warned of an ASEAN “torn apart” due to China’s growing influence and its ability to divide Southeast Asian countries on critical issues which should be of mutual concern such as the South China Sea (Riordan 2016). Even the Philippines is internally divided—President Rodrigo Duterte’s assertion that China was “already in possession” of the entire South China Sea was later countered by the Philippines’ Chief Justice, Antonio Carpio, that Chinese control accounts for less than eight percent (Alimario 2018). Beijing has made some progress in bilateral defense diplomacy with Southeast Asia, but still faces many barriers. This is due to a lack of trust regarding the management of territorial disputes, the poor quality of Chinese arms, and the desire for some Southeast Asian countries to maintain defense ties with Washington (Storey 2012). Consequently, Chinese military doctrine focuses on modernizing its power projection capabilities, militarizing its claimed islands, and establishing greater sea control and area denial over the South China Sea (The State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2015). In a 2016 edition of the Chinese journal Naval Studies, three PLA Navy officers argued that the “struggle in the South China Sea is not just about contention over rights and interests. More than that, it is a struggle for dominance in regional security affairs” (translated in Martinson and Yamamoto 2017). The Pentagon’s 2016 Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy highlighted that since 2013, China has “reclaimed seventeen times more land in twenty months than the other claimants combined over the past forty years, accounting for approximately ninety-five percent of all reclaimed land in the Spratly islands” (US Department of Defense 2015: 16). This amounts to more than 3,200 acres of land and includes the construction of military installations such as airstrips (some thirty kilometers long to accommodate a range of military aircraft), helipads, air defense batteries, berthing areas for large ships, barracks, radars, and other surveillance equipment. The PLA’s broader military modernization for Anti-Access/Area-Denial also applies, and PLA operations have taken place in Southeast Asian exclusive economic zones (see Office of the Secretary of Defense 2018). Defending its maritime route of commerce and energy supplies through the Indian and Pacific Oceans and preventing foreign interference are PRC priorities. China imports approximately eighty percent of its oil through the Strait of Malacca and is vulnerable to interdiction by American and other regional forces (China Power Team 2017). Consequently, wariness over Chinese intentions has manifested to varying degrees in Southeast Asia. The former Permanent Secretary of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry, Bilahari Kausikan, warned that “Singaporeans should be aware of when Beijing is trying to manipulate them.” He added that “China doesn’t just want you to comply with its wishes, it wants you to … do what it wants without being told. … China will always

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enjoy significant influence in this region, but significant influence is not dominant or exclusive” (quoted in Yong 2018). Vietnam has openly supported American freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, and in 2018 hosted an US aircraft carrier group. There is also growing awareness in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand that China’s Mekong River projects—hydropower stations and river-widening plans—will destroy local communities and make such countries beholden to Beijing (Goh 2006: 225–246). In the 2019 State of Southeast Asia Survey, whilst China was ranked the most influential in Southeast Asia economically (by seventy-three percent of respondents) and politically and strategically (by forty-five percent), forty-five percent of respondents believed that China will be a revisionist power in the region. This was the top response in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. In addition, seventy percent of respondents believed that their governments should be cautious and avoid unsustainable financial debt burdens—with the strongest sentiments in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Yet, even in the least concerned country of Laos, forty-six percent still agreed that the government should be wary of negotiating BRI projects (Tang et al. 2019: 20).

India reacts East India’s engagement in Southeast Asia comes at a time when regional countries—such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam—are looking for partners to balance Chinese power and the perception of American decline. Southeast Asian countries traditionally have not had any disputes with India, as compared to China and Japan, and India’s historical cultural and ideological impact on Southeast Asian civilizations is highlighted in its 2015 Maritime Doctrine (Ministry of Defence (Navy) 2015: 1–2). India is also the world’s fastest growing large economy and third largest contributor to global growth. Most importantly, New Delhi’s great power ambitions are challenged by China’s successful isolation of India in its own region of South and Southwest Asia, in particular in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (see Chung 2018: 315–332). For instance, in Sri Lanka, the Chinese upgrading of ports and other maritime facilities came with $8 billion debt. Desperate for debt relief, Sri Lanka handed over to Beijing the major Hambantota port on a ninety-nine-year lease. Intensifying China–Pakistan ties—which includes not just infrastructure and energy projects worth $32 billion but also civil nuclear cooperation—have left India politically detached and strategically vulnerable to its key opponent. The PRC has also constructed Gwadar Port in Pakistan and communication facilities in the Coco Islands in Myanmar (Brewster 2010: 5). Consequently, India’s engagement in Southeast Asia is driven by necessity and not by a comprehensive strategy like that of the PRC. New Delhi bases its presence on a historical legacy and similar post-colonial experience with Southeast Asia. As Mohammed Ayoob (2003) has argued: the first generation of India’s post-independence leaders had perceived the anticolonial struggles in Southeast Asia as indivisible from their own fight for freedom from colonial subjugation. The Congress leadership, with Jawaharlal Nehru, … was convinced that the future of India was indivisible from the future of Asia, and particularly of Southeast Asia … Second, the strategic importance of Southeast Asia to India was evident to India’s prospective policy-makers and strategic thinkers even before the transfer of power from British to Indian hands. The events of the

Unequal rivals in Southeast Asia  441

Second World War, especially the dramatic Japanese sweep through archipelagic and mainland Southeast Asia in a remarkably short time, had driven home the lesson to India’s nationalist elite that India’s eastern flank and the seaward approaches to the subcontinent were as important for India’s defence as the land boundaries of the northwest and the north which had been the traditional concerns of strategists during the days of the British Raj. India is capitalizing on its economic engagement with the region and promoting strategic partnerships and military cooperation to enhance its own interactions vis-à-vis China. When Narendra Modi took office as prime minister in 2014, he updated the long-standing “Look East” policy of the 1990s to “Act East,” and unveiled a vision for the Indian Ocean named “Security and Growth for All in the Region,” abbreviated to “SAGAR”—meaning “sea” or “lake” in Hindi (Roy-Chaudhury 2018). Using the SAGAR concept, Modi emphasized the shared norms of India and Southeast Asia. He commented that India and ASEAN should “work together to keep our seas safe and secure” and that India’s “relations [are] free from contests and claims” with a “common vision for the future, built on commitment to inclusion and integration, belief in sovereign equality of all nations irrespective of size, and support for free and open pathways of commerce and engagement” (Modi 2018). He further commented on the strategic nature of India’s role in Southeast Asia: To the East, the Malacca Strait and South China Sea connect India to the Pacific and to most of our major partners—ASEAN, Japan, Republic of Korea, China and the Americas. Our trade in the region is growing rapidly. And, a significant part of our overseas investments flow in this direction. (Modi 2018) As part of the Act East policy, New Delhi has announced rival infrastructure projects in response to China’s BRI. However, such initiatives remain at the discussion stage, with inconsistent planning and minor budgets compared to Beijing’s BRI. For example, the ASEAN–India Connectivity Summit aims to support flagship plans such as the India– Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway. The project was initiated in 2002, and in 2017 India proposed to extend the highway to Cambodia and Vietnam. However, progress remains slow due to a lack of consistent financial and institutional support. The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) connects the littoral states of the Bay of Bengal (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand) in order to enhance connectivity in fourteen areas— trade, technology, energy, transport, tourism, fisheries, agriculture, public health, poverty alleviation, counter-terrorism, environment, culture, people-to-people contact, and climate change. Despite the hope that such a grouping can address over- dependence on China’s IDF and provide access to consumer markets in India and rising BIMSTEC economies, BIMSTEC is broad in its remit and remains one of the least integrated sub-regions in the world (Hussain 2018). Similarly, the Mekong–Ganga Cooperation— comprised of India, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—aims to enhance areas of cooperation in tourism, culture, education, and transportation, but remains firmly in the capacity-building stage. When comparing ASEAN trade in goods by trading partners (see Table 27.2), since 2010 China has been ASEAN’s top trading partner, with increasing two-way trade, whereas India is seventh and fluctuating annually. In addition, a comparison of China

China EU-28 Japan US ROK 2 Australia India Russia Canada NZ3 Rest of the world Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

234,296 202,800 218,700 179,220 101,744 57,399 56,665 12,667 10,455 7,605 410,417 1,994,831

1,491,968 293,103 238,401 255,998 195,879 124,403 67,443 74,145 16,803 12,280 9,039 519,300 2,389,731

1,806,793

582,938

2011

316,984 240,708 264,035 198,087 130,974 70,379 71,133 18,091 11,932 9,283 533,831 2,471,077

1,865,437

605,640

2012

Source: Based on data compiled from ASEAN Secretariat (2018b: 64). 1 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 2 Republic of Korea 3 New Zealand

Trading partner

502,864

ASEAN1

Rank

2010

Trading partner

348,325 243,896 239,942 203,127 134,400 68,975 68,169 19,925 13,064 9,783 554,178 2,521,237

1,903,785

617,752

2013

Table 27.2 ASEAN trade in goods by trading partners, 2012–2017 (US$ million)

362,645 245,277 228,486 209,290 130,925 73,289 67,836 22,525 12,809 10,698 550,185 2,522,078

1,913,965

608,114

2014

363,497 230,655 202,800 210,582 120,567 57,493 30,166 13,969 12,655 8,753 456,345 2,272,862

1,737,481

535,380

2015

368,694 233,564 202,408 211,807 124,455 52,879 58,597 11,957 12,632 7,900 437,133 2,238,601

1,722,025

516,575

2016

441,009 261,402 219,258 234,269 153,680 59,140 73,630 16,790 13,817 9,524 501,542 2,574,288

1,984,062

590

2017

Unequal rivals in Southeast Asia  443

and India’s trade, FDI, and free trade agreements (FTA) via engagement with ASEAN demonstrates that while India is significantly integrated into Southeast Asia, its economic integration in the region does not match that of the PRC. Chinese FDI inflows to ASEAN were worth $11 billion in 2018, approximately eight times that of Indian inflows. Beijing also eliminated ninety percent of all FTA tariffs lines by 2015, whereas India’s FTA with ASEAN only eliminates seventy-eight percent of tariff lines and will only be accomplished by 2020. The combined ASEAN–China FTA area was worth $444 billion in 2017, whereas the ASEAN–India area was $74 billion (Dezan Shira and Associates 2017; ASEAN Secretariat 2018b: 147). This is in large part due to India’s limited resources despite its economic growth. In particular, New Delhi’s transition from aid recipient to donor has not been realized. This affects its capacity to invest in Southeast Asia compared to the economic weight of the PRC. In 2016, India remained the eighth highest recipient of ODA, receiving approximately $2.7 billion mainly from Japan and the IDA. Since 2005, its ODA as a ratio of gross national income has decreased, and since 2014 its FDI outward flows have also decreased. Its 2018–2019 foreign aid budget was also revised down to $900 million, which is minimal compared to the approximately $350 billion committed by China between 2000 and 2014 (AidData 2017). In addition, India’s development assistance is mainly targeted to South Asia—with sixty-six percent allocated to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Mongolia. Myanmar is the largest Southeast Asian recipient at five percent (Ministry of Finance 2018). In comparison to China’s power projection capabilities and land reclamation activities, Indian military modernization is also haphazard. Its 2015 Maritime Doctrine identifies that it needs an assured energy supply to sustain its economic growth. To this end, it harbors unfulfilled ambitions for a power-projection capability that extends across the Western Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean (Ministry of Defence (Navy) 2015: 49). As part of its great power ambitions, there is also growing recognition to invest in Indian naval modernization. However, such strategic thinking is constrained by India’s famed lack of coordination in strategic planning, its focus on nuclear arms technology vis-à-vis Pakistan, inadequate logistics and maintenance, and shortages of ammunition and spare parts (IISS 2018b). Also, the majority of policymakers support strategic autonomy and India’s continental land power status—and have no desire to provoke Beijing with maritime rearmament (Cohen and Dasgupta 2012: 28). The 2015 Maritime Doctrine does not articulate how India would defend its maritime supply lines and identifies the sea routes to the Pacific Ocean and the South and East China Seas as being of “secondary interest” (Ministry of Defence (Navy) 2015: 68). Moreover, despite an increasing defense budget, only twenty-five percent of India’s FY2018–2019 outlay of $16 billion is for defense and investment, with over seventy percent allocated to pay, allowances, and pensions (IISS 2018b). In contrast, in the PRC, the total outlay for FY2018–2019 is $45 billion, with thirty-three percent allocated to defense investment. This has impacted India’s ability to meet defense requirements in the Eastern Indian Ocean, and a 2017 report for India’s Controller and Auditor General raised major questions about the preparedness and capabilities of all its armed services (see CAG 2017: 11–45). In comparison, the PLA has adapted its defense requirements to deter foreign intervention in its claimed territories, including organizational and operational changes. In 2017, the PLA Navy had eighty-three principal surface combatants, compared to the Indian Navy’s twenty-seven; fifty-seven conventional submarines, compared to India’s fifteen; and four-nuclear powered submarines (SSBN), compared

444  Sheryn Lee

to one Indian SSBN still being tested. The PLA’s naval expansion plans include four aircraft carrier battle groups in service by 2030, significantly ahead of India’s wish-list of three aircraft carrier groups (IISS 2018a, 2018b; Nouwens 2018). In the absence of substantive power projection capabilities, New Delhi has focused on defense diplomacy in Southeast Asia, where it has made progress. Prime Minister Modi’s Act East policy and SAGAR concept have provided a base for India to upgrade many of its economic ties in Southeast Asia to political and security ones (Yong and See 2009: 34). In September 2017, India and Myanmar signed agreements related to maritime security cooperation, sharing white shipping information, and India providing a coastal surveillance system. In 2017 and 2018, the two countries also held the first India–Myanmar Bilateral Military Exercise and the first India–Myanmar Navy Bilateral Exercise in the Bay of Bengal. In May 2018, India and Indonesia signed fifteen agreements pledging to double bilateral trade by 2025, boost defense cooperation, and support the rule of law and freedom of navigation and overflight in the Indo-Pacific region. Approximately six weeks later, India and Singapore signed ten pacts, elevating relations to the “strategic partnership” level. The pacts elevated the defense dialogue to the ministerial level, agreed on collaboration in defense technology and exploration in co-development in the defense industry, and agreed to expand cooperation in maritime security through white shipping information sharing and greater bilateral coast guard cooperation. In addition, the Singapore Armed Forces is the only military to have agreements with India for all its service arms. In July 2018, India and Vietnam agreed to upgrade ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, with India extending a $500 million line of credit to Vietnam to facilitate deeper military cooperation. The two countries also agreed on the construction of offshore patrol vessels as one of the concrete steps to solidify the relationship. Yet it remains uncertain whether such initiatives have had any effect—only 0.1 percent of those polled in the 2019 State of Southeast Asia survey believed that India had the most influence economically, politically, and strategically in the region—ranking behind China, Russia, the EU, Japan, and the United States (Tang et al. 2019: 21). Upgrading India’s presence in Southeast Asia also faces a broader foreign policy challenge. Like many countries in the Indo-Pacific, India strikes a delicate balance between economic engagement with China and supporting security ties with Washington and like-minded partners. In 2017, Indian exports to China (including Hong Kong) were worth approximately $24 billion, approximately nine percent of its total; by 2018, twoway trade was worth $90 billion. Beijing’s ability to bring its economic heft to bear has resulted in attempts to resist Chinese political interference whilst maintaining economic interdependence. India and Southeast Asia both seek to avoid the perception of a coalition of states “containing” China. For instance, India and Indonesia’s statement on upgraded defense ties was careful not to mention concerns over China’s military expansion in the South China Sea as a motivation. In addition, to avoid the appearance of a military containment of the Chinese presence in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, New Delhi did not agree to elevate the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue to secretary-level consultations with the US, Japan, and Australia. It also has been reluctant to support the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” concept (see Palit and Sano 2018).

Conclusion The evolving contest for power and influence between China and India in Southeast Asia is not overt but instead involves each country seeking to strengthen ties with smaller regional states to secure their respective security and economic interests. Both

Unequal rivals in Southeast Asia  445

Beijing and New Delhi’s presence is tied to broader aspirations for great power status. China has successfully exploited existing divisions within the region and maintains political influence in mainland Southeast Asia. China’s financial diplomacy, along with its moves to aggressively prosecute its maritime claims in the South China Sea and extend its reach into the Indian Ocean, is causing concern in New Delhi and maritime Southeast Asian states. India is thus responding to the challenges in continental South and Southeast Asia, and especially to growing Chinese resources being invested in Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore continue to encourage Indian engagement to prevent China from leveraging power into influence. This has resulted in a messy patchwork of competitive interests, agreements, and partnerships as these Southeast Asian states attempt to maintain independent foreign policies and strengthen security partnerships to prevent the PRC’s dominance. The situation is further complicated by India and Southeast Asia’s desire to continue amicable commercial ties with the PRC. There are three key implications. First, as maritime Southeast Asian countries become increasingly wary of Chinese influence, they will increase their attempts to keep India engaged as a political, economic, and security counterweight. Second, Beijing will continue its militarization of the South China Sea and its financial diplomacy with mainland Southeast Asian states. As Indian actions in Southeast Asia have been defensive and many commitments are not yet fulfilled, the military balance of power has already shifted toward China. Finally, Southeast Asian countries will find it increasingly difficult to forge independent foreign policies. India is one of many major powers being courted by certain Southeast Asian states to check the expansion of Chinese influence. Due to India’s largely inconsistent investment and unfulfilled great power ambitions, many Southeast Asian countries will continue to encourage other actors such as Australia, the EU, Japan, South Korea, and the United States to upgrade their regional presence. In the future, India’s Southeast Asian engagement will likely take on a multilateral nature.

Notes

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28 China and India in the Middle East The rivalry moves west? Nicolas Blarel

China and India’s unprecedented involvement in the Middle East over the last decade opens a series of important questions. Will the growing economic and strategic interests of India and China in the Middle East lead to more activist foreign and security policies in the region? How will regional actors perceive China and India’s increasing investments? And how will India and China manage their relations in this particular region? Over the past century, the Middle East has experienced the coming and withdrawal of various external great powers. Today, there is the semblance of a new shift in the region with the perceived strategic disengagement of the United States1 and the undeniable emerging economic role of Asian powers. As of 2018, forty-five percent of Middle East trade was with Asia, whereas only fourteen percent was with the United States (Cohen 2019). China surpassed the United States as the world’s leading energy consumer and net importer of oil from the region in 2013 (EIA 2013; Johnson 2015). Trade patterns with oil-rich Gulf states also shifted by 2013 as China pushed the United States into second place while India moved Japan out of third place (Cohen 2019; Dorsey 2019). As a result, it is unlikely that China and India’s dependence on Middle East oil (and natural gas), and their engagement with regional economies, will decline any time soon. Some have coined the “CHIME” concept (China, India, and the Middle East) to characterize the emergence of a complementary ecosystem linking the capital surpluses and infrastructure needs of the oil-exporting Middle Eastern economies with the developing industrial capacities and consumer markets of China and India (Pieterse 2017). Furthermore, China and India’s significant economic and security interests in the Middle East, a key global junction, impact not only their energy security but also their regional postures, their relations with other global players like the United States and Europe, and, increasingly, their own domestic political situations. Regions like Kerala in India have developed and maintained strong and interdependent trade, cultural, and societal links with the Gulf states through decades of migration patterns and remittance flows, while China has progressively demonstrated concerns over how the religious divisions in the Middle East could impact the Uyghur community in its northwestern province of Xinjiang. Consequently, the protection of burgeoning interests in the Middle East has incited India and China to review their foreign and defense policies toward the region (Kemp 2010). The Middle East definitely has a much larger strategic weight in Chinese and Indian long-term planning than Latin America or Africa, but it has historically attracted little attention from policymakers and scholars. While there has been a growing literature on China’s relations with the Middle East (Ehteshami and Miyagi 2015; Scobell and Nader 2016; Horesh 2016a; Ehteshami and Horesh 2018; Reardon-Anderson 2018;

450  Nicolas Blarel

Dorsey 2019), there have only been sporadic studies looking at India’s Middle East policies (Ward 1992; Mudiam 1994; Abhyankar 2008), and the nexus between the Middle East, India, and China has been completely neglected.2 In spite of the important stakes, there is a surprising lack of scholarship examining India–China relations in the Middle East. This stands in stark contrast to the important literature analyzing ties between India and China in other sub-regions of Asia (Kavalski 2012, 2018; Acharya 2017; Grare 2017). This chapter seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the increasingly complex and multi-layered relations between China and India in the Middle East. Since the nineteenth century and the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East has been a contested geographical area between various global rivals—from Britain and France to Britain and Imperial Russia, Britain and the United States, and finally the United States and USSR until the early 1990s (Blyth 2003; Primakov 2009; Takeyh and Simon 2016; Barr 2018). Most of these rivalries led to zero-sum contests for resources and allies in the region (Chen 2018). Given that China and India’s economies have been increasingly dependent on resources and trade opportunities in the region, there are numerous points of potential friction between the two Asian powers that have emerged over time. However, shared concerns and interests in strategic stability and safe access to resources have also led to some degree of convergence and limited cooperation. In addition, despite growing investments in the region and deepening ties with all Middle Eastern actors, both India and China have been reluctant to get involved in regional politics, especially in the context of perceived US disengagement. The remainder of this chapter is organized in four sections. I first offer a brief historical background of the involvement of the two Asian powers in the Middle East from 1947 to the 1990s. I then discuss how economic and energy interests over the last twenty-five years have been driving India and China’s gradual strategic involvement into Middle Eastern politics. Building from this, I highlight in a third section the possible points of friction, but also of cooperation, linked to joint initiatives by both India and China to support their investments in the region. In the fourth section, I consider how this increased involvement has been perceived by major actors within the region. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of whether we can expect a competitive or collaborative relationship between China and India in the coming years.

1947–1992: limited and sporadic engagement The history of the two Asian powers’ engagement with the Middle East has been fairly different. Given its geographical location, the Indian subcontinent historically was the center of a sophisticated network of commerce between Middle Eastern and South Asian merchants (Ratnagar 2004; Bose 2006). Cultural and commercial ties were then reinforced by the settlements of Indians in the Arab world and of Arabs on the Western coast of the Indian subcontinent. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company built on the pre-existing trading networks and adapted them to its own commercial and strategic needs, notably by connecting these trade lanes with the larger British Empire (Blyth 2003). However, with the growth in scale of British political control of India, the spread of direct British political and administrative influence on the Middle East became necessary (Darwin 2009). Britain created a series of outposts and buffer zones along the Gulf coast in what was called the “Trucial system,” whereby British India signed a series of treaties with the Gulf sheikhdoms (Onley 2007). Following World War I, the British Empire again expanded in the region as

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Britain was given the mandate to administer Iraq and Palestine in 1922 by the League of Nations. As a result, the Middle East maintained an important position in political and commercial designs for successive polities in India. By contrast, China had less direct exposure to the Middle East until the 1950s. The present Chinese leadership often advertises its old commercial ties through the Maritime Silk Road and the expeditions of Zheng He, the Muslim Chinese explorer, in the fifteenth century (Finlay 1991; Musgrave and Nexon 2017). However, while Muslim traders established enclaves in Chinese ports, there was no long-term presence of Chinese traders in Middle Eastern cities, and pilgrimages to Mecca by Chinese Muslims were limited (Dorsey 2019: 11). Starting from the late 1940s, new political entities in India and China redefined their ties with the Middle East. The newly independent Indian government under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru aimed to differentiate its policies from the imperialist practices exercised under the British. In this context, India viewed the Middle East and newly decolonized countries as partners in this new international movement. India took a strong stance in support of Palestinians and Arabs in their struggle for liberation. China’s diplomatic relations with Arab states in the 1950s and 1960s were similarly driven by shared anti-colonial and anti-imperialistic concerns and rhetoric. In the early days of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both India and China developed robust pro-Palestinian stances; neither country established diplomatic ties with Israel until the 1990s (Blarel 2015). As a result, India and China were involved in Middle Eastern affairs, albeit in a sporadic and reactive fashion. The two Asian powers condemned the Anglo-French-Israeli attack during the Suez crisis in 1956, as well as the 1958 US intervention in Lebanon. While Nehru and India were perceived as an important extra-regional actor involved in the settlement of regional issues like the Suez crisis and the Lebanon crisis of 1958 (Blarel 2015; Nayudu 2018), local governments perceived China to be a distant player at the political, military, and economic levels. As a result, with the exception of Egypt, many new Arab states did not recognize the communist regime in China and favored ties with the Soviet Union or the United States (Shichor 1979). India’s involvement in Middle Eastern affairs during this period was also related to matters such as facilitating trade through guaranteeing access to sea lanes and to the Suez Canal (Bishku 1987). Indian elites were concerned about the security of key strategic choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal and adjusted India’s regional policy in order to preserve its economic and trade interests. This dependence on trade lanes led India to actively participate in the negotiations following the Suez crisis of 1956. While India supported Egypt’s decision to normalize the Suez Canal, Nehru’s priority was to keep the canal open to international shipping (Blarel 2015). In the late 1960s, oil became a vital necessity to India’s growing industrial sector. Since independence, India’s major suppliers had been Iraq and Saudi Arabia; India also developed relations with other Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The events accompanying October 1973 and the oil crisis further pushed India to harmonize its Middle Eastern policies with its oil and trade interests. By contrast to India, China had small economic and strategic stakes in the Middle East for most of the Cold War. In spite of China’s economic reforms of the late 1970s and its promotion of new open trade policies, the Middle East remained a marginal region in its foreign policy agenda. Until 1985, the total volume of trade between China and the Middle East was only $1.7 billion (Zhang 1999). Beijing’s assumption of the United Nations Security Council seat in the 1970s led it to slowly be recognized

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by all the Middle Eastern states, but Saudi Arabia and Israel only normalized ties with China in the 1990s (Calabrese 1990). Given its limited interests and stakes in the region, China promoted the resolution of Middle Eastern conflicts through direct negotiations between the parties without third-party interference (Shichor 2013). A series of domestic economic and political developments in the early 1990s encouraged India and China to reorient their Middle East policies. Initially, both countries reacted quite differently to geopolitical changes in the region. While China voted in the Security Council in favor of sanctions against Iraq in the wake of the invasion of Kuwait, India was more reluctant to directly condemn the Iraqi regime, with which it had developed strong energy and strategic ties (Mudiam 1994). India opposed the use of force to solve the Kuwait problem, and the External Affairs Minister I. K. Gujral was even sent to Baghdad to support a negotiated settlement of the conflict (Baral and Mohanty 1992). By contrast, China broke with its traditional stance on non-interference and indirectly endorsed military action by abstaining in the Council on the vote to authorize military force to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait (Shichor 2013). The Gulf War and the Oslo peace process further revealed important divisions and realignments within the Arab-Muslim world that left both India and China with unprecedented diplomatic leeway to engage all regional actors without any concern of diplomatic repercussions. One major indicator of this policy shift was the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel in January 1992 for both India and China (Kumaraswamy 2010; Blarel 2015). The normalization of ties not only helped the two Asian powers develop stronger defense and economic relations with Israel, but also enabled both states to move past old ideological configurations and engage a wider number of Middle Eastern actors, notably to further their energy and economic interests.

The quest for energy and trade Over the past two decades, China and India’s dependence on petroleum and other raw materials from the Middle East, as well as their sustained economic growth, has gradually made the two countries a major destination for exports and a venue for investments from Middle Eastern states. China’s primary economic interest in the Middle East has been to ensure stable access to the region’s energy resources. China became a net petroleum importer in the early 1990s, and the Middle East has been China’s main source of imported petroleum since 1995 (Alterman and Garver 2008); in 2014, the Middle East supplied fifty-two percent of China’s gross imports (Niu 2014). Over the last decade, China has also become the most important trade partner for most countries in the region, mainly as a supplier of goods (Ghiselli 2018). As an example, trade between China and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) increased from just under $10 billion in 2000 to $114 billion in 2016. Taken as a group, the GCC ranks as China’s eighth largest source of imports and its eighth largest export destination (Scobell and Nader 2016). Sino-Israeli economic relations have also progressed over the last decade, now exceeding $8 billion, up from $12.8 million in 1992, while China reportedly invested a total of $12.9 billion (Evron 2017; Efron et al. 2019). Finally, China has invested $100 billion in infrastructure projects in the region as part of its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative (now known as the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI), and more than half a million PRC citizens are reportedly now living and working in the Middle East (Niu 2014; Ehteshami 2018). India has equally boosted its economic and political relations with various regional actors, including Israel and the GCC states. The region remains the source of more than

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sixty percent of India’s oil and gas requirements and is therefore critical to the country’s energy security. While India only represented three percent of the GCC’s total trade in 1992, by 2016, India had become the GCC’s third trading partner after the European Union (EU) and Japan (Calabrese 2017). India’s trade with the GCC, which represented $5.5 billion in 2001, rose to $137.7 billion in 2014–2015 (Pethiyagoda 2017b). In 2017, the UAE was India’s second largest trading partner (after the United States) and India’s largest source of investment from the Arab world (eighty percent of GCC investments in India); the UAE had also committed to investing $75 billion more in India’s infrastructure sector (Calabrese 2017), while Indian investments in the UAE during the same period increased to $55 billion (Batrawy 2019). India’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is also particularly strong. In March 2019, Saudi Arabia announced investment opportunities worth more than $100 billion in India following Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to New Delhi (Miglani 2019). In August 2019, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Aramco purchased, for $15 billion, a twenty percent stake in the hydrocarbon and chemical businesses of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries (Batrawy 2019). As a result, in terms of demographics, industrial and technological capacities, and resulting economic opportunities, India has been able to offer the GCC a promising market for its oil exports and is expected to overtake China as the world’s largest energy market by the mid-2020s (PTI 2019). India’s relations with the Middle East have also been enhanced by the existence of a sizeable Indian diaspora. The region is home to approximately 8.9 million Indians who contribute about $35–40 billion in remittances every year and account for about three percent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) (IANS 2017). The strong historical transnational ties between this important diaspora and the populations of specific Indian states (Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu) reinforce the need for Indian leaders to see events and ties with Gulf states as directly affecting the welfare of parts of its society. As the Middle East’s increasing importance to both India and China has become evident, the leadership in both countries has gradually begun to design policies to limit their exposure to the geopolitical risks in the region. For various reasons, the two Asian powers had traditionally been reluctant to publicly articulate any strategy toward the Middle East. Both Beijing and New Delhi have maintained the status of outside powers that are on relatively amicable terms with most regional actors, and have tried to not jeopardize this balancing act by not formulating explicit strategies. In addition, both states have historically been able to depend on the US security umbrella in the region. Nevertheless, the mismatch between their growing interests in the Middle East and the limited resources deployed to defend these interests has been gradually and publicly recognized by both powers since 2015. For instance, in January 2016 the Chinese government published its first white paper dedicated exclusively to the Middle East. This document emphasized China’s efforts to establish and deepen economic engagement with and within the greater Middle East and focused on exporting China’s industrial capacity, notably its port and trade logistics infrastructure. With a total investment of $29.5 billion (compared to $7 billion by the United States), China emerged in 2016 as the Arab world’s top foreign investor (Dong 2017). While there is no formal mention of an economic corridor passing through the Arabian Peninsula, China has also considered how cooperation with Middle Eastern partners can be formally or informally integrated within the broader BRI initiative and China’s ambitious infrastructural projects (Fulton 2017). Funding for projects such as the fast rail connection between the Red Sea Port of Eilat and the Mediterranean port

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of Ashdod, for example, has gradually been provided by the newly established Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) (Shichor 2018). Most Middle Eastern states have also become members of the AIIB, and Chinese banks and financial institutions have increased their transactions, activities, and foothold in the Gulf region in order to fund and support BRI activities in the Middle East (Rakhmat 2019). In order to protect these investments and to ensure access to this economic corridor, China has increased its military and naval activity throughout the Indian Ocean, illustrated by the establishment of the country’s first foreign base in Djibouti. During the same time period, India has pushed its “Think West” policy to further institutionalize its rapprochement with the Middle East, which has increasingly been presented as being part of India’s “extended neighbourhood” ( Jaishankar 2015). Since 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has focused his attention on promoting ties with the GCC states as well as Iran and Israel, with the clear goal of building on existing business-to-business contacts. For instance, Modi chose the UAE as his first destination in the Middle East in August 2015, and then visited Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Qatar in 2016, as well as the UAE again and Oman by the first half of 2018. Modi was also the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories (Pant 2018). New Delhi has also promoted stronger strategic ties with Middle Eastern states. India has developed a robust defense partnership with Israel, which has involved the purchase of important weapons platforms and the joint production of defense systems (Blarel 2015). India also signed strategic partnerships with Saudi Arabia in 2010 and the UAE in 2017; developed high-level strategic security dialogues (UAE), inter-state defense cooperation agreements (Qatar, Oman, UAE, Saudi Arabia), and intelligence and counter-terrorism cooperation (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar); and promoted convergence in enhancing maritime security in the Indian Ocean region through bilateral activities and in multilateral fora such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) and the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS). This latest set of initiatives coincided with India’s redefinition of the geographic scope of Indian Navy missions to its western flank and the multiple choke points in the Western Indian Ocean denoted as primary maritime interests (Limaye 2017). The simultaneous economic involvement of India and China in the region has created conditions for tensions between India and China. Given the lingering border disputes between the two countries, New Delhi has notably been historically mistrustful of China’s intentions (Chen 2018). Naval and port deployments in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf have been one example of this security dilemma. The Chinese navy has stepped up its presence in the Indian Ocean even if it has yet to match that of the United States and India. However, there has been a more sustained engagement, including regular calls on Gulf ports (Dorsey 2019). In addition, China has increasingly relied on logistical bases as technical stops in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean at large. India, for its part, has perceived the establishment of Chinese ports along the Indian Ocean littoral, including Gwadar in Pakistan, and Djibouti, as possible threats to its own vital sea lanes and access to regional resources. Gwadar in particular is a central node in China’s BRI strategy as it is supposed to link the Gulf with China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang, and thereby provide, once operational, a crucial and more direct land-sea supply line from the Gulf to China. India has been particularly concerned by China’s development of ports with dual-use capacities, namely commerce and naval power deployment (Singh 2015).

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The  competitive dimension of Sino-Indian relations regarding the BRI has notably been acute in Iran, where the two Asian powers have struggled for control over access to the Chabahar port project. For China, Chabahar’s geographic position is key: Iran is the only state in the Middle East that can potentially export oil and gas to China entirely by land, circumventing the Strait of Hormuz, the Indian Ocean, and the Strait of Malacca. However, India had historically backed the development of the Chabahar deep sea port to create access to Afghanistan and Central Asia, and to break Pakistan’s regional maritime monopoly. As a result, Prime Minister Modi pledged a $300 million credit line for the Chabahar port soon after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani invited China to invest in the Chabahar economic zone and hosted a business delegation from Beijing (Ramachandran 2019). Furthermore, China and India have access and commercial stakes in ports in Oman and UAE (Panda 2018). This battle over the access to and control of strategically important Middle East ports such as Gwadar and Chabahar demonstrates a potential for regional rivalry. However, the highly realist security dilemma can be assuaged if India and China clearly define their security roles, commercial and strategic interests, and thereby possible shared responsibilities in the Middle East. In this scenario, international cooperation in Gulf security could prove beneficial for all the regional stakeholders, both Asian and Middle Eastern. Given China and India’s dependence on the Gulf for energy resources and lack of alternative suppliers, both countries need to take a more active stake in regional security arrangements. For instance, India and China have sought to put in place a joint working group to identify possible issues of cooperation in the energy sector, notably mechanisms to mitigate the risks of crude oil price volatility, and to assert their joint weight in discussions with OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) (Choudhary 2019). This was a unique cooperative initiative which followed a decade of competition between the two Asian powers for oil and gas resources in the Middle East. In addition, as US interest in the region gradually declines, the Gulf states have been looking East to the two Asian powers as credible new global actors that can play a practical role in managing conflicts and ensuring some degree of stability in the region—even if neither power has the military capacity to replace the United States in the short term ( Janardhan 2017). The tensions in the Strait of Hormuz in the summer of 2019 have demonstrated that the possibility of a naval changing of the guard could happen more precipitately than expected. In light of the recent attacks on oil tankers, US President Donald Trump called on Asian countries to protect their own ships and to share more of the naval burden when it comes to the Middle East (Graham 2019). India quickly responded to the crisis and the possibility of a disruption in access to oil resources by sending two warships to the Gulf to secure its interests, while, at the same time, refusing to be involved in regional disputes by joining any military coalition spearheaded by the United States (Bedi 2019). By contrast, China signaled through its ambassador to the UAE its possible willingness to participate in a US-led maritime coalition to secure and escort commercial vessels in the Gulf (Cornwell 2019). Until recently, both India and China have worked separately to preserve their interests in the Gulf (oil imports and secure shipping lanes), but it is not impossible to envisage the two powers cooperating in collective and multinational initiatives to contribute to Gulf security in the future. China’s 2016 white paper mentioned the expansion of military exchanges and the need to create a regular mechanism for security cooperation and joint anti-terrorist activities, including maritime activity like the international counter-piracy operations in the Gulf

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of Aden and the waters of Somalia in 2009 in what some labeled China’s “biggest naval expedition since the 15th century” (Pethiyagoda 2017a). At the time, Washington and the international community welcomed China and India as “responsible stakeholders” and contributors to security provision (Lou 2012). In this context, Djibouti has been an important base for rapid naval deployment to the Middle East to protect key trade routes to Africa and Europe, but there has been little projection of Chinese military power in the Gulf itself. Seeking to placate India and US concerns about the construction of a military facility in Djibouti, China has reaffirmed its two aims in the Indian Ocean: to preserve its economic interests and the security of sea lanes of communication. The Chinese Navy further emphasized that, unlike in the Pacific Ocean, China has no territorial disputes in the Indian Ocean and there is space for cooperation (Bo 2014). The absence of a clearly defined Chinese or Indian security strategy in the Gulf that goes beyond limited joint exercises and sales of weapons systems limits, at present, further opportunities for cooperation that could be driven by shared concerns in the Indian Ocean such as the threat of piracy and terrorism in the world’s busiest shipping lanes and the straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb connecting Asia and Europe. As India and China revise their roles—moving from free-riding on the US security architecture to being actual security stakeholders—it will be essential to observe how both powers manage their relationship in the Middle East in light of some converging interests. It remains to be seen how a possible security vacuum can be filled by the two Asian powers. The India–China relationship also needs to be understood as a multi-faceted and dynamic process. Relations between India and China in the Middle East should not solely be evaluated through the angle of the quest and contest for energy resources, and for naval and port presence; they are also shaped by factors such as local and regional dynamics and how China and India’s increased presence has been perceived by local actors. As a result, it is important to look at how both Asian powers have managed their competition for leadership, status, and legitimacy in the region.

Role change and regional perceptions Over the last two decades, China and India’s engagement with the Middle East has been strategically grounded in an American-policed regional architecture. Both Asian powers have benefitted since the 1990s from the US management of regional crises. This also entailed that the United States was the de facto arbiter of Chinese or Indian interactions with regional actors. For instance, in the 1990s, the United States criticized and blocked the Israeli transfer of Israel’s Phalcon airborne warning and control system (AWACS) technology to China and then supported a similar deal between Israel and India in 2003 (Blarel 2015). In addition, while criticizing US actions in the region such as its interventions in Iraq or Syria, China and India have never actively sought to undermine American regional primacy. Until recently, the two Asian powers, and especially China, meant little to this region, which has been, and to a large extent remains, focused on its own problems and beholden to its main patron and protector, the United States. However, it has become increasingly evident that the United States has been withdrawing from traditional regional leadership. The crisis of US global leadership has never been as apparent as in its management of Middle Eastern crises such as the 2003 Iraq War, the Arab Spring, the Syrian and Yemen crises, and the rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). In December 2018, the United States also announced its abrupt decision to withdraw military troops from Syria. This decision was perceived as a further

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signal that a more cost-conscious United States is no longer looking to unconditionally participate in multilateral efforts and to play a mediator role in regional disputes (Karlin and Wittes 2019). As mentioned previously in this chapter, India and China’s growing key interests in the Middle East have been forcing them to rethink the tools they can develop to support their interests and roles in the region in a more expansive way. This readjustment is further being compounded as regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Israel are looking for alternative partners and markets as confidence in unconditional US support wavers (Horesh 2016b; Hubbard and Hernandez 2019). It is therefore critical to understand this role transition and how it interacts with the aspirations of various Middle Eastern states. Both Asian powers are therefore faced with a dilemma over their role (re-)definition toward the region. As noted earlier, both India and China have generally been commitment-averse when it comes to Middle Eastern politics. China’s foreign policy in the region has historically been driven by an explicit attempt to not be perceived as dominant as the United States was (Schichor 2013). As a result, it is crucial that China not appear as if it is interfering in the domestic affairs of Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other regional actors. Similarly, since the early 1990s, India’s foreign policy toward the region has been recalibrated from supporting specific actors and issues such as Egypt or the Palestinian cause to engaging all relevant parties in the Middle East such as Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to promote its own economic and strategic interests (Blarel 2016). India has since then carefully shied away from commenting on domestic and regional political issues to protect its regional interests, including access to energy resources, military deals, and the welfare of its diaspora in the region. Both actors have also generally been reluctant to be too involved in Middle Eastern affairs for fear of direct consequences on their own domestic politics. China has been concerned that the growing connections and interdependence through its BRI could link sectarian disputes and unrest in the Middle East and the situation in Xinjiang, with jihadist groups like the Islamic State fueling unrest and radicalization among the Uyghurs (Gramer 2017). Beijing has also been concerned about the consequences of its treatment of the Uyghur minority on its image across the Islamic world; the Xinjiang issue has complicated China’s relations with its Middle Eastern partners as there has been growing international attention and concern regarding the rights of Muslims in China to practice their religious and cultural traditions (Finley 2007; Dorsey 2018). China has therefore been publicizing its efforts to promote economic development in Xinjiang and has successfully lobbied Arab partners to limit their open criticism of Chinese policies in Xinjiang by promising economic investment (Cafiero 2019; Gao 2019). To some degree, Indian policymakers have also been concerned that increasing instability in the Middle East will directly impact the welfare of India’s diaspora and indirectly impact sections of its own domestic population which directly receive remittances from the Gulf states. India’s past inability to influence geopolitics in the Middle East, combined with its lack of a security presence in the region, has led to costly evacuations of its diaspora (Xavier 2017). Given the important societal links through its trade and diaspora connections, India has equally been worried about interreligious disputes in the region and the possible implications for India’s domestic politics. Disagreements between Western and Indian diplomats over the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003, Lebanon in 2006, and recently in Syria and Yemen are therefore the result of different interpretations of the consequences of certain Middle Eastern crises. Contrary to distant extraregional powers like the United States, Indian leaders perceive Middle Eastern conflicts

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to have direct implications for India’s own internal well-being. For instance, India has been directly concerned about the impact that the rise and fall of the Islamic State will have on its own domestic and regional security interests (Taneja 2018). India has also been critical of Arab states commenting on its domestic problems such as the Kashmir insurgency (Al-Sulami 2018). However, Middle Eastern countries have been increasingly more neutral when it comes to condemning New Delhi’s policies in Indian-administered Kashmir, including a noted silence following the Indian government’s decision to strip the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its limited autonomy (Batrawy 2019). These muted reactions to the Kashmir situation from the Middle East, and especially the GCC, can be explained by the region’s important annual trade with India. As a result, both Asian powers have been reluctant to abandon their approach of balance and neutrality, a position that has served their interests well. However, the shared principle of non-interference is increasingly hindering the potential of both Asian powers to play more important regional roles commensurate with their growing economic clout. Until recently, China and India had mainly emphasized the need to develop mutually beneficial economic and commercial relations, banking on the fact that Middle Eastern states are pivoting East. Gulf states are increasingly vulnerable because of their energy wealth, small population size, and proximity to and involvement in protracted conflict zones, as well as the perception that the United States is no longer an active player in the region. While China and India have sought access to oil and gas, the major oil producers in the Gulf have simultaneously pursued access to the Indian and Chinese markets. China has built on this economic relationship to project soft power and emphasize its cultural and historical ties with the region through the BRI framework, as well as through the development of Confucius institutes in most Middle Eastern states. China’s economic model has appealed to regimes and elites in the Middle East who have been disillusioned by past US leadership (Kamrava 2018), as China lacks any colonial legacy and has suggested its own economic model with no strings attached (Fulton 2018). In parallel, India has also built a rhetoric of long-term historical, commercial, and people-to-people ties, arguably “dictated more by markets than by policy.” Indian diplomacy has openly suggested that the country build on the “combination of human and energy connectivity” and general positive perceptions of India and Indians in the region to develop further ties ( Jaishankar 2015). As mentioned earlier, China and India have been reluctant to get enmeshed in local conflicts and disputes despite their growing ties with the region. Nevertheless, the two Asian powers have seen their rhetoric slightly evolve over the last decade. China has gradually adopted a quasi-mediation diplomacy, a shift in strategy which implied a limited attempt to manage rather than resolve problems in the region (Sun and Zoubir 2017; Chaziza 2018). China was, for instance, directly involved in encouraging Iran to seek an agreement with Europe and the United States limiting its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions and the possibility to develop non-military nuclear research (Garver 2018). Likewise, India has occasionally been involved in multilateral forums over the Palestine–Israel peace process or the settlement of the Syrian civil war, but it has yet to develop a systematic and principled political strategy toward the Middle East (Pethiyagoda 2018). More recently, both India and China exploited US President Trump’s promise to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by reiterating a call for the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. While China and India enjoy enduring popularity due to their historical backing of the Palestinian cause, few Palestinians believe that either

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Asian power can supplant the United States, or even Europe and Russia, in resolving the territorial dispute (Burton 2018b). In addition, with the normalization of ties with Israel, both India and China have become more tepid in their support of Palestinian nationalism (Blarel 2015; Yu 2018). As a result of these ongoing shifts, Middle Eastern perceptions of India and China have reflected a number of contradictory attitudes. China has gained respect and interest for its economic and political model, but there have been concerns about its economic expansion (Kamrava 2018). For instance, the Chinese political and economic model is not seen as directly applicable to the Middle Eastern economies, which have very different histories of development, institutional capacities, and channels of public accountability (Dorsey 2019: Chapter 7). In addition, Beijing’s BRI has not widely been perceived as a mutually beneficial partnership. There have been concerns about the one-sided nature of the plan and the entrenchment of relations of dependence vis-à-vis the Chinese economy (Ghiselli 2018). Furthermore, China’s strategy of mediation in international issues like the Iran nuclear question, the Israel–Palestine conflict, and Syria’s civil war has been perceived as self-serving, as these efforts were mainly intended to preserve China’s commercial interests. In these cases, China has also followed rather than led multilateral initiatives and has thereby rarely set the agenda. For instance, China has primarily been backing Russia’s rhetoric supporting President Bashar Assad in Syria (O’Connor 2018). As a result, China has not been able to wield its growing economic influence to shape regional politics (Cook 2018). Indian policymakers have also hesitated in redefining India’s role toward the Middle East as India has maintained strong ties with all regional actors since the early 2000s. In the last decade, as India developed stronger trade and defense ties with Israel and with the Gulf monarchies, it continued to maintain its traditional relationship with Iran despite its rivalry with the Saudi-led Sunni bloc in the region (Blarel 2016). India also refused to openly take sides in intra-GCC divides. Unlike China, India has not articulated a new strategy through a white paper and has instead maintained a flexible position. In addition, China’s more recent pivot to the Middle East has led to a wide series of reactions in the region; in contrast, India’s more limited and less centralized economic involvement has generated more goodwill among local actors. India’s symbolic invitation as a guest of honor to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation foreign ministers’ meeting in March 2019, which was widely supported by Middle Eastern states like the UAE, illustrates this recognition of India’s global stature and of its historical and cultural connections with the region (Chaudhury 2019).

Conclusion This chapter aims to better understand the evolving nature of India and China’s relations with and within the Middle East. There are a number of conditions, such as the quest for energy and influence, which could potentially lead to competitive relations. For instance, India has expressed concerns with the growing naval Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean and in the Gulf. However, the India–China relationship has not yet moved to an irreconcilable zero-sum contest for resources and allies in the region. In fact, both actors have managed to simultaneously develop strong economic and strategic ties with all relevant actors. Unlike previous historical periods of great power involvement, there has been no clear emergence of alliance blocs with quasi-exclusive allegiances tilting

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toward one or the other extra-regional power. The two powers also have converging interests and potential opportunities for cooperation in light of the gradual US disengagement from the region. However, any discussions on security coordination also require a better definition of the shifting roles of both Asian powers in the Middle East. Until recently, Indian and Chinese policies in the Middle East have signaled shortterm, tactical moves to reassure the United States and other Middle Eastern stakeholders about their commitment to the region, while laying the groundwork for much more ambitious economic initiatives like BRI for China. As explained in this chapter, historical legacies and role transition management can explain the mainly cautious and incremental strategy from both powers—that is, maintaining good relations with most parties while maximizing economic benefits and access to natural resources, and limiting the impact of regional disputes and crises on their own domestic politics (Xinjiang, Kashmir, Kerala). While these policies have been successful over the short term, they will be increasingly challenged as Middle Eastern events could progressively draw the two Asian powers to become proactive, especially to defend their investments and their overseas workforces. The future roles of India and China in the Middle East will largely depend on the nature of their involvement in the region during these transitional stages. For instance, if India and China can maintain their positive relations with the Gulf states despite their diplomatic support for Iran, this would serve as a positive signal that both powers can manage conflicts among their interests in the region. Alternatively, the problems linked to Iran’s nuclear aspirations and the possible diplomatic and economic isolation of Tehran, as well as heightened tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, might push India or China to swing toward other regional actors. However, these realignments will likely happen slowly, as both Asian powers will continue to hedge their bets rather than stake out an explicit strategy toward the region or unequivocally choose sides in regional conflicts. If we look more closely at both Asian powers’ future involvement, one can also identify a more transactional partnership between China and the Middle East. China sees the region mostly as a market for resources, where its military force can sporadically be deployed to safeguard geo-economic interests. For instance, China does not seem to openly seek to establish hard military bases, on the model of past extra-regional powers’ involvement in the region like the United States, United Kingdom, and France. As a result, China’s military presence and role as security provider in the Middle East will mostly be ad hoc. By contrast, a more benign perception of India’s increasing presence in the Middle East has led countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Israel to actively promote economic relations and to invest in India, but also to develop strategic and defense ties. However, it will become a greater challenge for India, as it has been for China, to remain removed from conflicts in the Middle East and to remain equidistant to the different poles of the regional system.

Notes 1 The disengagement has been the result of a combination of President Obama’s pivot to Asia initiative, America’s increasing energy self-sufficiency due to the shale-gas revolution, and the Trump administration’s apparent reluctance to confirm its commitments to past alliances and peace processes in the region. 2 Some notable exceptions are Kemp (2010) and Zhao (2012). Other studies have analyzed and compared India and China’s ties with specific actors in the region (Burton 2018a; Fulton and Sim 2019).

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29 China and India’s engagement with Africa Seeking national interests Wu Fuzuo

China and India, two of the most important rising powers in the international system, have been undertaking a variety of measures to engage the African continent since the end of the Cold War, especially in the twenty-first century, including political, economic, military, and cultural measures, in addition to both countries’ newly initiated schemes—China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and India (and Japan)’s Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC). The rationale for China and India’s multifaceted engagement with Africa lies in both countries’ desires to pursue their national interests. Specifically, China needs Africa’s support for its one-China policy while India needs Africa’s support to acquire permanent membership of the United Nations (UN) Security Council (UNSC). Both China and India need Africa’s rich natural resources, especially oil, to fuel their economic growth, in addition to Africa’s markets for their investment and exports. Finally, both China and India intend to enhance their rising great power status in the international system through their contribution to Africa’s development and their increased influence on the continent. This chapter first explores the various measures China and India have adopted to engage Africa, investigates China and India’s national interests in such an engagement with Africa, and then examines the implications of China and India’s engagement for Africa. A brief conclusion is presented in the final section.

China and India’s engagement with Africa Since the end of the Cold War, especially in the twenty-first century, China and India have deepened their engagement with the continent through a variety of political, economic, military, cultural, and connectivity initiatives—China’s BRI and India’s AAGC. Political engagement China and India have been conducting frequent high-level official visits to politically engage Africa. China’s high-level official visits were initiated by Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s state visit to Africa in 1996, which laid the foundation for China’s engagement with Africa. More specifically, in May 1996, Jiang Zemin visited Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Namibia, and Zimbabwe (China Daily 2014). During this visit, Jiang put forward a “five-point proposal” to develop Sino-African relations, which included sincere friendship, treating each other equally, unity and cooperation, common development, and looking into the future (MOFA 2004). The proposal became the foundation of China’s policy toward Africa. In the twenty-first century, top-level Chinese leaders have visited Africa more frequently. Take

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the year 2006 as an example. In January, Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing visited six African countries (MOFA 2006a); in April, Chinese President Hu Jintao paid a state visit to Nigeria, Morocco, and Kenya (MOFA 2006b); in June, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited seven African countries, including Egypt, Ghana, the Republic of Congo, Angola, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda (MOFA 2006c). In February 2007, Hu Jintao visited eight African countries, including Cameroon, Liberia, Sudan, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, and Seychelles (Xinhua 2007). Two years later, in February 2009, Hu Jintao visited Mali, Senegal, Tanzania, and Mauritius (China Daily 2014). Chinese incumbent President Xi Jinping followed suit. According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Xi has attached great importance to China–Africa relations. For example, he chose Africa as the destination of his first foreign visit both after he was first elected Chinese president in 2013 and after his re-election in 2018 (Xinhua 2018c). In March 2013, Xi Jinping visited several African countries—Tanzania, South Africa, and the Republic of Congo—on his maiden foreign visit as the Chinese head of state (Xinhua 2018c). Five years later, in 2018, on his first overseas state trip since beginning of his second term as leader in July 2018, Xi Jinping visited Senegal, Rwanda, and Mauritius, three small African countries, in addition to South Africa where he attended the BRICS summit (Xinhua 2018a). According to one commentary, “Beijing’s top leadership (the president, premier and foreign minister) have reportedly made a total of around 80 visits to more than 40 different African countries over the past 10 years” (Hammond 2018). When it comes to India’s high-level official visits to Africa, India’s former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Africa five times within his eight-year premiership (Foy 2011), including the 2005 visit to Mauritius and the October 2007 visit to Nigeria and South Africa, which was “the first high-level Indian dignitary to visit Nigeria after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s trip in 1962” (PTI 2007); the November 2007 visit to Uganda (MEA 2012); the May 2011 visit to Ethiopia and Tanzania (Foy 2011); as well as the March 2013 visit to South Africa to attend the Fifth BRICS Summit held in Durban (MEA 2017b). On 7–9 July 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid an official visit to South Africa (MEA 2017b); in March 2015, in order to enhance India’s ties with the African Indian Ocean rim countries, Modi visited Seychelles and Mauritius, and signed agreements with these two small island countries to develop their infrastructure (Roy 2015). In June 2016, Modi visited four African countries—Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, and Kenya, which was his first visit to the African mainland (Roche 2016). In May 2016, Indian President Pranab Mukherjee visited Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Namibia, and in May–June Indian Vice President Hamid Ansari visited Morocco and Tunisia (Roche 2016). In July 2018, Modi visited Rwanda, Uganda, and South Africa. According to a commentary on the frequency of India’s top officials’ visits to Africa in the twenty-first century, “There have been 23 outgoing visits to Africa by the President, Vice-President and Prime Minister in the last four years” (IANS 2018). According to India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA 2017a): 16 outgoing visits have taken place in the last 5 years by the troika—3 by the President, 7 by Vice President and 6 by the Prime Minister. President Pranab Mukherjee has visited Namibia, Ghana and Ivory Coast. Vice President Hamid Ansari has been to Morocco, Tunisia, Nigeria, Mali, Algeria, Rwanda and Uganda. And PM Modi has traveled to South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Mauritius, and Seychelles. Under the extended political outreach of MEA, Ministerial visits have taken place to all the countries of the African continent.

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Apart from high-level official visits to African countries, both China and India have institutionalized their engagement with Africa. More specifically, in 2000, China established the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) at the ministerial conference in Beijing, as a tri-annual collective dialogue platform for cooperation between China and Africa. In November 2006, China hosted the first summit of FOCAC in Beijing, which was attended by the political leaders of forty-eight out of the fifty-four African countries (MOFA 2006d). During this summit, “the Chinese government proposed a new type of China-Africa strategic partnership featuring political equality and mutual trust, economic win-win cooperation and cultural exchange” (Xinhua 2015). At the second summit of FOCAC convened in Johannesburg (South Africa) in December 2015, Xi Jinping announced an upgrading of China and Africa’s new-type strategic partnership to a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership and put forth “10 major China-Africa cooperation plans” that cover a variety of areas (MOFCOM 2015). On 3–4 September 2018, China held the third summit of FOCAC in Beijing. Almost all of Africa’s fifty-four top leaders—either the Presidents or Prime Ministers except from eSwatini (formerly Swaziland)—attended this summit (Shaban 2018). During this summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping stated clearly China’s unique approach in its engagement with Africa, namely a “five-no” approach, that is, no interference in African countries’ pursuit of development paths that fit their national conditions; no interference in African countries’ internal affairs; no imposition of our will on African countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa; and no seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing cooperation with Africa. (Xi 2018) Xi also announced that China would “launch eight major initiatives in close collaboration with African countries in the next three years and beyond” (Xi 2018). Like China, India has institutionalized its engagement with Africa through the India–Africa Forum Summit (IAFS). The first IAFS was held in New Delhi in April 2008. At this summit, two declaratory documents were adopted, the India–Africa Framework for Cooperation Forum and the Delhi Declaration, which set out ambitions of South–South cooperation, capacity-building, and pursuit of mutual interests (Taylor 2012: 784). At the second IAFS held in Addis Ababa in May 2011, India and African relations were upgraded from a “closer partnership” to a “strategic partnership” (Gokarn, Sidhu and Godbole 2015). The third IAFS, held in New Delhi in October 2015, was attended by the representatives of all fifty-four African countries, including heads of state/government from forty-one countries and the African Union. At this summit, two documents, the Delhi Declaration 2015 and the India–Africa Framework for Strategic Cooperation, were adopted, focusing on political, security, and socio- economic issues (Bhatia 2015). Economic engagement China and India’s deepening economic engagement with Africa includes growing trade, investment, and aid/assistance. In terms of trade, Sino-African and Indo-African bilateral trade has been increasing significantly since the beginning of the twenty-first century, with China and India being, respectively, the largest and the fourth largest trading partner

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of Africa. China became Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009 (Xinhua 2015), and by 2017, China–Africa bilateral trade had reached $170 billion (MOFCOM 2018). In India’s case, according to a joint report issued by the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) and Exim Bank of India (Exim India), trade with Africa “increased more than eight-fold from $7.2 billion in 2001 to $59.9 billion in 2017, making India Africa’s fourth-largest national trading partner, accounting for more than 6.4 percent of total African trade in 2017, up from 2.7 percent in 2001” (Afreximbank and Exim India 2018: 6). Both China and India are key investors in Africa. With regard to China, Xinhua reports that by the end of 2016, China’s investment in Africa reached over $100 billion, growing over hundred times in a dozen years, making China became the single largest contributor of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa, with investments of $66.4 billion and the creation of 130,750 jobs from 2005 to 2016 (Xinhua 2018b). Regarding India’s FDI in Africa, according to the above-mentioned report by Afreximbank and Exim India, India’s FDI in Africa rose from $11.9 billion in 2010 to $15.2 billion in 2014 (Afreximbank and Exim India 2018: 21). India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) notes, “India is now the fifth largest investor in the African continent, with investments over the past 20 years amounting to US $54 billion” (MEA 2017a). According to the World Investment Report 2018 by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in the period 2011–2016, China was the fourth largest investor in Africa, after the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, while India ranked eighth (UNCTD 2018: 38). To facilitate their trade with and investment in Africa, both China and India have employed development aid/assistance to Africa in the form of loans and grants, as well as debt relief and cancellation. China has doubled its financing pledges toward Africa at its FOCAC meetings from $5 billion in 2006 to $10 billion in 2009, $20 billion in 2012, and $60 billion in 2015 (Sun 2015). At the third FOCAC summit in September 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a package of new aid to Africa: China will extend US$60 billion of financing to Africa in the form of government assistance as well as investment and financing by financial institutions and companies. This will include US$15 billion of grants, interest-free loans and concessional loans, US$20 billion of credit lines, the setting up of a US$10 billion special fund for development financing and a US$5 billion special fund for financing imports from Africa. (Xi 2018) Moreover, Xi said his government would encourage its companies to make at least $10 billion of investment in Africa in the next three years and announced that China would cancel the debt of Africa’s least developed countries that have diplomatic relations with China (Xi 2018). As for India, according to the MEA, the Indian government has been providing aid to African countries through its development partnership assistance schemes such as grantin-aid projects and Lines of Credit assistance. A case in point of grant-in aid projects is an Africa e-Network project (PANeP) on tele-education and tele-medicine covering forty-eight countries in Africa, which has completed its first phase. India is planning to initiate a second phase. India has given Rs 855 crores (roughly $7.2 billion) as aid in Financial Year 2016–2017 to African countries; 152 Lines of Credit have been extended to forty-four countries for a total amount of nearly $8 billion for developing infrastructure, public transport, clean energy, irrigation, and agriculture and manufacturing

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capacity across Africa (MEA 2017a). At the third IAFS in 2015, India announced Lines of Credit of $10 billion for development projects and grant assistance of $600 million spread over five years (MEA 2017a). Military engagement Both China and India have forged military and security cooperation with Africa, including actively participating in UN peacekeeping. In 2016, China deployed 2,496 peacekeepers, most of which were in Africa, across six missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Lebanon, Sudan, Mali, and South Sudan (Bwambale 2016). China has also increased its financial and personnel contributions to UN peacekeeping in Africa. In his September 2015 to the UN General Assembly, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that over a five-year period the African Union would receive $100 million in military aid toward an African standby force (Martina and Brunnstrom 2015). With regard to India’s peacekeeping in Africa, according to India’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Tanmaya Lal, by July 2018, Indian peacekeepers had served in eight UN peacekeeping missions on the African continent, and the first ever Female Formed Police Unit was provided by India and deployed in Liberia (PTI 2018). In addition, both China and India have exported arms to Africa. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2013–2017, Africa accounted for twenty-one percent of Chinese arms exports. Between 2008–2012 and 2013–2017, China’s arms exports to Africa rose by fifty-five percent and its share of total African arms imports increased from 8.4 percent to seventeen percent. A total of twenty-two sub-Saharan African countries bought major arms from China in 2013–2017, and China accounted for sixteen percent and twenty-seven percent of sub-Saharan African arms imports in 2008–2012 and 2013–2017, respectively (Wezeman et al. 2018: 5–7). India has also been selling arms to African countries. For instance, in December 2014, India sold the offshore patrol vessel (OPV) Barracuda—India’s first indigenously manufactured warship—to the Mauritius coast guard for $60 million (Ranjan 2016: 408). Between 2000 and 2015, India sold one maritime patrol (MP) aircraft Do-228, one OPV (Barracuda), and one Naidu-class patrol craft to Mauritius; three helicopters (one Cheetah and two Chetak) to Namibia; two seaward defense boats (SDBs) MK-5 patrol vessels, two Dornier aircraft Do-228 MP, and one EL/M 2022 radar for MP aircraft to the Seychelles (Ranjan 2016: 411). Moreover, both China and India’s navies have participated in anti-piracy patrolling in the Gulf of Aden. In June 2006, India deployed a ship in the Gulf of Aden for anti-piracy missions, which safely escorted 19 merchant ships including six Indian flagged ships through October 2017 (Indian Navy 2017). Since December 2008, China has deployed People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships to participate in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and waters off Somalia. Over the past decade, its naval fleets have escorted 3,400 foreign ships, around fifty-one percent of the total escorted, and supported anti-piracy and other missions. The PLAN established its first ever foreign military base in Djibouti on 11 July 2017 (The Maritime Executive 2019). Furthermore, both countries have their own unique measures to militarily engage Africa. For example, China held the first China–Africa Defense and Security Forum (CADSF) in Beijing from 26 June to 11 July 2018. The forum, attended by h igh-ranking military officials from fifty African states, was regarded by some commentators as evidence of China’s ambitions for militarizing its growing influence in Africa (Fisher 2018)

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and as a sign of China’s growing military ties with Africa (Benabdallah 2018). India’s defense cooperation with Africa has included joint exercises of different types, a variety of defense and security dialogues, and the offering of military training programs. India has also established crucial security relationships with Seychelles, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, and South Africa—the Indian Ocean littoral countries—to fight against piracy and terrorism (Naidu 2013: 202–203). Cultural engagement Both China and India have deepened their cultural engagement with Africa. Specifically, China has initiated educational cooperation with Africa under both FOCAC and the Development of China–Africa Education Cooperation (2000–2011). FOCAC’s initiatives have included: increasing scholarships for African students from 2,000 to 4,000 before 2009; distributing 33,866 Chinese government scholarships in the period 2010– 2014; promising to train 30,000 professionals in China as part of the African Talents Program between 2013 and 2015 and disbursing 18,000 government scholarships; and in 2015, instituting 30,000 additional scholarships and 2,000 post-graduate and doctoral placements at leading institutions in China (Gu 2017). In addition, in 2009, China started the “20+20 Cooperation Plan.” The plan, spread across seventeen African states, entails partnerships between twenty Chinese and twenty African higher education institutions. China also promised to provide $2 million annually under the framework of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) trust fund to support education development programs in Africa (Gu 2017). As a result of China’s various programs, “the number of African students studying in China has grown from under 2,000 in 2003 to over 50,000 in 2015. In 2017, China surpassed the United States and United Kingdom as the top destination for English-speaking African students” (Nantulya 2018). By 2018, China had already established seventy Confucius Institutes in forty African countries to provide Chinese-language training programs for African students (Nantulya 2018). Likewise, India has also established some educational programs for Africa, including a number of scholarships for African graduates and training positions under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Programme. At the second IAFS in 2011, then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that India’s total commitment for the next three years by way of scholarships to Africa students would stand at more than 22,000 (PIB 2011). Beginning in 2015, a total of 50,000 scholarships, over a period of five years, have been offered to African students (MEA 2017a). BRI and AAGC China and India have created unique connectivity initiatives—China’s BRI and India’s AAGC—to strengthen and broaden their engagement with Africa. Both initiatives seek to connect Asia and Africa through large-scale infrastructure projects. The BRI involves investing billions of dollars in infrastructure in Silk Road countries to link China with a network of countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa (The State Council 2015). Originally, the BRI focused on East African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania since these countries form a more natural geographic link with China’s Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road which stretches from East Asia westward through the Indian Ocean (Tiezzi 2018). Later on, China began to extend the BRI

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to West and Central Africa. Specifically, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to four African countries in July 2018, Senegal and Rwanda signed memorandum of understanding (MOU) with China on the BRI, making them the first West African country and the first Central African country, respectively, to sign a Belt and Road cooperation document with China (Xinhua 2018c). By 6 September 2018, China had signed MOUs on the BRI with thirty-seven African countries (Xinhua 2018d). With regard to India’s AAGC, its conceptualization was first put forward by India in November 2016. In 2017, at India’s invitation, Japan joined the AAGC, which is mainly a maritime corridor that connects several ports in India and Africa (Brinza 2018). The AAGC Vision Document lists four areas as its focus: development cooperation projects, quality infrastructure and institutional connectivity, enhancing skills, and people-to-people partnership (RIS, ERIA and IDE-JETRO 2017: 1). According to Global Times, a Chinese official newspaper, the route of the AAGC has extensive geographic overlap with that of the BRI, so it is regarded by China as a deliberate counterbalancing of the BRI (Xiao 2017). Compared with China’s BRI, India (and Japan)’s AAGC is new and still needs more policy design and implementation. A news commentary has noted that “Despite ambitious statements and an abundance of media reports, the AAGC is still a vague vision and at an early stage of development.” It further reports that during their October 2018 summit, Indian Prime Minister Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Abe even did not mention the AAGC at all, but instead held discussions on establishing the “Platform for Japan-India Business Cooperation in Asia-Africa Region,” which implies that India and Japan have adjusted their AAGC downward, to be a business-oriented project (Pajon and Saint-Mezard 2018). Another commentary explicitly points out that the AAGC is “capital-constrained and unlikely to gain much traction” (Stratfor 2018). In sum, China and India have been undertaking multifaceted measures to engage Africa. Politically, both countries’ top leaders have frequently visited the continent, and both have institutionalized their engagement with it through China’s FOCAC and India’s IAFS, respectively. Economically, both countries have enhanced their trade with Africa, accompanied by increased investment and aid/assistance. Militarily, both countries have not only actively participated in UN peacekeeping in Africa but have also sold arms to Africa and participated in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. Culturally, both countries have provided scholarships to African students, and China has established Confucius Institute in Africa to provide Chinese-language training for African students. Moreover, China and India have created the BRI and AAGC, respectively, to enhance Africa’s connectivity.

China and India’s interests in Africa The motivations behind China and India’s multidimensional engagement with Africa have been driven by both countries’ national interests in Africa. Politically and diplomatically, both China and India need Africa’s support on specific issues. China needs Africa’s support for its one-China policy with respect to Taiwan so as to isolate the latter internationally. This diplomatic need has been stated clearly in China’s white papers on its Africa policy issued in 2006 and 2015. In the former paper, China states that The one-China principle is the political foundation for the establishment and development of China’s relations with African countries and regional organizations. The Chinese Government appreciates the fact that the overwhelming majority of

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African countries abide by the one-China principle, refuse to have official relations and contacts with Taiwan and support China’s great cause of reunification. China stands ready to establish and develop state-to-state relations with countries that have not yet established diplomatic ties with China on the basis of the one-China principle. (Xinhua 2006) In the latter report, the Chinese government reiterates “the one-China policy” as “the political precondition and foundation” for it to establish and develop its relations with African countries and regional organizations (Xinhua 2015). With China’s prioritization of its one-China policy in its multidimensional engagement with Africa, by May 2018, fifty-three of the fifty-four African countries except eSwatini had officially recognized China rather than Taiwan (Blanchard 2018). For its part, India needs to secure African diplomatic support in its quest to gain a permanent seat on the UNSC, which it has long sought. India formed a Group of Four (with Brazil, Japan, and Germany) to jointly seek to reform the UNSC so as to obtain a permanent seat (Wu 2018: 54). The African continent, with its fifty-four member countries in the UN, would play a key role in influencing the result of India’s efforts (Sinha 2010: 78). Economically, both China and India need Africa’s rich natural resources, especially oil, to sustain their economic growth. China and India, with their fast-growing economies over the past two to three decades, have become the world’s second- and third-largest energy consumers, after the United States, and the world’s second- and fourth-largest oil consumers. Both countries have relied heavily on oil imports, especially from the M iddle East (EIA 2015, 2016). In order to achieve energy security—especially oil security— both countries have encouraged their national oil companies (NOCs) to procure oil and gas assets in energy-rich countries and regions across the world, including Africa, to diversify supply sources (Wu 2018: 106–176). According to the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Chinese NOCs—China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec), and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)—are participating in upstream activities in forty-two countries; half of their overseas oil production stems from the Middle East and Africa, especially Angola, Sudan, and South Sudan (EIA 2015: 9). The two Sudans had become significant oil exporters to China until 2012, when the civil war terminated supplies. Since 2014, China’s oil imports from these two countries have resumed at a reduced level (EIA 2015: 10). Apart from the Middle East, African countries, particularly Angola, have contributed significantly to China’s oil imports. For instance, in 2014, Angola, accounting for thirteen percent of China’s oil imports, was China’s second largest oil supplier, after Saudi Arabia (EIA 2015: 11). According to the Annual Report 2017–2018 issued by the Indian Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MPNG), India’s dependence on oil and natural gas imports has been over eighty percent and nearly forty percent, respectively. As a result, the Indian government has encouraged its NOCs—including the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Videsh Limited (OVL), and Oil India Limited (OIL)—to seek overseas equity oil and gas assets across the world (MPNG 2018: 82–83). India’s NOCs have at various points of time owned equity oil and gas assets in twenty-six countries. Out of these, eleven are in Africa, including Sudan (1), South Sudan (2), Libya (2), Mozambique (1), Nigeria (2), Gabon (1), and Namibia (2) (MPNG 2018: 93–97). In addition, India

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is importing oil from African countries, including Algeria, Chad, and Angola. According to the EIA, Africa is India’s second-largest source of oil imports, accounting for nineteen percent, with most of the crude oil coming from Nigeria (EIA 2016: 10). Moreover, India built a 741 km-long Khartoum-Port Sudan Pipeline in Sudan (MPNG 2018: 93). In this regard, China and India’s engagement with Africa has been filled with both competition and cooperation. On the one hand, China and India have engaged in fierce competition for Africa’s oil assets. For example, in October 2004, when India’s OVL almost reached a deal with Shell Oil to buy the latter’s oil assets in Angola, the Chinese and Angolan governments reached an agreement at the last minute to force Shell to sell its oil assets to the Angolan state-owned company Sonangol. To win this bid, China offered the Angola government $2 billion of economic assistance, which overshadowed India’s offer of $200 million of assistance to Angola to build railways (Da Jiyuan 2004). On the other hand, both countries have also cooperated with each other in exploring Africa’s oil, especially in Sudan and South Sudan’s oil sector. Specifically, China’s CNPC has been involved in Sudan’s oil sector since the mid-1990s and played an important role in making Sudan into an oil exporter. India’s OVL entered Sudan’s oil sector in 2003 when it was invited by the Sudanese government to participate in the Greater Nile Oil Project (GNOP)—a consortium jointly shared by China, Malaysia, and Sudan. Since then, Chinese and Indian NOCs have cooperated in Sudan’s and later South Sudan’s oil sector, with shares of forty percent (CNPC) and twenty-five percent (OVL) in the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC), Blocks 1, 2, and 4 in Sudan and Nile Petroleum Corporation (Greater Pioneer Operating Company (GPOC)), Blocks 1, 2, and 4 in South Sudan (MPNG 2018: 93–94). In addition to seeking Africa’s raw materials (especially oil) to fuel their economic growth, China and India have also tried to access Africa’s markets for exports and investments. According to a report by Ernst & Young (EY)—a professional services firm—Africa remains on track to be a $3 trillion economy by 2030, making it a potentially lucrative market for China and India’s export industries (EY 2017). In the security area, China and India need Africa’s support to eradicate piracy and ensure maritime security especially the safety of commerce along the international shipping lanes or the sea lines of communication (SLOCs) off the coast of Africa. Most of China and India’s imported raw materials from Africa (including oil), and their exports to Africa, are shipped by sea. Clearly, seaborne trade is strategically important for both China and India. It is therefore vital to protect the SLOCs along the coast of Africa. In this context, China has forged extensive maritime links with eastern African countries such as Seychelles and Mauritius (Alam 2018), in addition to establishing a military base in Djibouti as mentioned earlier. Likewise, India has built close maritime ties with African littoral countries, especially those along the Indian Ocean (Naidu 2013). Moreover, China and India’s engagement with Africa has been driven by a desire for higher status in the international system. On China’s part, its engagement with Africa is to project itself as a responsible great power in the international system by facilitating Africa’s industrialization and modernization. In its second Africa policy issued in 2015, the Chinese government explicitly pointed out it would use its comparative advantage to help Africa’s industrialization and modernization: China’s comparative advantages in development experience, applied technology, funds and market can help Africa overcome the two major bottlenecks constraining

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its development—backward infrastructure and inadequate professional and skilled personnel. They can also help Africa translate its natural and human resources advantages and potential into a driving force for development and benefits for people’s livelihoods, thereby speeding up industrialization and agricultural modernization, and doing a better job in pursuing economic independence as well as self-reliant and sustainable development and achieving lasting peace and stability. (Xinhua 2015) Infrastructure projects in Africa developed under China’s BRI can obviously help fulfill its economic promises. India, like China, is a status seeker in the international system (Cohen 2001; Nayar and Paul 2003), and it intends to seek great power status by facilitating Africa’s development. Not surprisingly, India has mimicked China’s BRI in initiating the AAGC, with an aim to play a role in facilitating Africa’s development through enhancing “interconnectedness between and within Asia and Africa for realizing a free and open Indo-Pacific region” (RIS, ERIA and IDE-JETRO 2017: 1). However, due to its limited financial and political resources, India’s influence in Africa is obviously limited compared to China’s. To sum up, China and India’s multifaceted engagement with Africa has been motivated by their desires to seek material interests—including political, economic, and security—as well as status. In Cheru and Obi’s words, Despite the rhetorical statements of ‘friendship’ and ‘solidarity’ that are implicit in the official Africa policy documents of both China and India, competition over African resources and markets, and the quest for influence and support, are the principal motivation for both countries in their engagement with African nations. (Cheru and Obi 2010: 7)

Implications for Africa China and India’s multifaceted engagement with Africa has profound implications for the continent. Economically, since most African countries are underdeveloped, China and India’s engagement can positively lead to African development. For instance, according to a report by the World Bank more than a decade ago, China and India’s economic engagement with Africa “presents a significant, and in modern times, rare, opportunity for growth, job creation, and the reduction of poverty on the Sub-Saharan continent” (Broadman 2007: 43). In the same vein, a report by RAND points out that China’s investment in Africa alone accounted for the continent’s economic growth between 2005 and 2009 in the period leading up to the global financial crisis, and China’s $13 billion of investment in Angolan infrastructure shortly after Angola’s civil war contributed to its recovery and stability (Thrall 2015: 81). In particular, African countries stand to benefit from China’s BRI and India (and Japan)’s AAGC as these two initiatives are aimed at enhancing the continent’s connectivity, a necessary precondition for its rapid economic growth. For instance, the Export–Import Bank of China has funded the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway which is the first transboundary railway line in Africa. It links Ethiopia, which has no outlet to the ocean, to the maritime routes of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (Biswas and Tortajada 2018). China is also constructing the Madaraka Express, connecting the

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Kenyan port of Mombasa to Nairobi. This has substantially reduced transportation time and costs (Biswas and Tortajada 2018). Similarly, India’s AAGC’s priorities such as health care, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food processing, and disaster management are critical to Africa’s development. If the goals of the initiative in these sectors are reached, Africa’s value chains will be upgraded, new channels of production will be created, the movement of people between Africa and Asia will be expedited, and infrastructure will be improved (Richter 2018). Moreover, the AAGC could provide African governments with a mechanism for diversifying risk and reducing their potential over-reliance on China as their principal source of finance for development (Richter 2018). Geopolitically, China and India’s competition for Africa’s natural resources, markets, political and diplomatic support, as well as their competition to enhance their influence in Africa, can significantly increase African countries’ ability to play China and India against each other in order to get the deals that most benefit them. Moreover, China and India’s engagement with Africa can play a role in increasing peace and stability in the region. Commensurate with their increased economic stakes in Africa, especially their increased interests in natural resource supply and diversification, China and India have a growing interest in peace and stability. In these circumstances, China and India have begun to engage in maintaining peace and stability. For instance, China played an important role in mediating conflict between Sudan and South Sudan and between rival factions in South Sudan. Thus, China tacitly interfered in the peace process of the two Sudans and the domestic stability of the two countries (Wu 2018: 144–150).

Conclusion China and India have been engaging Africa in various ways since the end of the Cold War, especially in the twenty-first century. Both countries have employed political tools of engagement, especially high-level official visits, and economic means such as trade, FDI, and aid/assistance. They have also used military means such as participation in UN peacekeeping and arms sales, as well as cultural diplomacy including providing student scholarships and, in China’s case, establishing Confucius Institutes throughout the continent. Moreover, China and India have undertaken initiatives to enhance the connectivity of Africa through the BRI and AAGC. China and India’s multifaceted engagement with Africa has been driven by national interests. Politically and diplomatically, both countries need Africa’s support: China needs Africa’s support for its one-China policy while India needs Africa’s support for permanent membership in the UN Security Council. Economically, both need Africa’s rich natural resources—especially oil—to sustain their economic growth, in addition to gaining access to Africa’s markets for exports and investments. They also need African support to maintain the safety of the SLOCs. Finally, the two Asian powers seek to enhance their international status by facilitating Africa’s development and increasing their influence on the continent. These interests fit well with China and India’s ambitions to become great powers. While the two powers seek to benefit from their presence in Africa, their engagement with African countries can raise living standards in the continent, increase its importance in global affairs, and promote peace and stability. In sum, even as they pursue their own interests, China and India can promote the interests of others.

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30 Beyond triangulation Latin America and the Caribbean’s relations with China and India in the era of the Belt and Road Initiative Adriana Erthal Abdenur With the intensification of the political crisis in Venezuela in early 2019, analysts of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) began to parse out the region’s broader geopolitical dynamics, including the split among other states’ backing for the regime of Nicolás Maduro or for that of the self-appointed president, Juan Guaidó, elected in January of that year. Scholars and media outlets noted the crucial role of Chinese support to Venezuela, especially the generous loans for the purchase of crude oil. Far less attention was paid to the role of India, which had quietly begun to increase its purchases of Venezuelan oil to support its growing economy, and which vastly increased this procurement as US sanctions created hurdles for US imports from Venezuela. Two weeks after Washington announced the sanctions, the president of the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA, traveled to New Delhi for a “surprise visit” with Indian government officials to offer India a wide range of payment forms for its oil. As a result, in March 2019 India became the single largest buyer of Venezuelan oil, purchasing 500–600 thousand barrels per day (BBC Brasil 2019). The international relations scholarship on rising powers helps to shed light on the dynamics of cooperation and competition that are emerging as the international order undergoes profound structural transformation, including the proliferation of transregional ties among geographically distant parts of the world. Much of the literature has focused on the rise of China and its fast-expanding cooperation across the Global South, through economic flows presented by Chinese leaders as South–South cooperation. Despite the predominant focus on bilateral flows between China and countries in Africa and, to a lesser extent, China and countries in LAC, some scholars are analyzing the co-incidence and interaction of these rising powers in “third spaces.” The idea of “triangular relationships” presumes that broader geopolitical dynamics between rising powers shapes the behaviors of rising power actors—not only the state but also private sector companies and civil society entities—in other parts of the world. This chapter adopts a comparative perspective to analyze the relations of China and India, respectively, with LAC, focusing on the period 2009–2019. The spike in India’s purchase of Venezuelan oil must be understood not only with reference to Indian energy security debates but also, more broadly, in light of India’s goals as a rising power—and those of China. Do the two countries compete for influence in Latin America? How, and to what extent, are their ties with the region shaped by the fast-changing geopolitical context in Asia, as well as the sweeping political changes taking place in LAC? For the most part, the two Asian powers do not directly compete for influence in the region; instead, the geographic overlap in their cooperation has increased. In addition, far from operating in a vacuum, China and India’s relations with LAC are shaped by global and

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regional dynamics that promote a number of divergences, especially in light of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and sweeping political changes in LAC, both domestically and internationally. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first part offers background on the changing geopolitical and geo-economic landscapes in both Asia and LAC and discusses how these tectonic shifts shape the behaviors of the rising powers. The second part analyzes the bilateral relations of China and India, respectively, with LAC states, as well as their interaction within the region. The conclusion notes key take-aways and offers some directions for future research on the role of external rising powers in LAC.

Rising powers and trans-regional cooperation The past ten years have brought about a surge in the international relations scholarship on rising or emerging powers, generally defined as “states whose increasing material capacities and status-seeking strategies may potentially have an impact on the international system and also affect the dominant position of the hegemonic powers therein” (Wehner 2017). Interest in the behavior of these states is propelled in part by the growing recognition of, and sometimes concern with, the transformation of the world order in the direction of an asymmetrical multipolarity. The emergence of new poles of economic growth, political influence, and geopolitical rivalry has cast the US-led liberal world order into doubt, prompting international relations scholars to unpack the efforts of rising powers to cooperate as part of their ascension strategies (Mawdsley 2012). Within this scholarship, there has been a strong focus on China’s rise, underscored by the country’s unprecedented economic expansion and the speed of its internationalization, from the “Go Out” policy of the 1990s, when the Chinese government encouraged its enterprises to invest overseas, to the progressively expansive reach of its defense policy, as reflected in its white papers (State Council 2015). This literature has shed light on China’s discourse related to South–South cooperation, which stresses win-win situations and the fact that China does not impose political conditionalities, in alignment with the horizontal cooperation practices of other Southern actors and often in contrast to the norms of Northern aid as codified through the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Concurrently, Chinese and Western scholars have debated the extent of China’s reformist impulse in global governance, as well as the impact its rise has had on the role of global powers, especially the United States (Ikenberry 2008; Yan 2010). As China becomes a more active player in established institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the Bretton Woods organizations, as well as loose coalitions such as the G20 (Zhang 2016), it becomes bolder in proposing and even leading alternative platforms, for instance via the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) or the initiatives emerging out of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) coalition (Abdenur 2014), and the BRI. The study of rising powers has extended to other regional actors, including Brazil, India, and Turkey, and has often focused on their roles in trans-regional cooperation. Some of this scholarship has adopted a comparative perspective, asking how different cooperation partners, for instance China and India, engage with counterparts in “third spaces” such as African countries and subregions (Mthembu 2018). Only a minority of these studies, however, have analyzed these engagements from the perspective of the cooperation partners, including the strategic considerations of their leadership (however, see Cheru 2016 and Fernández Jilberto and Hogenboom 2010).

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This neglect of context and agency is particularly true of the “triangular relationship” approach, in which three actors are analyzed in isolation from broader regional and trans-regional dynamics. This geometric approach has appeared in particular with reference to the US–China–Latin America relationship (Guilhon-Albuquerque 2014; Leon-Manriquez and Alvarez 2014). With respect to China and India in LAC specifically, recent scholarship continues to consider the United States as a fulcrum on which these countries’ relations with Latin American states pivot (Roett and Paz 2016). It is also telling that most of this literature cites the Asian powers before LAC, reflecting a primary preoccupation with the “entrance” of Asian power into the region rather than the experience of local states and other actors in those cooperation ties (Lederman, Olarreaga and Perry 2009). This triangular, Asia-first approach to analyzing LAC’s cooperation with China and India (or any other external actor, for that matter) has three problems. First, it tends to overlook what is happening in the cooperating partners’ own regions and the ways that changing dynamics of cooperation and rivalry affect their individual trans-regional efforts. The intensification of Chinese and Indian cooperation in Latin America takes place against a backdrop of deep political changes sweeping across LAC, as well as broad geopolitical and geo-economic transformations triggered by the BRI. Second, the “triangular relationship” approach tends to treat the “third spaces” as mere staging grounds for geopolitical rivalries and other dynamics. For the most part, this literature tends to overlook or minimize the agency and perceptions of national and local actors in the countries where South–South cooperation initiatives are implemented, treating them as passive recipients of cooperation or as geopolitical chessboards where global powers and rising powers dispute influence. Finally, this literature remains heavily state-centric, particularly when a realist approach is adopted. Yet cooperation is also implemented by civil society actors and private sector firms, whether in isolation or through partnerships with government and across sectors. It is thus necessary to consider multiple geometries of power, rather than honing on a narrow triangle, and to open up the analysis to the role of non-state actors. China–India cooperation and competition in the Asia Pacific The question of whether China and India compete for influence and resources in LAC presupposes that there is indeed geopolitical rivalry between these states. This dynamic is most visible within the Asia-Pacific region due to the importance of territory and borders to their respective processes of state-building. Interconnections between what is now referred to as the People’s Republic of China and India have taken place for thousands of years, including through the networks of exchange known as the Ancient Silk Road, despite the formidable barrier of the Himalayas. People, goods, and ideas, including Buddhism, crossed the passes of the mountain range and inter-connected communities in the region. Yet modern China and India have had a complex relationship since the two states were established in 1949 and 1947, respectively. Despite an auspicious beginning to bilateral ties and periods of cordiality, border disputes have frequently recurred and fed broader geopolitical rivalries that include nuclear weapons programs by the two countries as well as neighboring Pakistan. Despite these tensions, streams of exchange and even inter-state cooperation, whether bilaterally or through multilateral arrangements, have taken place between the two regional powers—the world’s most populous countries—since the end of the Cold War.

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China and India have increasingly interacted through regional platforms such as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Cooperation corridor. These different strands of multilateral and regional cooperation promise to warm ties between China and India despite the persistence of the Kashmir dispute and other border disputes that have periodically erupted in minor skirmishes. In addition, China and India are bound by a number of commonalities within the international system. Starting in the 1990s, the two regional powers began to be referred to increasingly as “rising powers.” This trend intensified when the BRICS coalition was created as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) in 2006, when these four (later, five with the addition of South Africa in 2010) geographically politically and historically disparate countries began working toward the adoption of a common language of contestation to the US-led world order and a call for deeper reform of its main global governance institutions. Through BRICS, China and India found common purpose in their status as rising powers with global aspirations, as well as a platform for selectively needling the United States and, more broadly, Western powers. They also found in BRICS an additional channel through which to strengthen ties to LAC, albeit in a highly selective manner, through Brazil’s membership in the grouping. The BRICS coalition was able to advance cooperation among its members on several areas, including development financing and education, and to launch new institutions that both compete with the established counterparts and create new pressures for change. The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingency Reserve Agreement (CRA) offered BRICS member states new spaces in which to cooperate on concrete initiatives, not only within the five member states but also in other developing countries. In other words, through these new institutions the BRICS states could move beyond rhetorical flourishes and normative debates to implement new structures and launch new initiatives that would, at least in theory, embody the ideas behind the grouping. BRICS also began to form links, and increasingly be recognized by, a variety of established institutions, from the World Bank to components of the UN system. Despite their geopolitical differences, both China and India have remained vocal supporters of BRICS. However, even before BRICS became consolidated as an alternative power hub capable of pushing through major changes within the global governance system, another initiative began to change the geopolitical and geo-economic landscape of Asia. Unlike BRICS, this new initiative was based on a contiguous geographic space that, at least initially, encompassed both China and India, as well as Russia—but not the distant rest of the BRICS member states. The New Silk Road, now referred to as the BRI (shorthand for the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road) quickly surpassed the BRICS in visibility and reach. The China-led, multibillion-dollar initiative, nominally focused on infrastructure and connectivity but in fact entailing a trans-regional cooperation platform with its own governance structure, has expanded beyond Asia to include not only parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe but also, more recently, countries in LAC. BRICS has not disappeared, but the sheer scale and scope of the BRI (as of May 2019, comprising 152 countries and international organizations; thirty percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and sixty-two percent of the world population) (The World Bank 2018) have outpaced the efforts of the five-state coalition.

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As the BRI eclipses BRICS as the world’s major rising power-led platform, the sharpening geopolitical rivalry between China and India has affected the two countries’ abilities to interact via multilateral platforms—and, by extension, any harmonization in their efforts in LAC. South Asia has emerged as one of the BRI’s priority areas, so the stakes are high on all sides. Like China, India has long aspired to be a global power, including through its bid for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council (something that China already possesses). Although Indian perceptions of the BRI have evolved across time (Sachdeva 2018), India has been a vocal opponent of the BRI from the start. In 2017, India boycotted the first Belt and Road Forum (BRF) due to concerns over the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is China’s flagship BRI project in Pakistan (Kamdar 2019). Indian leaders have argued that the BRI infringes on its “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” because CPEC runs through Gilgit-Baltistan, a part of Jammu and Kashmir that is claimed by India yet remains under Pakistani administration. Although China has maintained that relations between China and India remain “insulated” from differences arising over the BRI, it has treated Pakistan as an “all weather partner” sharing “core interests”—a relationship that threatens India. These tensions sometimes spill over into disputes over China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh. In 2017, less than two months after India’s initial boycott of the BRI, there was a seventy-three-day standoff in the Doklam plateau bordering India, China, and Bhutan, over Chinese construction of a road. Since then, relations between China and India have been calmer, but rivalry continues through other channels. Some observers consider that the BCIM project has been subsumed under the broader umbrella of the China-dominated BRI. Indian perceptions of the threat have increased, with members of its strategic community often repeating that the BRI includes five of India’s neighbors—not only Pakistan but also Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Nepal—as well as many of India’s major trade partners in Africa and elsewhere, granting Beijing greater influence in those capitals. This has heightened fears among some stakeholders in India of “encirclement” by China, especially given China’s advances along the Indian Ocean. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has promoted a nationalist Hindu discourse, has worked to promote India as a major global economy, including via BRICS ( Joshi 2018). India has built on its previous “Look East” orientation to pursue an “Act East” Policy, which focuses on expanding Indian soft power within its extended neighborhood in the Asia-Pacific region through bilateral, regional, and multilateral ties. This policy puts the Indian Ocean at the center of India’s Indo-Pacific strategy in an effort to counter China’s Maritime Silk Road and, in particular, Beijing’s growing role in the Indian Ocean, where India fears encirclement. The deepening regional rivalry has also led India to focus more on its own connectivity plans (individually or with other partners), including with Japan, another regional power outside the BRI. The Indian leadership has also stepped up efforts to convince other states in the region to turn down BRI offers, calling the initiative “debt-trap diplomacy,” especially after Sri Lanka, facing difficulties in repaying debts to Chinese institutions, in June 2018 handed over the deep-sea port at Hambantota along with 15,000 acres of land to China for ninety-nine years. Indian leaders were also absent from the second BRF, held in Beijing on 26–27 April 2019. Their non-attendance signaled that, even as the BRI expands in other parts of Asia and well beyond the region—including to LAC, as examined below—China and India’s competition in South Asia has intensified. The extent to which these geopolitical and geo-economic dynamics spill over into the countries’ respective cooperation efforts

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elsewhere in the world, however, is mediated by their regional policies, approaches, and trajectories, as well as by domestic-level drivers. While the geographic distance between Asia and LAC means that Asian powers like China and India can pursue their Latin American interests relatively insulated from the rivalries they face in their own neighborhood, their use of soft power in other regions of the world, including LAC, is shaped by broader politics that includes relationships with LAC regional powers and with global powers present in the region, in particular the United States. The changing Latin American landscape and relations with Asia LAC is a culturally, linguistically, and politically heterogeneous region that has been undergoing important political changes and turmoil since the mid-2010s. In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the “Pink Tide” phenomenon—a wave of left-leaning governments that coincided with (and benefitted from) an increase in global commodity prices—changed not only the political landscape but also the socioeconomic dynamics in much of the region. Since LAC states are primarily commodity exporters, whether of agricultural products or natural resources such as metals, this panorama opened up new windows of opportunity to engage with Asia, by then the world’s fastest-growing region. In particular, China’s booming economy, with its skyrocketing demands for raw materials, helped to boost LAC economics. China surpassed the United States and European countries to become the top trade partner for many of the region’s countries, as well as an important source of foreign direct investment: Chinese trade with LAC surged from $12 billion in 2000 to almost $306 billion in 2018 (Carvalho 2019). Yet China was far from the only economic partner for LAC states; Japan continued to be a significant investor and trade partner, and ties also multiplied with smaller economies such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia. The effect of this surge in trade and investment was felt broadly across the LAC. In parts of LAC, the resulting boom in revenues was used to finance progressive social policies such as conditional cash transfer programs that lifted millions out of poverty and improved living standards. Extreme poverty decreased and inequalities narrowed across much of LAC even as corruption, violence, and crime persisted. Yet there were also negative aspects to the influx of trade and investment. Countries like Brazil and Mexico underwent a degree of deindustrialization and fears of Dutch disease and land grabs spread in many parts of the region. Corruption continued to be a problem, facilitated by the lack of transparency in foreign direct investment by both LAC and external partners. The surge in LAC–Asia ties was not driven by economic interests alone; there were also political and cultural dimensions, although at the state level ties remained by and large constrained to the sphere of development cooperation. Many of the left-leaning governments in LAC promoted a discourse of South–South cooperation based on ideas of solidarity with other developing countries. This discourse sought to differentiate South–South cooperation from Northern assistance, which associated aid with colonial and neocolonial dynamics. For many countries in LAC, this discourse facilitated the diversification (not just the intensification) of ties with China because of its resonance with the win-win and non-interference principles championed by the Chinese government in its cooperation efforts with developing countries. In addition, economic cooperation opened up more space for LAC–China exchanges among civil society actors. Universities and think tanks expanded their educational and

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exchange programs, and researchers began taking part in a wider variety of collaborative projects, including via the BRICS think tank and academic networks. As Chinese overseas communities in LAC began expanding with new flows of migrants (still modest compared to the same phenomenon in Africa, but nonetheless vastly expanded since the 1980s), Chinese cultural products, including movies and books, became more common in LAC. Although Indian cinema has not found similar success in the region, there is an increased interest in Indian culture, including greater LAC tourist flows to India and a widely viewed Brazilian soap opera, Caminho das Índias (The Path of the Indies), that was set in part in India, with Brazilian actors playing Indian characters. LAC civil society presence and influence in China have remained low, however, in part due to the more closed nature of the Chinese single-party political system, and in part due to the relative lack of resources on the Latin American side. Although most LAC ties to Asia remain at the bilateral level, there has also been an increase in efforts to create new multilateral platforms that would stretch across these regions. Apart from BRICS, whose reach into LAC was highly selective and contested by other countries in the region, there is the Pacific Alliance, a trade bloc formed by Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Some LAC countries, namely Chile, Mexico, and Peru, also looked to Asia-Pacific trade arrangements and had entertained hopes of joining the (now defunct) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Trans-regional platforms such as the Forum for East Asia–Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC), created in 1999 at the initiative of Chile and Singapore, promoted regular dialogue across a wide variety of issues and expanded its membership to thirty-seven countries in the 2000s and 2010s. Sub-regional bodies such as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Southern Common Market (known as Mercosur), and the Union of South A merican States (UNASUR, recently disbanded in favor of the nascent Forum for the Progress and Development of South America, Prosur) have also attempted to engage with Asian partners. Despite these collective efforts, however, LAC has consistently failed to formulate a uniform regional policy either for Asia, or, more specifically, for China and India. This surge in LAC–Asia ties, following the traditional bilateral channels, was boosted in the mid-2010s by changes in world leadership. With the November 2016 election of Donald Trump to the United States presidency, the US adopted an official discourse of open disregard for multilateralism and globalization. Especially after Xi Jinping defended globalization from the Davos stage in January 2017 (Xi 2017), perceptions increased in LAC that Beijing, rather than Washington, had become the new beacon of liberalism and globalization. The Trump administration’s attacks on multilateralism and globalization, juxtaposed onto China’s embrace of capitalism and international exchanges, reinforced the sense among many Latin Americans that China—and, more broadly, the Asia Pacific—offered attractive new alternatives to partnerships with the United States and (among the more reformist groups in LAC) possibly to the US-led liberal world order. Starting in the mid-2010s, however, most of LAC’s major economies, including Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—all of which had highly visible leftist governments— underwent major political shifts. The drop in global commodity prices triggered economic crises and recessions in parts of the region, and millions who had been lifted out of extreme poverty began to sink back down. Persistent frustration at crime, violence, and corruption added to the discontentment with leftist governments. Combined with right-wing influences from the United States and Europe and a lingering nostalgia

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among many conservative Latin American groups for the military dictatorships of the twentieth century, the political pendulum in LAC swung back to the right, with conservative or neoliberal governments replacing the progressive leaderships that had prevailed in the previous decade. This shift has been evident throughout a number of government transformations, from impeachments (notably of Paraguay president Fernando Lugo in June 2012 and of Brazil Workers Party president Dilma Rousseff in May 2016) to elections across Central and South America, including the victories of Mauricio Macri in Argentina (December 2015), Sebastián Piñera in Chile (March 2019), Pedro Kuczynski in Peru ( July 2016), Juan Carlos Varela in Panama ( July 2014), and far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (October 2018).1 When Bolsonaro promised to break off ties with Beijing during his presidential campaign, arguing that China was still Communist, Beijing issued a thinly veiled warning via an editorial in the government-owned China Daily, titled “No reason for ‘Tropical Trump’ to disrupt relations with China” (China Daily 2018).2 At the same time, the region began facing new turbulences. Colombia’s peace agreement with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), signed in 2016, began to encounter major implementation challenges, including due to lingering political opposition to the peace deal from conservative groups. This was significant for cooperation with Asian partners because the peace agreement had generated vast optimism about Colombia’s capacity to grow economically and to expand, and perhaps even lead, part of LAC’s cooperation efforts abroad. At the same time, Venezuela—a main Asian partner, especially for China and India—began spiraling into a humanitarian crisis that has spilled across borders, with 3.4 million Venezuelans (ten percent of the total population) fleeing the country. In addition to the turbulence in Venezuela’s internal politics, with the embattled regime of Nicolás Maduro clinging to power through its cooptation of the military leadership, Venezuela’s instability has been fueled by the growing interest and presence of external actors. Two blocs of support have emerged, with the United States leading a group of more than sixty countries that, as of May 2019, officially recognized Juan Guaidó as president; and, on the opposing side, Russia, Cuba, and Iran leading a bloc in support of Maduro. This means that, as the next part of the chapter shows, China and India began interacting more sharply within the same spaces in LAC, some of them increasingly turbulent and subject to broader geopolitical tensions.

Comparing LAC’s ties to China and India LAC–China ties under the BRI China has historical ties to LAC dating back centuries, including due to the arrival of Chinese workers during the colonial period and the establishment of small Chinesedescendant communities in parts of South and Central America and the Caribbean. In the modern era, this presence became more varied with the expansion of trade and especially with the growth of Chinese investment in LAC. Latin American markets have been flooded with Chinese goods, from low value-added products such as plastic toys and buckets to, more recently, highly sophisticated technological innovations, including communications systems. Since 2009, China’s trade with LAC has grown more than twenty times, and the Latin American countries have signed hundreds of agreements in areas such as infrastructure (Koop 2019). Subnational units such as state and provincial

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governments, as well as cities, have also struck deals with Chinese counterparts in a fast-expanding decentralized cooperation flow. For most LAC countries, China came to represent an opportunity to diversify consumer products but also to help fill the immense development financing gap—a deficit that was exacerbated due to the elevation of LAC states to Middle Income Country (MIC) status, which makes them ineligible for certain lines of financing from the World Bank and other Western-led funding sources.3 From China’s perspective, the region is primarily important for economic reasons, especially due to growing concerns among the Chinese leadership with food and energy security: LAC exports include both food and energy in abundance, including soybeans, meat, and crude oil (Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Grenada 2016). China’s growing concerns with food and energy security and its goal of diversifying sources and securing long-term access to inputs from abroad have led to a shift from largely financial investments, especially through the acquisition of Latin American companies, to a greater number and wider variety of joint and greenfield projects, especially in areas such as natural resources extraction and energy. As a result of this change, Chinese investments and their impacts have become more visible across Latin America, including through Chinese proposals for “mega-projects” such as a new canal cutting across Nicaragua or a bi-oceanic railway interconnecting ports along Brazil’s Atlantic coastline and Peru’s Pacific littoral. For some actors, China appears to bring to LAC a distinct advantage: the ability to implement “whole package” initiatives that combine financing and construction (Carvalho 2019). The fact that umbrella agreements between China and LAC are negotiated at the state level but are then executed by companies, both state-owned and private, also promotes within some LAC circles the idea that Chinese cooperation is better coordinated and more long-term than Western alternatives. In addition, there is appetite within the region for cooperation that does not include the sorts of crosssectoral conditionalities imposed by Western institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For some actors, Chinese cooperation has entailed an increasing level of engagement with technology, beginning with the China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) program, which dates back to the early 1990s. For Latin Americans eager to see their countries join the BRI, cooperation with China appears to be a channel toward technology integration. For instance, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ South America Center for Astronomy (CASSACA) has launched a joint project, implemented by the National Astronomical Observatory of China and the University of Chile. Chinese officials have located this as part of the BRI (Chauvin and Fraser 2019). In another example, though not BRI related, a $50 million Chinese-funded satellite and space mission control center is being implemented in Argentina’s Patagonia region under a bilateral agreement signed in 2012 (Londoño 2018). China is now LAC’s third largest investor (Abdenur 2017), with loans now surpassing the financing LAC receives from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) (Carvalho 2019). Since the mid-2010s, the Chinese government has made concerted efforts to diversify its investments in LAC. In 2014, Xi Jinping outlined a “1+3+6” cooperation framework for the region, calling for one plan, three “engines” (trade, investment and financial cooperation), and six fields, including scientific and technological cooperation (MOFA 2018). Chinese state-run banks have lent approximately $140 billion for LAC projects (Myers and Gallagher 2019). At the same time,

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LAC has a trade deficit with China of over $60 billion, and there is an imbalance in the composition of these flows, with soybeans, metals, and minerals and hydrocarbons making up seventy percent of LAC exports to China (Koop 2019). In general, the Chinese government has remained reluctant to overtly engage with LAC at a political level, despite regular visits by high-level officials and some exchanges among political parties and politicians. Beijing has steadfastly insisted on its principle of respect for national sovereignty. If anything, this discourse has found added sympathy in LAC as the new wave of conservative leaders, including military-led governments such as that of Bolsonaro, step up their own sovereignty discourse. One area in which China has deviated from this approach is in its efforts to further its One China policy by “converting” LAC countries from maintaining diplomatic relations with both the mainland and Taiwan to switching over to exclusive ties with the mainland. Panama and the Dominican Republic were the most recent to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of China, in 2017 and 2018. In recent years, as competition between Beijing and Washington and other Western actors intensifies in certain arenas, these efforts have acquired new geopolitical weight—in part because many of LAC’s recently elected governments either reject or deemphasize South–South cooperation and have instead focused on deepening ties to Washington. In addition to its bilateral channels of exchange and influence, China has also made inroads into the region through cooperation with multilateral regional platforms. It has focused primarily on ties to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), through which China has called on LAC states to join the BRI. Starting in 2018, China also began to reinforce this call by extending individual invitations to LAC countries to be formally part of the initiative. Opinions about the BRI in LAC, however, are far from homogeneous. To many countries in the region, joining the BRI represents an opportunity to finance infrastructure and energy, industry, and services projects at a time when capital is scarce. A  number of LAC leaders attended the first BRI forum in 2017, and Panama was the first to sign on to the scheme in 2018, jangling nerves in the United States; since then, eighteen LAC countries have endorsed the BRI (as of May 2019: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Peru, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela). The list includes countries that have long had close ties to the United States, including Panama—with whom Washington has enjoyed a special relationship in part due to the long period during which the United States operated and provided defense for the Panama Canal—as well as Costa Rica. Some in the region view this as a positive opportunity in other respects. In addition to filling a major gap in infrastructure and energy financing in particular, some in the region view this as a positive opportunity in other respects. An official at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has argued that the BRI facilitates compliance by LAC states with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the realization of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the region because both the 2030 agenda and the BRI seek sustainable development and reduction of inequality and poverty, “without contradicting the proper model of each country (Dang and Zhu 2019). At the same time, LAC has also sent mixed signals about the initiative. During the January 2018 Santiago ministerial meeting, CELAC approved a joint (yet vague)

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declaration on BRI in which the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of CELAC “welcomed, with interest, the presentation of the Chinese Foreign Minister on the Belt and Road Initiative for deepening cooperation among Latin American and Caribbean Countries and China in the economic, trade, investment, cultural and tourism sectors, among others” (CELAC 2018). The following year, however, only one top leader (Chile’s Sebastian Piñera) attended the second BRF in April 2019. What is more, despite Chile’s adherence, the major economies of LAC—Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—have not joined the BRI despite China’s intensifying efforts to integrate them into the platform. When Brazil’s vice president, Hamilton Mourão, visited Beijing in May 2019, the main result was not an announcement that Brazil would join the BRI (as some had expected) but rather an umbrella declaration focusing on bilateral ties with China, and specifically plans to strengthen the Sino-Brazilian Commission for Coordination and Cooperation (Harris, Schipani, Hornby and Zhang 2019). Criticism of the BRI centers not only on bilateral ties with China, but also specifically of the idea of joining the BRI. Observers note that both Ecuador and Venezuela have borrowed heavily and found themselves indebted to China ( Jenner 2019; see also Gallagher and Myers 2019). There are growing concerns, including by LAC civil society actors and some politicians, over the environmental and labor practices of Chinese companies, as well as human rights issues more broadly (Carvalho 2019). Individual Chinese projects in LAC from Costa Rica to Argentina and Peru, especially those related to natural resource extraction, have faced backlash due to pollution and impact on local populations (Carvalho 2019). There are also accusations of land-grabbing and of lack of transparency around Chinese financing and projects. Some of these criticisms are magnified by US pressure to counter Chinese influence in LAC, which include open references to the alleged risks of cooperating with China (see Jourdan 2018). An additional concern that has gained momentum since 2017 is that leading Chinese technologies may be used for political purposes, especially surveillance of the general population. Several LAC states, including Ecuador, have bought Chinese facial recognition technology packages, and in 2016, Venezuela used Chinese technology to introduce the “Fatherland Card,” an identity document used by the Venezuelan government that, according to human rights activists, can be used for surveillance or to infringe on privacy (Carvalho 2019). With respect to the BRI, there is also a widespread perception that the terms of joining are unclear and, in some countries, that the potential benefits must first be weighed against the risks. Finally, some actors feel that the speed of China’s expansion in LAC is very fast, leaving local stakeholders little time to prepare or even understand the changes being proposed, whether bilaterally with China or via the BRI (Barrios 2018). LAC relations with Modi’s “Global India” Although most LAC countries and India share a common history as former colonies of European powers, LAC states and India have found themselves in very different situations after independence. Most LAC countries became independent (from Portugal, Spain, and other European countries) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, much earlier than India. Under the 1923 Monroe Doctrine—a US policy of opposing European colonialism in the Americas—LAC countries remained subject to the heavy influence of US hegemony and specifically of the US perception of LAC as its “geopolitical backyard.” During the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine acquired an

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anti-Communist bent and was invoked to justify several US military disputes and interventions in LAC, from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s covert training of Contra guerrillas in Honduras. India, meanwhile, followed a very different path. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1962, the recently established state pushed for the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). In 1971, it signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. These efforts imposed a political distance between LAC (many of whose states were under military rule, often with US backing) and India, as the latter pursued a path inspired by socialism and maintained a more closed economy. This political distance remained in place even though many LAC countries eventually joined the NAM and India supported LAC countries at the UN against outside intervention. High-level visits, including Nehru’s visit to Mexico in 1961 and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s tour of the region in 1968—a trip which she called a “voyage of discovery”—were unable to overcome this gap. And these visits were not followed up by any significant expansion of ties between LAC and India for decades, although individual LAC states did pursue (mostly limited) relations with India (Ross 2013). In addition to the geographic distance separating India and LAC, the countries pursued different domestic and international priorities, and the linguistic, cultural, and diaspora connections were weak. A moderate deepening of ties finally began to take place during the 1990s with the end of the Cold War, the decline of US hegemony in the Americas, a wave in democratization in LAC, and India’s economic liberalization starting in 1991. Starting in the mid-2000s, parts of LAC have converged with India in several aspects. First, India is politically more similar to most of LAC than other external cooperation partners in that it is a multi-ethnic democracy, like all of the region’s countries. In addition, India, too, has a large and growing middle class, and the fact that the Indian economy has been growing at a rapid rate (as of May 2019, around 6.6 percent annual GDP growth) makes it an attractive economic partner for LAC states. Indeed, many countries in the region began to actively seek to deepen ties with India; there have been a total of five high-level visits by Latin American leaders to India since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014. New ties were also established through trans-regional groupings. These included not only BRICS but also the India Brazil South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum, established in June 2003 and based on the member states’ common characteristics as large, multi-ethnic democracies in the developing world. This common political identity in theory allowed the three countries to address issues of internal governance, democracy, and human rights that were implausible to pursue through the BRICS agenda due to the presence of China and Russia, both authoritarian states. However, as BRICS gained strength, IBSA was progressively weakened despite some continuity in trilateral naval exercises (the IBSAMAR initiative) and the IBSA Fund, which finances peacebuilding and reconstruction in conflict-affected settings via the UN. Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, visited the region and had promised three new Indian diplomatic missions in the region—in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Uruguay—but these were not created, even after Modi visited Brazil in 2014 to attend the BRICS summit. Since Modi promised during this period that his government would open eighteen new embassies in Africa, there were some expectations that India would also expand its interactions in LAC (Aggarwal 2018). The lack of attention by India’s top leadership generated a degree of frustration in LAC regarding the Modi administration’s commitment to deepening ties with the region’s states.

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In November 2018, Modi visited Argentina to attend the Group of Twenty (G20) meeting. The Indian prime minister used the occasion to meet several LAC heads of state and pledged greater Indian engagement with LAC. Because this deepening of ties meant aligning with one of the main objectives of his foreign policy, i.e. to strengthen India’s economy, the focus remained heavily on economic cooperation. India’s presence in LAC, compared to that of China, has been both more recent and less visible. This is partly because LAC has not been a priority for India, whose geopolitical concerns are within its own region and whose foreign policy focuses on ties with United States, the European Union, Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, and even Africa. India’s trade with LAC stands at $50 billion—less than one-fourth that of China’s, but nevertheless a formidable leap from the minimal trade flows between LAC countries and India during the Cold War (Seshasayee 2016). In addition, a number of Indian companies have increased their investments in LAC. Although here, too, India lags behind China—Chinese investments in LAC total $50 billion, whereas India’s amount to $20 billion—the investment represents a significant change, both qualitatively and quantitatively, compared to the 1990s (Seshasayee 2016). In addition to the expansion in value, Indian investments in LAC over the past decade have encompassed a wide variety of sectors, from agribusiness to pharmaceuticals and energy. India’s investments in the region are much more diversified than those of China, with only eighteen percent focused on raw materials extraction, compared with fifty-seven percent for China (Seshasayee 2016). This diversification is especially important to LAC given the drop in global commodity prices. In addition, Indian investments do not entail bringing in labor from abroad: in 2016, it was estimated that Indian information technology companies employed around “25,000 people in Latin America, nearly all locals” (Seshasayee 2016). A good example of how Indian companies have generated jobs is the case of Tata Consulting Services (TCS) that established a Global Delivery Center in Montevideo, Uruguay, which later expanded to Chile. It expected to employ up to 10,000 local personnel (Shivapriya 2007). India’s presence in LAC is also different from that of China because the flows are led by private sector actors, with the state playing a relatively less visible role. At the same time, LAC has gained strategic importance under Modi’s government thanks to the region’s significance in the area of energy security, combined with geopolitical risks in other areas that supply India’s oil, especially the Middle East. India currently obtains twenty percent of its crude oil from LAC countries (especially Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela) (Seshasayee 2016). This means that there is increasing overlap in the geographies of cooperation by Asian actors in LAC and a few instances where Indian cooperation has outpaced China’s. In 2012, for example, India overtook China as the largest buyer of Venezuelan oil; some experts expect these purchases to increase in the future (provided there is a minimum of stability in Venezuela) as the Indian economy grows. LAC possesses sizeable reserves of crude oil, estimated at twenty percent of global reserves (BP 2018: 12). As the region’s biggest importer of oil, the United States, is becoming less energy dependent on the LAC thanks to its shale gas discoveries, Latin American oil exporting states are looking toward India as an increasingly important partner in the future. However, India does not have a coherent approach to the region. Although relations with major economies like Brazil, Mexico, and Chile have intensified, ties with other LAC states remain weak. Occasionally, LAC–India relations are affected by rivalries

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within LAC itself, such as when Argentina contested Brazil’s bid for a permanent UNSC seat. Brazil, along with India, is part of the G4 that seeks reform of the UN Security Council to include permanent membership for itself, Germany, India, and Japan. India’s warming ties to the United States put it, if not at odds with China in LAC, then certainly in a degree of uneasy mismatch that could spill over into greater competition, especially if tensions rise over the Venezuelan crisis. Venezuela’s domestic instabilities could affect the energy security efforts of India (and of China). The sharpening rivalries among pro- and anti-Maduro blocs, in which the United States is a player, could affect Indian energy supplies. However, these dynamics are shaped not only by relations between China and India but also with third actors, such as the United States and European states, and by demands and resistance from within LAC.

Conclusion Advances in technology, including communications and transportation, now allow states set physically apart by vast geographic distances to cooperate on an unprecedented scale. Technology, however, is not the only factor behind the uneven, generally lopsided yet nonetheless considerable expansion of LAC’s ties to Asian powers, especially China and India, since the 2000s. More space for cooperation between LAC and Asia, even beyond the economic sphere, has been made possible by the transformation of the world order, with the rise of these new hubs of economic power and political influence, and their varied impacts on established leaders such as the United States and Europe. The style, content, value, and impact of these ties vary widely across LAC, but they have acquired both density and visibility over the past decade. For some LAC states, such as Brazil and Mexico, the enhanced flows can be understood against the backdrop of expanding relations between regional powers, even those located in disparate regions of the world—a phenomenon best embodied in the multilateral (albeit ad hoc) BRICS coalition. The grouping allowed a select number of regional powers to not only intensify and diversify their cooperation but also to better align their official foreign policy discourse on a variety of topics, ranging from global governance to security and even some areas of social policy. Aside from these strategic ties, however, most of LAC’s relations with China and India continued through bilateral channels, whether led by the state or by non-state actors such as private sector firms. Since the mid-2010s, however, BRICS has been eclipsed by a larger and more clearly China-led effort, the BRI. The broad geopolitical changes taking place shape LAC’s relations with China and India in that they alter not only the prominence of regional and trans-regional multilateral platforms but also because they reshape the opportunities and risks inherent in cooperating with specific states—especially since China is leading the BRI and India, so far, has declined to join the initiative. Further research on LAC’s relations with China and India should seek to clarify the role of non-state actors in Latin America, as well as the influence of subnational actors such as provincial and city governments. In addition, more comparative research is needed on specific sectors, such as energy and technology, as well as in particular settings, as in the case of Venezuela. Because LAC and Asia, perhaps more than ever, remain fast-moving targets, the main challenge will remain incorporating the perspectives of multiple actors and avoiding a narrow triangulation approach.

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Notes

Bibliography Abdenur, A. E. (2014) “China and the BRICS Development Bank: Legitimacy and Multilateralism in South-South Cooperation,” IDS Bulletin 45(4): 85–101. Abdenur, A. E. (2017) “Skirting or Courting Controversy? Chinese FDI in Latin American Extractive Industries,” in G. Carbonnier, H. Campodónico and S. T. Vázquez, eds., Alternative Pathways to Sustainable Development: Lessons from Latin America (Leiden: Brill): 174–198. Aggarwal, P. (2018) “Why India Should Focus More on Latin American Region Now,” Observer Research Foundation (21 September), available online at www.orfonline.org/expertspeak/44407-why-india-should-focus-more-latin-american-region/ (accessed 29 May 2019). Barrios, R. (2018) “China’s Belt and Road Lands in Latin America,” Diálogo Chino (9 July), available online at https://dialogochino.net/11326-chinas-belt-and-road-lands-in-latin-america/. BBC Brasil (2019) “Crise na Venezuela: Como a Índia se tornou uma aliada fundamental para o governo de Nicolás Maduro” (17 March), available online at www.bbc.com/portuguese/ internacional-47564734 (accessed 29 May 2019). BP (British Petroleum) (2018) “BP Statistical Review of World Energy” ( June), available online at www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energyeconomics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2018-full-report.pdf. Carvalho, R. (2019) “China in Latin America: Partner or Predator?” South China Morning Post (25 May), available online at https://multimedia.scmp.com/week-asia/article/3011618/ beijing-conquest-latin-america/index.html (accessed 29 May 2019). CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) (2018) “Special Declaration of Santiago of the II Ministerial Meeting of the CELAC-China Forum on the Belt and Road Initiative,” Ministério das Relações Exteriores (22 January), available online at www.itamaraty.gov.br/ images/2ForoCelacChina/Special-Declaration-II-CELAC-CHINA-FORUM-FV-22.1.18. pdf (accessed 29 May 2019). Chauvin, L. O. and Fraser, B. (2019) “South America is Embracing Beijing’s Science Silk Road,” Nature (8 May), available online at www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-01901127-4/index.html (accessed 29 May 2019). Cheru, F. (2016) “Emerging Southern Powers and New Forms of South-South Cooperation: Ethiopia’s Strategic Engagement with China and India,” Third World Quarterly 37(5): 592–610. China Daily (2018) “No Reason for ‘Tropical Trump’ to Disrupt Relations with China” (29 October), available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201810/29/WS5bd702e9a 310eff303285424.html (accessed 29 May 2019). Dang, Q. and Zhu, Y. (2019) “Interview: Belt and Road Helps Latin America to Achieve UN 2030 Agenda, Says ECLAC Official,” XinhuaNet (26 April), available online at www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-04/26/c_138011601.htm (accessed 29 May 2019). Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Grenada (2016) “China’s Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean” (24 November), available online at http://gd.china-embassy.org/ eng/zlhz_1/zgdlzcwj/. Fernández Jilberto, A. E. and Hogenboom, B. (2010) Latin America Facing China: South-South Relations beyond the Washington Consensus (New York: Berghahn Books). Gallagher, K. P. and Myers, M (2019) “China-Latin America Finance Database,” Inter-American Dialogue, available online at www.thedialogue.org/map_list/.

Latin America and the Caribbean  497 Guilhon-Albuquerque, J.-A. (2014) “Brazil, China, US: A Triangular Relation?” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 57: 108–120. Harris, B., Schipani, A., Hornby, L. and Zhang, A. (2019) “Brazil’s Mourao Seeks to Repair Ties with China,” Financial Times (29 May), available online at www.ft.com/ content/5d1506a8-80aa-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b. Ikenberry, G. J. (2008) “The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive?” Foreign Affairs ( January/February), available online at www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/asia/2008-01-01/rise-china-and-future-west. Jenner, F. (2019) “Where China Is Most Heavily Investing in Latin America,” Latin America Reports (15 May), available online at https://latinamericareports.com/where-chinainvest-latin-america/2064/. Joshi, M. (2018) “Why Attending BRICS 2018 Was So Significant for PM Narendra Modi,” Observer Research Foundation (30 July), available online at www.orfonline.org/research/42854-whyattending-brics-2018-was-so-significant-for-pm-narendra-modi/ (accessed 29 May 2019). Jourdan, A. (2018) “China Denounces Pompeo’s ‘Malicious’ Latam Comments Amid Influence Battle,” Reuters (22 October), available online at https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/ idAFKCN1MW03N. Kamdar, B. (2019) “What to Make of India’s Absence from the Second Belt and Road Forum?” The Diplomat (9 May), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2019/05/what-to-makeof-indias-absence-from-the-second-belt-and-road-forum/ (accessed 29 May 2019). Koop, F. (2019) “Belt and Road: The New Face of China in Latin America,” Diálogo Chino (25 April), available online at https://dialogochino.net/26121-belt-and-road-the-new-faceof-china-in-latin-america/. Lederman, D., Olarreaga, M. and Perry, G. E. (2009) China’s and India’s Challenge to Latin America: Opportunity or Threat? (Washington, DC: The World Bank). Leon-Manriquez, J. and Alvarez, L. F. (2014) “Mao’s Steps in Monroe’s Backyard: Towards a United States-China Hegemonic Struggle in Latin America?” Supp. Special Issue of Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 57: 9–27, available online at www.scielo.br/article_plus.php?p id=S0034-73292014000300009&tlng=en&lng=en (accessed 29 May 2019). Londoño, E. (2018) “From a Space Station in Argentina, China Expands Its Reach in Latin America,” The New York Times (28 July), available online at www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/ world/americas/china-latin-america.html. Mawdsley, E. (2012) From Recipients to Donors: Emerging Powers and the Changing Development Landscape (London: Zed Books). MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China) (2018) “Xi Jinping Attends China-Latin America and the Caribbean Summit and Delivers Keynote Speech” (18 July), available online at www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/topics_665678/xjpzxcxjzgjldrdlchwdbxagtwnrlgbjxgsfwbcxzlldrhw/t1176650.shtml (accessed 29 May 2019). Mthembu, P. M. S. (2018) China and India’s Development Cooperation in Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Myers, M. and Gallagher K. P. (2019) “Cautious Capital: Chinese Development Finance in LAC, 2018,” The Dialogue (21 February), available online at www.thedialogue.org/analysis/ cautious-capital-chinese-development-finance-in-lac-2018/. Roett, R. and Paz, G. (eds.) (2016) Latin America and the Asian Giants: Evolving Ties with China and India (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press). Ross, C. (2013) “India, Latin America, and the Caribbean During the Cold War,” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 56(2): 23–44, available online at www.scielo.br/scielo. php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-73292013000200002. Sachdeva, G. (2018) “Indian Perceptions of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative,” International Studies 55(4): 285–296. Seshasayee, H. (2016) “India’s Rising Presence in Latin America,” Americas Quarterly (13 February), available online at www.americasquarterly.org/content/indias-rising-presence-latin-america.

498  Adriana Erthal Abdenur Shivapriya, N. (2007) “TCS Shifts Gears in Latin America,” The Economic Times (30 May), available online at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/tcs-shifts-gears-inlatin-america/articleshow/2085074.cms. State Council (2015) “China’s Military Strategy” (27 May), available online at http://english. gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2015/05/27/content_281475115610833.htm. The World Bank (2018) “Belt and Road Initiative” (29 March), available online at www.worldbank.org/en/topic/regional-integration/brief/belt-and-road-initiative (accessed 29 May 2019). Wehner, L. (2017) “Emerging Powers in Foreign Policy,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, available online at https://oxfordre.com/politics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/ acrefore-9780190228637-e-363 (accessed 29 May 2019). Xi, J. (2017) “Jointly Shoulder Responsibility of Our Times, Promote Global Growth,” Keynote Speech at the Opening Session of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos on 17 January, The State Council Information Office, The People’s Republic of China (6 April), available online at www.china.org.cn/node_7247529/content_40569136.htm (accessed 29 May 2019). Yan X. (2010) “The Rise of China in Chinese Eyes,” Journal of Contemporary China 10(26): 33–39. Zhang, Y. (2016) “China and Liberal Hierarchies in Global International Society: Power and Negotiation for Normative Change,” International Affairs 92(4): 795–816.

Part 7

China, India, and global order

31 Chinese and Indian competitive nuclear restraint in the global nuclear order Nicola Leveringhaus and Kate Sullivan de Estrada

In the last two decades, China and India have been actively modernizing their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems. This has led to scholarly and policy debate over whether an arms race between the two Asian powers is likely, or even already at play. This chapter first examines conventional thinking around this debate before introducing a relatively undiscussed dimension to the bilateral nuclear dynamic: Chinese and Indian status competition within the global nuclear order (GNO).1 Our focus is on both countries’ projection of Self and Other in relation to the key norms, institutions, and central guarantors of the GNO. This bilateral dynamic, we contend, signals weak prospects for both arms racing and bilateral arms control between China and India, and an overall pessimistic future for their bilateral relationship in the GNO. Our argument proceeds as follows. China and India are both rising powers and seek positive status as “nuclear responsibles.” The two countries compete with one another as they project their own distinctive brands of nuclear responsibility to the world at large. In particular, both China and India have sought to compete by emphasizing their own conceptions of nuclear restraint. Moreover, at a number of critical junctures, China and India have sought to diminish one another’s credentials as restrained nuclear-armed states by drawing international attention to one another’s “restraint failures.” This dynamic is quite distinct from engagement in the pursuit of “competitive excess,” or a nuclear arms race. Instead, it manifests as the pursuit of “competitive restraint.” How does competitive nuclear restraint play out for each side? For China, competition with India centers on its institutionalized position within the GNO. In particular, China’s perceived advantage over India as a nuclear actor relates to the question of inclusion/exclusion from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime, namely that China is an NPT-recognized nuclear state, whereas India is not. For India, its advantage lies beyond the NPT, in perceptions—notably held by the United States—of India’s responsible non-proliferation behavior, which stands in stark contrast to China’s strongly suspected proliferation past, as well as in India’s more generally perceived benevolent role as a democracy in world politics. Conceptually, this chapter draws from our 2018 article in the Review of International Studies (Leveringhaus and Sullivan de Estrada 2018), where we propose a framework for understanding how China and India each seek status as nuclear responsibles through both “conformist” and “innovative” restraint behaviors in relation to the norms and institutions of the GNO. In this chapter, we take our argument further by focusing on their interactive bilateral dynamic. Moreover, we shift our argument into empirical terrain by focusing on three specific sites where competitive nuclear restraint in Sino-Indian nuclear relations has played out since the end of the Cold War. In  particular, we

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examine: (1) India and Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests; (2) India’s 2008 Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) waiver and its ongoing bid for NSG membership; and (3) ChinesePakistani civil nuclear cooperation since the late 2000s. In each case, one or both sides have sought to undermine—whether implicitly or explicitly—one another’s nuclear restraint credentials. The combined picture supports our claim that competitive nuclear restraint is at play in the bilateral. Our argument that competitive restraint operates as a core dynamic of the China– India nuclear bilateral has the potential to address at least two puzzles in the existing literature. First, and perhaps most significantly, why do we not see a spiraling arms race between two countries that are widely understood to exist under conditions of rivalry? Our conception of competitive restraint between China and India bolsters, and extends, existing accounts of stable nuclear deterrence between the two countries (Narang 2018). Active competitive nuclear restraint and subdued competitive excess (or arms racing) within the dyad are related, and China and India’s practices of competitive restraint deliver a positive lock-in effect on future nuclear force expansion and development. Second, while nearly all analysts suggest that China and India are comparatively restrained nuclear powers compared to the Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, it is unclear why this restraint has not translated into significant nuclear dialogue, cooperation, or arms control in the Sino-Indian bilateral. The dynamic of competitive restraint and its underlying logic of status competition within the GNO demonstrate the costs of cooperation, both materially and socially, for each of these rising nuclear powers.

Existing assessments of the China–India nuclear relationship While a small number of analysts in recent years have argued that China and India are gearing up for a “full-blown nuclear arms race” (Sharma and Finaud 2018: 12), or that they are already engaged in “quiet” (Zhang 2016) or “slow” (Sidhu 2004) nuclear arms racing, most agree that an arms race is not a good way of describing what is at play within the Sino-Indian nuclear dyad (for example, Cunningham and Medcalf 2011; Taylor Fravel and Narang 2012). A 2018 analysis concluded that “neither India nor China has shown (thus far) any proclivity for the kind of arms racing that characterised the Cold War era” (Basrur 2018). It should be noted that the absence of major arms race pressures between China and India is not generally deemed attributable to material limitations in either country. Indeed, a 2016 report concluded that “China and India, the two Asian countries most capable of engaging in nuclear arms racing by virtue of their financial and technical means, have so far chosen not to do so” (Krepon 2016: 194). Instead, the absence of a bilateral arms race dynamic has been explained in two main ways in the literature. One explanation argues that rather than an isolated bilateral dynamic, the China–India nuclear dyad is embedded in a “cascading effect” (Basrur 2018) between the United States, China, India, and Pakistan. This “cascade” sees the security dynamics between China and the United States as driving China’s nuclear modernization, which, in turn, spurs a modernizing reaction from India, which then ultimately places pressure on Pakistan to modernize. While there are elements of arms racing running through the cascade as a whole, this does not produce Sino-Indian reciprocity, nor are the two countries closely matched opponents. A second explanation for the lack of a bilateral arms race centers on the presence of a stable relationship of mutual deterrence between China and India (Dalton and Tandler

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2012). The two countries’ nuclear strategies are deemed mutually stabilizing because they are based on the logic of “assured retaliation:” each side has a No First Use (NFU) pledge and both recognize their vulnerability to one another’s second-strike forces (Narang 2018). This means that China and India have finite deterrence requirements vis-à-vis one another, since “each envisions nuclear use only in retaliation for strategic use by the adversary” (Narang 2018). This reduces the pressure to reciprocally arms race. In this chapter, we introduce a third explanation for limited bilateral arms race pressures, that of competitive restraint, which we argue is a core dynamic of the China– India bilateral nuclear relationship. As we discuss in the final section of the chapter, competitive restraint delivers a wider view than the two established explanations above, and a more disquieting one. It leads to prognoses that reinforce optimism at the level of the strategic relationship, but that introduce pessimism at the level of China’s and India’s competition as status-seeking rising powers, as well as pessimism regarding the future of nuclear strategic dialogue or bilateral arms control between the two countries.

Responsibility and restraint in Chinese and Indian nuclear behavior In our 2018 article, we argued that both China and India have sought status as nuclear responsibles through both “conformist” and “innovative” restraint behaviors in relation to the norms and institutions of the GNO, in particular, those that constitute the NPT regime (Leveringhaus and Sullivan de Estrada 2018). We concluded that both countries were more successful in securing status through conformist, rather than innovative, behaviors. Essentially, conformist behaviors offer a fast track for rising powers to secure responsible status in the GNO. That said, we also argued that when innovation fails to produce status payoffs at an international level, it nonetheless affords insight into the preferred social roles of China and India as rising powers, and introduces new, nascent ideas and norms into the established patterns of global governance around nuclear weapons. Specifically, in terms of conformist behaviors, we highlighted how both countries sought responsible nuclear status either through institutional or normative means. In China’s case, institutional compliance (joining the NPT, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and NSG) contributed most to demonstrating conformity. India, however, has sought to demonstrate normative conformity through an official moratorium on testing despite being outside the CTBT and claims of a strong nonproliferation record despite being outside the NPT. In terms of innovative behaviors, we underscored China’s pledge of NFU, in place since 1964, as an example of restraint. However, China has seen limited direct success in promoting this pledge either as an international norm or as part of an international treaty. For India, aside from modest attempts at promoting a norm on the de-alerting of nuclear weapons, a major goal of its innovation has been to seek “exceptional” recognition as a responsible nuclear power despite its lack of membership in the NPT or CTBT. Overall, while external recognition of these innovative behaviors has been limited, these policies do make strategic sense for both countries. In addition, China’s and India’s respective brands of restraint offer a mechanism for their identity projection. Both states stress their distinctiveness as “minimalist” nuclear possessor states, and at different moments in their post-Cold War nuclear histories they have sought to re-imagine entrenched understandings of nuclear deterrence, arsenal size, and the acceptable degree of operational alertness. Through

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these actions and positions, China and India have sought to set themselves apart from other nuclear-armed states. Such strategies are intended to appeal to an audience beyond the elite club of nuclear powers, in particular a group of developing countries broadly contiguous with the Non-Aligned Movement, whose membership makes up the bulk of non-nuclear weapon states.

Chinese and Indian competitive nuclear restraint Our central argument in this chapter is that in recent years there have been a number of critical junctures at which China and India have each sought to highlight the other’s restraint failures in order to undermine the other’s status as a responsible nuclear power. At the crux of this competition is not simply who has the more compelling brand of nuclear restraint—in other words, whether India’s conditional NFU policy is more credible, or China’s preference for nuclear minimalism is more likely to remain unchanged. Instead, wider issues of inclusion, acceptance, and responsibility in the GNO are at play. In fact, China and India have their own perceived advantages and sources of legitimacy in this competition for status as nuclear responsibles. As we have already noted, for China, competition with India in the domain of nuclear restraint centers on the question of institutional conformity within the GNO. China views its legitimacy and advantage as a nuclear actor over India as stemming from the fact of its institutional embeddedness within the NPT regime. India is not an NPT signatory. In general terms, NPT recognition can only be afforded to a state that has tested a working nuclear device prior to 1 January 1967. India has no option to join the NPT as a recognized nuclear weapons state, and therefore only has the option to surrender its nuclear status and join the NPT as a non-nuclear state (which is highly unlikely), or remain, as it currently does, as a nuclear-armed state outside the NPT regime. Beijing would rather India’s “outlaw” nuclear status is unchanged—namely that India stays outside the NPT—and that its outsider status extends to other nuclear institutions, such as the NSG, because this arrangement serves to check India’s overall rising power and status ( Joshi 2013). Nonetheless, there is some, albeit limited, acknowledgment of India’s nuclear status among Chinese experts today.2 In essence, while China cannot ignore India’s de facto nuclear status, Beijing does not want India to be seated at the top nuclear table as a nuclear equal, even if India is a rising power with shared values of nuclear restraint. India’s advantage lies elsewhere, beyond the NPT, in Indian claims and external perceptions—notably held by the United States—of India’s responsible non-proliferation behavior and more general benevolent role in world politics. India’s emphasis on its non-proliferation record stands in stark contrast to the controversial nature of China’s past record, particularly in relation to its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan and others (Burr 2004). More broadly, however, India’s identity as a democracy has bolstered its image as a peaceful and trustworthy partner of the United States. According to Jarrod Hayes, despite the 1998 tests, “India is described as a democracy often and usually before any other characterization. Arising out of this shared democracy is a sense of partnership and trust” (Hayes 2009: 994). Hayes notes how US perceptions contrast “peaceful, democratic India against expansive, oppressive, and aggressive China” (Hayes 2009: 986). In this sense, India’s responsible status is served strongly by its apparent familiarity and benignity as a democracy, even in the face of India’s status as an NPT outsider, whereas the threat perceptions commonly associated with China mitigate against recognition of its rule abidance within the norms of the NPT regime.

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The 1998 nuclear tests in South Asia The testing of a nuclear weapon is not, in the first instance, an example of restraint or of responsible conduct. Indeed, international condemnation of the South Asian nuclear tests in 1998 was widespread, with many considering the nuclearization of the region both reckless and irresponsible. However, more relevant to the argument presented here is that the tests soon became an important issue over which China and India each sought to diminish one another’s credentials as responsible nuclear players. India’s initial justification for its 1998 tests, briefly summarized in a letter from Prime Minister Vajpayee to President Clinton, identified security concerns in the region as the main motivation for testing. The letter cited China in particular as a nuclear threat, and made reference to past Chinese assistance to Pakistan that had enabled the latter “to become a covert nuclear weapons state” (prior to Pakistan’s own tests, which were conducted just days after India’s) (The New York Times 1998). In an attempt to justify India’s test, therefore, the letter labeled China as both an aggressor and a proliferator: hardly the characteristics of a responsible nuclear actor. China’s immediate reaction to the tests in South Asia was to downplay security concerns and the significance of India’s and Pakistan’s newly acquired nuclear status. From a security standpoint, China had to confront a new reality in which India, armed with Agni missiles, would soon be able to target Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong (Cai 1998: 24; Zhang 1999a; Frazier 2000). Far more problematic for China was the way in which India’s declared nuclear status challenged China regionally. India was the first state to overtly proclaim itself a nuclear weapons state since China had tested its own nuclear device in 1964 (Walker 1998: 517–518). To compound matters, India made clear references, both prior to and after the test in 1998, to China as a reason for testing, undermining Chinese efforts to project a peaceful and responsible image to the international community. Beijing immediately refuted the Indian claims as “totally unreasonable,” pointing to other factors driving India’s decision to test: ambitions for regional hegemony and great power status, and as an attempt to balance neighboring military capabilities, not just in Pakistan and China but also as a response to the US military presence in the Indian Ocean (Chen 1998; Zou 1999: 19; Zhang 1999b). China also sought to highlight how the tests were destabilizing to global and regional stability, heightening the prospect of nuclear war, as well as going against positive restraintoriented trends such as the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995, the signing of the CTBT in 1996, and the decision to roll back nuclear weapons programs and join the NPT in South Africa (1991), Argentina (1995), and Brazil (1998). Given that both India and Pakistan were non-signatories to the CTBT and NPT, Chinese analysts feared that the South Asian nuclear tests would set a “bad example” for other states inclined to go down the nuclear path in the future (Li and Li 1998). Moreover, according to Chinese nuclear experts, these new nuclear states only served to reinforce the significance of nuclear deterrence and undermine non-proliferation (Author interview, Beijing 20 July 2011 and Qian 1998). Despite these fears, China ultimately decided not to implement sanctions against either India or Pakistan. Instead, China chose to co-host P5 talks on this issue at the United Nations (UN) to draft United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1172, opting to actively use non-proliferation tools to police the nuclear order and re-state its position in that order as a legitimate nuclear actor. By 27 June 1998, China had also issued a joint statement with the United States calling for India and Pakistan

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to cease testing and to join the CTBT and NPT (Renmin Ribao 1998). China, as the only recognized nuclear weapons state and signatory to both the CTBT and NPT in Asia, was particularly keen to ensure that India and Pakistan were not recognized as legitimate nuclear weapons states. Therefore, in the joint statement on this issue, both China and the United States made clear that “notwithstanding their recent nuclear tests, India and Pakistan do not have the status of nuclear weapons states in accordance with the NPT” (Renmin Ribao 1998). In other words, China would only accept India as a nuclear outlaw, outside of the NPT, and therefore not as a nuclear equal. The 2008 NSG waiver for the US–India civil nuclear deal3 The Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver granted for the US–India civil nuclear deal in 2008 is a more recent case where India and China’s competition comes to a head on questions related to inclusion/exclusion and nuclear responsibility within the NPT regime. On this issue, India defends itself on the basis of its solid non-proliferation record whereas China is concerned that the deal affords India new levels of status and legitimacy within the NPT regime, diluting India’s image as an illegitimate nuclear-armed state in the region. Expanded cooperation between the United States and India throughout the 1990s and, after a hiatus following India’s nuclear tests, in the early 2000s, led to Washington formally signaling that it was willing to consider recognition of India as a nuclear partner. The culmination of these developments was the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (announced on 18 July 2005, signed on 2 March 2006, and concluded on 10 October 2008), which took the unprecedented step of categorizing India as “a responsible state,” and publicly acknowledged a spotless record on nuclear non-proliferation. A key consequence of the agreement was that the United States unilaterally reversed the position adopted by the NSG in 1992 that had made nuclear cooperation with all non-nuclear weapons states conditional upon the acceptance of “full-scope” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. India’s relentless cultivation of an image as a restrained and responsible nuclear power had paid off insofar as US support for the waiver made reference to this feature of India’s nuclear history. Even before the deal was passed in 2008, Beijing was paying increasing attention to India’s drive for great-power status (Yuan 2007). More specifically, for the Chinese, “… in the nuclear arena, these [US-India] ties also grant New Delhi legitimacy and recognition” (Yuan 2007: 137). In addition, China was worried about the effects of such a deal in transforming and undoing the NPT regime. Indeed, in a press conference held at China’s Foreign Ministry on 2 March 2006, with regard to the question of how China would respond to US–India nuclear cooperation and whether the current restriction on Indian nuclear non-proliferation was strong enough, China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Qin Gang said: The Non-Proliferation Treaty serves as a corner stone of the international nonproliferation regime and has played an important role in preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons and promoting peaceful use of nuclear energy. As a signatory party to the treaty, China hopes that non-signatory countries can get on board as non-nuclear states at an early date, and contribute to a stronger international nonproliferation regime as well as the regional and international peace and stability. (MOFA 2006)

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Later, during the talks for an NSG waiver in August 2008, China urged that the terms of the exemption be stated generally, rather than in specific reference to India (Weiss 2007: 448). This would mean that it would be criteria-based and therefore applicable to other countries such as Pakistan. This first round of talks failed, and during the second round of talks in September, China appeared to be stalling, as it called for a third round. After a call by US President Bush to China’s President Hu Jintao on day two of the second round, however, China did not attend the negotiations on day three, and the NSG trade waiver passed by consensus on 6 September 2008 (Krepon 2007: 15–17; Srivastava 2008). China was not, however, the only country obstructing the agreement. NSG members such as New Zealand, Australia, and the Czech Republic were also reluctant to offer an exemption to India. Siddharth Varadarajan, reporting in depth on the progress of the talks, noted how a statement issued at the eleventh hour by India’s then External Affairs Minister, Pranab Mukherjee appeared to play a key role in securing the agreement (Mukherjee 2008; Varadarajan 2008). Mukherjee’s statement stressed India’s long history of disarmament initiatives, voluntary commitment to a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, policy of NFU, willingness to work toward a fissile material cut-off treaty (FMCT), and positive non-proliferation record. These restraint claims appeared to contribute positively to the ultimate NSG agreement: references to Mukherjee’s statement appeared within the NSG’s final “Statement on Civil Nuclear Cooperation with India.” The exceptional treatment meted out by the NSG was a victory for India. Subsequent civil nuclear trading deals between India and a number of other states have been both materially beneficial, and have signified widespread, though not universal, international recognition of India’s responsible nuclear status.4 Yet China continues to see the 2008 US–India civil nuclear deal as counterproductive to the future stability of the GNO and its position within that order. For China, first, the deal exposed double standards exercised by the United States since the exemption made by the NSG was only granted to India, a country that is not a member of the NSG and has not signed the NPT or the CTBT (Boese 2008). Despite this, the United States deemed India sufficiently responsible as a nuclear-armed state to bend NSG rules (Fan 2008). Second, given that the deal went some way to granting India recognition as a responsible nuclear weapons state, it continued to undermine China’s status and prestige as the sole recognized nuclear weapons state in the region (Limaye 2008; author interview, Beijing, 22 July 2011). Up until then, China had enjoyed being ahead of India in terms of status as the sole recognized nuclear weapons state in Asia—a status underpinned by China’s permanent seat on the Security Council, membership of the NSG (which it joined in 2004), and as a signatory to the CTBT and NPT, unlike India. Third, and more widely, the deal had a damaging effect on the non-proliferation regime, undermining, for instance, the CTBT since the deal demanded weak requirements on testing and safeguards. Fourth, the US–India deal was perceived in Beijing as part of a wider attempt by the United States to contain China. According to Shen Dingli, the deal demonstrates that “the United States has decided that using India to check and balance China is of more importance than non-proliferation” (Quoted in Buckley 2007). The more recent question of India’s membership in the NSG also poses material and social challenges for both China and India. Under the terms of the 2008 waiver, India is committed to following NSG guidelines; yet as a non-member, it can have no input into decisions that could potentially impact its civil nuclear industry. Moreover,

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as multilateral non-proliferation initiatives evolve to meet contemporary global challenges, these will likely be built upon the NPT–NSG framework. An extended version of the Proliferation Security Initiative, for example, would have difficulty including New Delhi as a stakeholder given India’s position outside both the NPT and the NSG. China, meanwhile, has real concerns about India’s growing ties with the United States. In comparison to the activism of George W. Bush, the Obama administration lent comparatively muted support to India’s NSG membership quest from 2014 to 2016, but US backing was nonetheless in play. From 2005 onward, Beijing has seen US support of India’s civil nuclear ambitions as offering preferential treatment for India and as a symptom of a de facto strategic alliance between the two countries (Sullivan de Estrada and Leveringhaus 2017). China has resisted the idea of a case by case basis for determining membership of NSG. In 2017, at the NSG plenary meeting, China again reiterated this stance: Indian membership should be considered not on a case by case basis, but instead in a non-discriminatory fashion that allows other countries, namely Pakistan, to be considered as well (Hibbs 2017: 281). More recently, in January 2019, reports in the Indian media speculated that China’s resistance to Indian NSG membership might be softening—with the Indian Ministry of External Affairs holding talks with Chinese counterparts on a variety of issues, including India’s pursuit of membership of the NSG (Mohan 2019). Yet China’s wider concerns about India’s outsider status with regard to the non-proliferation regime remain and the denial of NSG membership stands as a bulwark against India’s mainstreaming. China is sufficiently concerned about India’s nuclear status and its relationship with the United States to persist with its strategy of keeping India out of the NSG. China–Pakistan civil nuclear cooperation in the late 2000s A third area of competition for nuclear status plays out over the uncertain depth and substance of current Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation. Concerned that China is providing strategic nuclear support to India’s long-time rival, Pakistan, India has questioned the legitimacy of Chinese actions with regard to its responsibilities under the NPT and as a member of the NSG, but it appears to have done so via quiet diplomacy. Similar to China at the time of India’s 1998 tests, New Delhi has referenced the non-proliferation norms of the GNO in an attempt to hold China to account and to question its legitimacy as a responsible nuclear actor. Shortcomings in Beijing’s past non-proliferation record provide a foundation for the mistrust of China internationally and stand in contrast to the broad consensus over India’s more positive record on proliferation activities. Chinese shortcomings are based largely on US accusations in the 1990s of China transferring nuclear weapons and cruise and ballistic missile technology to Pakistan as well as a number of other countries, notably Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Algeria (Medeiros 2007: 30–88). However, US concerns over Chinese-Pakistani nuclear cooperation date back as far as the 1960s (Denney 1968) and especially after 1976, when China is said to have signed an agreement with Pakistan to formalize nuclear cooperation (Garver 2001: 329–330). Western analysts suspect that following India’s peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974, Pakistan decided to initiate a nuclear weapons program and turned to China for help (Burr 2004). Certain media reports in Pakistan claim that by 1979 China had supplied UF6 to Pakistan, an important compound in the uranium enrichment process (Garver  2001:  329, ft. 30;

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Levy and Scott-Clark 2007: 62). By 1983, US intelligence sources pointed to Chinese assistance to Pakistan in the production of fissile materials as well as information regarding nuclear warhead and missile designs (US Embassy China 1982). Later, after China signed a comprehensive civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Pakistan in 1986, reports surfaced suggesting that Chinese scientists had also offered assistance in the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium and had transferred enough tritium gas to Pakistan for ten nuclear weapons (Smith and Warrick 2009). Despite these reports, China has continued to insist that its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan has been purely for “peaceful purposes.” Unfortunately for China, in 1995, it was reported that the China Nuclear Energy Industry Corporation had sold ring magnets—an important component in gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium—to Pakistan. This represented a serious case of proliferation. However, Beijing highlighted that this transfer had taken place without government knowledge, and the items, despite being dual-use, were not on international trigger control lists (Medeiros 2007: 66). Nonetheless, as a result of the 1995 incident, China arguably appeared to have failed to uphold its responsibilities of non-proliferation as a signatory to the NPT since 1992. China has since made a concerted attempt to improve its image. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, China has stated its official commitment to non-proliferation on a regular basis and implemented a more robust system of export controls (SCIO 1995). Indeed, as testimony to these important changes in its nuclear practices, China was granted membership of the NSG in 2004. Upon joining the group, China’s civil nuclear assistance to Pakistan ordinarily should have ceased. However, Beijing informed the NSG of a pre-existing contract for a second reactor at the Chashma nuclear reactor complex in Pakistan. Then, in 2010, China announced the export of a further two reactors to Chashma (World Nuclear News 2013). A recent report—unconfirmed by either government—suggests a fifth Chinese reactor may even be scheduled for ex port (Gertz 2013). Moreover, in June 2013, it was reported that Pakistan had approved construction of a second atomic energy facility in Karachi with help from China (NTI 2013). The open-ended nature of Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation has caused widespread concern among NSG members, as well as non-NSG members such as India (Nayan 2013). NSG members object to China’s cooperation with Pakistan on the grounds that the latter is a non-signatory to the NPT. Others point to the lack of full-scope IAEA safeguards in Pakistan, typically a condition for nuclear supply agreements within the NSG. Beijing, however, has argued that it should be able to maintain its nuclear cooperation with Islamabad as it predates its entry into the NSG. It thus argues on the basis of a “grandfather clause” that these actions do not violate NSG conditions. More precisely, Chinese officials argue that the bilateral cooperation “does not violate relevant norms of the NSG,” although what these relevant norms are was left unspecified (Krishnan 2013a). The United States accepts this argument as it relates to the first two reactors but contends that the additional reactors since 2010 require NSG agreement. Mark Hibbs (Hibbs 2011) has argued that the Chinese ought to provide information to the NSG regarding the scope of its previous agreements with Pakistan, and that without this evidence, an NSG waiver would be needed before China could export any new reactors. Other NSG members have appeared to accept China’s continued exports since 2010, considering them compensation for the waiver granted by the NSG to the US–India nuclear deal in 2008 (Painter 2013). There is also a fear that pushing China too far could result in its withdrawal from the NSG.

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Given that China’s image as a nuclear responsible is suffering, China’s civil nuclear cooperation with Pakistan requires explanation. Beyond Sino-Indian animosity and a sense of loyalty to a historical strategic partner in Pakistan, China’s decision to move forward with further Chashma reactors in 2010 can be understood as a reaction to the 2008 NSG waiver granted to India. The recent announcement of an additional reactor sale in 2013 is possibly a by-product of that waiver and/or a reaction to India’s prospective membership in the NSG (Painter 2013). India’s official, public response to China’s 2010 announcement of continued civil nuclear cooperation with Pakistan was relatively muted. In mid-2010, Indian media sources suggested that India would strongly oppose any such Chinese assistance to Pakistan (Parashar 2010). Yet just as China was careful not to overtly denounce the NSG waiver for the US-Indo nuclear deal, India’s official, public stance was to downplay China– Pakistan nuclear cooperation. In May 2010, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao refrained from any overt critique and announced that the proper place for the discussion of the China–Pakistan nuclear deal was within the NSG: India would not comment until the deal had been assessed within that forum and according to NSG guidelines (Cleveland 2010). In December of the same year, she noted at a conference on China that India had “genuine concerns” about the nuclear relationship between China and Pakistan (MEA 2010; Rao 2010). Just a few days later, at a media briefing and in response to a question that asked whether India had raised the issue of Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation during the ongoing visit of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, she responded: On the issue of the nuclear reactors, I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that both countries stated their commitment to nonproliferation objectives and to expand their dialogue on these and related issues in bilateral and international fora. So, we already have a means, a mechanism, a way to handle these issues, and that is how we intend to tackle it. (MEA 2010) While these statements certainly did not express support or understanding for Chinese actions, they carefully referred the matter back to the appropriate non-proliferation institutions. However, Indian opposition to the deal was clearer within unofficial thought pieces by influential voices within India’s strategic community. Kanwal Sibal (2010), serving on India’s National Security Advisory Board, described China’s nuclear conduct as “errant.” T. P. Sreenivasan (2010), also serving on India’s National Security Advisory Board, claimed that India’s nuclear cooperation with the United States was merited, on the basis of “three years of agonizing negotiations based on India’s record of responsible behavior,” while China was behaving irresponsibly by not demanding the same, strict non-proliferation criteria of Pakistan as the United States had of India. Indian allegations of nuclear weapons cooperation between China and Pakistan have gradually surfaced in recent years. A public reference to “Chinese assistance to Pakistan’s strategic programme” was made by Shyam Saran (2013), Chairman of India’s National Security Advisory Board, in what he claimed was not an official address in April 2013. During the official visit of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to India in May 2013, India made no public mention of Sino-Pakistani nuclear cooperation (Pradhan 2013). Concern was raised privately, however, according to media reports citing diplomatic sources, at the level of foreign minister prior to the visit (Krishnan 2013b) and

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during the visit itself (Hussain 2013). The reported Chinese response was that India had no need for concern as cooperation was peaceful in intent and aimed at assisting Pakistan in the context of its energy crisis. In 2016, the Indian media widely cited a report by the Washington-based Arms Control Association that claimed that Chinese nuclear cooperation to Pakistan was continuing and that it awarded China a failing “F Grade” on nuclear weapons related export control (PTI 2016). In response to a question posed in the lower house of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha, in November of the same year, the Indian Government claimed that it was “aware of the Chinese assistance to Pakistan in developing the Khushab nuclear reactor that is capable of producing plutonium for use in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons” (Lok Sabha 2016). Despite this awareness, the strategy of avoiding overt confrontation with China has persisted at the official level. Indirect and semi-official critique via the media also continues, however: in 2017, retired diplomat G. Parthasarathy claimed that: India is today confronted with a situation where China has not only provided Pakistan with designs and equipment to manufacture nuclear weapons, but has also given Pakistan the know-how and materials for manufacturing missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons to every part of India. (Parthasarathy 2017) Overall, India’s strategy has been to defer to established institutional rules and norms, and to quiet diplomacy, rather than appear confrontational toward China, a strategy which serves both its bilateral relationship with China and its responsible image in the eyes of the international community.

Conclusion Each of the three sites of competition examined in this chapter, the 1998 tests, India’s NSG waiver and membership, and Sino-Pakistani civil nuclear cooperation, have, at their core, notions of nuclear restraint as well as elements of Sino-Indian competitive restraint. At key moments in the past two decades, China and India have attempted to diminish one another’s image as a responsible nuclear-armed state, particularly when their own status has been at stake, by making references to notions of nuclear responsibility, be these framed in terms of insider/outsider status within the non-proliferation regime or a positive or negative historical track record on proliferation. China has been more active in this regard than India, an imbalance that reflects China’s well-established position within the GNO, especially China’s veto power within the NSG. Yet while each state draws on its own brands of responsibility and restraint to enhance its international image, its respective quests for status are additionally, at times, constructed in opposition to one another. Our argument that competitive restraint exists in the nuclear bilateral intervenes in the existing literature on the Sino-Indian nuclear dynamic in important ways. China and India may well find themselves in an arms race cascade, but even if a cascade is at play in strategic terms, a clear bilateral dynamic is evident when it comes to status competition within the GNO. This competitive bilateral dynamic can serve to raise bilateral tensions because China’s objective is to uphold India’s outsider status within the GNO, while India’s objective is to be treated as an insider.

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Our argument also delivers a greater degree of robustness to some of the core assumptions that underpin claims of limited and stable deterrence between the two countries. The model of mutually assured retaliation depends strongly on each country’s NFU policy, which is typically viewed as a product of narrow domestic preferences. Our 2018 argument linking status seeking to the upholding of an NFU policy offers additional optimism that both countries will persist with NFU: as a former Indian diplomat and nuclear expert once commented, “our ‘no first use’ doctrine has served us well internationally,” and the same could be said for China (Parthasarathy 2017). However, our argument here, centering as it does on the dynamic of competitive nuclear restraint, goes further: it suggests that China and India will each be reluctant to proliferate either vertically or horizontally in ways that will damage their respective reputation as responsible nuclear powers both in absolute and relative terms. Finally, our argument sheds light on a puzzle in the literature on Sino-Indian nuclear relations. One might expect that China and India’s restrained nuclear postures would be complemented with cooperation and strategic dialogue on nuclear issues, but this has not been the case. Despite a sixth round of the very modest “India-China Dialogue on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation” having taken place in June 2019, there is, in fact, “no strategic dialogue of any consequence between China and India” (Krepon 2016: 195). Nearly all of the studies of the bilateral nuclear relationship we have referenced in this chapter argue strongly for confidence building measures, strategic dialogue, or other forms of cooperation between the two countries, with the imperative to do so perhaps even greater after the 2017 Doklam crisis (O’Donnell 2018). Our analysis provides insights into why these recommendations have failed to translate into action: largely, because a Chinese dialogue with India on nuclear issues would suggest China’s recognition of India’s status as both a nuclear equal and an insider within the GNO. In short, there is a far wider normative context within which decisions about nuclear dialogue, cooperation, or arms control at the bilateral level are made within both China and India. Overall our findings deliver little hope for the future of nuclear strategic dialogue between the two countries. Our argument adds to existing optimism at the level of the strategic relationship: China and India are both unlikely to move substantially from their restrained nuclear postures in the near future. However, our emphasis on competitive nuclear restraint as a form of status competition in the GNO delivers a more pessimistic outlook for their overall bilateral relationship than the more sanguine view taken by observers of Sino-Indian stable deterrence.

Notes 1 The conception of status we refer to here is predominantly social, as opposed to material—in other words, our analysis of status competition includes but goes beyond the material status or “prestige” that is often understood to accompany the acquisition of nuclear weapons. 2 In a 2012 academic work, for instance, PLA General Yao Yunzhu (2012) stated that while “India has not been accepted by as a NWS [nuclear weapons state] by the Non Proliferation Treaty on the one hand, and in reality it is no longer a NNWS [non-nuclear weapons state] on the other hand. China must thus take India as it is, a de facto NWS.” Italics and bracket contents have been inserted by the authors. 3 In 2008, the deal—first announced in 2005, in a joint US–India statement on nuclear cooperation—was approved by the NSG, IAEA Board of Governors, and US Congress. 4 India now has civil nuclear trading agreements with the United States, France, Russia, Mongolia, Namibia, Argentina, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Australia, and Japan.

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514  Nicola Leveringhaus and Kate Sullivan de Estrada Krepon, M. (2007) “The Nuclear Flock,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 65(2) (March/April): 15–17. Krepon, M. (2016) “Summing Up and Looking Ahead,” in M. Krepon, T. Wheeler and S. Mason, eds., The Lure and Pitfalls of MIRVs from the First to the Second Nuclear Age ( Washington, DC: Stimson Center). Krishnan, A. (2013a) “Nuke Ties with Pak Does Not Violate NSG Norms, Says China,” The Hindu (25 March), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/nuketies-with-pak-does-not-violate-nsg-norms-says-china/article4547108.ece (accessed 2 May 2018). Krishnan, A. (2013b) “Chinese Premier to Meet Nawaz Sharif Next Week,” The Hindu (16 May), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/chinese-premierto-meet-nawaz-sharif-next-week/article4721262.ece (accessed 20 January 2019). Leveringhaus, N. and Sullivan de Estrada, K. (2018) “Between Conformity and Innovation: China’s and India’s Quest for Status as Responsible Nuclear Powers,” Review of International Studies 44(3): 482–503. Levy, A. and Scott-Clark, C. (2007) Deception: Pakistan, the US and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy (London: Atlantic Books). Li, Z. and Li, F. (1998) “Impact of South Asia’s Nuclear Tests upon CTBT,” Sixth ISODARCO Beijing Seminar on Arms Control (29 October–1 November), Shanghai, China. Limaye, S. (2008) “Sino-Indian Relations: The Four Disconnects,” PacNet No. 7 (18 January), available online at https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/media/ csis/pubs/pac0807.pdf. Lok Sabha (2016) “Question No. 147 Nuclear Reactors in Pakistan,” Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India (16 November), available online at www.mea.gov.in/lok-sabha. htm?dtl/27619/QUESTION_NO147_NUCLEAR_REACTORS_IN_PAKISTAN. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) (2010) “Briefing by Foreign Secretary on Ongoing Visit of Chinese Premier” (16 December), available online at https://mea.gov.in/in-focus-article. htm?3346/Briefing+by+Foreign+Secretary+on+ongoing+visit+of+Chinese. Medeiros, E. (2007) Reluctant Restraint: The Evolution of China’s Nonproliferation Policies and Practices, 1980–2004 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China) (2006) “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Qin Gang’s Press Conference on 2 March 2006” (3 March), available online at www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/ceun/eng/fyrth/t238267.htm (accessed 10 May 2018). Mohan, G. (2019) “India Working with China on NSG Membership, UN Sanctions on Terrorists: MEA,” India Today (3 January), available online at www.indiatoday.in/india/story/indiachina-relations-nsg-doklam-un-sanctions-1422996-2019-01-03 (accessed 10 January 2019). Mukherjee, P. (2008) “Statement by External Affairs Minister of India Shri Pranab Mukherjee on the Civil Nuclear Initiative,” Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India (5 September), available online at www.mea.gov.in/in-focus-article.htm?18806/Statement+by+External+Affairs+Minister+of+India+Shri+Pranab+Mukherjee+on+the+Civil+Nuclear+Initiative (accessed 10 December 2018). Narang, V. (2018) “Nuclear Deterrence in the China-India Dyad,” in T. V. Paul, ed., The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press): 187–201. Nayan, R. (2013) “China Nurtures Its Nuclear Nexus with Pakistan,” IDSA Comment (5 April), available online at www.idsa.in/idsacomments/ChinanurturesitsnuclearnexuswithPakistan_ rnayan_050413 (accessed 2 May 2018). NTI (2013) “Pakistan OK’s China-Backed Atomic Energy Project: Insider” (13 June), available online at www.nti.org/gsn/article/pakistan-oks-china-backed-atomic-energy-projectinsider/ (accessed 10 May 2018). O’Donnell, F. (2018) “Stabilizing Sino-Indian Security Relations: Managing Strategic Rivalry after Doklam,” Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy ( June), available online at https:// carnegieendowment.org/files/CP335_ODonnell_final.pdf.

Chinese and Indian competitive nuclear restraint  515 Painter, D. (2013) “The Nuclear Suppliers Group at the Crossroads,” The Diplomat (10 June), available online at https://thediplomat.com/2013/06/10/the-nuclear-suppliers-group-at-thecrossroads/comment-page-1/?all=true (accessed 2 May 2018). Parashar, S. (2010) “India to ‘Expose’ China-Pakistan Nuclear Deal,” The Times of India (20 June), available online at http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-06-20/ india/28320433_1_nsg-nations-clean-waiver-nuclear-reactors (accessed 10 January 2018). Parthasarathy, G. (2017) “Beware the China-Pakistan Nuclear Axis,” The Hindu Business Line (1  November), available online at www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/beware-thechina-pakistan-nuclear-axis/article22220540.ece1. Pradhan, S. D. (2013) “Assessing Chinese PM Li Keqiang’s India Visit,” The Times of India Blog (27 May), available online at http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ChanakyaCode/entry/assessing-chinese-pm-li-keqiang-s-india-visit (accessed 10 January 2019). PTI (2016) “China Continues to Sell Nuclear Reactors to Pakistan, Says Report,” The Indian Express (1 August), available online at https://indianexpress.com/article/world/world-news/ china-continues-to-sell-nuclear-reactors-to-pakistan-says-reports-2948460/. Qian, J. (1998) “Eliminating Nuclear Weapons: China’s Policy,” Statement (Hardcopy) (7 November), London. Rao, N. (2010) “Address by Foreign Secretary at ORF Conference on China ‘India-China Relations’, Speech at ORF Conference on 3 December 2010, The Hindu (4 December), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/resources/Address-by-Foreign-Secretary-at-ORFConference-on-China-ldquoIndia-China-relationsrdquo/article15580293.ece. Renmin Ribao (1998) “Joint Statement of the Heads of China and the United States on the Issue of South Asia” (27 June). Saran, S. (2013) “Is India’s Nuclear Deterrent Credible?” Speech at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, Arms Control Wonk (24 April), available online at http://krepon.armscontrolwonk. com/files/2013/05/Final-Is-Indias-Nuclear-Deterrent-Credible-rev1-2-1-3.pdf (accessed 16 July 2019). SCIO (State Council of the People’s Republic of China, Information Office) (1995) “White Paper: China: Arms Control and Disarmament,” Federation of American Scientists (November), available online at https://fas.org/nuke/guide/china/doctrine/wparms.htm. Sharma, G. and Finaud, M. (2018) “The South Asian Nuclear Posture: A Vicious Nuclear Arms Race,” Strategic Security Analysis 3 (November), Geneva Centre for Security Policy, available online at www.gcsp.ch/publications/south-asian-nuclear-posture-vicious-nuclear-arms-race. Sibal, K. (2010) “A China-Pak Nuclear Axis against India,” Vivekananda International Foundation (14 July), available online at www.vifindia.org/China-Pak-Nuclear-Axis-Against-India%20 (accessed 17 July 2019). Sidhu, W. P. S. (2004) “A Languid but Lethal Arms Race,” in K. Vignard, ed., India and Pakistan: Peace by Piece, UNIDIR Disarmament Forum No. 2: 7–19, available online at https://www. unidir.org/files/publications/pdfs/india-and-pakistan-peace-by-piece-en-343.pdf. Smith, J. R. and Warrick, J. (2009) “A Nuclear Power’s Act of Proliferation,” The Washington Post (13 November). Sreenivasan, T. P. (2010) “The Nuclear Suppliers Group’s Shameful Silence,” The Wall Street Journal (28 June), available online at www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405274870421280457 5333840545064262. Srivastava, A. (2008) “NSG Waiver for India,” PacNet #46, Pacific Forum (8 September), available online at www.pacforum.org/analysis/pacnet-46-nsg-waiver-india. Sullivan de Estrada, K. and Leveringhaus, N. (2017) “China’s Stance on NSG Membership Shows the Extent of India’s Challenge in the Global Nuclear Order,” The Wire (30 June), available online at https://thewire.in/external-affairs/india-china-nsg-global-nuclear-order. Taylor Fravel, M. and Narang, V. (2012) “The Asian Arms Race that Wasn’t,” Foreign Policy (8 May), available online at https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/05/08/the-asian-arms-racethat-wasnt/.

516  Nicola Leveringhaus and Kate Sullivan de Estrada The New York Times (1998) “Nuclear Anxiety; Indian’s Letter to Clinton on the Nuclear Testing” (13 May), available online at www.nytimes.com/1998/05/13/world/nuclear-anxietyindian-s-letter-to-clinton-on-the-nuclear-testing.html (accessed 15 May 2018). US Embassy China (1982) “Arms Control and Disarmament,” Cable 17090 to State Department, Secret State Department FOIA Release, National Security Archive (George Washington University) (17 December), available online at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB114/ chipak-8.pdf (accessed 2 May 2018). Varadarajan, S. (2008) “Thirty Words that Saved the Day,” The Hindu (8 September), available online at www.hindu.com/2008/09/08/stories/2008090856401200.htm (accessed 10 December 2018). Walker, W. (1998) “International Nuclear Relations after the Indian and Pakistani Test Explosions,” International Affairs 74(3): 505–528. Weiss, L. (2007) “US-India Nuclear Cooperation Better Later than Sooner,” Nonproliferation Review 14(3) (November): 429–457. World Nuclear News (2013) “Chashma 3 Gets Its Dome” (22 March), available online at www. world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Chashma_3_gets_its_dome_220313a.html (accessed 3 May 2018). Yao, Y. (2012) “Linking Strategic Stability and Ballistic Missile Defense: The View from China,” in L. Saalman, ed., The China-India Nuclear Crossroads (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for Peace): 70–76. Yuan, J.-D. (2007) “The Dragon and the Elephant: Chinese Indian Relations in the 21st Century,” The Washington Quarterly 30(3): 135–142. Zhang, B. (2016) “Sino-Indian Nuclear Relations and the Security Dilemma,” China-India Brief #77 (Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy) (12 July), available online at https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/research/publications/details/china-india-brief-77. Zhang, M. (1999a) “What Threat?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55(5): 52–57. Zhang, M. (1999b) China’s Changing Nuclear Posture: Reactions to the South Asian Nuclear Tests (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). Zou, Y. (1999) “Chinese Perspectives on the South Asian Nuclear Tests,” Center for International Security and Cooperation ( January), available online at https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/publications/chinese_perspectives_on_the_south_asian_nuclear_tests (accessed 17 July 2019).

32 China, India, and outer space Cooperation and competition in the global commons Julie Michelle Klinger

There are two contrasting perspectives on India–China space relations in Anglophone literatures. One is to frame each party’s milestone in a classical geopolitical perspective, emphasizing bilateral rivalry at the expense of international cooperation. One example of this perspective followed the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) 5 May 2017 launch of the South Asia Satellite, which provides advanced communications and meteorological services to India and its South Asian neighbors. This important achievement—with direct and indirect benefits for the India’s national development, neighboring states, and the broader international community—was quickly cast in Anglophone media as “intensifying” competition with China and as evidence of an “Asian Space Race” that is “heating up” (e.g. Hunt and Arora 2017). This framing downplays the broader global significance of both states’ space programs. In another example, technological milestones, such as ISRO’s 2017 launch of 104 satellites from a single rocket (Sudhakar 2018), were celebrated in international scientific circles, but quickly painted by the media as India “taking on” China (Kuronuma 2017). Even though the previous record of total satellites launched in a single payload was held not by China but rather by Russia (37), Anglophone media framed the debate in reference to China. The second perspective on China–India space relations champions outer space as an arena of cooperation between the two countries and with the international community more broadly. Officials, researchers, and policymakers on both sides see outer space as a domain in which peaceful and cooperative relations can be advanced. While the protracted and complex geopolitical tensions between China, India, and their neighbors are important, the tendency to frame watershed technological achievements in terms of bilateral competition obscures more than it clarifies and limits richer analyses of the initiatives by both states to promote peaceful international scientific cooperation. Indeed, it is because long-term India–China relations are characterized by multiple tensions that scientific and political leaders on both sides have viewed space cooperation to be especially important. The origins of any national space program are transnational in nature, and India and China are no exception. But in both perspectives, nationalist rhetoric prevails because it serves multiple purposes. In India as elsewhere (Barker 2005; Sage 2016), nationalist rhetoric aimed at domestic constituencies is an important ingredient to the political economy of national space programs. Annual outlays of public funds must be justified in the face of competing domestic priorities. While there is room in the classical geopolitical perspective to celebrate international cooperation as a means of increasing national strength and prestige, this framing can feed brinkmanship within and beyond

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the space sector (Hickman and Dolman 2002), and ultimately undermine long-term international cooperation, technology transfer, and scientific exchange (Kohler 2015). In more celebratory internationalist framings, meeting national development and security imperatives through space technologies are aligned with broader international public goods provision such as scientific progress, improved satellite infrastructure, and greater monitoring capacity. In essence, national interests serve the international community, which generates benefits for the continued pursuit of peaceful national interests. There is robust geopolitical theorizing on this point (e.g. Al-Rodhan 2012), and the historical record shows that the early architects of India and China’s space programs used this approach to address multiple and at times contradicting domestic and international concerns. This chapter provides historical background to the multiscalar geopolitics of China, India, and outer space. While classical geopolitical considerations are important, the preponderant focus on bilateral competition and potential conflict obscures the important role of collaboration between China and India on matters of policy, technology, and multilateral diplomacy with respect to outer space. In the process, more substantive explorations of the value and potential of India–China space cooperation are lost. By contrast, a comparative historical geography, drawing on peer-reviewed research and primary source materials from India, China, and the United States, puts both the cooperative and competitive dimensions of China and India’s outer space activities in broader context. The role of both cooperation and competition between the two programs, with reference to their national diplomatic and strategic contexts, sheds light on the evolving policies and practices in the global commons beyond our atmosphere.

Background The preponderantly future-oriented discourse that suffuses discussions of outer space often roots the space age as beginning in the twentieth century, but the civilizations that precede the contemporary nation states of India and China have millennia-old traditions of innovation in mathematics, astronomy, rocketry, and other sciences (Plof ker 2009; Elman 2014). Therefore, post-World War II historiographies of outer space, particularly in post-colonial states, need to be seen in light of their extensive histories. Like China, India’s space agency shares its modern antecedents with the race to harness atomic power within the “hot” twentieth-century context of Cold War Asia. But as Michael Sheehan notes, “subsequent development histories have made it clear that Indian space and missile programs are distinct enterprises, notwithstanding their common roots, and the technologies employed are far from interoperable” (Sheehan 2007: 142). The same can be said, albeit to a lesser degree, about China’s space program. Although space technologies are routinely characterized as “dual use,” this characterization erases the array of scientific instruments and applications that only with great difficulty could be marshaled to military ends. Both China and India’s national space agencies were built in the shadow of the US military’s nuclear weapons detonations in the Pacific (Dutton 2008; Lee 2013). Policy and scientific elites in both countries framed developing space capability, along with nuclear weapons capability, as fundamental to national sovereignty, security, and progress. National leaders referenced then-recent memories of colonial and imperial subjugation to frame these programs as essential to addressing the development and security challenges facing each of their countries in the mid-twentieth century.

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Despite this broader shared geopolitical context, China and India’s space programs followed different institutional trajectories in their early years. China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) was an outgrowth of the Fifth Academy,1 designed to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in close collaboration with the former USSR from 1950 to 1957. After the Sino-Soviet split in 1957, China’s planners relied heavily on scholars educated overseas to advance space and nuclear weapons capability within the Ministry of National Defense. ISRO’s origins lie in the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), established in 1950 with Homi Bhabha serving as its first secretary (Daniel 1992). The DAE funded space research in the early post-independence years, but in 1962, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru established the Indian Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) to move space science research out of the DAE. INCOSPAR was an entirely civilian space agency with early specializations in atmospheric science. This institutional arrangement facilitated technology transfer and research collaboration with Western countries because it was clearly separate from nuclear energy and weapons development. By contrast, China’s space agency emphasized the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and satellites because the country did not possess the channels to obtain these technologies from overseas partners (Erickson 2014). In both China and India’s cases, national space programs took shape in the context of competing national and international interests. At stake in the internal debates over whether space should be a civilian or military endeavor were fundamental concerns over territory, security, and above all, national sovereignty.

Territorial politics and outer space in China and India For China, the early development of its space program was subsumed in the Sino-Soviet split (1957–1978), which significantly reduced China’s access to international networks of scientific expertise, technology, and institutional support. Policy elites viewed the development of national space capacity, like the development of nuclear weapons, as a sensitive activity to be securitized and controlled. In the 1950s, there were two vivid recent memories that informed this sensibility: the Japanese annexation of parts of northern and eastern China a few decades prior, where critical industrial infrastructure was located; and US support for the Nationalists in the fight against the Communists during and following World War II. After the Sino-Soviet split in 1957, border concerns with the USSR further influenced territorial politics and practices in China. In this climate, Chairman Mao Zedong and fellow planners used China’s geography defensively. By placing space and weapons-related facilities in remote areas and securitizing China’s frontier with new military installations, their strategy was to protect China from potential outside interference. This fit with broader ethnonational and territorial imperatives to settle and securitize historically contested frontier regions populated by formerly autonomous groups (Klinger 2017). Historian Asif Siddiqui details the contrasting use of national territory by scientific and policy elites in India, who instead of fortifying borders and excluding foreigners “used geography as an instrument to create a vast international network of scientific and political actors committed to the science that was possible within India” (2015: 420). In so doing, “they were drawing on a long tradition of linking geography to science redolent of the colonial era, but now manifested in a postcolonial environment marked by Cold War imperatives,” meaning that India’s space program “was ‘produced’ in many places across the world: in Ahmedabad, Nainital, Bombay, Washington, DC,

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eastern Virginia, Minneapolis, Florence, Geneva, Moscow, Algeria, and other locales” (Siddiqui 2015: 442). Like China’s program, India’s was ideologically fused with national development and progress. But the two programs differed in terms of how they instrumentalized space programs to enhance international status. India sought to promote and share indigenous expertise to drive the international process of advancing space sciences, while in China the focus was on demonstrating technological outcomes, particularly to nuclear powers. In both China and India, the development of a national space program was envisioned as a matter of self-sufficiency and enhanced status. In China, the project assumed a particular form in the totalizing ethnocentric politics of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as compared to India’s cosmopolitan democracy. The structural link between weapons development and space capability set CNSA on a different path than ISRO, in a way that continues to shape relations between the two countries. CNSA only became a civilian space administration in 1993 with the formation of the state-owned enterprise spin-off—the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation—but military security protocols continue to dictate data-sharing practices. The difference in data management practices in China and India, particularly concerning transparency and public availability of geographic, remote sensing, and space-related data, has posed the greatest practical obstacle to deeper cooperation between the two programs. Beginning in the 1980s, both China and India increasingly made greater use of private contractors and cooperation agreements with space agencies around the globe. While India’s emphasis on collaborative international processes captured multiple benefits for India’s space program from diverse partner states, China’s focus on outcomes has, in the past decade, garnered it a reputation as a reliable partner for national and commercial space agreements, which in many cases has enabled China to out-compete other programs and firms for space technology agreements and launch contracts. Both countries’ space programs launch payloads for government and private sector clients across the globe, even though their launch geographies are quite different. China’s launches occur at approximately forty degrees north of the equator, while India’s Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Site is located at eight degrees north of the equator.2 This has meant, in practice, that while both programs are cost competitive, significantly greater payloads can be launched from India than from China for similar costs. This is due to the smaller degree of inclination required for equatorial launches, which means that less fuel needs to be expended to correct courses of rockets aiming to place satellites in Earth’s orbits. Although CNSA and ISRO are often discussed in competitive nationalist terms, both have been inextricably intertwined with transnational politics and domestic territorial politics since their beginnings.

Historical origins and evolution of China’s space agency India’s pursuit of international partnerships enabled it to leverage the strategic agendas of both the United States and the USSR to capture greater benefits. To attract the technology and resources to build a national space agency and incentivize the United States and USSR to engage in scientific collaboration, Indian scientists and officials could offer both India’s equatorial geography as well as the promise of friendly relations with a geostrategically important state. In the context of the Cold War, the US Congress and the executive branch sought to court India away from China and the former USSR

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through a multi-pronged foreign aid and loan program. Public Law 480, through which the United States provided loans for food in exchange for raw materials (Merrill 1990; Chengappa 2000), was accompanied by science, technology, and defense agreements intended to “help maximize the orientation of [Indian] scientists away from the Soviets in the advanced application of science” (quoted in Siddiqui 2015: 430). China took a different approach, focusing instead on achieving milestones to place it on closer footing to the United States and USSR in the context of Cold War hostilities. By most accounts, the antecedents for China’s contemporary space program date back to the height of Sino-Soviet cooperation, with the establishment of the Fifth Academy in 1956. But starting the chronology here erases the transnational composition of not just China’s space program, but also that of the United States, embodied in the first director of China’s Fifth Academy, Dr Qian Xuesen. In fact, the US space exploration program owes as much to Qian Xuesen’s early work as China owes the United States for deporting him to Shanghai at the height of anti-communist paranoia in the 1950s United States (Ryan and Summerlin 1969). With the current resurgence of China–US diplomatic tensions and xenophobia on both sides of the Pacific, it is worthwhile to retell Qian Xuesen’s story to highlight the transnational histories on which some of the most critical contemporary enterprises are founded. This also illustrates the transnational origins of national space programs. Qian Xuesen had been a founding member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in 1936. During World War II, Qian advised the Allied Powers on ballistic missile guidance technology (Wines 2009). At the end of the war, he was assigned the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel in the US Army to debrief Nazi scientists, including Werner von Braun.3 Qian Xuesen was part of the team that analyzed Germany’s V-2 rocket facilities and recovered some three million pages of technical papers. In these papers, he found that certain theories of his concerning supersonic flight had already been tested and confirmed in German facilities during the war. Such facilities had not yet been developed in the United States. From his interviews and research, Qian published Survey of the Development of Liquid Rockets in Germany and their Future Prospects and an 800-page manual, known as the “classified technical bible” for post-WWII aircraft and rocket development in the United States (Wade 2008). At JPL, Qian spearheaded the technological breakthroughs that helped the United States transition from propeller to jet-powered aircraft. He was part of a small group of experimental rocket scientists known as the Suicide Squad, which was at the forefront of rocket development technology later used to send humans into space (Noland 2009). During the second red scare in the United States, shortly after Chairman Mao Zedong’s rise to power in 1949, Qian’s ethnic Chinese heritage was used as a basis to accuse him of having communist sympathies. Despite all evidence to the contrary and the strenuous objections of his prominent scientific colleagues, Qian was placed under a delayed deportation order in 1950 (The Caltech Archives 2016). The evidence: his ethnicity, his attendance at the same social gatherings as other accused sympathizers, and his expressed discomfort with the prospect of building weapons that might be used against “Red China” (Ryan and Summerlin 1969). Stripped of his security clearance with no further career prospects in McCarthyist America, Qian decided not to fight deportation and to return to China despite the interventions of his colleagues and administrative superiors at Caltech. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service, however, blocked his departure on the basis that he knew too much about US weapons systems, and held him under house arrest for five years (Noland 2009). In 1955, Qian was released to

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China in exchange for eleven US airmen captured during the Korean War (AP 1955).4 To avoid charges of espionage, he deliberately left behind all of his research notes and papers (Wines 2009).5 The late Iris Chang, in her biography of Qian Xuesen, concluded that the US Government had no concrete evidence to substantiate its charges (Chang 1995). On the occasion of his death in 2009, Caltech released a statement concerning his deportation: “No evidence was produced to substantiate the allegations, and [Qian] and his colleagues in academia, government, and industry protested that they were nonsense” (Caltech Today 2009). Qian Xuesen was welcomed to China in 1955 as a hero, where he joined colleagues Zhao Jiuzhang, Qian Sanqiang, Chen Fangyun, and Cai Xiang to develop China’s aerospace and defense programs. It was his expertise, recognized by and capitalized upon by the Chinese central government’s investment in developing multi-use rocket technology, that enabled China’s space program to weather the Sino-Soviet split (1957–1978). During times of intense national hardship characterized by the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Qian oversaw the launch of the first Chinese R-2 Missile in 1960, founded the Space Flight Medical Research Center in 1968 to prepare for human space flight, launched China’s first satellite in 1970, and developed in 1972 the Long March rockets that have been used in all subsequent spaceflights (Wade 2008). He was credited with helping China develop intercontinental ballistic missiles and China’s first several satellites (Marble 2002), as well as the technology that paved the way for China to put a person in space in 2003 and launch its lunar orbital program in 2007. Qian Xuesen was perhaps an unwitting transnational actor whose life trajectory shows the importance of international politics in shaping national space programs. In the political climate of McCarthyist America, Qian’s central contributions to US rocket science were insufficient to preserve his professional standing and citizenship status. His deportation to China on the eve of the Sino-Soviet split proved decisive in building China’s defense and space technologies. Since Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, CNSA has cultivated extensive international partnerships and supported private-sector spin-offs. Although China’s space agency is often discussed as a wholly state-owned and state-run organization, it behaves like other major space agencies by working with private contractors in procurement and competitive international bidding processes. Foremost among these is the China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC), which was established in 1980 as the commercial partner to CNSA to provide commercial launch services, satellite systems, and international space technology cooperation. Over the past three decades, CGWIC has won dozens of contracts to build satellites for space programs across the world, particularly in countries with more recent or smaller space programs.

Historical origins and evolution of India’s space agency The ISRO has conducted over a hundred successful space missions since its founding in 1969. It was preceded by the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) in 1962. Between 1963 and 1975, over 350 rockets from the United States, Britain, France, and Russia were launched from the UN-sponsored Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) (Sheehan 2007). The mid-twentieth century modernist drive that swept the globe was expressed with particular intensity in newly independent and non-aligned states (Soekarno 1956).

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Planners and policymakers in India viewed space science as the solution to many diverse development and security problems (Rajan 1988). Space sciences were to serve as the medium through which to engage as equals across developed and developing countries. This cosmopolitan vision had many champions in post-WWII Asia who framed the advancement of science as a way to overcome other national, ethnic, and political challenges. The 1947 Asian Relations meeting, held in New Delhi, was the precursor to the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which is more generally recognized as the launch of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Organized by Leelamani Naidu, the objective was “to provide cultural and intellectual revival, and social progress in Asia, independent of all questions of internal as well as international politics” (quoted in McCallum 1947: 13). At this meeting, attended by delegates from thirty-six countries, prominent scientific and political figures C. V. Raman, Pandit Nehru, and Leelamani Naidu steered discussions toward proposals for international scientific cooperation and the construction of international research networks. These figures were important acquaintances to two of the perhaps most celebrated figures in the advancement of nuclear and space sciences in India, Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. Although Bhabha and Sarabhai differed on the question of nuclear weapons, both built institutions, international partnerships, and indigenous technological capacity to advance the two programs. The life trajectories of these scientists were shaped by broader transnational circuits of scientific knowledge production between India and the West. Homi J. Bhabha developed his expertise in nuclear physics at the Cavendish Laboratories in the 1930s, while pursuing degrees in mathematics and theoretical physics. He was part of the group of international scientists working together in the “Spirit of Copenhagen” fostered by Niels Bohr in the interwar period at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Bohr maintained the place as an intellectual center for scientists from all over the world, united in the pursuit of science above differences in nationality. This ethos influenced many of his contemporaries, who, like Bhabha, went on to promote science as the basis for peace in their home countries (Pais 2000). During this time, Bhabha published several papers on cosmic radiation and nuclear physics (Bhabha 1935, 1937; Bhabha and Heitler 1937). In September 1939, Bhabha returned to India to visit family on the same vessel as India’s future first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The outbreak of World War II prevented them both from returning to England. With no clear date for departure in sight, Bhabha began working as a reader in the Indian Institute of Science, headed by Nobel Laureate C.V. Raman, who happened to also be Vikram Sarabhai’s doctoral advisor. During this time, he promoted nuclear physics and space research among the senior leadership of the Congress Party, including his acquaintance Jawaharlal Nehru. The relationship with Nehru was important to the subsequent development of nuclear and space science institutions in India. Nehru appointed Bhabha as the first chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission in 1948. Two years later, Bhabha began funding early space research through the DAE, which managed space and nuclear sciences through the early 1960s. In 1954, the Indian Atomic Energy Commission set up the Trombay Atomic Energy Establishment, managed by Bhabha’s DAE with Bhabha as secretary. Like his early mentor Niels Bohr, Bhabha was an active promoter of “Atoms for Peace,” and was nominated to serve as President of the United Nations Conference of the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955. Vikram Sarabhai chaired the first meeting in Geneva in 1955, which resulted in

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the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency. During the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), in which scientists from dozens of nations collaborated to study the Earth, US and Indian scientists worked together to install Earth observation infrastructure in Northern India (Muir-Harmony 2010). In 1961, Nehru co-founded the NAM with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nassar of Egypt, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Among the movement’s principles were scientific advancement and nuclear disarmament. Bhabha’s support of the disarmament principle of the NAM is disputed by his biographers, since much of India’s early nuclear policy was set by unwritten personal communications between Bhabha and Nehru in the 1950s (Chengappa 2000). In 1962, Nehru’s position on nuclear weapons development changed after the China–India War of that year. This war coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the result that neither the United States nor the USSR provided aid to India. The lack of support from Cold War superpowers underscored for India’s leadership the importance of developing an independent nuclear weapons capacity as a guarantor of sovereignty. Of the two conflicting philosophies between non-violence and nuclear armament, Bhabha reportedly stated: “We must have the capability. We should first prove ourselves and then talk of Gandhi, non-violence, and a world without nuclear weapons” (Chengappa 2000: 82). India’s weapons detonation in 1974 weakened its credibility with other NAM states but did not seem to hinder the early growth and development of the space program. On the contrary, the progress of India’s nuclear program under the DAE provided a platform and legitimacy to build international partnerships with space agencies from developed countries that were seeking international partners and equatorial launch sites. Vikram Sarabhai, who regularly visited the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology to work with Bruno Rossi in the 1940s and 1950s, capitalized on his own international networks as well as the prominence of Bhabha in India’s nuclear program to forge the partnerships necessary to rapidly develop a civilian space agency (Siddiqui 2015). International counterparts—particularly NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and the Soviet space agency—were motivated by the dual agendas of the Cold War: to advance peaceful cooperation but also in hopes of ideologically influencing the development of India’s nuclear program and policies. Within India, linking space research to atomic energy served the political and economic purpose of capturing public resources to support space development, while Sarabhai’s meetings with NASA representatives in the United States helped capture resources from the United States in exchange for access to India’s advantageous equatorial location. But there was also a regional rivalry. Pakistan signed a cooperation agreement with NASA in 1961, making it the first country outside of the West, other than Japan, to do so. Prominent Pakistani physicists who completed their graduate work in the United States and Europe were likewise promoting their programs overseas. For a number of years, space science in Pakistan was more advanced than in India. Both were competing for UN sponsorship of an equatorial launch base (Siddiqui 2015: 435). The fusion of space power and nuclear power intensified the geopolitical rivalry between India and Pakistan, which, in turn, accelerated institutional development in India. India wanted a space partnership with the United States, and NASA required a civilian space counterpart with which to conduct its dealings. Agreements with NASA progressed quickly after the 1962 creation of INCOSPAR, but at the same time, India was working with the USSR. Space cooperation was part of the USSR’s diplomatic offensive in the 1960s. After cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel to space in 1961, he visited

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India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Brazil, Cuba, and many other places. In India, he was hosted by Prime Minister Nehru in November–December 1961, and reportedly said that “sometime Soviet and Indian cosmonauts will research unexplored expanses of space together” (quoted in Zheleznyakov 2004: 4). The Soviet Interkosmos program, which supported the space missions of Warsaw Pact and non-aligned countries, recruited cosmonaut candidates from India in 1982 for the 1984 flight aboard the Soyuz T-11 (Chengappa 2018). Russia launched India’s first satellites, the Aryabhata and Bhaskara, from the Baikanour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 1975 and 1979, respectively (Dadhwal 2013). This cooperation with the USSR counterbalanced India’s cooperation with the United States and warded off criticisms that India was not adhering to the principles of non-alignment (Sheehan 2007). Since the turn of the millennium, bilateral agreements between India and Russia have increased. By the end of June 1962, an agreement in which NASA would provide rockets, scientific training, and technical personnel while the newly established INCOSPAR would provide scientific payloads, operations personnel, and the launch site was sent to the Indian government for final approval. That same year, the United States, the USSR, and France worked with Bhabha, as Chairman of the DAE, and Sarabhai, as chairman of INCOSPAR, to establish the TERLS in southern India (Guruprasad 2018). Less than a year later, on 21 November 1963, the first rocket was launched from Thumba as part of a collaborative international mission. Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai leveraged international networks, geopolitical rivalry, and competing national mandates to build cooperative space ventures with developed countries and to enshrine space as a means to national development for newly independent states. As Sarabhai put it, the pursuit of “space research in a developing nation … contributes to the creation of a climate for development which is essential in an age where colonialism has largely ended” (quoted in Siddiqui 2015: 443). That the United Nations would later define outer space as the province of all humankind, and as important to development and progress, was not an accident. In no small part it was due to the work of Sarabhai and others who framed space programs as fundamental to peace and prosperity, particularly for newly independent countries.

China and India in international space cooperation China’s space program activities during the 1960s and 1970s cohere with the classical geopolitical perspective. Missions and mandates were defined in competition with other space-faring powers, with national security as the primary concern. India’s competition with Pakistan likewise coheres. But India’s close relationship with the United States and USSR space agencies appears to run counter to the newly independent country’s principle of maintaining independence from superpowers. These differing approaches reflect the different geopolitical calculus between India and China in the mid-twentieth century, which resulted in different practices. To attain international prominence in space science and technology, senior administration in India engaged in three strategies: to gain sponsorship and recognition from the United Nations, to work with the United States and the USSR, and to advance India’s space capacity as quickly as possible. This was done, in part, by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s (1966–1977) employment of Hideo Itokawa, one of the founders of Japan’s space program, to advise the development of India’s space agency (Prasad 2015). In 1968, Dr Vikram Sarabhai was appointed vice president and scientific chairman

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of the first US conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space ( UNISPACE-1) held in Vienna (Prasad 2015). Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dedicated TERLS to the United Nations on 2 February 1968 to support international scientific cooperation (Nandakumar 2018). In contrast, China focused on using indigenous expertise to develop domestic capacity during the Great Leap Forward. By 1957, China had foregone an alliance with the Soviet Union as well as the United States and did not join the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space until 1981, after Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms. During this time, China was not entirely isolationist. China was one of the first signatories of the watershed 1967 Treaty on the Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies (aka the Outer Space Treaty or OST). In addition to the OST, which defines outer space as open to peaceful use and exploration by all, both China and India are party to the 1968 Astronaut Rescue and Return Agreement, the 1972 Liability Convention, and the Registration Convention. However, unlike China, India is party to the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the 1984 Moon Treaty. The history of India and China’s participation in international agreements pertaining to peaceful and orderly use of outer space shows a broad commitment to international cooperation even amidst bilateral geopolitical rivalry. Their engagement in multilateral forums facilitated bilateral engagement in which outer space served as a point of cooperation despite ongoing conflicts in other domains. In December 1988, Chinese Premier Li Peng invited Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to visit China. Although the primary issue on the agenda was the Sino-Indian border dispute, the two heads of state discussed the importance of expanding bilateral relations in scientific and technological fields in order to create a more peaceful and friendly atmosphere. One of the outcomes of this visit was the Institutional Framework Agreement on Scientific and Technological Cooperation. This established the Joint Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation, which meets biennially to define priority areas for bilateral cooperation. Twenty-five major agreements, letters of intent, and memoranda of understanding (MOUs) have since emerged from these meetings (EOI 2018). In 2004, both sides signed a framework agreement to share satellite data, but the agreement stalled after China did not reciprocate in sharing remote sensing information with India ( Jayaraman 2014). This is in part due to differences in the classifications of such programs: ISRO is a wholly civilian organization, while CNSA is still closely linked to the Ministry of Defense, and national security protocols prohibit the sharing of remote sensing data in China. In 2014, ISRO Chairman Koppillil Radhakrishnan and CNSA Vice Administrator Zhang Jianhua signed a MOU to define space cooperation between 2015 and 2020. The MOU established the Space Cooperation Mechanism to facilitate data-sharing issues that hindered earlier agreements. This agreement, signed in the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping, “enables both sides to encourage exchange and cooperation in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes, including research and development of scientific experiment satellites, remote sensing satellites and communications satellites” (quoted in Suryanarayana 2016: 69). These bilateral agreements are complemented by the deepening cooperation between China and India in multilateral forums, as illustrated by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) remote sensing satellite initiative. At the 2015 BRICS summit in Russia, member states issued a declaration of intent to intensify cooperation in joint

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applications of space technologies. On 31 October 2016, the heads of space agencies of BRICS member states met in Zhuhai, China, to discuss the construction of joint satellite arrays for Earth observation and remote sensing. Less than a year later, on 3 July 2017, the parties convened in Haikou, China to draft the BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation Agreement. A technical meeting in Brasília, Brazil, followed on 18–20 September 2017, which counted as the first official BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Forum. Although there is considerable variation among BRICS national space programs, all member states possess institutions and ground-based infrastructures that can be reclassified as part of the initiative. For example India’s Resoursesat-2 primarily monitors land use change in South Asia. Brazil contributes earth observation data from the joint China–Brazil Earth Resources Satellite, CBERS-4. This satellite scans the entire surface of the Earth every twenty-six days and has receiving stations in Brazil, China, and several African states. Russia’s Kanopus-V1 is a remote sensing satellite that monitors natural disasters, agriculture and land use change, forest fires, and major pollution incidents. China’s Gaofen-1 and Ziyuan-3 provide near real-time observations of disasters to support prevention and relief. Each of these satellites has a resolution of one to three meters, which allows for a variety of scientific, commercial, and security uses. Among many other applications, the coordination of a BRICS remote sensing network provides the BRICS-founded New Development Bank with the data and imagery that is critical to development project planning, implementation, and monitoring (Klinger 2018). The BRICS remote sensing initiative is proceeding in two phases. The first was to construct legal frameworks that are more amenable to this initiative by realigning national space activities and policies to facilitate technology transfer and information sharing among the BRICS member state space agencies. These legal and institutional transformations are intended to create the global circuits of power, expertise, and visibility necessary to support the second phase in 2020 or 2021, which is the launch of a BRICS remote sensing satellite constellation. Both India and China have independent bilateral agreements with other BRICS member states and neighboring countries. China has built satellites for Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and it is constructing ground receiving stations in Sri Lanka. ISRO and Russia’s Roscosmos have comprehensive space agreements including joint missions, technology development, and data sharing. In effect, the bilateral space cooperation agreements between China and India are complemented and supported by many other independent agreements with third country space programs. Despite this cooperation, there are other instances of conspicuous coolness. ISRO is not a member of the Beijing-based Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, nor has it signed formal agreements with Chinese counterparts on the “Digital Silk Road.” This is, in part, due to India’s policy of maintaining a separation between economic and security initiatives (Rawat and Chan 2018). By contrast, China’s space agencies have forged closer working relationship with counterparts in Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka through these space-based initiatives. Although China and India’s relations with their neighbors are often discussed as a zero-sum competition, it is worth noting that the current treaty regime to which both states are party allows for free collaboration among space-faring states. This also allows for competition within the bounds of the “peaceful use” doctrine. Rather than zero-sum rivalry, China and India’s multiple agreements with other states are a testament to the robustness of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which provides the framework for the bilateral and multilateral space agreements in which China and India engage. But both states have also seriously undermined this principle with their anti-satellite missile demonstrations: by China in

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2007 and by India in 2019. This shows how military rivalries can hinder space cooperation, despite prevailing peaceful practices, but it is important to view these instances of competition in context. The 2019 plans announced by US President Donald Trump to develop a Space Force have shifted the global geopolitical calculus, threatening to undermine the “peaceful use” doctrine that has characterized the half-century of human conduct in the global commons of outer space. In this context, cooperation between China and India assumes a special significance, not only for the short-term diplomatic goals and long-term security interests of both countries but also for global stability in space more generally. The key question concerns the role that China and India will play, respectively and together, in shaping the new space order.

Conclusion The roles of China and India in bilateral and multilateral forums indicate that both cooperation and competition are key features in constructing the international space order, while their histories have shown that cooperation in space research can proceed amidst tensions in other areas. Cooperation and competition should not be considered contradictory, any more than, as Sheehan notes, development and military rationales should be viewed merely “as distinct objectives in a managed tension with each other” (Sheehan 2007: 143). Instead, as space geopolitician Al-Rodhan (2015) observes, space capability is crucial to a host of national development strategies, of which security is a core component. Characterizing the relationship between the programs solely in terms of classical geopolitical rivalry obscures important histories of constructive bilateral and multilateral engagement. For the most part, both China and India have advanced outer space-related programs in a manner envisaged by the major United Nations treaties of the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, India’s scientists assumed prominent roles defining space as a forum for international cooperation during the most tumultuous years of the Cold War, while China maintained presence and engagement with multilateral forums even during its most isolationist years. The different approaches to enhancing space status—India’s focus on the building international stature through the process of space sciences, and China’s emphasis on generating politically significant outcomes—were both a cause and a result of the two states’ approaches to international and regional geopolitical tensions during the formative years of their respective national space programs.

Notes 1 Also known as the Number Five Research Academy of the Ministry of National Defense. The China Aerospace Industry Corporation is a spin-off of the Fifth Academy. 2 For reference, Cape Canaveral is 28 degrees north, and the Guiana Space Center is located at 5 degrees north. 3 “No one then knew that the father of the future U.S. space program was being quizzed by the father of the future Chinese space program” (Perret and Asker 2008). 4 “I do not plan to come back,” Qian told reporters. “I have no reason to come back….I plan to do my best to help the Chinese people build up the nation to where they can live with dignity and happiness” (Noland 2009). 5 When his close friend and colleague, Frank Marble, tried to return the two file-cabinets’ worth of papers and notes to Qian in 1981, Qian reportedly said “Frank, American students need them much more than Chinese students” (Marble 2002).

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530  Julie Michelle Klinger Marble, F. (2002) “Tsien Revisited,” Caltech News 36(1): 10–11, available online at https:// caltechcampuspubs.library.caltech.edu/2177/1/2002_36_1.pdf. McCallum, J. A. (1947) “The Asian Relations Conference,” Australian Institute of Policy & Science 19(2): 13–17. Merrill, D. (1990) Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Muir-Harmony, T. (2010) “Tracking Diplomacy: The International Geophysical Year and American Scientific and Technical Exchange with East Asia,” in R. D. Launius, J. R. Fleming and D. H. DeVorkin, eds., Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar and Geophysical Years (New York: Palgrave Macmillan): 279–305. Nandakumar, T. (2018) “ISRO Celebrating a Golden Milestone,” The Hindu (1 February), available online at www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/golden-jubilee-of-soundingrocket-launch-today/article22622729.ece. Noland, C. (2009) “Qian Xuesen Dies at 98; Rocket Scientist Helped Establish Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” Los Angeles Times Obituaries (1 November), available online at www.latimes. com/nation/la-me-qian-xuesen1-2009nov01-story.html (accessed 14 April 2015). Pais, A. (2000) The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery of Twentieth-Century Physicists (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Perret, B. and Asker, J. R. (2008) “Sea Change,” Aviation Week and Space Technology 168(1): 56–61. Plof ker, K. (2009) Mathematics in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Prasad, M. Y. S. (2015) “ISRO and International Cooperation,” in P. V. M. Rao, B. N. Suresh and V. P. Balagangadhara, eds., From Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet: India’s Space Journey (New Delhi: Harper Collins). Rajan, Y. S. (1988) “Benefits from Space Technology: A View from a Developing Country,” Space Policy 4(3): 221–228. Rawat, D. and Chan, J. H. (2018) “China’s Digital Silk Road: Implications for India,” Institute of South Asian Studies Insights (521) (18 November): 1–6, available online at www.isas.nus. edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ISAS-Insights-No.-521-Chinas-Digital-Silk-RoadImplications-for-India.pdf. Ryan, W. L. and Summerlin, S. (1969) The China Cloud: America’s Tragic Blunder and China’s Rise to Nuclear Power (London: Hutchinson). Sage, D. (2016) How Outer Space Made America: Geography, Organization, and the Cosmic Sublime (London and New York: Routledge). Sheehan, M. (2007) The International Politics of Space (London: Routledge). Siddiqui, A. (2015) “Science, Geography, and Nation: The Global Creation of Thumba,” History and Technology 31(4): 420–451. Soekarno (1956) “Let a New Asia and a New Africa Be Born,” Opening Address at AsianAfrican Conference, Bandung, Indonesia (April). Sudhakar, G. (2018) “ISRO: 104 Satellites in One Go,” Vidyaniketan Journal of Management and Research (March): 74–94. Suryanarayana, P.S. (2016) Smart Diplomacy: Exploring China-India Synergy (Singapore: World Century Publishing Corporation). The Caltech Archives (2016) “In the News: The Father of Chinese Rocketry” (last modified 14 December), available online at http://archives.caltech.edu/news/tsien.html (accessed 6 February 2015). Wade, M. (2008) “Tsien Hsue-shen (Qian Xuesen),” Encyclopedia Astronautica, available online at http://astronautix.com/t/tsien.html. Wines, M. (2009) “Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Dies at 98,” The New York Times (3 November), available online at www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/asia/04qian.html. Zheleznyakov, A. (2004) “Intercosmos Restrospect 1984: India,” ORBIT: Journal of the Astro Space Stamp Society 62 ( June): 4–5, available online at www.astrospacestampsociety.com/ images2/orbitimages7/Orbit%2062%20June%202004.pdf.

33 China, India, and global security Deploying to UN peacekeeping operations and shaping the responsibility to protect Courtney J. Fung

There is much discussion about the implications of the rise of both China and India as providers of public goods for a global security order: the norms, institutions and rules that pertain to global security issues.1 Both states are key participants in two complementary and overlapping elements of this order: as troop contributors to UN peacekeeping operations and as norm shapers of the responsibility to protect. These two issue areas in particular tell us how the two states consider their role in providing for global security and their positions vis-à-vis a global security order. This is because both peacekeeping and the responsibility to protect present challenges to traditional sovereignty, a particularly important concern for both China and India given their colonial histories and self-appointed positions as anti-imperialist Global South leaders seeking recognition for their heritage as great states (Miller 2013). While both China and India accept that massive human rights crises may provide conditions for intervention, neither are enthusiastic supporters of incursions on the traditional sovereignty norm that underpins the international system (Carlson 2002, 2006; Virk 2013).2 Unlike antagonisms and disagreements in these two states’ foreign policies, their efforts in these areas are not marked by competition but instead are relatively complementary as China and India operate in contrast to one another in both these issue areas. Both states are considered core contributors to UN peacekeeping: China sends more troops than the rest of the UN Security Council’s five permanent members (P5) combined; India sends double the troops of the P5 combined (see UN Peacekeeping 2019). Both states agitate about UN peacekeeping strategy from the perspective of the Global South, chastising Western states for their lack of field commitments. Both states deploy globally, in contrast to other regionally focused rising peacekeeping states like Brazil or South Africa. However, after these broad dimensions, China and India differ on practically every other aspect. While India has already risen to the challenge of being a multi-spectrum troop contributor, it has yet to turn its long-established history of deployment into strategic diplomatic gains. In contrast, China is a risk-adverse, cautious, and deliberate contributor, but has managed to strategically maximize the benefits of its peacekeeping deployment. In regards to the responsibility to protect, both states were initially norm rejectionists but quickly diverged in their respective stances. Though China uses state sovereignty to modify the responsibility to protect, it has only recently actively engaged in discussions on the international community executing protection over the state. In contrast, India has focused the majority of its energy on rejecting the use of the responsibility to protect to justify armed intervention. This chapter proceeds with brief studies of China and India’s peacekeeping profiles, focusing on why these states deploy and contrasting issues that arise out of their

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contributions. I then analyze how China and India engaged with the responsibility to protect since the introduction of the norm in 2001, through its institutionalization at the 2005 World Summit, and through its implementation in the seminal case of the 2011 Libya crisis—marked as the benchmark case for the invocation of the responsibility to protect (Luck 2010; Evans 2011; Hehir and Murray 2013)—when both states were in the United Nations (UN) Security Council with equal opportunity to affect change in the crisis. Resolution 1970 was a first for the UN Security Council to unanimously refer a country case to the International Criminal Court, and Resolution 1973, calling for sanctions and a no-fly zone against the regime, was explicitly invoked for protection of civilians purposes, not due to a threat to international peace and security.3 I conclude with an analysis of the implications for global governance of China and India’s rise.

China as a troop contributor to UN peacekeeping China typically dispatches sought-after non-combat enabler troops—the logisticians, engineers, and medical teams that provide the backbone for peacekeeping missions in the field. These specialist troops are more challenging for the UN to source. At the 2015 World Summit, China committed 8,000 troops for the UN peacekeeping standby force—alone offering a fifth of the total forces committed by fifty nations. It also committed $1 billion to establish the UN Peace and Development Trust Fund and $100 million for the African Union Standby Force (Xi 2015). China signaled interests in deploying military helicopters, a new commitment filling a significant deficit in UN capabilities (Wang 2014). By 2017, it was the second largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget, a sharp contrast as the United States capped its contributions to UN peacekeeping, while calling for a $1 billion cut in the peacekeeping budget (Nichols 2017). These contributions are remarkable given that China initially rejected any interaction with peacekeeping for a decade when it assumed its seat at the UN Security Council in 1971. Beijing dispatched its first peacekeeping personnel to United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in Cambodia in 1992. By the early 2000s, China had dramatically increased its troop deployment numbers. This coincided with the official expansion of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) missions to include military operations other than war. Its motivation in part was that peacekeeping deployment garners China a number of benefits. China’s troop contributions link peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and development assistance by strengthening state capacity, while Chinese peacekeepers “collaborate with Chinese institutions and organizations in the country of residence to protect the rightful interests of Chinese people and companies” (Huang 2010). Peacekeeping also means field-testing Chinese-made equipment and giving troops first-hand, expeditionary experience as part of complex, multilateral operations, in line with calls by President Xi Jinping for “real combat” training. China’s peacetime military’s last combat experience was the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979, and PLA officials view a lack of real-world fighting experience as a serious concern.4 Peacekeeping offers an avenue for consistent military-to-military diplomacy as well. At the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou and during meetings between President Xi and President Trump in Beijing, both states pledged to continue peacekeeping cooperation as a means to smooth Sino-US relations. Such opportunities are key for China as it has limited platforms to foster international military cooperation and to deflect criticisms of its defense spending and geopolitical rivalries (Higgins 2009). Just as important, peacekeeping deployment offers China key status and reputational gains. China’s troop

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contributions set it apart from other Western powers who by and large only deploy token contributions and present it as a developing world peer actively contributing to peace and progress in unstable locales (Fung 2016a). China’s great power status is merged with its role as a responsible power, which now signifies active involvement in multilateral organizations and global governance, in ways that are atypical in comparison to other great powers on the UN Security Council. Peacekeeping deployments show that China offers stability in the international system when the hegemon cannot or does not. Beijing uses deployments and its field record to maximize respect and authority at the UN.5 China’s peacekeeping deployment supports national narratives of the country’s leading role in global politics through troops’ sacrifice, commitment, and patriotism on behalf of China. While enabler troops provide services akin to development workers in support of the peacekeeping mission, they do so under the assumption of not participating in combat, in line with China’s traditionally espoused support for “core” peacekeeping principles of host state consent, impartiality, and the use of force only for self-defense. These tasks kept Chinese peacekeepers away from the notional “front line,” reducing the potential downside for China, and gave it the opportunity to project itself as a neutral, helpful, positive-sum actor through relatively low-risk activities. Hence Chinese peacekeepers are unreservedly promoted by Beijing as a “helpful fixer” (Richardson 2011), a force for peace in that they built roads, provided medical aid, and offered logistical support (Hirono 2011). Beijing recently modified its peacekeeping participation to include deploying combat troops, which may have to engage in live fire in order to defend the mandate, presenting China with new challenges in the field: taking casualties, adjudicating the use of force, and managing expectations for China’s performance, all the while staying within its own normative framework. If Chinese peacekeepers on mission fall short of their own high standards, this is a real issue for China, given the use of its impeccable and much lauded peacekeeping record for the country’s national narrative, international image, and status.6 Chinese domestic expectations remain high for troop performance, as China’s peacekeepers are represented as an elite, well-equipped, unanimously welcomed emblem of China’s strength, prosperity, and commitments to international peace. Concerns about the ability to perform in the field are reflected in tentative signals regarding China’s willingness to deploy combat troops (Cheng 2010). China’s predicaments in its deployment of combat troops to two missions—United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in Mali and United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in South Sudan—reveal how it is still learning as a peacekeeping state.7 China deployed close to 400 troops to MINUSMA, starting in 2013.8 MINUSMA has an “all necessary means” mandate, so peacekeepers can deter threats challenging transitional authorities in Mali so as to stabilize the state (UN Security Council 2013). Chinese peacekeepers did not anticipate the tense political conditions on mission, facing frequent extremist attacks and violent local protests (see Han 2017), and PLA troops were criticized for taking an overtly cautious approach to their duties—only performing their tasks during daytime and limiting their interaction with civil society groups.9 In November 2015, extremist attacks led to the deaths of three China Railway International Group executives (China Daily 2015; Hinshaw 2015). Domestic Chinese complaints about the perceived impotence of Chinese peacekeepers10 led to a People’s Daily report that peacekeepers only operate under a UN mandate and that Chinese forces were too far away to assist in the rescue operation (The People’s Daily 2015: 22). The incident highlighted the conflation of overseas threats

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with China’s infrastructure development projects and the high domestic expectations for Chinese combat troops. Similar problems occurred with Chinese assets on mission with UNMISS, where Chinese troops were mainly tasked with perimeter security at UNMISS headquarters. Fighting between South Sudanese political factions led to hundreds of South Sudanese seeking refuge at protection sites at UN bases (Mold and Adongo 2017; for the details of the UN mandate, see UN Security Council 2016: para. 7aii). Violence escalated in early July 2016, as government soldiers moved through Juba on their killing, looting, and raping spree (Burke 2016). UNMISS forces did not keep a unified command during this attack, leaving hundreds of individuals brutalized and sexually assaulted. The UN review report noted “at least two instances in which the Chinese battalion abandoned some of its defensive positions” and criticized the lackluster performance of national peacekeeping contingents.11 During these attacks, two Chinese peacekeepers were killed, China’s first combat deaths in decades.12 China was “deeply astonished” by the attack (Zhang 2016), and Chinese at home were shocked and surprised to see such a different image than the carefully curated narrative of elite troops receiving medals and praise from senior UN officials (Page and Stevis 2016; see also Kuo and Huang 2016). The question of combat deaths reopened debate within the Ministry of National Defense about the viability of deploying combat troops to peacekeeping.13

India as a troop contributor to UN peacekeeping Indian forces are rightly regarded as the “backbone” for UN peacekeeping (Wiharta, Melvin and Avezoz 2012: 13). India has deployed over 100,000 troops on mission and has been a consistent UN troop contributor since the Korean Armistice Agreement, serving in over two thirds of UN missions (see Figure 33.1). It was a committed peacekeeper during the Cold War, dispatching to address the fallout of the Suez crisis and in significant numbers to the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC). Even at this juncture, India was already a dynamic peacekeeping presence in ONUC, pushing to use force as a necessary last resort to implement the mandate. To this end, Indian aircraft bombed military assets held by the Katangan forces and enforced a no-fly zone (for more detail, see Pant 2000). In the post-Cold War era, India maintained a strong level of engagement, deploying into some of the most difficult missions and flashpoints in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Somalia, amongst others. India maintains a 4,000-strong Standby Brigade Group, and an infantry battalion is deployable within a thirty-day timeframe, with the rest of the standby contingent following in eight weeks. India is also a rare leading troop contributor in that it has “standalone capability”—the military hardware, supplies, and troops to deploy en masse to peacekeeping without any external support (Mampilly 2018: 180). India brings a range of hard-to-source assets on mission—to include field hospitals and attack helicopters—and was the first state to deploy all-female units on mission. At the 2015 World Summit, India committed an additional battalion of 850 troops for peacekeeping and reaffirmed its commitment to provide critical enabler staff and equipment on mission. Perhaps most importantly, Indian soldiers are recognized as fulfilling “the very narrow bracket of troop contributing countries willing and able to act kinetically” (Vira 2012). Partly in recognition of India’s operational experience, India has held over fifteen force commander posts and other senior positions on mission, and twice served as military advisor at UN Headquarters ( Permanent Mission of India to the UN n.d.).

China, India, and global security  535 Number of Indian peacekeeping troops

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Figure 33.1 Number of Indian and total UN peacekeeping troops from 1947 to 2018. Source: Based on data compiled from UN Peacekeeping (2019).

Popular explanations for India’s peacekeeping deployments emphasize financial remuneration, as the peacekeeper reimbursement rate allows India to have “guns and butter,” since the costs for keeping these troops are outsourced to the UN (Axe 2010; Kathman and Melin 2017). However, this logic appears to overstate the financial benefits for India: the “reimbursement gap” for helicopters is a perpetual irritant (Sherman, Kugel and Sinclair 2012), and India has led the charge pushing for “risk premiums” to be paid for troops that carry out the most dangerous missions.14 There is little evidence that peacekeeping is part of India’s economic strategy: Manmohan Singh offered the African Union $2 million toward peacekeeping in Somalia, but this was an isolated incident (Gowan and Singh 2013: 187), and some are critical that India still lacks a clear strategy for linking peacekeeping, state-building, and economics (Sidhu 2011: 23). A rguably, the pushback inherent in dealing with complicated mandates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone has put Indian investments at risk through a close association with contentious peacekeeping. Others argue that India’s deployment is the result of “habit or inertia”: as India has always been a peacekeeping state, it should remain a peacekeeping state (Gowan and Singh 2013: 188). Indeed, commentators note that India already had a comparative advantage through its legacy of a large expeditionary force used to oppress colonial insurgency during Empire (see Mukherjee 2008; Mohan 2013), so to participate in peacekeeping was a natural application of a specific

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military skillset. Scholars also attribute India’s early willingness to contribute forces to the prominence of status: high-minded Nehruvian foreign policy meant India must demonstrate international responsibilities as a Global South player supporting decolonization, offering security guarantees, and ensuring the UN as a well-functioning institution, where all states have equal say (Mampilly 2014). India’s long and distinguished peacekeeping history continues to give Delhi diplomatic capital for its other foreign policy efforts at the UN, with deployment bolstering its profile as a leading contributor to the yeoman’s work of buttressing global peace and security. India has, in turn, used this history to secure rotating seats at the UN Security Council, agitate for reform of the UN Security Council, and continue to lead the Non-Aligned Movement. India’s efforts are not without controversy, though. To date, India has lost the most peacekeepers of all troop contributing countries. India has also borne critique for its peacekeeping performance: it has been challenged for being unprepared to defend the mandate15 and for being too prepared to defend the mandate in the first place.16 Criticisms about troop misconduct continue to dog India. In the DRC alone, Indian troops were accused of smuggling, illicit trade (Escobales 2008), sexual assault and abuse (Singh 2015), and weapons and information trading with Congolese militias (Ahmad 2008). Despite these issues, India consistently pushes for peacekeeping improvements from its perspective as a troop contributor: it agitates for troop contributors to have more say about mandate design, financial reforms for troop and contingent-owned equipment reimbursement rates, and for compensation for peacekeepers killed on mission. But India is yet to multiply its critiques of the UN Security Council and the Secretariat’s roles in peacekeeping into “political influence commensurate with its massive field presence, nor has it given any indication that it intends to do so” (Tardy 2011: 106–107). India’s surprise loss of a rotating Security Council seat to Japan in 1996 fed Indian ambiguity about the benefits of peacekeeping as part of a greater diplomatic strategy and critiques of the overall peacekeeping enterprise (Gowan and Singh 2013).

China, India, and the responsibility to protect Both China and India were initially focused on preventing the responsibility to protect from gaining any ground as an emerging norm.17 As the draft of the responsibility to protect circulated, the “hardest line against intervention and in defense of sovereignty” was touted in Beijing (Thakur 2006: 268; Virk 2013). China launched four critiques of the new norm: that challenges to sovereignty, unless for the benefits of self-defense, had no role in the UN Charter; that self-interest would lead to abuse the principle; that tensions between individual human rights versus the rights of nations were unreconciled; and that the responsibility to protect would only reintroduce Western views and double standards (ICISS 2001: 392–394). There was scant discussion of the term beyond the small working group of scholars involved, implying that the term was no priority for Chinese elites to address. Participants at the New Delhi roundtables emphasized India’s firm position that “military intervention to save the victims of even gross human rights abuses is a violation of the [UN] Charter” (ICISS 2001: 387), as intervention and sovereignty were “incompatible concepts” (ICISS 2001: 388). At this juncture, foreign policy elites viewed the responsibility to protect as “just a garb … a fancy term to defend your geopolitical interest”.18 To this end, India argued at the UN General Assembly that the responsibility to protect “has not found acceptance among the vast majority of [states]” (UN General Assembly 2002: 16).

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In the run up to the 2005 World Summit, however, China acknowledged that “when a massive humanitarian crisis occurs, it is the legitimate concern of the international community to ease and defuse the crisis” (Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN 2005). Yet China still determined that “[e]ach state shoulders the primary responsibility to protect its own population …” turning the emphasis back to traditional sovereignty. In contrast to China, India did not issue policy pronouncements vis-à-vis the responsibility to protect before the World Summit, with the Indian representation receiving next to no guidance on how to proceed (Bellamy 2011: 23). The responsibility to protect was perceived as a low diplomatic priority as it was “so obviously self-evident” that India would not accept the suggested norm, and therefore would continue with its position of outright dismissal.19 When the World Summit negotiations began, India noted its concerns about “intrusive monitoring and finger pointing” at other countries and perpetuating a “right of humanitarian intervention” or “military humanism” (UN Security Council 2005a: 13–15), and pushed to have the responsibility to protect completely removed from the draft. India galvanized the Non-Aligned Movement to reject the responsibility to protect outright, viewing the emerging norm as a contravention of international law (Bloomfield 2016: 87). China grasped the opportunity to follow suit, announcing its own “deep reservations” about the concept (Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN 2005). India’s refusal to accept responsibility to protect language led to a forty-eight-hour hold on issuing the final World Summit document ( Jaganathan and Kurtz 2014: 469). Out of fear of “[scuttling] the whole summit” in rejecting the responsibility to protect (Traub 2006: 372–375; Bellamy 2011: 23), the Prime Minister’s Office had a belated intervention with the Indian Mission in New York, pushing for India’s return to negotiate. At the 2005 World Summit, the largest gathering of the heads of states ever, both states signed on to a much watered-down version of the norm, marking a hardening toward the maintenance of the traditional state system (UN General Assembly 2005). The World Summit Outcome Document charged the international community to act in a “timely and decisive manner,” lifting the threshold on target states from being “unable and unwilling” to protect their citizens to proving that these states are “manifestly failing” at doing so; the precondition of UN authorization reified the state system, and the norm could only be applied in four categories of specified crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Beijing calculated that the term was so diluted it was now rendered meaningless (Teitt 2009), and only a topic for future discussion (UN Security Council 2005b). Even with the signing of the World Summit Outcome Document, New Delhi took the view that India had only committed to future consideration of the responsibility to protect and that it “remained a deniable, ad hoc practice” (Virk 2013: 78). India remained committed to containing the norm and ensuring that the norm was “strictly pulled back to what was agreed and nothing more”.20 After the 2005 World Summit, China gave cautious support for the responsibility to protect, refusing to “expand, willfully … interpret or even abuse this concept” (UN Security Council 2006a). China endorsed the responsibility to protect in various UN Security Council Resolutions when the language replicated the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document wording (UN Security Council 2006b, 2006c, 2006d), and did so even while it could have used Russia for “veto cover”,21 signifying some acceptance of the norm. After all, as Chinese analysts reasoned, the norm was “not such a challenge to sovereignty as we had thought”.22 The responsibility to protect still reified the state

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system and the UN Security Council’s position in determining the contours of global politics. When the responsibility to protect was applied beyond the immediate threshold of the four crimes—as suggested by France in the case of the 2007 Myanmar crisis— China pushed back with a veto stating that “the primary responsibility entrusted by the UN Charter to the Security Council is to maintain world peace and security” and that “similar problems exist in many other countries” (UN Security Council 2007a; Badescu and Weiss 2010). China advocates for greater say by regional organizations, state-based groups that are traditionally hesitant to intervene, reinforcing Beijing’s view that state-led sovereignty is prime in international politics (Bellamy and Williams 2011). China does so through using discursive frames (i.e. that regional organizations matter when addressing protection problems), advancing constitutive norms derived from the prior status quo (i.e. regional actors should address problems in their neighborhood), and mobilizing support for its preferred solutions with complementary policy initiatives (e.g. boosting the profile of regional organizations at the UN Security Council), so as to prevent its dilution or dismissal from the Security Council’s agenda altogether. All of these efforts position China as an advocate for conflict prevention and local/regional capacity-building in the context of the responsibility to protect. China draws upon its academic community’s research as foundations for future normative innovations by Beijing in line with traditional conceptions of sovereignty (Liu 2012). There was only brief mention of co-opting the responsibility to protect into Indian foreign policy principles (Rajagopalan and Sahni 2008; Hall 2013); India instead offered repeated public dissent against the emerging norm. Its strategy was not to signal disinterest by withdrawing from discussions like other states—instead, it voluntarily and actively engaged in these debates, but framed its discontent by harkening back to prior issues like the problems of humanitarian intervention. Therefore, even as the debate about the responsibility to protect was updating, New Delhi offered no policy statements guiding the development of the norms. India instead became “a scrupulous watchdog of the fairness of external interventions” justified by the norm (Pai 2013: 309). The 2009 report on the status of the responsibility to protect attempted to address backlash by stating that “the responsibility to protect seeks to strengthen sovereignty, not weaken it” (UN General Assembly 2009a: 7). The report clarified that the responsibility to protect rested upon three pillars of prevention, assistance, and reaction, summarized as follows: • • •

Pillar 1: states bear primary protection responsibilities; Pillar 2: the international community should assist states to meet their protection responsibilities; Pillar 3: when a state is manifestly failing to protect its population, the international community should be prepared for a timely and decisive response.

China continued its complementary, interlocking strategy of advocacy for a greater say for regional organizations at the UN Security Council, early warning systems at the state and regional levels in this context (UN Security Council 2006a, 2007b; UN General Assembly 2008; Teitt 2008: 20), and a redefinition of “timely and decisive response.” At the 2009 protection-of-civilians debate, China focused efforts not on the responsibility to protect, but rather on the responsibility to prevent, as a multistakeholder and multi-faceted project (see UN Security Council 2009). China focused

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on what role the international community could play in supporting states to acquire effective early warning systems—therefore recasting the meaning of “timely and decisive response” as a long-term commitment to protect populations and not just as a reaction to an immediate crisis. Local-level early warning systems are consent-based opportunities to improve the state’s awareness and control over events in its territory. China initiated its first-ever thematic debate during its UN Security Council presidency on how regional organizations could promote multilateralism and coordination with the UN (Lin 2010, see Fung 2016b). Beijing was filling a gap in the norm, as advocates admitted that the initial work on prevention was “brief, confused and unoriginal” (Bellamy 2009: 52; Liu 2012). In contrast, even as the responsibility to protect moved toward its current denomination of three pillars, India was still engaged with prior debates about intervention, rather than in the widening and updating responsibility to protect discussion. New Delhi focused on matters “tangential to the real issue at hand” instead, like the need for UN Security Council reform (Hall 2013: 87). It pointedly remarked that “deep intellectual acrimony” colored the discussions of the responsibility to protect, and that the norm could “provide a pretext for humanitarian intervention or unilateral action” and that “[to] do so would not only give responsibility to protect a bad name but also defeat its very purpose” (UN General Assembly 2009b). India registered its skepticism for the viability of the early warning system, challenging that this mechanism was liable to become a “fishing expedition” (Puri 2010). These tactics were surprising in light of India’s new seniority in the responsibility to protect hierarchy: its former ambassador to the UN, Nirupam Sen, who had led the anti-responsibility to protect push in 2005, had recently become the senior advisor on the responsibility to protect to the president of the UN General Assembly (Press Trust of India 2009). India assumed a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council on 1 January 2011,23 presenting equal opportunity for both China and India to confront crises in real time against the context of the emerging norm. To date, references to responsibility to protect have featured in over seventy resolutions and presidential statements (Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect 2018), used in reference to crises from Myanmar to Libya to the Central African Republic. Instead of being forced to accept UN Security Council mandated resolutions, India could now have a direct effect on policy by proscribing or prescribing responsibility to protect language. At the outset, the UN Security Council could not agree on military measures against Muammar Gaddafi based on principled and practical grounds. However, regional groups lined up to condemn Gaddafi’s use of force against civilians, paving the way for UN Security Council action (Fung 2016b). China and India both cast “yes” votes for Resolution 1970, the first time that the UN Security Council unanimously referred a country case to the International Criminal Court (UN Security Council 2011d). China explicitly noted that it took into account the positions of various regional groupings (UN Security Council 2011a: 4). India lamented that New Delhi had “preferred a calibrated and gradual approach,” but the draft was acceptable since India wanted to support consensus (UN Security Council 2011a: 2). While given the opportunity to shape the vote, or engage in meaningful debate, India discarded the opportunity to do so. Both China and India called for states to “accommodate the concerns and opinions of the Arab and African countries” (Leiby and Mansour 2011; Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN 2011a), still raising practical concerns regarding a no-fly zone. However, when all the Middle East regional organizations seconded the

540  Courtney J. Fung

no-fly zone request of the Interim Council of Benghazi, this advanced the agenda for intervention.24 On 17 March 2011, the UN Security Council authorized Resolution 1973, calling member states, acting nationally or through regional organizations, to take all necessary means, short of foreign occupation, to protect civilians under threat of attack in Libya (UN Security Council 2011e). Brazil, China, India, Germany, and Russia all abstained, viewing that peaceful means were still viable and that armed intervention would only raise civilian casualties. In articulating its abstention vote, India critiqued all the working parts of the resolution, arguing that a no-fly zone and sanctions would lead to further deterioration of the quality of life for Libyans without having exhausted diplomatic means (UN Security Council 2011b). Underlying India’s position was the suspicion that a call for all necessary means necessitated an open call for regime change.25 China issued a comparatively short statement again emphasizing the relevance of regional organizations for China’s abstention vote (Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN 2011b). Despite India and China’s opposition, French aircraft committed strikes to hamper Gaddafi’s advance on rebel-held territories, a coalition of states conducted ground target strikes and enforced a naval blockade, and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) confirmed that it planned to implement the no-fly zone (Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy 2011).26 When the UN Security Council resolutions were used to justify foreign-imposed regime change in Libya, responsibility to protect advocates noted that Libya was “a textbook case of the … norm working exactly as it was supposed to” (Evans 2011). Chinese analysts, however, saw proof of regime change, and Chinese officials called the no-fly zone enforcement an “abuse of force” (Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States 2011). India had proof of “the instrumentalisation of [the responsibility to protect] to justify regime change …” ( Jaganathan and Kurtz 2014: 475), and it critiqued the intervention as “different than what was intended,” saying that “Libya gave R2P a bad name” (Puri 2012a). In the May 2011 protection-ofcivilians debate, India referred to its “consistent view that the foremost responsibility of every State is to protect its population,” before steering its protection comments back to problems of peacekeeping deployment (UN Security Council 2011c: 11). Following the Libya crisis, a number of states reoriented the responsibility to protect debate, appropriating the term “responsible” in their role as creative resisters.27 China briefly explored a nascent, semi-official concept of “responsible protection.” Responsible protection was driven by the view that NATO had abused its mandate for the use of force in Libya (Garwood-Gowers 2016); China cited questionable outcomes following Western-led interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Responsible protection argued that responsibility for a target state carries on during and after an intervention— giving a much narrower interpretation for the use of military force emphasizing a means-end trade-off (Ruan 2012). China emphasized a monitoring element for the use of military force and responsibilities for post-intervention rebuilding—new norms to compete with the responsibility to protect, which only focused on cues for intervention. China presented the most restrictive interpretation for the use of force for humanitarian purposes. This focus on responsible protection was short-lived, however, and limited to low-level policy discourse (Fung 2018). In contrast, despite its vehemence regarding Libya, India did not engage with the normative discussion about the application of the responsibility to protect. Instead, Indian officials focused on supporting Brazil’s proposals for “responsibility while protecting,” and circled back to the view that the responsibility to protect is “… a tool in the

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hands of the powerful to pressurize weaker states, and bring about regime change …” This positioning revealed India’s preoccupation with humanitarian intervention and perceived Western abuses of power (Puri 2012b; see also Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations 2013).

Conclusion Both China and India view the UN as a crucial forum for advancing their interests and bolstering their status. Though the two countries have taken the opportunity to modify the global security order in different ways, the analysis shows that these rising powers share some common views and are both cautious players at best in promoting change. India’s engagement with elements of a global security order, as shown in its peacekeeping contributions and approach to the responsibility to protect, reflects ambivalence about taking on a leading role. Though India is a longtime player in peacekeeping, it has yet to develop a narrative in this arena that appeals beyond its immediate perch as a troop contributor. This means that Indian policy is focused upon agitating for incremental, low-lying fruit (like reimbursement rates for “hazardous” missions) instead of using the pedigree of a distinguished robust peacekeeper to push for policy engagement regarding contentious meta-issues like the use of force in such missions. India’s engagement with the responsibility to protect reflects the same limitations. The country’s brief foray into pushing for revisions in 2005 was indeed seminal: without India threatening to reject the 2005 World Summit Outcome document, it is quite possible that the codification of the norm would not have occurred as it had. However, this is not to say that India generated new ideas or norm content. Moreover, its position since then has been to bad-mouth the norm without offering correctives. India limits its rhetorical and leadership reach, contrary to assumptions of how rising powers elevate national vision to amend the international order. Though China does not have the breadth and depth of India’s peacekeeping experience, it has burnished its proud history as a peacekeeping contributor to derive maximum benefits, especially in terms of its reputational and status gains. Yet, its entry into the robust peacekeeping space highlights the country’s lack of awareness and experience about connecting tactical decisions about kinetic action to bigger, strategic issues regarding the use of force. This is particularly challenging for China as it tightly holds its pristine peacekeeping narrative as an unreserved “force for good.” Entry into more robust roles will almost inevitably lead to challenges for China to address not only in the field but also as a sophisticated player in the policy arena. Beijing has started to proffer updates to the responsibility to protect norm, though these are not creative new additions to the responsibility to protect; instead, for the most part, it seeks to rewrite the normative content by substituting past normative structures derived from traditional sovereignty. Though China may aspire to modify a global security order to be more akin to its own vision, it too appears ambivalent about just how to do so beyond negating activities; when positive engagement is required—generating new ideas, connecting strategic policy to tactical implementation in practice—China too is a novice. In contrast to the established great powers, China and India are both similar in exhibiting a consistent, deep-rooted opposition to foreign-imposed regime change via UN-sanctioned activities. For example, concerns about the responsibility to protect and foreign-imposed regime change were raised by both China and India regarding the removal of Gaddafi in Libya as well as crises in Syria and the Democratic People’s

542  Courtney J. Fung

Republic of Korea (United Nations Security Council 2012, 2017; see also Puri 2012b).28 China and India have viewed the responsibility to protect as a “Trojan Horse,” where apparently legitimate requests for intervention are in fact efforts to push through regime change on the sly (McMillan and Mickler 2013).29 This is in part due to the implicit recognition that the responsibility to protect may be used to justify altering a government so as to address the source of mass abuse. The Libya case burnishes the legitimacy of China and India, who were ultimately proven correct in their anxieties about ulterior motives for foreign-imposed regime change, and in so doing, have gained greater credibility for their dissension against pillar 3 actions. While the study of China and India as normative actors is a relatively new area of research (Schweller and Pu 2011; Pu 2012; Miller 2013; Bloomfield 2016), this has not prevented speculation that these two states have the potential to be new “models,” “paradigms,” and “examples” in global affairs (see critique by Breslin 2011). The chapter speaks to what new normative leadership these rising powers might offer in a global security order. It would be an incomplete assessment to see China and India as rising powers intent on challenging the existing contours of a liberal international order outright. China and India are ultimately similar in that their attempts to lead with new ideas and thinking are modest at best, as both states still prefer an idealized version of a prior status quo, where sovereignty and territorial integrity are the respected foundations for global security.

Notes

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548  Courtney J. Fung Putten, F. P. V. D. (2015) “China’s Evolving Role in Peacekeeping and African Security: The Deployment of Chinese Troops for UN Force Protection in Mali,” Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael (September), available online at www.clingendael.org/sites/ default/files/2018-02/China%27s_Evolving_Role_in_Peacekeeping_and_African_Security.pdf (accessed 5 June 2015). Rajagopalan, R. and Sahni, V. (2008) “India and the Great Powers: Strategic Imperatives, Normative Necessities,” South Asian Survey 15(1): 5–32. Richardson, C. J. (2011) “A Responsible Power? China and the UN Peacekeeping Regime,” International Peacekeeping 18(3): 286–297. Ruan, Z. (2012) “Responsible Protection,” China Daily (15 March), available online at http:// usa.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2012-03/15/content_14838556.htm. Schweller, R. L. (2001) “The Problem of International Order Revisited: A Review Essay,” International Security 26(1): 161–186. Schweller, R. L. and Pu, X. (2011) “After Unipolarity: China’s Visions of International Order in an Era of U.S. Decline,” International Security 36(1): 41–72. Sherman, J., Kugel, A. and Sinclair, A. (2012) “Overcoming Helicopter Force Generation Challenges for UN Peacekeeping Operations,” International Peacekeeping 19(1): 77–92. Sidhu, W. P. S. (2011) “India’s Evolving Role in Development and Security in States at Risk,” in J. Sherman, M. Gleason, W. P. S. Sidhu and B. Jones, eds., Engagement on Development and Security: New Actors, New Debates (New York: New York University, Center on International Cooperation): 23–30. Singh, R. (2015) “Indian Army punishes 2 soldiers for sexual abuse in UN missions,” Hindustan Times (29 June), available online at www.hindustantimes.com/india/indian-armypunishes-2-soldiers-for-sexual-abuse-in-un-missions/story-UHwqPJ0UBXfflCn51oPobI. html. Tardy, T. (2011) Peace Operations: The Fragile Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). Teitt, S. (2008) China and the Responsibility to Protect (Brisbane: Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect). Teitt, S. (2009) “Assessing Polemics, Principles and Practices: China and the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 1(2): 208–236. Thakur, R. (2006) The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The People’s Daily (2015) “Jiuyuan Mali Bei Jiechi Zhongguo Renzhi Shimo (An Overview of Rescuing Chinese Hostages in Mali)” (23 November), available online at http://world.people. com.cn/n/2015/1123/c1002-27842634.html (accessed 26 May 2018). Traub, J. (2006) The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in an Era of American Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). UN (United Nations) (2016a) “‘The Independent Special Investigation into the Violence which Occurred in Juba in 2016 and UNMISS Response’, Drafted by Major General Patrick Cammaert of the Netherlands,” SG/A/1677-AFR/3433-PKO/601 (23 August). UN (United Nations) (2016b) “Executive Summary of the Independent Special Investigation into the Violence Which Occurred in Juba in 2016 and UNMISS Response” (1 November), available online at https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/ Public_Executive_Summary_on_the_Special_Investigation_Report_1_Nov_2016.pdf (accessed 4 June 2018). UN General Assembly (2002) “Fifty-Seventh Session: 58th Plenary Meeting,” A/57/PV.58 (25 November). UN General Assembly (2005) “Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 16 September 2005: 60/1. 2005 World Summit Outcome,” A/RES/60/1 (24 October). UN General Assembly (2008) “United Nations Human Resources Structures must be adapted to meet growing demands of peacekeeping, other field operations, Budget Committee told,” GA/AB/3837 (24 March).

China, India, and global security  549 UN General Assembly (2009a) “Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: Report of the Secretary-General,” A/63/677 (12 January). UN General Assembly (2009b) “Sixty-Third Session: 99th Plenary Meeting,” A/63/PV.99 (24 July). UN General Assembly (2012) “Letter Dated 11 October 2012 from the Chair of the Senior Advisory Group on Rates of Reimbursement to Troop-Contributing Countries and Other Related Issues to the Secretary-General Transmitting the Report of the Group,” A/C.5/67/10 (Annex) (15 November). UN General Assembly (2018) “Fifth Committee, Seventy-Second Session, Summary Record of the 33rd Meeting,” A/C.5/72/SR.33 (3 May). UN News and Media (2010) “Ceremony Held at Shanghai Expo for Peacekeepers Day” (29 May), available online at www.unmultimedia.org/photo/detail.jsp?id=438/438617&key=631& query=police&so=0&sf=date (accessed 26 May 2018). UN Peacekeeping (2019) “Contributors to UN Peacekeeping Operations by Country and Post: Police, UN Military Experts on Mission, Staff Officers and Troop” (31 March), available online at https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/1_summary_of_contributions_2.pdf (accessed 1 June 2019). UN Security Council (2005a) “5225th Meeting,” S/PV.5225 (12 July). UN Security Council (2005b) “5319th Meeting,” S/PV.5319 (9 December). UN Security Council (2006a) “5577th Meeting,” S/PV.5577 (4 December). UN Security Council (2006b) “Resolution 1653 (2006): Adopted by the Security Council at Its 5359th Meeting, on 27 January 2006,” S/RES/1653 (27 January). UN Security Council (2006c) “Resolution 1674 (2006): Adopted by the Security Council at Its 5430th Meeting, on 28 April 2006,” S/RES/1706 (28 April). UN Security Council (2006d) “Resolution 1706 (2006): Adopted by the Security Council at Its 5519th Meeting, on 31 August 2006,” S/RES/1706 (31 August). UN Security Council (2007a) “5619th Meeting,” S/PV.5619 (12 January). UN Security Council (2007b) “5781st meeting,” S/PV.5781 (20 November). UN Security Council (2009) “Security Council, in Presidential Statement, Reaffirms Commitment to Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, Adopts Updated Aide-Memoire on Issue,” SC/9571 (14 January). UN Security Council (2011a) “6491st Meeting,” S/PV.6491 (26 February). UN Security Council (2011b) “6498th Meeting,” S/PV.6498 (17 March). UN Security Council (2011c) “6531st Meeting,” S/PV.6531 (10 May). UN Security Council (2011d) “Resolution 1970 (2011): Adopted by the Security Council at Its 6491st Meeting, on 26 February 2011,” S/RES/1970 (26 February). UN Security Council (2011e) “Resolution 1973 (2011): Adopted by the Security Council at Its 6498th Meeting, on 17 March 2011,” S/RES/1973 (17 March). UN Security Council (2012) 6826th Meeting (S/PV.6826) (30 August). UN Security Council (2013) “Resolution 2100 (2013): Adopted by the Security Council at Its 6952nd Meeting, on 25 April 2013,” S/RES/2100 (25 April). UN Security Council (2016) “Resolution 2327 (2016): Adopted by the Security Council at Its 7840th Meeting, on 16 December 2016,” S/RES/2326 (16 December). UN Security Council (2017) 8042nd Meeting,” S/PV.8042 (11 September). Vira, V. (2012) “India and UN Peacekeeping: Declining Interest with Grave Implications,” Small Wars Journal (13 July), available online at http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/ india-and-un-peacekeeping-declining-interest-with-grave-implications. Virk, K. (2013) “India and the Responsibility to Protect: A Tale of Ambiguity,” Global Responsibility to Protect 5(1): 56–83. Wang, Y. (2014) “‘The Blue Helmet: Lighting the Beacon of Peace’, Intervention by H.E. Wang Yi Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China at the High-Level Meeting on Un Peacekeeping,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (26 September), available online at www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjb_663304/wjbz_663308/2461_663310/ t1195556.shtml (accessed 9 May 2018).

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34 China and India Continuity and change in climate negotiations Lydia Powell

At the fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP 15) in Copenhagen in 2009, the French President called on the Western countries to “react” to the “hypocrisy” of China when China declined to take on commitments to reduce carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions (mitigation, in climate parlance) in response to the offer of substantial reduction of CO2 emissions by Western Europe (Rapp, Schwagerl and Traufetter 2010). India was also targeted for attack as it endorsed the position articulated by China, but most of the acrimonious commentary was reserved for China (Kanter 2009; Lee 2009; Lynas 2009). Eight years later, China and to a lesser extent India were said to be taking over leadership on climate change action from the United States (Hall 2017; Jaiswal 2017) notwithstanding the fact that China and India accounted for more than half the increase in CO2 emissions in 2017 (See BP 2018b).1 The change in perception may have been influenced, at least partly, by the ambitious targets set by both China and India to increase the share of low-carbon renewable energy sources in their energy baskets. The factors that motivated China and India to voluntarily participate in this mitigation action are discussed in the academic literature and wider media. The international relations literature argues that China and India are no longer “third world moralizers” and are emerging as “pragmatic deal makers” in climate negotiations and other multilateral forums in line with the change status from poor third world countries to global economic powers (Narlikar 2011). The environmental literature along with the popular media cites growing domestic discontent over urban pollution as an important driver of change in China (Feng 2010; Green and Stern 2016; Gardiner 2017). For cost-sensitive India, the falling cost of electricity generated by renewable energy and its competitiveness over coal are among the commonly cited explanations (Anand 2017; Upadhyay and Singh 2017; Sushma and Anand 2018). The rationality of “co-benefits” (environmental and economic benefits) in lowcarbon growth paths is cited in the environmental literature from government and non-governmental research agencies (Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change 2008; Atteridge et al. 2012; Dubash 2013; Planning Commission 2013). Other more contentious arguments in the security literature primarily concerning China’s green energy transition conclude that investment in low-carbon energy technologies is more a part of China’s strategy for global economic dominance in future technologies including energy technologies and less a path to environmental sustainability (Beckley 2011; Ong 2012) or that investment in renewable energy is effectively a cover for increasing investment in fossil fuels (Eisen 2011; Monk et al. 2016; Wright 2018; Stanway 2019). More generous arguments attributed to both China and India include concern over the increase in the share of imported energy (Steeves and Ouriques 2016; Wu 2018;

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Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation 2019) and the emergence of China and India as “Responsible global powers” (Li 2016; Saryal 2018). The design of the Paris Agreement (PA) that promoted a voluntary and bottom-up approach as a driver of progressive climate action by China and India is among the more recent arguments (Zhang et al. 2017). While these arguments are evidently salient, some are oversimplifications. The view that China and India are now leaders of climate change action as well as the counter view that their climate actions are a cover for strategic motives is rather superficial. The focus of this chapter is to explore the inconsistency between China’s and India’s domestic effort to ramp up renewable energy capacity and their formal contributions articulated in multilateral agreements such as the PA and identify less exciting but possibly more robust motivations behind their low-carbon initiatives. The similar attributes of China and India, such as the size of the populations, and diverging attributes, such as the difference in the structure of economy and their respective governance frameworks, are lenses through which the motivations behind China’s and India’s domestic actions and international commitments are explored.

Converging attributes that inform positions on climate change Negotiating the contradiction between quantity and quality For the first time in human history global economic powers such as China and India are not necessarily wealthy in terms of per capita income. Instead, they derive their economic strength more from the size of their populations and the consequent size of their economies and less from economic efficiency and knowledge- and technology-driven productivity that defined the power of Great Britain in the late nineteenth century and of the United States after World War II. China’s and India’s contributions to binding international agreements to address climate change (such as the PA) are not necessarily ambitious as they do not deviate significantly from the status quo or business-as-usual path partly because the contradiction between size and substance limits their choices, especially in the context of energy (the primary source of CO2 emissions), and partly because no other large emitter has made commitments that deviate significantly from a status quo path (Ekholm and Lindroos 2015). China is the second largest economy but its per person gross domestic product (GDP) of $8,827 is half that of small economies such as Uruguay or Trinidad and Tobago (World Bank 2017). India’s economy is the sixth largest (in current US dollars) in the world but its per capita GDP in 2017 is lower than that of Vietnam or Sudan (World Bank 2017). This contradiction between size and substance is reflected in the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of India and, to a lesser extent, China. India is one of the world’s largest energy consumers and importers, but most of its citizens live in relative energy poverty, with millions having low access to modern energy, and consequently per capita energy consumption is lower than the world average (World Bank 2017). The need to address the issue of quantity of energy to meet growing demand for energy and quality of energy to meet CO2 reduction targets limits the energy choices of India and China. China’s energy basket is dominated by fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) that accounted for about eighty-nine percent of total primary energy demand in 2017 (IEA 2018). Coal, oil, and gas use accounted for almost all of the CO2 emission from energy use,

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with coal alone accounting for eighty percent of emissions (IEA 2018). If new policies in place in 2017 to reduce CO2 emissions continue to make progress, including but not limited to policies in China’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) included in the PA, the share of fossil fuels is expected to fall to about seventy-six percent in 2040, with the largest reduction coming from coal whose share is expected to fall from about sixty-three percent in 2017 to about forty-three percent in 2040 (IEA 2018). India’s primary energy basket is also dominated by fossil fuels whose share in total primary energy demand was seventy-five percent in 2017 (IEA 2018). As much as seventy-two percent of the country’s CO2 emissions from energy use is from coal combustion (Olivier, Schure and Peters 2017; IEA 2018). Extensive use of unprocessed biomass such as firewood in households that accounts for about twenty-two percent of total primary energy demand in India reduces the share of fossil fuels in the primary energy basket compared to China. If new policies are adopted by India, including but not limited to the NDC, the share of fossil fuels in India’s primary energy basket is expected to increase marginally to seventy-six percent by 2040, with the share of coal remaining at about forty-five percent (IEA 2018). Unlike China where the share of coal is likely to fall substantially in the next two decades, the share of coal in India’s primary energy basket is likely to remain the same, primarily because household access to modern energy forms, particularly electricity, is already near universal in China but not so in India (IEA 2018). In the next two decades, millions of Indian households in villages will not only gain physical connection to the electricity grid for the first time but will also start using electricity for everyday activities like their affluent counterparts in the cities. This is an important distinction between China and India that the chapter will return to in later sections. Size, which underwrites the economic status of China and India, is a liability in framing the country’s identity in climate change negotiations. Small island nations such as Maldives, whose per capita CO2 emissions are twice that of India or Caribbean small island states whose per capita emissions are five times that of India (World Bank 2017), are assigned the identity of victims of climate change while the identity of key perpetrator is thrust upon India. This is despite the fact that India has more people with incomes of about a tenth of that in small island states exposed to risks such as drought, floods, and sea-level rise linked to climate change (O’Donnell and Wodon 2015; Barbier and Hochard 2018; Winsemius et al. 2018). Likewise, “small states” (identified by the World Bank database) that have CO2 emissions comparable to that of China are in “morally superior” negotiating blocks that include industrialized countries calling for deep “de-carbonization,” while China, as the largest emitter of CO2, pushed into a more defensive negotiating block. Size is also a liability in meeting climate change obligations, as a large share of the cost falls on large countries (Spence 2009; Nordhaus 2017). Historically, the abundance of domestically available coal and the stability of its price have made it an indispensable choice of fuel for electricity generation in China and India. Shifting away from coal would not only mean higher economic costs (including cost of back-up or storage and system integration costs for renewable energy) but also substantial social and political costs because replacing coal would also mean replacing an entrenched political economy based on coal. However, size also gives both China and India veto power in climate negotiations because without their participation climate negotiations are meaningless given the magnitude of their current and future CO2 emissions. Prem Shankar Jha’s observation that

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“China and India have the capacity to destroy the world” ( Jha 2010) is not an exaggeration especially under the “catastrophe” narratives that form the basis of the discourse on climate change risk (Beck 1992; Hulme 2008; Haibach and Schneider 2013). China and India leverage the position of strength and their position of weakness using ambiguities in the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) that is part of the framework of formal climate negotiations. Leveraging the principle of CBDR China and India have called for strong adherence to the principle of CBDR, incorporated in Article 3(1) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (UN 1992) since negotiations on climate change action mediated by the United Nations (UN) began in the 1990s (Powell 2015). The CBDR concept is a product of decades of effort by China and India to highlight the divergence between developed and developing countries in their respective responsibility toward international environmental degradation and protection. The historic speech by the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the United Nations Conference on Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 that blamed poverty for pollution could be seen as a source of inspiration of the CBDR principle: Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters? ... The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty. Nor can poverty be eradicated without the use of science and technology. (Gandhi 1972) The key message in the speech was that “economic development” was behind environmental problems in the developed countries and poverty and the “lack of development” caused the environmental problems of the developing countries (UN 1971). This sentiment was reflected in the interventions of the Chinese delegation which strongly influenced amendments to the draft declaration of the Stockholm conference bringing out the differences between the developed and developing countries (Lu and Tsai 2006; Jiang 2015). Later China, with support from India, leveraged the idea of differentiated responsibilities to incorporate amendments to the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The Protocol called for establishment of an interim multilateral fund for financial and technical assistance to developing countries to reduce ozone-depleting substances (Zhao and Ortolano 2003). In the following decades, China and India continued to call for differentiation of responsibilities of developed and developing countries in transboundary environmental problems. The persistent efforts by China and India culminated in the explicit articulation of the CBDR principle in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (Ibrahim, Deleuil and Farah 2016) and in the UNFCCC in 1992 (Honkonen 2009). The inclusion of the CBDR principle in the climate change negotiating framework is a significant achievement because concern over the distribution of the temporal, political, social, and economic cost of addressing climate change is now embedded in the conceptual structure of international environmental law (Brunnee and Streck 2013). Though legal scholars disagree on whether CBDR has attained the status of international customary law (Honkonen 2009), there is widespread acceptance that CBDR is part of the norm in climate negotiations (Stalley 2018).

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In the last decade China and India have continued to reiterate the significance of the CBDR framework in multilateral forums. In a short speech at a UN climate summit in 2009, Chinese President Hu Jintao referred to CBDR three times and reiterated the link between development and environmental pollution: Climate change is an environmental issue, but also a development issue, as it is closely connected with the development stage, way of life, size of population and resource endowment of different countries and their places in the international division of labor. (Hu 2009) At the Paris climate summit in 2015, the Chinese President Xi Jinping explicitly called for adherence to the CBDR principle: Given the difference between developed and developing countries in historical responsibility, developing stage and coping capability, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, instead of being obsolete, must continue to be adhered to. (Xi 2015) At COP 24 in Katowice in 2018, China and India as part of G77 (UNFCCC 2018) and the BASIC group (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) (MoEFCC 2018) insisted the equity principle be embedded in the CBDR framework in the global stock-take (GST), i.e. the monitoring framework for commitments under the PA, and cautioned against the dilution of the CBDR (India Today 2018). Politically, the CBDR principle resolves the tension between national sovereignty (autonomy in decision making) that is of strategic importance to both China and India and the demand from industrialized countries that all countries accept some form of contribution to multilateral agreements designed to address climate change (Zamboni 2008; Josephson 2017). CBDR also preserves legal equality among states (Weinschel 1951) but provides for economic inequality, two attributes that are important to the Asian giants. However, the broad sense of fairness that CBDR conveys intuitively is less important to them (and also to other negotiating blocks in climate change platforms) than the ambiguity CBDR introduces over interpretations of common and differentiated responsibilities. China and India along with other negotiating blocks have exploited this in discussions on climate change. The strategy of leveraging the discrepancy in negotiating frameworks is not unique to China and India, but it is a strategy that is consistent with their stand in other spheres of international engagement. For example, China and India are seen as “sovereignty hawks” (strong preference for non-interference in domestic policy making) that have taken far-reaching measures (relative to their historic status as closed economies) to harness globalization while also limiting the economic and political adjustment costs in the interest of domestic stability (Roberts 2011; Laidi 2012; Johnson 2013). In the context of climate change, the two countries use CBDR to resist the efforts of the industrialized countries to impose “hierarchical” or “vertical” norms on carbon mitigation through multilateral climate agreements.2 Yet they voluntarily embrace “peer-group” or “horizontal” norms to invest in low-carbon renewable energy that not only enables them to be counted among leading climate-conscious countries but also allows them to derive economic and political benefits from global low-carbon initiatives (Axelrod 1986; Florini 1996).

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The endorsement of “common responsibility” to protect the environment and climate is used to validate China and India’s status as responsible global powers. Differentiation in responsibility on climate action accommodates the pragmatic realist sentiments of both China and India toward reducing their share of the costs of climate action. China and India interpret “differentiation” as a burden-sharing provision anchored in historic, moral, and legal responsibility to pay, which is a departure from the industrialized countries’ interpretation of “differentiation” as a pragmatic problem-solving formula based on current and future capacity for contributions (Mickelson 2000; Stone 2004; Brunnee and Streck 2013). Many academic observers have portrayed China and India as reluctant participants of the prevailing Western international order and consequently reluctant suppliers of global public goods (Breslin 2013; Tellis and Mirski 2013). If so there must be a strong incentive for China and India to invest in providing “environmental security,” a global public good by investing in renewable energy (Wu 2013) albeit outside an international mandate to do so. Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) The formal contributions of China and India articulated in their respective NDCs which is a part of the PA reflect their interpretation of the CBDR principle. Domestic targets for renewable energy are cited in their NDCs, but they are not part of the formal contributions (Press Information Bureau 2016). China’s primary NDCs are: to achieve peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030, making best efforts to peak earlier; to lower CO2 emission per unit GDP by sixty to sixty-five percent from 2005 levels; to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy to around twenty percent; and to increase the forest stock volume by around 4.5 billion cubic meters from 2005 levels. Two of China’s NDC goals (peak CO2 emission by 2030 and increase share of non-fossil fuels to twenty percent) were foreshadowed in a US– China bilateral agreement signed in 2014 (NBC News 2014; The White House 2014). The goals mentioned in India’s NDCs are: to reduce the emissions intensity of GDP by thirty-three to thirty-five percent compared to the 2005 level by 2030; to achieve about forty percent cumulative installed capacity for electric power generation from non-fossil fuel energy by 2030, with the help of transfer of technology and low-cost international finance including from the Green Climate Fund (GCF); and to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030. As observed earlier, the difference in the development status of China and India explains the fact that India’s NDCs are not only less ambitious compared to China’s but also hedged with conditions. Both China and India are on track to meet or exceed all their NDC targets for 2030 ( Jiang, Tamura and Hanaoka 2017). China’s commitment that CO2 emissions will peak around 2030 is closely linked to the peak in China’s coal use in 2014 (Wang et al. 2018). The share of coal in China’s primary energy mix declined to about sixty percent in 2017, the lowest on record, from sixty-two percent in 2016 and seventy percent just ten years ago (BP 2018a). Though policies to shift away from coal were among the reasons, a major cause of the decline in the growth of coal consumption was the shift in economic activity from heavy industry to the services sector and lower rates of economic growth compared to growth rates in the previous decades (Qi et al. 2016). One of the important consequences of the peak in coal demand is that the growth in China’s CO2 emissions reduced substantially (Qi et al. 2018).

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China’s energy intensity target is consistent with the trend of steep decline that started in 1980. Between 1980 and 2010, China’s GDP increased eighteen times but China’s energy consumption increased only by five times which resulted in a seventy percent decline in China’s energy intensity (energy consumption per unit GDP) (World Bank 2014). The continued improvement in energy intensity along with the structural shift of the economy away from heavy industry increases the likelihood of China’s emissions peaking by 2022 (BP 2019a). The share of non-fossil fuels (including nuclear and hydro-power) in China’s primary energy basket was about eleven percent in 2017 (IEA 2018). If China successfully implements current policies, the share of non-fossil fuels in China’s primary energy basket is expected to increase to about nineteen percent by 2030 and twenty-four percent by 2040 (IEA 2018). The key question here is whether China would have made ambitious commitments to increase the share of renewable energy if its manufacturing growth had not peaked for reasons that are unrelated to climate change mitigation. Put differently, is China’s shift away from fossil fuels a co-benefit of the peak in China’s export-led manufacturing growth? If so, China’s commitment to peak CO2 emissions by around 2030 is not a significant deviation from the course it would have followed on account of the general slowdown in economic growth rates attributable to both external and cyclical factors as well as internal structural factors. The consequent decline in the growth in demand for commodities that include, but is not limited to, coal is a significant factor in Chinese CO2 emissions peaking before 2030. Effectively China’s position is similar to that of other affluent countries where industrialization (along with population and consumption growth) has peaked and led to stagnant or declining growth in energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Figure 34.1 shows the CO2 emissions among major producers from 1965 to 2017.

Million Tones (MT)

25000

20000

Europe

15000

USA

10000

India

5000

China

1965 1967 1969 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017

0

Figure 34.1 CO2 emissions: China, India, United States, and Europe, 1965–2017. Source: Data compiled from BP (2019b).

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India is also well on its way to meet or exceed all its NDC commitments. India’s CO2 emission intensity per unit of GDP has been decreasing (from 0.6 kg/GDP[$-PPP] in 1990 to 0.3 kg/GDP in 2016) on account of improvements in efficiency of energy use and also because economic growth in the last two decades has come from an expansion of services over energy-intensive manufacturing (World Bank 2017). If the decline in CO2 emission intensity continues at the current rate of about 2.5 percent per year India will easily achieve its target of thirty-three to thirty-five percent reduction in CO2 intensity. Given that India has far more ground to cover in its path toward industrialization compared to China, its commitment to increase the share of non-fossil fuel energy is more generous but also more cautious than China. Unlike China which has committed to increasing the share of non-fossil fuels in its primary energy basket, India’s commitment is limited to capacity in power generation (capacity is the potential to generate rather than actually generate electricity). The share of non-fossil fuels (including hydro and nuclear power) in power generation capacity in 2018 was thirty-six percent which means that the target of forty percent by 2030 is well within reach (CEA 2018). Despite the optimism over achievement of NDC goals, neither China’s nor India’s efforts are likely to curtail average increase in temperature to less than 2°C, the most important objective of the PA (Admiraal et al. 2015). An assessment of NDCs based on equity (including historic responsibility), capability (capacity to pay), equality (emission rights per person), and cost effectiveness classifies China’s NDC targets as “highly insufficient” and outside the country’s fair share and, in addition, inadequate to limit global warming to below 2°C (Climate Action Tracker 2018a). On the same basis India’s efforts are rated as “2°C compatible” and within the country’s fair share but still not fully consistent with goals of the PA (Climate Action Tracker 2018b). Assessment by other agencies based on alternative criteria falls within the broad rating cited earlier (UN 2019). Domestic policies and targets that contribute to NDC goals China is currently home to thirty percent renewable energy capacity worldwide, which is twice as much capacity as any other nation (Sandalow 2018). China’s Thirteenth Five Year Plan contains the goal of increasing hydro-power capacity by 60 GW and raising the total hydro-power capacity to 380 GW by 2020 and 470 GW by 2025 (Sandalow 2018). China also aims to increase the capacity for wind-power generation from about 164 GW in 2017 (a third of global capacity) to about 259 GW by 2020 (including offshore), with specific regional targets. In 2017, China’s solar power generation capacity of 130 GW was larger than the total solar power capacity in the rest of the world (REN21 2018). China’s Thirteenth plan targets an addition of about 110 GW of solar energy capacity by 2020, mostly in distributed forms of photovoltaic generation (Gosens, Kaberger and Wang 2017). In 2015–2016, the new Indian government revised the target for renewable energy capacity to 175 GW by 2022 that included 100 GW of solar (from about 17 GW in 2015–2016), 60 GW of wind (from about 32 GW), 10 GW of biomass, and 5 GW of small hydro-power (Ministry of Finance 2015). The government also increased the target for solar-water pumps to over 100,000 from less than a thousand. To reach the overall target set for renewable energy, India would have to develop, in just seven years, a renewable energy capacity that exceeds its overall power-generation capacity developed over the last sixty years.

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Implementation of China’s and India’s ambitious policies for renewable energy is predicated upon their capacity for domestic intervention (Ruggie 1982). In both countries, the electricity sector, which is the primary vector (carrier) for renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy, is under direct or indirect state control at the federal and regional level. Though their private sectors are significant investors in renewable energy production and distribution, they are critically dependent on indirect state support that includes, but is not limited to, financial and non-financial subsidies. State capacity for domestic action In China, less than four percent of traditional power-generating assets are owned by the private sector. State ownership is evenly split between local governments and five big generation companies that were originally part of the state power corporation (Cunningham 2015). The State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) is the world’s largest electricity utility that oversees construction and operation of the power network covering twenty-six provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities (SGCC 2015), with support from two smaller networks (Buckley and Nicholas 2017). Despite regulatory reform and considerable liberalization of the electricity value chain, the federal government of China (often through the Chinese Communist Party and the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission [SASAC] of the State Council, a political body) has (i) rights of senior personnel appointment, (ii) the power to grant access to capital at preferential rates from policy banks, (iii) the power to approve the majority of projects of medium to large size through the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and other institutions, and (iv) the authority to pick industrial winners. All of the earlier points are significant levers of influence that can shape the course of the electricity sector and thus the renewable energy sector (Alva and Li 2018). In India, a significant part of the electricity value-chain is under government control at the federal or regional level. Though roughly half of India’s power generation assets are owned by the private sector, the backward link to fuels (primarily coal, which contributes roughly seventy-five percent of power generation) is controlled by the state-owned monopoly Coal India Limited (CIL) and the forward link to transmission is controlled by state-owned Power Grid Corporation of India (PGCIL) ( Jai 2015). Barring a few exceptions, the retail distribution of electricity is owned and regulated by regional governments that influence key decisions such as electricity tariffs (Pargal and Banerjee 2014). Like China, reform and liberalization of the electricity sector have made substantial progress in the last two decades, but political factors continue to influence the sector, directly or indirectly (FE Bureau 2014; PTI 2018b). In both China and India, renewable energy investments receive a host of capital and other financial subsidies (Moody’s Investor Service 2018) along with a host of nonfinancial subsidies such as mandates for purchase of renewable energy (Sraisth 2018) and priority access to the electricity grid that guarantee demand for renewable energy (Alva and Li 2018). In China “guaranteed renewable energy purchasing” (guaranteed purchasing hour) was included in the Renewable Energy Law of 2006 (Chen 2015). In India, “renewable purchase obligations” (RPOs) were incorporated in the Electricity Act 2003 and the Tariff Policy 2006 (Ministry of Power 2006) to encourage the purchase of renewable energy by distribution companies (Prasad 2018b). Renewable energy is given priority in the Chinese power market, particularly for interregional and interprovincial

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trading (Davidson 2018). In India, interregional transmission charges for renewable energy are waived to increase the competitiveness of renewable energy (Prasad 2018a). The “must run” status for renewable energy in India (CERC 2016, 2017) to address the issue of intermittency is similar to the mandate for “maximum full load hours” in China (Lu et al. 2016). Both countries have feed-in-tariffs for renewable energy that reduce financial risk for renewable power generators. In India, feed-in-tariffs for renewable energy are offered by both federal and regional governments in addition to projects that are offered on the basis of competitive bidding on electricity tariffs (Moneycontrol 2017). China has feed-in-tariffs for power generated from both fossil fuels and non-fossil fuels. In the case of renewable-based power, the difference between the feed-in-tariff of renewable power (say wind or solar power) and the provincial benchmark feed-in-tariff for coal power is covered by the renewable energy development fund (Ball et al. 2017). The presence of the state in the energy sector in China and India enables both governments to “socialise” the cost of decarbonization (Darwall 2015; Schmalensee et al. 2015; Ghosh, Sharma and Subramanian 2017; EIA 2019). Both countries emphasize contracts and auctions rather than bilateral markets to increase the share of decentralized low-carbon energy (Azuela and Barroso 2014; SECI 2018). Decisions on low-carbon energy sources are made through centralized mechanisms in which consumers do not necessarily participate (Ram 2018). The costs determined centrally are passed through to consumers administratively rather than through responsive price mechanisms. As the low-carbon energy transition has to be pursued at relatively low levels of per capita incomes in China and India, their ability to use markets as the instrument of change is limited. Consequently, both countries are less dependent on policy initiatives such as carbon prices and taxes which are difficult to implement when income levels are low. Ironically the active role of the state in the energy sectors of both China and India that was until recently portrayed as a threat to the global energy order mediated mostly by market forces is now the driver of the shift toward low-carbon renewable energy sources (Madan 2010; Lee 2012; Kennedy 2013; Isoaho, Goritz and Schulz 2017). The key question in this context is whether the two countries are using their capacity for domestic action primarily to contribute toward global climate change mitigation action or do they have other motives? (Mizo 2016). The divergence in their economic structure offers some clues for analysis.

Diverging attributes The emergence of China and India as major forces in the global economy is the most significant economic development in the last three decades. The simultaneous emergence of two large economies has led to the perception, at least among more casual observers, that China and India are similar. Though they started almost at the same level of per capita incomes three decades ago and shared the goal of poverty alleviation through economic growth, their development trajectories and achievements have diverged significantly. China: domestic manufacturing as dominant driver of low-carbon initiatives China’s growth exploded through the industrial sector aided by low-cost manufacturing; India’s growth in contrast was fueled by rapid expansion of services which was not the traditional development path that begins with low-wage manufacturing (Bosworth and

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Collins 2007). Between 1978 and 1995 manufactured exports rose over hundred-fold in China (Brandt, Ma and Rawski 2016). By 2006, China overtook Japan as the world’s largest manufacturer (in gross value-added basis) and industry accounted for roughly half of China’s GDP in 2005–2006 (Valli and Saccone 2015). In 2010, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest manufacturer (Morrison 2018). Industry dominated by manufacturing contributed forty percent to China’s GDP in 2017 (Statista 2018). In contrast, India’s industry as a whole contributed about twenty-three percent to GDP in 2017–2018, with manufacturing contributing about seventeen percent (Ministry of Finance 2018). This divergence in industrial capacity between China and India throws some light on China’s emergence as both a producer and consumer of renewable energy technologies in the last decade and India’s contribution largely as a consumer of renewable energy. In the case of solar energy, which has greater potential for expansion than wind, China has roughly fifty-four percent of global capacity for refining polycrystalline silicon (solar grade), eighty-seven percent of capacity for production of silicon wafers, sixty-nine percent of capacity for solar cells, and seventy-one percent of capacity for solar modules (Liu 2018). India has no significant capacity in any part of the solar manufacturing value chain, and consequently India depends on imports mostly from China for over ninety percent of its solar equipment (PTI 2018a). Turbine manufacturing for wind energy is less concentrated, with market share distributed among European, American, and Chinese companies (Statista 2017). However, Chinese wind turbine manufacturers that dominate China’s market account for over sixty percent of global wind turbine manufacturing capacity (BNEF 2019). The single largest Indian wind turbine manufacturer that started with a “first mover” advantage over China about a decade ago has since lost its advantage to China, with India’s market share shrinking to less than three percent in 2017 (Wind Power Monthly 2017). In storage (batteries) China’s dominance is stronger, as it controls roughly eighty percent of manufacturing capacity globally (Overland 2019). Though China’s solar energy program was initially designed to meet low-end demand for electricity from rural households, it leveraged its manufacturing capabilities to respond to high-end demand for solar panels from Germany, Spain, and Italy in the 1990s (Fialka 2016). Provincial and local governments saw the opportunity to generate skilled and semi-skilled jobs by setting up solar manufacturing facilities, leveraging funding support for “strategic industries” from the federal government (Wang, Luo and Guo 2014). This expansion led to a dramatic reduction of solar panel and module cost for renewable energy consumers, initially in Europe and eventually in other parts of the world including India (Fialka 2016). Globally between 1980 and 2012, solar module costs fell by about ninety-seven percent (Chandler 2018). According to a detailed analysis of factors behind the cost reduction, policies that stimulated market-growth accounted for sixty percent of overall cost decline in solar modules and government-funded research and development (R&D) accounted for the remaining forty percent (Kavlak, McNerney and Trancik 2018). R&D in advanced economies was important in the early years, but the exponential costdecrease in the last decade was due to economies of scale in manufacturing for which China must be given credit. Though cost reductions in technologies to harness solar energy have expanded the consumer base for solar energy, the effort was driven less by China’s desire to subsidize the production of global public goods and more by China’s quest to maintain its

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competitive edge in manufacturing based on cheap labor and abundant capital. China’s twelfth five-year plan articulated a green strategy to turn low-carbon industries into major drivers of the economy (Dembicki 2017). The Communist Party of China endorsed the strategy of leveraging low-carbon development for China’s economic and social development (Central Committee of the Communist Party of China 2016). The development of renewable energy manufacturing capabilities was thus not just a part of China’s environmental and foreign policy (in the context of climate change negotiations) but also a part of its industrial policy. Behind China’s drive to maintain its competitive edge in manufacturing renewable energy technologies (and other goods) is what Feng refers to as “economic insecurity” that arises primarily from China’s qualitative weakness (Feng 2010). China believes that the global conversation about climate change has moved from “well-intentioned” environmentalism to considerations of the future geo-political international economic order and not investing in low-carbon energy sources would affect China’s economic and trading competitiveness (Feng 2010). China’s suspicion that the real motivation of Western powers is in securing economic advantages masked by a powerful ethical discourse in climate dialogues has some merit when seen in the context of trade disputes over renewable energy technology between countries that include, but are not limited to, China and India. Developing as well as developed countries have built up financial and non-financial trade barriers to protect their renewable-energy manufacturers (Lewis 2014). Trade barriers increase the cost of transitioning to low-carbon growth and thus go against the spirit of solving a common global problem of climate change (Cosbey 2011). The imposition of carbon-related border adjustment taxes proposed by the United States suggests that “green-marginalization” is indeed a realistic possibility (Bullock 2018). In this light, the conclusion by Fuzuo Wu (2013) that China’s negotiating strategy on climate change is more reactive than proactive and is shaped by asymmetric interdependence with the rest of the world is accurate. The motivations that turned China into a consumer of renewable energy are different from those that turned China into a producer of renewable energy technologies (Cao and Groba 2013). Today, China is the world’s largest consumer of renewable energy (Zhang 2017), but in the early stages of the industry the need to absorb excess capacity, particularly of solar modules, was the motivation behind domestic consumption (Wang, Luo and Guo 2014). Following the lead of Germany, China introduced attractive feedin-tariffs to promote the domestic use of solar energy in 2013 (Fialka 2016). By 2015, China had surpassed Germany as the largest market for solar energy in the world. Domestic consumption of renewable energy (seen as part of its climate change policy) by China is in large part a co-benefit of its industrial strategy. India: multiple drivers behind low-carbon initiatives The motivations behind India’s ambitious targets for renewable energy, other than contributing to climate change action by reducing CO2 emissions, are less evident. In choosing to remain predominantly as a consumer of renewable energy, India has chosen the more expensive path of producing a public good at domestic expense despite having a per capita income of less than a fifth of China. This suggests greater influence of international drivers over domestic drivers in India’s renewable energy policies. Its desire to be seen as a global power and responsible actor along with its fear of being isolated in

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negotiations (Dubash 2009) suggests a strong influence of foreign policy on its environmental policy. The flow of equity foreign direct investments (FDIs), especially pension funds looking for ethical and green investment opportunities, which is a key factor behind India’s successful renewable energy projects, may also be read as international influence. In 2015–2016, FDI equity inflows into the renewable energy industry in India were almost equal to the FDI flows into the traditional power industry (OGD PMU 2018). Renewable energy projects enjoy sovereign assurance of guaranteed long-term returns that make these projects an attractive asset class for pension funds (Tripathy and Varadhan 2017; The Economist 2019). Effectively the Indian state uses its capacity for domestic intervention to guarantee a seemingly cost-less way of addressing the challenges posed by climate change. The redistribution of the costs of meeting renewable-energy targets among electricity rate-payers and tax-payers in India is diffused and is not contested strongly as it is being currently contested in more affluent countries such as France (Daily Express 2018). Ambitious targets for renewable-energy projects and the international rhetoric around it provide the opportunity for Indian leaders to appropriate the upside of such policies, such as international prestige, while passing on the downside such as costs to domestic energy consumers. A related influence is the small but articulate new middle and elite class in India whose interests and opinions are often aligned with those of their counterparts in affluent countries (Esteva 2010). Aided by an activist English-language media, their positions on climate change are strongly reiterated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that invariably depend on funding from Western institutions (Batabyal 2014). The popularity of internationally influenced values on climate change action among the educated elite is important in domestic politics even though this group does not constitute a majority in elections (Lippmann 1955). As a result, the Indian government may actually be supplying environmental goods at a higher level than desired by the median voter (Posner 2009). The median voter in India is not ideologically opposed to addressing climate change but is typically poor with more immediate concerns about food, water, shelter, and income (Singha 2019). Hard domestic rationales, such as the competitiveness of renewable energy over traditional energy, are widely cited as the drivers of India’s renewable energy program but they are subject to contestation (Niti Aayog 2017; Tongia and Gross 2018). The competitiveness of electricity generated by renewable energy at the plant level does not translate into competitiveness at the system level, and this imposes additional costs on traditional generators due to frequent ramping and also on India’s distribution companies that are under extreme financial stress (Prateek 2018). Notwithstanding the narrative of competitiveness of renewable energy, state programs for providing subsidized access to modern energy for lighting to poor households rely predominantly on grid-based electricity (Banerjee et al. 2014). State programs for providing access to cooking fuels are also entirely based on liquid petroleum gas (LPG). These re-distributive social projects are much larger in scale and scope and have greater domestic political and financial support than do renewable energy projects (Ahmad, Sharma and Singh 2018; Singh 2018; Soman et al. 2018; Tripathi 2019). Heavy dependence on imported solar panels and modules does not support the notion that India’s renewable energy program is driven by concern over energy import dependence (Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation 2019). Ironically, the economic viability of its celebrated solar initiative is critically dependent

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on cheap imported solar equipment. India is not alone in this predicament, as many countries that are dependent on low-cost imported equipment for underwriting the competitiveness of renewable energy projects are often doing so at the cost of domestic industries (The Economic Times 2018). Overall the degree of influence of international rationales on India’s climate change actions and responses appears to be higher than that of China. However, these international influences have not trumped domestic constraints on climate change action such as the need to accelerate growth and improve living standards even if it is powered by fossil fuels.

Conclusion Unearthing the motives of China and India in multilateral climate negotiations invites a lot of forward-looking analysis. The PA hailed as a diplomatic success of industrialized powers consolidated a bottom-up approach to mitigation targets. The bottom-up approach in PA is cited as a key reason for China and India’s participation in mitigation action (Streck, Keenlyside and Unge 2016). But the bottom-up approach is also blamed for the ineffectiveness of the PA. If so, did the domestic interests of China and India compromise the PA and consequently endorse the proposition that China and India are reluctant suppliers of global public goods (Tellis and Mirski 2013; Hou, Keane and Velde 2014)? The bottom-up approach in the PA was an inevitable consequence of the removal of the firewall between Annex I (industrialized countries that were expected to reduce CO2 emissions under the Kyoto Protocol) and non-Annex I countries (less developed poor countries that were exempted from such commitments) in 2009 at Copenhagen (Rajamani 2010; Falkner 2016; Saryal 2018), a development China and India had tried to resist in all COP negotiations. Though a price was extracted from the industrialized countries in the form of a promise to fund mitigation and adaptation activities in developing countries, with at least $100 billion a year by 2020, the blurring of the distinction between industrialized and industrializing countries meant that all countries would be expected to contribute to mitigation action irrespective of their economic status (Bodansky 2010). The PA merely brought these developments to their logical conclusion by codifying bottom-up voluntary contributions on mitigation action from all countries (Bodansky 2017). More importantly, the PA sidestepped distributional conflicts inherent in the post-Kyoto negotiations with careful wording of the legal language (Vidal 2015) that limited obligations to procedural issues (Slaughter 2015). “Ratcheting up” of ambitions was tied to economic growth which means that the wealthier countries become, the greater will be their contribution to climate change mitigation. The PA promised mobilization of climate finance from a variety of sources, instruments, and channels (article 9[3]) (Clémençon 2016). This meant that commercial investments by the private sector for renewable energy and other projects could now be counted as financial assistance to developing countries. These key provisions of the PA favor long-held positions of the industrialized countries. It would be premature therefore to conclude that China and India have moved from being norm-takers to becoming norm-makers. However, the dilution of binding obligations in the context of mitigation is a victory for the veto power of China and India, because the PA effectively acknowledged that none of the economic powers can be forced into drastic mitigation targets (Falkner 2016).

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The de facto status of veto players “whose agreement is required for a change of the status quo” (Narlikar 2010) is a natural consequence of their “size” rather than the result of China and India firmly establishing the primacy of domestic policies in climate change negotiations. China and India used this veto power constructively to upset the “environmental risk management narrative” that influenced negotiations for nearly two decades and replaced it with the narrative of “economic growth within ecological limits” (Sanwal 2015). In place of shared risk, the two have made shared prosperity central. But since China and India’s “quantity” is not necessarily matched by “quality,” they continue to hold on to the CBDR principle in formal negotiating environments to keep the door to the north–south distributional conflict open. The distributional conflict serves rather than determines China’s and India’s strategic interests (Levi 1965). The two powers are resisting the pressure of “vertical” norms (where cooperation is coercive) on decarbonization imposed by a legally qualified lawgiver such as the PA. Effectively, they are linking international climate negotiating frameworks to domestic interests and concerns in formal multilateral negotiating environments (Ham 2015). China and India have thus inadvertently enlarged the opportunity to bring moral and legal arguments to bear on the powerful economic actors (Cohen 1959) and expanded the moral and legal space for developing countries to object to the limits to growth. The seemingly contradictory pronouncements by China and India of ambitious domestic targets for renewable energy capacity and their use of state capacity to implement targets signal their adherence to a global “horizontal” norm (where cooperation is voluntary) or soft law on decarbonization. China and India care about the collective judgment of their conduct because they have an interest in reciprocal compliance and future cooperation with others (Johnstone 2005; Cass and Pettenger 2007). This affirmation of “soft law” conforms to the expectations that China and India should behave as responsible global powers in the context of climate change, without the norms being binding on them (Elster 1989; Ratner 1998). Ambitious renewable energy targets are a means of projecting influence and status and have enhanced the image of Chinese and Indian leaders. The high level of congruence between the prevailing international policy space of climate negotiations and the emerging domestic environmental policy space of China and India shows that these two arenas are not mutually exclusive (Goertz and Diehl 1992; Stevenson 2011; Ong 2012; Johnson 2013). China and India have embraced commercial diplomacy and strategic coalition-building to meet domestic targets for low-carbon energy that reflects not only their ideological tilt toward neoliberalism in their economic and foreign policy approaches (Stevenson 2011; Betz 2014) but also their ability to leverage global neo-liberal forces to serve domestic interests. By replacing competitive moralism (industrialized countries wanting to save the planet versus developing countries wanting to save their people) with competitive commercialism, China and India exposed the reality that international environmental outcomes will be shaped by economic concerns that are likely to follow market norms. Even in the domestic context, China and India perceive market norms not only as compatible with environmental protection but also necessary for the successful incorporation of environmental concern in the practices of relevant state and non-state actors. This is a product of liberal environmentalism that was institutionalized by “sustainable development” thinking now adopted wholeheartedly in both countries (Bernstein 2001). Though an ambiguous concept, “sustainable development” endorses the longheld position in China and India that environmental protection is predicated on the promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order for growth.

566  Lydia Powell

The domestic causes of international actions, identified by Kenneth Waltz (1959) as the “second image” in International Relations analysis, hold in the case of China and India in formal negotiations where vertical norms prevail. But the international causes of domestic actions (including the influence of global neo-liberal forces in shaping domestic institutions and actions) which, in turn, influence international positions, identified by Peter Gourevitch (Gourevitch 1978) as the “second image reversed,” also hold for both China and India in contexts governed by horizontal norms (Keohane and Oppenheimer 2016).

Notes 1 Between 2016 and 2017, Global CO2 emissions increased by 426.4 million tons. Emissions by China (including Hong Kong SAR) and India during the same period saw a combined increase of 218.4 million tons. 2 According to Axelrod (1986) hierarchical or vertical norms are imposed on everyone by the powerful (industrialized countries or Annex I countries in climate negotiations) and cooperation exhibited is coerced; equalitarian (peer-group or horizontal norms) norms elicit voluntary cooperation because they are derived from mutual interest.

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35 Engaging global health governance The experience of China and India Huang Yanzhong

The past three decades have witnessed profound changes in the biological and political worlds, which, in turn, have shaped the contours of global health governance (GHG). Globalization and economic development, adaptation in natural microbial populations, and a demographic transition have led to the rise of a multitude of global health challenges, including the transborder spread of infectious diseases, the rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), transboundary pollution, and unequal access to health care and medicine within and between nations. Efforts to address these challenges have been accompanied by the emergence of a new set of global health actors, processes, and institutions. While states and intergovernmental organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) remain central actors in GHG, non-state actors and public–private partnerships (PPP) such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have become indispensable global health advocates, funders, and implementers (Fidler 2010a). But rising global health challenges also underscore the limits of the existing GHG regime, which continues to be constrained by a lack of resources, insufficient coordination, and weak health system capacities. It is within this discrepancy between the needs of global collective action and the coping capacities of the existing GHG regime that the role of emerging powers such as China and India becomes relevant. Combined, China and India now account for nearly thirty-eight percent of the world’s population and more than one quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP). Their sheer population size and the vast rebalancing of wealth across the globe have nurtured a growing expectation that the two countries can and should leverage their expanding influence to fill the void left by the United States and other developed countries. Yet unlike Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, China and India face tremendous domestic health challenges, which only constrain their ability to mobilize the domestic resources and political support needed for engaging GHG. This chapter discusses the role of China and India in engaging GHG by addressing the following question: to what extent has their status as emerging powers led them to play a role in GHG that is distinctive from more established powers? To that end, this chapter will first examine China and India’s contribution to the development of global health norms and institutions. Next, it will look at their participation in other global governance arrangements that seek to further global health objectives. This will be followed by a discussion of the two countries’ visions of GHG in terms of health aid models, approaches to the state in GHG, and the domestic health model.

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Background Domestic health challenges Despite robust growth, both China and India face significant domestic health and development challenges. Combined, they account for thirty-three percent of the global disease burden, measured by disability-adjusted life year. Both face acute problems in combating infectious disease. In 2017, India had the world’s largest tuberculosis-infected population, with 2.74 million new cases, while China had 889,000 new cases. Together, China and India account for thirty-seven percent of the world’s cases of MDR/RR-TB (India: twenty-four percent; China: thirteen percent) (WHO 2018). India is home to the third-largest number of individuals with HIV (2.1 million) (Avert 2019). India and China also confront the looming threat of NCDs. In India, NCDs, along with injuries, represent the largest disease burden, and NCD-caused loss of productive years is one of the highest in the world (Mondai and Van Belle 2018: 2). The NCD problem is even worse in China, where more than eighty-five percent of deaths are attributed to NCDs. In 2010, China surpassed India to become the world’s diabetes capital. The latest report suggested that four people die of cancer in China every minute (China Med Device 2018). Both countries also have to deal with some prominent health risk factors. The countries are among those most affected by smoking, the world’s leading preventable cause of death. Smoking kills approximately 1.2 million people in China and 900,000 in India every year, twenty percent and fifteen percent, respectively, of global smoking-related deaths. China is the world’s largest tobacco producer and has the world’s largest smoking population (350 million), while India is the second-largest tobacco producer and has the second-largest smoking population (195 million) (Rani et al. 2003; Zhang, Ou and Bai 2011; Amirapu 2012). The two countries also top the world in pollution-related deaths, accounting for forty-eight percent of global fatalities attributed to pollution (India: 2.5 million; China: 1.8 million) (Landrigan et al. 2018). Such internal health challenges reduce the incentives and capacity for both countries to earmark significant amount of resources to tackle health challenges in other, poorer states. Indeed, despite growing pressures to become full global health donors, China and India continue to focus on tackling their domestic challenges. As indicated by a senior Chinese official, the government interprets these internal health challenges in a broader global context: “in order for China to shoulder more global health responsibilities, the most important thing is to take care of our own business; taking care of China’s health care is itself the biggest contribution to world health” (Pan 2009). India similarly attaches greater importance in addressing its domestic health challenges than in assisting other developing countries. In a 2012 interview with the author, Arunabha Ghosh, a leading Indian scholar, believed that India was a “transitional” power and considered domestic issues “paramount” (interview, New Delhi, 30 January 2012). Shifting processes and priorities in engaging global health In spite of the mounting domestic health challenges, both countries have historically been a provider in development assistance for health (DAH). Between 1963 and 2012, China dispatched medical teams to seventy-three countries, including fifty-six Chinese Medical Teams (CMTs) to Africa alone (SCIO 2012). Beginning in the 1990s, China

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has diversified its aid by investing increasingly in health-related infrastructure and human resources. By the end of 2011, China had already built one hundred fully stocked hospitals in fifty-two countries and held more than 400 training courses for 15,000 foreign health-care personnel.1 China’s health grants to Africa reached $3.8 billion during the five-year period between 2009 and 2012, which represented a 146 percent increase over the five-year period between 2004 and 2008 (Shajalal et al. 2017). In 2014, during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, China kicked off its largest ever response to an international humanitarian crisis, offering US$123 million worth of humanitarian aid to the global Ebola control efforts (Huang 2017). India has also dispensed significant resources, donating medicines, diagnostics, ambulances, and other supplies to recipient countries. Like China, much of India’s DAH takes the form of health infrastructure development. India has shown strong interest in leveraging areas in which it maintains a comparative advantage such as information and communications technology. For example, hospitals and universities in Western Africa are networked together with counterparts in India to facilitate an information exchange of best practices through the Pan-African e-Network (Huang 2013). Between 2009 and 2012, India committed at least US$100 million to bilateral health projects in nearly twenty countries in Africa and South and Southeast Asia (GHSi 2012). While both countries deliver DAH primarily on a bilateral basis, they have shown increasing interest in participating in multilateral global health arrangements. In 2011, health ministers of China, India, and other BRICS countries held their first meeting in Beijing, committing themselves to using the platform as a “forum of coordination, cooperation and consultation on relevant matters related to global public health” (BRICS Information Centre 2011). During the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, China worked with WHO and the Lancet to host the International Scientific Symposium on Influenza A (H1N1) Pandemic Response and Preparedness. At the regional level, China proposed a series of important initiatives on the control of avian flu and the management of public health emergencies through participation in the ASEAN+3 Summit, the East Asia Summit, and the Asia Europe Meeting (Huang 2010). Compared to China, India has shown little initiative on the international stage with respect to acute disease outbreaks. Still, it has played a leadership role in promoting the need for urgent action against NCDs and their risk factors, especially mental health issues. In May 2012, the sixty-fifth World Health Assembly (WHA) approved a resolution sponsored by India to develop a common action plan addressing mental health.

Global health norms development Establishing global health norms Global health norms, rules, and standards are the principal institutions underpinning GHG. Both China and India have shown a willingness to work with other global health actors in setting rules and norms, including the negotiation over the two legally binding international health agreements: the revised international health regulation (IHR) and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The former is a legal instrument that aims to assist countries to work together in addressing the international spread of diseases and to avoid unnecessary interference with international trade and travel. The latter is the first treaty negotiated under the auspices of the WHO to create binding norms for the reduction of tobacco-related demand and

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supply as well as information/resource sharing. In negotiating the FCTC, China—the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco—was considered the least vigorous opponent among the “big four” (China, Japan, Germany, and the United States). The interference from the domestic tobacco industry, however, not only influenced China’s positions but also watered down the final FCTC rules. The Chinese delegation included a representative from the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (STMA), which was the de facto representative of China’s giant tobacco industry. The STMA opposed pictorial warning labels on tobacco packages, and tried to water down the provisions on “responsibilities and liabilities,” which would have allowed individuals to use the convention to sue tobacco industries for compensation. Lack of Chinese support on these provisions contributed to a less robust and more generic FCTC (see Huang 2014a: 163). China also played an important role in negotiating the revised IHR. Indeed, it was precisely the 2002–2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak in China that highlighted the gap between the 1969 IHR (which did not mandate that states report the outbreak and act quickly) and the emerging norms (under which a failure to report an outbreak of international concern is considered a serious infraction), which, in turn, accelerated the IHR revision process (Heimer 2018: 923). At the request of the Fifty-sixth WHA, the director-general established an Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) for its revision. China participated proactively in the revision process. In sharp contrast to India, which sent only three delegates to each of the three IGWG meetings, China sent twelve delegates between November 2004 and May 2005. The relatively large delegation size enabled China to have enough negotiators to cover concurrent sessions, “corridor negotiations,” and other processes. A staunch defender of state sovereignty, China allowed the WHO to take into account information provided by non-state actors in decision making (Bernard 2012: 52–53). Compared with China, India was less proactive in its participation in the IHR revision process. But it has played a constructive role in the development of other international norms, most notably the FCTC and the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework (Huang 2013). In negotiating the FCTC, India played a sophisticated twolevel game consisting of mutually reinforcing negotiations at the domestic and international levels. The Indian cabinet first approved strong provisions to regulate tobacco use, leading to the Indian Tobacco Control Act in 2003. This domestic development, in turn, strengthened India’s position at the FCTC negotiation table. During the intersession periods of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body for the FCTC, India chaired four regional consultations and forged consensus on a draft text of the FCTC (Lee et al. 2012: 354). Later, members unanimously elected India to serve as regional coordinator of WHO South-East Asian countries in the negotiations. Despite differing preferences for international health rules and norms, China and India occasionally work together in global health rule making. Both countries have participated actively in discussions to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning an entire category of weapons. Their approach, however, is not always constructive. China and India teamed up with Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia to articulate a common opinion on the exceptional role of states and blocked references to the need for improving transparency. In later meetings, they pushed for a return to negotiations on a verification protocol, a process that ended with the 2001 review conference due to strong opposition from the United States.

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Compliance with global health rules Both nations have a mixed record of compliance with global health rules. China signed the FCTC in 2003, pledging to ban smoking in workplaces and indoor public spaces by January 2011. However, a 2011 report found that China’s implementation of FCTC requirements was poor (Yang and Hu 2011: 12). The fundamental reason that China has failed to honor its international obligations is that the Chinese tobacco industry—a pillar of many provinces’ economies—has interfered with the drafting and enforcement of tobacco control policies. China Tobacco even sponsored posters in elementary schools linking smoking to academic achievement. Indeed, among emerging powers, China’s anti-tobacco policies were deemed among the weakest and least effective in the world (Waterloo News 2015). Furthermore, China’s signing and later ratification of the FCTC encouraged the industry to turn to expansion abroad to offset the potential erosion of domestic market share. China Tobacco’s globalization strategy will undermine the global tobacco control regime by increasing competition with other global tobacco companies and driving down tobacco prices (Fang, Lee and Sejpal 2017). Contrary to its record in implementing FCTC, China serves as an exemplar for compliance with IHRs. In the wake of the SARS outbreak, China not only amended its domestic laws and regulations but also dramatically improved core surveillance and response capacities to tackle public health emergencies of international concern (PHEIC). By 2008, it had already built the largest infectious disease surveillance and reporting system in the world. The central government is more responsive to transborder public health emergencies and has cooperated with WHO and the scientific community in sharing disease-related information and developing diagnostic tools and vaccines in addressing the problem. In 2007, for example, China shared the Avian Flu virus sample and information with the WHO, in sharp contrast with Indonesia’s refusal to do so under the name of “viral sovereignty.” In 2013, a decade after SARS, less than half the days lapsed between the first avian influenza H7N9 case and submission of a report to WHO (Liu et al. 2014: 797). In 2014, China announced that it had met 91.5 percent of IHR’s core competency requirements, which cover disease surveillance, laboratory capabilities, biologic management, and core competence of exit and entry ports (NHC 2014). That said, during the 2011 H1N1 pandemic, China possibly violated IHR by instituting trade and travel restrictions in defiance of WHO recommendations, namely against Mexican citizens and North American pork products, sending a signal to other countries that compliance with IHR and honest reporting practices would not be rewarded but punished instead. The overreaction undercut trust and goodwill among states, potentially exacerbating the “stag hunt” dilemma in international disease prevention and control (Tang 2009). In late August 2018, news came out that China had been holding for more than one-year samples of the H7N9 virus from US CDC labs (Baumgaertner 2018). This move is viewed as a clear deviation from the existing norm governing infectious disease outbreaks. Comparing to China, India has a better record of compliance with FCTC. It enacted comprehensive tobacco control legislation before ratifying FCTC in 2004 and launched the National Tobacco Control Program to fulfill FCTC obligations. The program raised taxes on chewable tobacco and banned the sale of tobacco products to minors. It also banned tobacco advertising and required mandatory visual health warnings to appear on all product packaging. Furthermore, India imposed a ban on smoking in public spaces, including indoor workplaces, and established a multi-stakeholder task force

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to coordinate tobacco control. Still, the country has been slow in implementing key provisions including smoke-free environments and health education (Schwartz, Wipfli and Samet 2011). India also has made progress in implementing IHR requirements. In order to strengthen the core surveillance capacity required by IHR, it earmarked approximately $80 million in 2005 to build infrastructure and human capacity (Narain, Lal and Garg 2007). The country has built two biosafety level-four (BSL-4) laboratories. Information technology (IT) has been used to facilitate rapid communication between districts and the capital for the transmission of surveillance data, videoconferencing, and distance learning. Still, India has a long way to go in building robust surveillance and response capacities. Widespread underreporting was observed in the 2012 dengue fever epidemic. Unlike China, one of the main challenges for India in complying with IHR is not deliberate cover-ups or overreaction to outbreaks, but rather the lack of substantial investment in public health infrastructure, which undermines the ability to detect and contain infectious diseases. India’s failure to construct an adequate dengue fever surveillance system, for example, contributed to a lack of awareness of the disease’s spread, slow clean-up response, and inability to develop a vaccine. Compliance with soft global health norms China and India’s role in global health norm development is also reflected in their record in internalizing global health norms and practices that are not legally binding but widely accepted in the field. One example of this “soft norm” is the best practice guidelines for global AIDS response. Formulated by WHO, UNAIDS, and other international organizations, the “Geneva Consensus” includes the following components: bureaucratic development for AIDS response; harm reduction measures in prevention; providing antiretroviral (ARV) therapy to people living with HIV (PLWH); and non-stigmatization and rights protection for PLWH (Lieberman 2009). Despite their emphasis on sovereignty and national ownership, both China and India have shown a willingness to adopt the Geneva Consensus. In India, the government launched the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) in 1992 as a comprehensive program for HIV prevention and control. Under NACP, the country has developed community-based harm-reduction alternatives to Compulsory Centers for Drug Users, including needle and syringe programs (NSP) and opioid substitution therapy (OST). More recently, India adopted WHO’s “test and treat” guidelines, allowing anyone testing positive for HIV to be eligible for treatment, regardless of their CD4 count. As a result, the percentage of PLWH who are covered by ARV treatment increased from thirty-six percent in 2013 to fifty-six percent in 2017 (Avert 2019). Stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV remain common, but India began to implement Act 2014 in 2018, which criminalizes discrimination against this group in employment, health care, education, public facilities, and public office. China was a latecomer in tackling its HIV epidemic (Huang 2006). After years of denial and inaction, the State Council set up a national committee in 1996 to coordinate HIV response work. In February 2004, it created a more powerful coordination body, the State Council Working Committee on HIV/AIDS, to guide national HIV response and mobilize a multi-sectoral approach to HIV prevention and control. The first meeting of the committee authorized harm reduction measures, including condom promotion measures, in entertainment centers, as well as needle exchange programs

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(Huang 2006). By the end of 2014, the government had set up 767 methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) clinics in twenty-eight provinces serving around 184,000 people. The government has also followed the 2013 WHO guidelines for HIV treatment, which recommends providing HIV treatment for PLWH who have a CD4 count of 500 or less. Implementation of the guidelines has enabled eighty percent of people eligible for ARV therapy (ART) in China to receive it. That said, the government has been suppressing the activities of AIDS-related human rights groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in the country, and HIV-related discrimination in employment, education, and health care remains widespread.

Participating in global governance for health At the international level, there is no integrated, comprehensive regime governing efforts to improve global health. Instead, there is a regime complex—a loosely coupled set of specific regimes—for global health. Global governance in non-health sectors (e.g. trade, international development) can have profound impacts on GHG processes and norms. Take the World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property (IP) regime, for example. In 1994, states created the WTO to establish the rules for global trade. Upon accession, members agreed to adhere to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which set standards for IP rights protection. TRIPS Article 31, in particular, places restrictions on compulsory licensing (i.e. forcing a pharmaceutical firm to license a patented drug to a generic producer) by requiring domestic production for every medicine a country may need. Implementation of this trade rule would deprive countries with significant drug manufacturing capability (e.g. India and China) from developing and exporting generic versions of patented drugs. It would also impede access to most effective medicines in countries like China and India, which themselves face a huge disease burden. Restrictions on compulsory licensing and poor accessibility to life-saving medicines for AIDS patients triggered trade disputes between developing and developed countries, leading to a debate over protecting patents versus saving lives. As a result, WTO adopted the Doha Declaration in November 2001, affirming the right of member states to grant compulsory licenses. In response to the lack of manufacturing capacities in some member states, Article 6 of the document called for an expeditious solution to the problem, thus leading to further negotiations on compulsory licensing. In this process, India, Brazil, China, and many other countries in the developing world formed a bloc to press for amending TRIPS to enable more flexible use of compulsory licensing. Their efforts led to the WTO decision on TRIPS and Public Health in August 2003. Considered the first “balancing act” of developing states in the TRIPS arena, the decision created a mechanism to allow WTO members to issue compulsory licenses to export generic versions of patented medicines to countries with insufficient or no manufacturing capacity in the pharmaceutical sector. India was one of the main parties to oppose TRIPS during the Uruguay Round (1986 to 1994). As the fourth-largest producer of prescription drugs at the time, India did not change its pharmaceutical patent law until the end of 2004 to conform to the WTO agreement. Still, Indian manufacturers have made good use of the flexibilities offered by the WTO IP regime to produce and export generic drugs to the developing world. For a time, India supplied eighty percent of all donor-funded HIV therapies in the developing world (GHSi 2012: 52). It is also the largest provider of cheap high-quality vaccines for developing countries. Moreover, Indian firms manufacture

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sixty to eighty percent of all vaccines procured by UN agencies.2 In this way, India plays a critical role in driving down prices and improving access to vaccines and life-saving drugs for millions worldwide. Compared to their Indian counterpart, the Chinese pharmaceutical industry did not take full advantage of the flexibilities in the WTO IP regime to produce or import lowcost generic drugs to benefit its own population. China amended its domestic patent law in 1993 to begin granting patents on pharmaceuticals while also limiting the scope of compulsory licensing. Driven by incentives to join the WTO and attract foreign direct investment, China not only extended all patent coverage to twenty years, but also capitulated to U.S. demands on issues such as data exclusivity and patent linkage.3 These concessions reinforced the monopoly of foreign pharmaceutical firms on the domestic market, even where patents did not exist or had expired. Until 2004, China relied almost entirely on combinations of four generic drugs to combat HIV/AIDS domestically rather than import or produce the full range of ARVs available. It prefers negotiating quietly with big pharmaceutical companies for discounts, and only occasionally and implicitly does it raise the issue of compulsory licensing to create leverage at the bargaining table. During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the government denied a domestic pharmaceutical firm’s application to produce a generic version of Tamiflu, the main first-line antiviral drug against a pandemic. This conservative approach might explain why China, even with a large generic drug industry, still trails India in providing medicines and vaccines to the developing world. Only a small number of Chinese pharmaceutical companies have been Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP)-approved by the WHO; even fewer Chinese pharmaceuticals have received WHO pre-qualification to supply to international organizations and donor funds. In 2015, China had only had eighteen drugs included on the WHO’s list of prequalified medicinal products for procurement, compared to 355 from India (Huang 2015). Instead, China is mainly an exporter of chemical raw materials. With an annual output of 800,000 tons of pharmaceutical ingredients, China became a world leader in global active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing and exports in 2012 (China Exhibition 2014). Its ability to produce and supply APIs is of critical importance to the global generic drug market, as well as to formulators in emerging economies (e.g. India) and the developed world. As NCDs increasingly threaten public health in China and India, access to affordable, effective medicine becomes imperative. In both countries, the most effective anticancer drugs are monopolized by big pharmaceutical firms, and these patented drugs are prohibitively expensive. In March 2012, the Indian Patent Office issued its first-ever compulsory license for the anticancer drug sorafenib tosylate (Nexavar), authorizing Netco, a domestic generic drug maker, to produce a low-cost version of the drug. This move led to a ninety-seven percent drop in the price premium. In China, however, thus far there have been no successful applications for compulsory licensing of any patented drugs. Until recently, Chinese law considered unapproved drugs to be counterfeit and in 2014 even arrested a leukemia sufferer who helped get a cheap generic substitute of Gleevec (a very effective treatment for leukemia) to more than 1,000 other leukemia sufferers in China (Huang 2018). But the government is facing increasing pressures to make its drugs more affordable to a majority of its population (Huang 2014b; China News 2018). In April 2018, the Chinese government unveiled measures that include authorizing compulsory license grants to enhance availability of innovative drugs (Wang 2018).

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Both countries have also leveraged the global agenda on international development, such as Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for improving health policy outcomes domestically. They have used the MDG process to improve maternal and child health and to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. Between 1990 and 2012, for example, China contributed twenty-six percent of the fall in global child deaths. Its success on MDGs provides an example for others to follow for the post-2015 development agenda. India, too, brought down its infant mortality rate and maternal mortality ratio while achieving MDG goal 6 on combating HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria (Gera et al. 2018: 256). The SDGs, with their strong focus on equity and inclusiveness, offer a window of opportunity for both countries to pursue policy shifts that are rooted in a rights-based approach to global governance (Buse and Hawkes 2015). It remains to be seen, however, whether the two countries will adopt a real human rights framework that describes government legal responsibilities and mechanisms to enhance accountability in government agenda and priority setting. As Lincoln Chen suggested, China’s main goal in engaging global health was health security, not health equity (Horton 2017: 2752). Both countries also are making headway in fulfilling the right to prevention, treatment, and control of disease, such as promoting universal health coverage (UHC), an important benchmark against which to measure and track progress toward the SDG. Today, more than ninety-five percent of the population in China is covered by some kind of health insurance and out-of-pocket payments have dropped below thirty percent. In India, however, as of 2014, less than twenty percent of the population was covered by government insurance schemes and the share of out-of-pocket payments in total health spending remains high at sixty-two percent (MacQuilkan et al. 2018: 4). But it has rolled out ambitious plans on achieving UHC after the launch of the SDGs. By establishing a “National Institution for Transforming India” (NITI) and rolling out the National Health Policy-2017 (NHP), the policy environment for achieving UHC has improved significantly (Gera et al. 2018). If UHC is successfully implemented in China and India, more than one-third of the world’s population would be covered by health insurance. The two countries are also using new global governance initiatives to improve global health outcomes. China, for example, is working with African countries to build their capacity to achieve UHC, focusing on technology transfers, access to essential medicine, and training of health personnel (Lin et al. 2016: 4). In 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to connect with sixty-five countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe in trade and infrastructure. The initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) can be viewed as an alternative to the existing U.S.-centered global governance framework and is designed to serve the infrastructure needs of fifty-six percent of the world’s population. Combined, China and India have seventeen percent of the shares in AIIB. While these initiatives are primarily economic, they have important health components. In January 2017, China signed an Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the WHO that supports IHR and promotes health security on the Silk Road. This was followed by the launch of the biennial global conferences of health on the BRI in August 2017, through which seventeen bilateral MOUs were signed between China and surrounding Silk Road countries and international agencies including UNAIDS, the Global Fund, and GAVI. These arrangements, according to some Chinese scholars and officials, would encourage international cooperation and improve the health of the people in the countries covered by the initiative. Yet as Richard Horton indicates, growing interactions may also result in more misunderstandings and

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consequences that threaten GHG (Horton 2017). There is also an absence of measurable targets and prescribed indicators to assess the success of such initiatives (Tang et al. 2017: 2597).

Visions of global health governance An alternative model for DAH When Chinese and Indian leaders launched their development assistance programs decades ago, they had in mind a foreign aid model different from that of the Western powers in mind. In 1964, China unveiled eight foreign aid principles, which highlighted equality, political noninterference, and the interests of recipient countries. Similarly, India’s development assistance policy upheld the principles of nonalignment, moralism, and human dignity (Sagar 2009: 804). The underlying motives for providing foreign aid, however, were more pragmatic than altruistic. As then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai explained, “[we] provide aid to brother countries and newly independent countries to strengthen their state power, which in turn undermines the power of imperialism” (Xue 2013). Likewise, India’s development assistance was rooted in concerns over geopolitical stability when it first offered aid to its South Asian neighbors. Over time, the foreign aid policies of both countries deviated from their idealistic foundations and focused instead on promoting their economic and security interests. That said, China’s and India’s DAH programs are different from those of many traditional donors in many other aspects. Their assistance programs are primarily “demand driven” or “request based.” Instead of announcing DAH initiatives and then publishing formal requests for proposals, potential recipients approach the donor country for support. The pattern of investing in specific, country-based projects is also in sharp contrast to that of Western donors, which are used to making large programmatic investments with clear objectives and involving multiple projects (e.g. the United States’ President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief ). In addition, China and India deliver DAH mainly on a bilateral basis rather than in collaboration with other countries or international organizations. For instance, China sponsored nineteen antimalarial projects in Africa between 1978 and 2008, but none of these programs coordinated their work with global antimalarial projects (see Lee, Pang and Tan 2013: 235–236). India, on the other hand, relies on bilateralism under the assumption that this approach allows for innovative programming and is concordant with India’s demand-driven, horizontal philosophy. These distinctive DAH models reflect a general rejection of existing Western approaches to development assistance. Neither China nor India looks favorably upon a donor–recipient paradigm in which the rich give handouts to the poor. India goes as far as to openly reject paternalistic development terms such as “donor” and “aid,” preferring to view its development assistance programs as a form of South–South partnership (GHSi 2012: 60). Despite their non-altruistic motives, these countries reject the Western model of attaching political strings to assistance projects. Both emphasize infrastructure projects such as constructing hospitals. Among China’s DAH projects in Africa from 2000 to 2013, for example, fifty-seven percent are infrastructure and equipment ventures (Shajalal et al. 2017). While this helps fill the gap for infrastructure projects ignored by many OECD countries such as the United States (which spends only three percent of the DAH on infrastructure) (US Department of State 2019), China and India appear to have little interest in promoting good governance and human rights in

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recipient countries or introducing transparency to health aid flows. In 2011, China declared that “the principle of transparency … should not be seen as a standard for SouthSouth cooperation” (GHSi 2012: 60). There is little indication, however, that this model presents a viable alternative to the existing development assistance paradigm. Both countries’ health-related development assistance is increasing, but it is unlikely that it will bridge substantial gaps vacated by other donors (Tang et al. 2017: 2597). Their DAH level, for example, is significantly lower than that of OECD donors. The bilateral approach may facilitate the execution of projects in a timely and effective manner, but multilateral aid does a better job in lowering administrative costs and reducing the burden on recipients through increased coordination (Glassman 2012). The provision of health aid and soft loans with few strings attached was popular in Africa at first but can easily become targets of domestic opposition in recipient countries and may not be sustainable. In other words, the approach of traditional OECD donors has not lost its appeal in the developing world. State-centered approach Addressing global health challenges necessitates strategies and actions that go beyond the boundaries of any one nation’s sovereignty. However, in the development and enforcement of international health norms, China and India pursue a state-centric approach, viewing global regulation as primarily the responsibility of the state. The IHR negotiations provide a useful context for examining state-centrism. China and India declined to gather input from NGOs prior to the regional consultations and IGWG negotiations. They also, along with other Asian states, sought to limit the role of NGOs. This unflinching support for state sovereignty also accounts for the absence of an “Asian voice” in international negotiations. During the IHR talks, China argued vehemently (though unsuccessfully) against the proposal to include a list of infectious diseases for fear that it might be compelled to reveal information that would threaten national interests. China also resisted the idea of sending WHO investigative teams to countries without their consent (Kamradt-Scott, Lee and Xu 2013: 88–90). Similarly, sovereignty concerns led China to oppose a move to recognize Taiwan’s status at the WHA. Keenly aware that the principle of “universal application” to IHR might be used by Taiwan to justify formal WHO membership, China’s chief negotiator did not mince words: “health is a very important issue, but sovereignty and territorial integrity are more important” (Sha 2004). China later softened its stance and allowed Taiwan to obtain special observer status at WHA, but Taiwan is still not permitted to liaise with the WHO other than at its headquarters in Geneva. Since 2017, frustrated by Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen’s pro-independence agenda, Beijing has exerted pressures to WHO secretariat of not inviting Taiwan to participate in the WHA, on the grounds that neither WHO’s constitution nor the assembly’s procedure provides a legal basis for “a region of a sovereign state to join the assembly as an observer” (Ravelo 2018). Furthermore, both China and India seek to suppress the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in their health projects. Civic space in India has shrunk since Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi came to power in 2014. Through restrictive legislation, the government denies CSOs the right to register, and in some cases suspends or withdraws CSO permits to operate (Frontline AIDS 2018). As a result of this government crackdown on CSOs, there is a significant drop in foreign funding for these organizations (TNN 2017). For China, there is an even more glaring collision between

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a state-centric approach and one that incorporates other actors (e.g. NGOs and intergovernmental organizations) in multi-stakeholder arrangements. In January 2017, the government rolled out the Foreign NGO Law, which requires all overseas NGOs and non-profits to register with the police and maintain a government sponsor. The law had a chilling effect on foreign health-related NGOs’ activities in China. While the state-centric approach may serve the national interests of China and India, it also limits the scope and effectiveness of international cooperation in an era of interdependence. China’s stance on Taiwan, for example, threatened to derail the early IHR negotiations. Many have noted that this rigid state-centrism not only leads to a narrow and limited interaction with GHG, but also proves unsustainable in the long run because it is increasingly out of sync with global norms (Tan 2009; Fidler 2010b). Domestic health model Due to their large populations and rising levels of development, China and India serve as a reference point for other lower-middle income countries (LMICs) who want to address their own domestic health problems. Historically, both countries rejected topdown, high-tech, and disease-focused Western approaches, favoring an accessible and integrated approach that recognized the role of local communities and affordable technologies. China and India’s experience in primary health care (PHC) demonstrated the capacity to improve public health with limited resources, thereby contributing to the rise of the PHC movement in the late 1970s. Since transitioning to market-oriented economies (China in the 1980s and India in the 1990s), both countries have pursued a strong market-based approach to health care. They also relied heavily on international donors to launch and sustain vital public health programs. Prior to 2003, China’s HIV/AIDS programs were almost entirely supported by international donors. Likewise, India’s campaigns against smallpox and polio received significant international support. Donors such as the Global Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank have played an important role in health governance in terms of policy planning and implementation, including improving bureaucratic and financial capacities. In India, the effort of Dr Jon Andrus from the US Public Health Service played a critical role in convincing Indian leaders to commit to polio eradication (Schaffer 2012: 2–3). The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was then used as a mechanism to fund India’s own domestic eradication efforts. Likewise, in China, international entities were critical in moving latent public health issues such as HIV/AIDS onto the governmental agenda. International entities also affected the timing of state action (as shown in the SARS crisis), as well as policy design decisions (as shown in HIV/AIDS prevention efforts and control). In terms of the ideational foundations of addressing domestic health challenges, many of the ideas put forth by Chinese policymakers are not novel. Since the rollout of China’s health-care reform in 2009, debates and discussions about the reform have centered on whether to adopt a government-focused approach inspired by the British model, in which the government provides basic health care for free, or a market-focused approach influenced by the German model, which favors the use of third parties to provide health services. In contrast to China, India is often seen as practicing “frugal innovation,” that is, finding “the simplest and cheapest way of doing something without compromising effectiveness” (Shetty 2012; see also The Economist 2010). In putting innovation to work, India’s business leaders and health providers have collaborated with government

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actors, private hospitals, and the IT and telecommunications sectors. In 2000, Dr Devi Shetty founded Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH) in Bangalore. By embracing mass production, he is able to make quality health care financially accessible to a wider range of people (Hunter 2018). As a result of Shetty’s innovation, India is on course to become the first country in the world to delink health from wealth (eHealth 2013).

Conclusion Over the past two or three decades, both China and India have expanded their engagement in GHG. An examination of their history in global health norm development, their use of other global governance arrangements to promote global health, and their visions of GHG all suggest that China and India have the ability to play distinctive, important, even inspiring roles in GHG. The analysis, nevertheless, has not led us to conclude with confidence that both countries represent a transformative force in GHG. Their contributions to GHG remain limited and constrained by domestic health challenges and institutional shortfalls. In developing institutions for global disease prevention and control, their approach to global health agenda-setting and rule making remains selective and individualistic. Moreover, their record of compliance with global health rules is mixed, mitigated by limited health-system capacities and ongoing governance challenges. A look at the ideational foundations of China’s and India’s involvement in GHG suggests that while both contribute to an alternative model for GHG, most components of the model are neither novel nor innovative, and their effectiveness remains in question.

Notes 1 From 1956 to1999, China helped build only twenty hospitals in Africa. See CCHER (2012: 30), SCIO (2012), and Wen (2009). 2 See Green (2011: 53). WHO pre-qualification of medicines is a service provided by the organization to assess the quality, safety, and efficacy of pharmaceutical products. Since international donors strictly limit procurement to products that have passed international standards, WHO pre-qualification is required for a vaccine to be purchased by international organizations or donor funds for use in a recipient country. 3 Data exclusivity refers to a practice whereby, for a fixed period of time, drug regulatory authorities do not allow generic drug manufacturers to use an originator’s registration files to obtain a market authorization of their products. Patent linkage is a system or process by which drug regulatory authorities link drug marketing approval to the status of the patent(s) corresponding to the originator’s product in order to ensure that no patent is being infringed before marketing approval for a new product is issued.

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Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aadhaar (biometric personal identity) 30n14 Abdenur, Adriana 3, 11 abrupt debt crisis, India 341 Abu Zayd al-Sirafi 41 Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China (Tan) 2 “Act East” policy 10, 310, 354, 441, 444, 486 active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) 585 Adani Defence and Aerospace and Elbit Systems 272 Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway 475 Afghanistan: China, economic agreements 356; Inter-Services Intelligence 387; peaceful dénouement in 392; 1979 Soviet invasion of 384; 1989 Soviet withdrawal from 386 Africa: BRI and AAGC 471–2; China and India’s interests 472–5; cultural engagement 471; economic engagement 468–70; implications for 475–6; military engagement 470–1; political engagement 466–8 Africa e-Network project (PANeP) 469 African Export–Import Bank 469 African Union Standby Force 532 Africa Regional Centre (ARC) 359 Afro-Asian movement 381 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 2030 350 Agni-V missile 122 Agreement on Trade and Intercourse with Tibet Region 87, 90, 91, 195 airborne warning and control system (AWACS) 456 “AI+X” program 279 Aiyar, Pallavi 4 Alexander, P. C. 340 Alexander successors 36, 37 Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) 276 Al-Idrisi (1154) 41 Allen, A. R. 76 Allen,Young 47, 48

al Qaeda-led 9/11 387, 388 American funds 89 American “Monroe doctrine” 420 American-policed regional architecture 456 American political system 119 #Amierhan# (#Aamir Khan) 130 Amoghavajra (705–774) 39 Andaman and Nicobar Islands 260 Anglo-American powers 9, 12 Anglo-French-Israeli attack 451 Anglophone media 517 Anglo-Saxon race 52 Annan, Kofi 350, 404 Annual Report 2017–2018 473 Ansari, Mohammad Hamid 308, 467 anti-access area-denial (A2AD) approach 240, 241, 247 anti-British movement 64 anti-China activities in India 195 anti-India moves on Kashmir 383, 425 anti-Japanese solidarity 64 anti-Japanese war 92 anti-Japan feeling 404 antiretroviral (ARV) 583 antiretroviral therapy (ART) 583, 584 anti-Soviet criticism 385 anti-tank missiles 242 anti-tobacco policies, China 582 apropos property rights 26 Aptech in Beijing 109 Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) 334 “area of peace” concept 90 Argentina 505 armed co-existence 6, 181 Arrow war/Second Opium war in 1860 46 Arthashastra (Kautilya) 152 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 7 Arunachal Pradesh 8, 188, 202, 220, 316 ASEAN–China Free Trade Area 437, 442

596 Index ASEAN–India Connectivity Summit 441 Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC) 260, 326, 466, 472, 475, 476 Asian-African Conference, 1955 523 Asian-African solidarity 90 Asian connectivity: African solidarity 90; China reshaping 303–7; Chinese views 309–11; connectivity projects, Chinese 321–4; and consequences 320–1; defined and reimagined 316–19; India’s opposition to China’s BRI 324–7; India’s response to BRI 307–9; “Neighbour First” policy 310; physical connectivity 316; reactions to India’s position 309–11; trade and investment ties in 9 “Asian development agency for Asians” 400 Asian Development Bank 159 “Asian Diplomacy” 400 Asian Financial Crisis, 1997/1998 437 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) 370, 422, 445, 454, 586 Asian leadership, implicit competition 96–8 Asian Relations Conference in 1947 64, 65, 68, 82n10, 97, 155 Asian Research Network 372 Asian Space Race 517 Asia-Pacific, competition 484–5 Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy 439 Asia’s Giants: Comparing China and India (Friedman and Gilley) 2 Aśoka, King 37 Assad, Bashar 459 Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) 340, 341 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 10, 434, 439 Atal Innovation Mission 26 Atal, Madan Mohanlal 92 atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) 235 Atomic Energy Commission in 1948 523 “Atoms for Peace” 523 Attlee, Clement 69 Aung San Suu Kyi 306 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) 272, 273 Avatarpsaka sutra 39 “The Average Zhou on India” 109 Avian Flu virus 582 Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay (Bardhan) 18 Awara Hoon (Indian film) 109, 115 Ayoob, Mohammed 420, 440 Ayres, Alyssa 2–3 Azad, Maulana 67 Azhar, Masood 415, 417 Bagchi, P. C. 71 Bahal, Sandeep 116 Bailadila Iron Mine in India 398

Bajpai, Kanti 29n1, 139 Bajrangi Bhaijaan (Indian film) 115 Bajwa, Qamar Javed 322 “balance of powers” 47 Bandung Conference in 1955 89, 92, 93, 97, 98, 398–9 Bandung Declaration, 1955 354 Bangladesh 305, 427; in the Brahmaputra Basin 218; BRI, construction of 305; China economic cooperation 306–7, 355; domestic industrial production 305; 2018 refugee crisis 424; war of independence 411; Xi Jinping visit in 2016 305 Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar economic corridor (BCIM-EC) 307–10, 325, 326, 422, 436 Bank of China in Kalimpong 76 Bardhan, Pranab 18, 29n1 Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) 441 Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) 276 Beijing Miteno Communication Technology Co. Ltd. 297 Belt and Road Forum (BRF) 357, 486 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 8, 143, 220, 255, 257, 262, 296, 303, 315, 333, 356, 414, 420, 436, 466, 586 Bhabha, Homi J. 519, 523, 525 Bhadada, Shubhangi 29n1 Bhandari, Mohan 111, 112 Bharat Forge 114 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 160, 173, 191, 204, 341 Bhattacharya, P. C. 398 Bhutan: 1988 and 1998 agreements 185; border tri-junction 121, 204; China, road construction 185; Doklam plateau 390, 486; Himalayan kingdoms 94; India’s overseas development assistance 317; 2013 parliamentary election campaign 428; parliamentary election campaign in 428; Peace and Prosperity Party 428 “Bias and Noise” essay 26, 27 Biba, Sebastian 6 bilateral arms race: absence of 502; conflicts, impact of 5–6; lack of 502–3 bilateral economic cooperation 8, 120, 127–8; background of 291–2; bilateral relationship 501; bilateral trade 292–6; 1962 border war 291; Chinese investment in India 296; future challenges 299–300; investment relations 296–9 Billions of Entrepreneurs (Khanna) 18, 24–7, 29 BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) 422

Index  597 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) 581 Biswas, A. 213 Blarel, Nicholas 11 “bloodiest” border clash 182 Bloomberg report 123 “Blue Water” navy 257 Boao Forum for Asia 298 boddhisattva 39, 54, 57 Bohr, Niels 523 Bollywood films, Chinese media 128–30 Bolsonaro, Jair 489 “26/11” Bombay attacks in 2008 241 border after 1962, India’s view of: armed co-existence 181–2; Chinese violations 180; differences and agreements 185–7; incursions 182–5; post-war reactions and changes 188–9; resolve territorial disputes 189–90; territorial claims, clearing misunderstandings on 187–8 border dispute, China and India: after 1962 war 171–2; border peace 172–3; China–India bilateral relationship 170; China’s goals in 1962 war 170–1; Cold War (Taiwan) 170; conflict, Sino-Indian 99; deepening differences on 94–6; Doklam standoff 175–7; incursions in 2000s 173–5; tranquility agreement 172–3; US and Russia/Soviet Union play 8–9 Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement of 1993 230 Border Personnel Meetings (BPMs) 186 border tension/aggression 121 Bose, Subhas Chandra 64, 72, 81n2 Bosshard, Walter 57 Brahmans 53 Brahmaputra Basin 212, 219, 246 BrahMos cruise missile system 232, 243 BrahMos missile 122 Brazil 505 “breaking news” transmissions 121 Brewster, David 7 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) 8, 422, 485; achievements and challenges of 357–60; analytical perspective 350–1; China–India relations 354–7; Chinese and Indian participation 351–4; Doklam military standoff 355; global economic and political landscape 352–3; gross domestic product 349; Indian foreign policy 354; Modi–Xi leadership 354; New Development Bank 357–60; summit on 5 September 144 “BRICS Plus” 355 BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation Agreement 527 BRI-related project arrangements 357 British: British East India Company 450; Chiang, three-way discourse 67; “foreign

yoke” 45; Indian government 43, 63, 67, 72; policy of Tibet 171; war against Germany and Japan 67 British Empire’s privilege in Tibet 88 British India–China trade 76 British Raj 107, 200, 253 British-trained Sepoy troops 46 Buddhism 35, 37–40; Buddhist monastic 40; Cakravartinraja 39, 42; in China 3–4; Delhi Sultanate suppression of 43; inspired foreign Chinese trade 42; Mughal dynasty 43 “Buddhist Conquest of China” 37 Budhi Gandaki hydroelectric project in Nepal 320 bureaucratic model 334 Burma 71, 76, 82n13 Burma–Yunnan Ledo Road 74 Bush, George W. 392, 508 Business Standard (newspaper) 128 Business Today (newspaper) 270 Cakravartinraja 39, 42 “Can India Overtake China?” (Yasheng) 24, 26 Caravan (Indian film) 109 Cariappa, K. M. 91 “cascading effect” 502 cast-iron money 37 Center for Advanced Studies, Translational Research and Leadership (CASTLE) 269 Center for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) 23 Central Asia policy 303 Central-Eastern Europe Consortium 343 Central Military Commission (CMC) 171 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) 89 Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) 267, 269, 271 Centre for Research on Sub-Systems (CROSS) 269 Centre of Excellence (CoE) 268, 269 Centre of Excellence in Technology Innovation and Transfer (CETIT) 269 “certainty of military victory” 229 C-17 Globe Masters 233 Chabahar port in Iran 326, 455 Chadda, Mayank 114, 115 Chandrasekaran, N 270 Chang Xiufeng 43, 72, 74 Chashma Nuclear Power Complex 235 Chaudhury, Nihar Ranjan 72, 74 Chauhan, Rishika 6 Cheena Bhavana 69, 74 Chellaney, Brahma 209 chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNe) 272 Cheng,Y.-K. 75 Chen Li-fu 73

598 Index Chen, Lincoln 586 Chery Automobile Company 298 Chettur, K. K. 75 Chiang Kai-shek 6, 64–9, 67, 71, 73, 75, 90 Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) 404 Chief of Defense Staff (CDS) 244 “CHIME” concept 449 China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation 520 China–Africa bilateral trade 469 China–Africa Defense and Security Forum (CADSF) 470 China and India relations 1937–1949: cultural sphere 70–4; economic sphere 74–7; political sphere 63–70; “subaltern” sphere 77–9 China and India relations 1939–1948: exports to India from China 80–1; imports into China from India 80 China and India relations 1950s: achievements in golden period 91–3; Asian leadership, implicit competition 96–8; border issue, deepening differences on 94–6; China–India agreement on Tibet 93–4; leaders, situation changes 99–100; peaceful coexistence 88–90; Sino-Indian conflict 99; Sino-Soviet relations 99; Tibet problem, temporary solution for 90–1 China–ASEAN Expo 404 China–Bangladesh economic cooperation 306 “China Brain” Plan in 2015 276 “China-centric system in Asia” 311 China Daily (newspaper) 64, 489 China Defence League 65 China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC) 522 China–India agreement on Tibet 93–4 China–India–Bhutan border 121, 246 China–India collaboration 65–6 China–India conflict 9 China–India joint statements 196–7 China–India military relations 8 China–India nuclear relationship: allegations of nuclear weapons cooperation 510; assessments of 502–3; competitive nuclear restraint 504–11; responsibility 503–4; restraint 503–4 “China-India Plus” cooperation programs 311 The China–India Rivalry in the Globalization Era (Paul) 2 China–India–Russia Tripartite Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Beijing 308 China–India space relations 517 China–India–Tibet relationship 201 China–India–US triangle: “balancing power” in 365; lingering reluctance to choose 372–3; non-alignment, curious case of 368–9; nonalignment veil 373–4; paradise, trouble in

371–2; simple logic 365–6; unique triangle 366–8; Wuhan spirit 369–70 China Institute of Cyberspace Strategy 121 China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) 145, 146 China Merchants Group Holdings 306 China–Myanmar economic corridor 306 China–Myanmar relations 307 China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) 473 China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) 473 China–Nepal connectivity cooperation 321 China–Nepal–India Economic Corridor 310 China–Nepal railway line 310, 321 China–Pakistan civilian nuclear cooperation 508–11 China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) 128, 160, 185, 204, 296, 305, 318, 356, 372, 390, 410, 414, 415, 486 China–Pakistan internal security agreement 356–7 China “potential threat No. 1” 158 China’s Exim Bank 293 China’s foreign policy 88, 99 China Shipbuilding Industry Company 243 China’s military, artificial intelligence: AI ecosystem, expanding an 273–6; Basic Research Urgent Management Projects 275; Industry Development Alliance 275; military–civil fusion 276–9; Plan Implementation Office 275; Strategy Advisory Committee 275; unmanned systems 280–1 China’s National Intelligence Law 278 China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) 519, 520 China’s navy 257 China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) 185 China-South Asia Cooperation Forum 423 China’s solar energy program 559 China’s space program 518 China State Shipbuilding Corporation 243 “China’s 12th Five-Year Plan of Energy Development” 211 China’s view of India 120 China’s Western strategy 256 China’s White Papers on Tibet 198 China–US rivalry 366 “China wall” 122 Chinese Academy of Sciences’ South America Center for Astronomy (CASSACA) 490 Chinese aggression 181 Chinese Air Force 232 Chinese border transgressions 174 Chinese Box Office in Hindi Cinema 124 Chinese-British negotiations 46

Index  599 Chinese Buddhist literature 71 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 90, 97, 99, 141, 170, 319, 321, 386, 434 Chinese diplomacy 88; “Expanding the Trend of Peace and Neutrality” 89; “peaceful united front” 88; “Promoting the Peaceful Neutral Zone” 89 “Chinese Educational Mission” 73 Chinese forbearance 6 Chinese foreign policy 139, 414 “Chinese Hall” 71; see also Cheena Bhavana Chinese-language libraries in India 71 Chinese-language press 56 Chinese-language record 35 Chinese Medical Teams (CMTs) 579 Chinese military focus 229 Chinese “mobilization” model 342 Chinese navy 1, 454, 456 Chinese nuclear submarines in Sri Lanka 231 “Chinese Official Fans Group of Aamir Khan” 130 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) 340 Chinese social media 124–7 Chinese strategic thinking, India: constructivism 144–6; Deng Xiaoping, Indian friendship 141–2; Hu Jintao administration 142–3; Jiang Zemin, Indian relations 142–3; liberalism 146–7; Mao Zedong, friends to rivals 139–41; realism 147–8; Xi Jinping, partners and rivals 143–4 Chinese Treaty Ports 43, 78 “Chinese Turkestan” region 75–6 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters 233 Chola Kingdom in South India 43 Choudhury, Raj 29n1 Chowdhury, Debasish 3 Christian-inspired Taiping rebels 46 Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir (Kalhana) 41 Chumar–Demchok area in Ladakh 184 civil–military partnership 270–1 civil society organizations (CSOs) 588 C-130J Super Hercules 233 “Cleaning up the House First Before having Guests” (dasao ganjing wuzi zai qingke) 88 climate negotiations: CBDR principle 554–6; China, low-carbon initiatives 560–2; domestic action, state capacity for 559–60; domestic policies and targets, NDC 558–9; India, low-carbon initiatives 562–4; nationally determined contributions 556–8; quantity and quality, contradiction 552–4 Clinton, Bill 158, 387 Clinton, Hillary 303 Coal India Limited (CIL) 559 CO2 emissions 552, 553, 556, 557, 562 Cold War 119, 227, 309, 367, 466, 534

Colombo Plan 400 Colombo Port City project 306 “Colonialism Must Go” 68 “command and control” system 336 command, control, computer, communication, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) 244, 248 “command economy” 336 commercial exchanges between British India 75 common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) 12, 554–5 Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) 245, 389 Communist Party of China (CPC) 88, 199 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 97 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) 491 comparative exercise, China and India: contemporary China and India 26–9; cottage industry 18; how to compare 20–4; “practice,” role of 24–6; why compare 19–20 competitive nuclear restraint 501, 504; China– Pakistan civilian nuclear cooperation 508– 11; NSG waiver 506–8; nuclear tests 505–6; US–India civilian nuclear deal 506–8 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) 158, 404, 503 Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) 298, 340, 341 Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) 182, 189 “conformist” restraint 501, 503 Confucianism 40 “Confucian” symbol 42 Congress Against Colonial Oppression 65 Congress Party 89, 381 “Connect Central Asia” policy 310 “connectivity” concept 317 “consolidate control over Tibet” 68 “contact zones” 77 “Contextual Intelligence” 29n7 Contingency Reserve Agreement (CRA) 485 “cooperation spirals” concept 210, 215, 217 Copenhagen Climate Summit 195 “core foundational” technologies 274 Corneille, Pierre 29n5 cotton industry and trade 75 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) 371 Cowrie shells 36 Crimean War (1853–1856) 46 cross-border international projects 107, 318 Cuban Missile Crisis 8–9, 524 “cultural genocide” in Tibet 202 Cultural Revolution (CR) 109, 172, 336, 411, 425, 520, 522 Cyrill, M. 296

600 Index Dahal, Pushpa Kamal 422 Dahl, Robert 434 Dai Jitao 66, 71 “Dalai Clique” 203 Dalai Lama 6, 94, 101n2, 140, 155, 170, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 367, 370; health condition 204; India’s support of 201; troubles for China 203 Dangal (Indian film) 115, 130, 299 Data Direct Networks 268 Davy, H. N. 72 debt-trap diplomacy 486 Declaration on Principles for Relations and Comprehensive Cooperation 201 Deepak, B. R. 200 Deep Learning Technologies 276 Deep Penetration Strike Aircrafts (DPSAs) 229 Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) 272 Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) 243, 267, 271, 272 2025 Defense Science and Technology Plan 243 DefExpo in 2018 272 “de-hyphenation” concept 9, 410 Delhi Sultanate 40, 42, 51 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 535 Deng Xiaoping 7, 107, 109, 139, 152, 187, 291, 338, 384, 388, 411, 522, 526; Chinese policy toward India 141; governments’ developmentalism 339; 1988 meeting Rajiv Gandhi 291 Deng Xiaoping Theory 319 Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) 299 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) 519 Desai, C. C. 398 Desai, Morarji 384 “deterrence by denial” strategy 232 “development as freedom” concept 351, 357 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) 483 development assistance for health (DAH) 579, 580 Dhaka Stock Exchange 426 Dhanaraj, Charles 29n1 Dharmapala, Anagarika 72 “Diary of a Journey” (Nehru) 81n7 Dinar, S. 213 Ding Xiangrong 277 “diplomatic autonomy” 398 diplomatic–political relations 4 “direct transcultural exchanges” 4 Doha Declaration in 2001 584 Doklam crisis 120, 124–8, 129, 131, 148, 236, 410; military standoff 161, 175–7, 189, 355 domestic generic drug maker 585 domestic health challenges 579 “domino theory” 89 Douban.com 115

Doval, Ajit 186 Dowager Empress 50 Duara, Prasenjit 18 Dubey, Muchkund 94 Dunseith, B. 296 Dupleix, Frenchman Joseph 53–4 Duterte, Rodrigo 439 Dutt, Subimal 398 Dying to Survive (Indian film) 115 East Asian community-building 405 East Asian security 6 East Asia Summit (EAS) 396 Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement 356 East India Company 44, 48 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 491 Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 578 economic diplomacy 107, 399, 468–70 “economic factors” 159 “economic insecurity” 562 Economic Policy Program 349 The Economic Times (newspaper) 128 economy in socialist India 337–8 educational exchanges 73 Electricity Act 2003 559 Elman, Benjamin 2 “emerging markets” 159 “empty threats” 229 Encyclopedia of Geography (Murray) 44 energy and enthusiasm”, Chinese 65 England: broker for India–China interaction 43–8; India–China interaction 43–8 environmental impact assessments (EIAs) 220 Erickson, Andrew 258 Ethiopian Airlines flight 108, 113 Eurasian continental power 255 European Parliament 198 European Union 216 executive education program 19 Exim Bank of India 469 “Expanding the Trend of Peace and Neutrality” 89 Expert-level Mechanism (ELM) 213 exports to India from China 80–1 “exterior lines” for China 259 extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles (XLUUVs) 280 Fang Tien-sze 6 Faxian (Buddhist monk) 37 Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) 298, 340, 341 Female Formed Police Unit 470 Fernandes, George 158 “Fiat and Fairness” essay 26, 27

Index  601 fifth generation (5G) wireless networks 370 Financial Action Task Force 417 Financial Times (newspaper) 28 Fisman, Ray 29n9 fissile material cut-off treaty (FMCT) 507 “five-point proposal” 466 Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence 87; adoption and advocacy of 89, 93; background and motivation 88–90; Bandung Conference 92; India’s China policy 90 Five-Year Development Program 295 “foolish young man” 72 2018–2019 foreign aid budget 443 foreign direct investment (FDI) 8, 333, 334, 338, 339, 469, 563 Foreign NGO Law 589 Foreign Policy (Yasheng) 24 foreign trade with British India 75 Forum for East Asia–Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC) 488 Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) 468 forward policy 170, 171, 181 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) 580–2 Frankel, Francine 2 Fravel, Taylor 5, 6 Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) 9, 260, 369 free trade agreements (FTA) 443 French Indian 77 Friedman, Edward 2 Frost, Adam 29n1 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) 489 “Fund for Industrial Restructuring and Upgrading” 274 Fung, Courtney 3, 12 Gabuev, Alexander 354 Galtung, Johan 351 Gandhi, Indira 156, 340, 420, 493, 525, 526; India’s special frontier force 186; Treaty of Peace 157 Gandhi, Mahatma 57, 58, 64, 67, 71 Gandhi, Rajiv 7, 142, 152, 172, 184, 186, 230, 385, 391; budget in 1985 340; Deng Xiaoping meeting 157; 1988 meeting Deng Xiaoping 291; Nehruvian “reset” with China 158; visited China in 1988 201 Gao Feng Lin 111 Gao Jianfu 72 Garver, John 260, 420 Geertz, Clifford 29n4 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 292 Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) 371 “Geneva Consensus” 583

“genuine autonomy” proposal 198 German model 589 Ghemawat, Pankaj 29n8 Ghosh, Arunabh 29n1, 30n23 Gibbons, Edward 29n5 Gilgit-Baltistan 412, 414 Gilley, Bruce 2 Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 113, 157, 389 global health governance (GHG) 578; challenges, domestic health 579; compliance with global health rules 582–3; DAH, alternative model for 587–8; domestic health model 589–90; health, participating in 584–7; setting global health norms 580–1; shifting processes and priorities 579–80; soft global health norms 583–4; state-centered approach 588–9 global nuclear order (GNO) 501 global order, thinking on 11–13 Global Times (newspaper) 121, 128 Goh, Evelyn 434 Goh, Gillian H. 2 “going out” strategy 219 Gokhale,Vijay Keshav 189, 204, 370, 371 Goldstein, Lyle 210, 215, 216 “Go Out” policy 483 government-focused approach 589 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) 278 “Great Depression” 74 Greater Nile Oil Project (GNOP) 474 Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC) 474 Great Leap Forward (GLF) 171, 336, 381, 520, 522 Green Climate Fund (GCF) 556 “green-marginalization” 562 gross domestic product (GDP) 1, 18, 292, 292, 336, 349, 436, 453, 552 G-8 Summit 392 G-20 Summit 189 Guaidó, Juan 482, 489 Guangxu Emperor 48 Guardian 28 Gu Jing 8 Gujral, I. K. 452 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 452, 453, 458 Gulf War 173, 452 Guomindang (GMD) 63, 64, 67, 68, 70, 78, 80 Gupta, Shekhar 119 Guru Nanak Dev’s 550th birth anniversary 322 Gyanendra, King 427 Haier Group 22 Hall, Ian 5, 139 Hambantota Port project 306 Han Yu 40

602 Index Harding, Harry 2 Harrison, L. E. 29 Harșa, King 41 Harvard Business Review (HBR) 21 Harvard Business School (HBS) 18, 19, 22 Hasina, Sheikh 422 Hatoyama,Yukio 398 Hayes, Jarrod 504 Health Policy-2017 (NHP) 586 He Ruzhang 47 “Hey Sexy Baliye” 115 “high-tech” foreign capital 344 Himalayas: coexistence 423–5; competition 425–7; conflict 427–9; cooperation 421–3; frontier 227, 228; kingdoms of 94; 2017 military standoff 428; Sino-Indian interactions 429–30 Himmatsinhji Committee 316 Hindi Chini bhai bhai 58, 87, 93, 154 Hindi movies in China 108 Hindoos people 44 Hindu nationalists 152–3, 157 “Hindu rate of growth” 291 Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. 243 Hindustan Times (newspaper) 116, 121 “HIRA model of development” 359 historical institutionalist approach: BRI vs. project mausam 342–6; Mao vs. Nehru 335–8; reform divergence 338–42 HIV/AIDS programs, China 589 H1N1 pandemic, 2009 580, 585 Homer-Dixon, Thomas 209 Hong Kong Merchants Group 338 Horton, Richard 586 Ho, S. 217 Ho, Stanley 338 “household-based, bottom-heavy” economy 335 Huang Hua 189, 230 Huang Yanzhong 3, 12 Huang Yasheng 18, 24 Huang Zunxian 47, 49 Hu Jintao 107, 109, 139, 142, 159, 201, 467, 555 “humanitarian interventions” 158 human security: analytical perspective 350; emancipatory and capabilities approach 351 Humayun, Emperor 42 Hung, H. H. 71 Hung-ming, Ku 56 Hu Shi 57, 59 Hu Shisheng 176 Hu Xiaowen 3 Hu Yaobang 141 Ibn Battutta (1304–1377) 42 Ikeda Daisaku 400 Ili crisis 47 imports into China from India 80

India–Africa Forum Summit (IAFS) 468 India and China in Asia (Panda) 2 India and China in the Colonial World (Thampi) 2 India and China–Pakistan relationship: China–Pakistan relationship 410–13; de-hyphenation experiment 413–17; 1965 India–Pakistan war 411; Pakistan-based terror groups 416; relationship upgrade 416; Sino-Indian war 411; Sino-Pakistani border settlement 411 India-as-balancer theory 402 India–Bhutan–China border 390 India Brazil South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum 493 India–China Border Affairs 124, 186 India–China economic and trade 93 India–China Friendship Association (ICFA) 92, 93 India China: Neighbours Strangers (Pande) 2 The India–China Relationship:What the United States Needs to Know (Frankel and Harding) 2 India–China trade 291 India first trade agreement, 1953 89 India independent 1947 19 India–Japan economic cooperation 399 India Kitchen 110 India–Maldives relations 306 India–Myanmar Navy Bilateral Exercise 444 India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway 441 Indian-administered Kashmir 458 Indian Air Force (IAF) 175, 189, 227, 229, 232, 233 Indian Army 123, 126, 172, 229, 241, 253 Indian Aryans 53 Indian-British interaction 55 Indian “class system” 53 Indian Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) 519 Indian Community in Beijing (ICB) 78, 114 Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries 453 Indian cotton trade 43, 75 Indian Council for World Affairs (ICWA) 68, 305 India–Nepal–China (INC) 423 Indian film festival in China 93 Indian film industry 299 Indian Foreign Medical Graduates Examination (FMGE) 114 Indian independence 55, 56, 67, 70, 74 Indian Information Service 425 Indian investments in China 108 “Indianization of China” 57 Indian market 294 Indian military’s force 174 Indian Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MPNG) 473 Indian Mission in New York 537 Indian National Army’s (INA) 64

Index  603 Indian National Congress (INC) 55, 63, 64 Indian Navy 1, 160, 228, 233, 247, 253; Ensuring Secure Seas: India’s Maritime Security Strategy 254; expansion and modernization of 254–5; long-term modernization program 254; 2019 Military Balance 254 Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) 454 Indian Ocean region (IOR) 120, 228, 231; China’s future naval presence in 257–8; China’s growing role in 255–8; forwarddefense perimeter in 253; India’s regional role, Beijing’s views 256–7; India’s strategic aspirations 252–4; String of Pearls strategy 259 Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) 454 Indian Ocean trade 260 Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) 517, 519, 522 Indian students in China 108 Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) Programme 471 Indian Tobacco Control Act in 2003 581 “Indian Trade Mission” 75 1965 India–Pakistan war 229, 411 “India’s anti-China activities” 100 India’s Central Board of Secondary Education 269–70 India’s China policy 151 India’s diplomatic stance 139 India-Sikkim Peace Treaty 183 India’s independence 316 India’s military, artificial intelligence: AI ecosystem, creating an 267–70; “aiming without arming” 266; civil–military partnership 270–1; defense ecosystem 269; defense structure 270; Robotics 266–7; unmanned systems 271–3 India’s “Monroe Doctrine” 253 India’s nuclear program 524 India’s 1998 nuclear tests 142 India’s strategic policy, China: accommodation and assertion 154–5; commerce, competition, and culture 159–61; Hindu nationalists 153; Nehruvian tradition 152, 157; oscillating between options 157–9; realism, reverting to 155–7 India’s view of China 120 India–Tibet border trade 385 India–US geopolitical cooperation 126 India–US relationship 356 Indo-China War, 1962 2, 6, 30n23, 140, 169, 172, 291 Indo-Pacific power 261 Indo-Pacific region 367 Indo-Pacific strategy 10, 127 Indo-Sinkiang trade 76 Indo-Soviet treaty 383 Indo-Tibetan Border 228

Indo-Tibetan Border Force 94 Industrial Policy, 1991 341 Industrial Policy Resolution (IPR) 337 Industries Act, 1952 337 Indus Water Treaty 218 “inevitability,” of Chinese reforms 49 informal summit meeting in Wuhan 370 Information Management and Analysis Centre (IMAC) 233 information technology (IT) services 295 “infrastructure gap” 357 “innovative” restraint 501, 503 INS Chakra 233 INSEAD (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires) 23 Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses (IDSA) 307 institutional conformity 504 “institutional void” 21 INS Vikramaditya 233 intellectual property (IP) regime 25, 584 Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) 245 inter-Asian relations 68 Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile capability 234 Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) 581 “Intermediate Zones” (zhongjian didai) 88 Inter-Ministerial National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (IM-ICPS) 269 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 506, 524 International Centre for Transformational Artificial Intelligence (ICTA) 269 International Centres of New Knowledge (ICON) 269 international development financing (IDF) 436, 438 International Geophysical Year (1957–1958) 524 international health regulation (IHR) 580, 588 international maritime trade route 43 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 365, 387, 490 International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) 326 international relations scholarship, rising powers: cooperation partners, “third spaces” 483; definition 483; dynamics of cooperation and competition 482; South–South cooperation 483 international relations (IR) theory: constructivism 144–6; liberalism 146–7; realism 147–8 International Relations theory 216 International Scientific Symposium on Influenza A (H1N1) 580 Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) 387

604 Index intra-BRICS relationship 354 IP-centric business model 25 Iran 455; Trump administration 371 Iraqi regime 452 “iron brother” 296, 356 Isaacs, Harold 18, 29 ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) 123, 456 “Islamic” extremism in Xinjiang 356 Israel 452 Israel–Palestine conflict 459 IT companies, Indian 109 Itokawa, Hideo 525 IT training market in China 109 Izuyama Marie 9 Jacob, Jabin 8, 10 Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) company 298 Jahangir, Emperor 42 Jaipur Literature Festival in India 30n14 Jaishankar, Subrahmanyam 309, 354, 372, 373 Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist groups 355, 412, 417 Jana Care, medical device company 25, 30n19 Japan: economic and diplomatic ties 9; Indo-Pacific strategies of 10; Silk Road diplomacy 303; space program 525; trade and investment ties in Asia 9 Japanese military expansion 63 Japanese samurai class of warriors 59 Japan, Germany, India, and Brazil (G4) 404 Japan–India steel cooperation 398 Japan’s Asian policy: Bandung Conference, 1955 398–9; East Asia, India’s entry to 402–5; economic diplomacy 399; India’s centrality in Japan’s return to Asia 397–8; India’s marginalization 400–2; Japan–India strategic partnership 403–4; Kishi and hope for India 399–400; partnership with China and India 403; policy of regionalism in Asia 403; in post-World War Asia 397; regionalism in Asia 397; “return to Asia” policy 397; 1957, visited Japan 400; World War guilt 397; World War II 400 Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai 326 Jet Airways 114 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) 521 Jha, L. K. 340 Jha, Prem Shankar 163n20, 553 Jiangsu Yueda Yancheng Tractor Company 298 Jiang Zemin 139, 142–3, 158, 411, 466 Jia, S. 209 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 65, 67 Jin Wei 199 Jio, Indian mobile phone 294 Joint Cooperation Committee, 2017 416 Jones, Geoffrey 29n1, 29n8 Joshi,Yogesh 7

Kala Bhavana 71 Kalha, Ranjit Singh 230 Kalidas Nag 71 Kalimpong–Lhasa route 76 Kalimpong–Tibet route 77, 78 kalpa, rhythm of 38 Kamakoti,V. 270 Kamath, K.V. 358 Kandla Port in Gujarat 326 Kangxi Emperor 54 Kang Youwei 48, 50, 51, 55, 56 Kapoor, Deepak 232 Kapoor, Raj 109 Karakoram Highway 412 1999 Kargil war, 1999 231, 386, 387 karmic retribution, mechanical process of 38 Karnad, Bharat 235 Kashmir dispute, Pakistan 89 Kashmiri Muslim 79 Kaur, Manpreet 111, 114 Kausikan, Bilahari 439 Kavic, L. J. 228 Keister, Lisa 21 Kelly, David A. 2 Kemp, G. 460n2 Kennedy, Andrew B. 89, 96 Kennedy, John F. 18 Key South China Sea claimants 435 Khan, Aamir (Indian actor) 115, 130, 299 Khan, Imran 416 Khanna, Tarun 3, 29n10, 299 Khosrau I (Anurshiwan), Emperor (501–579) 41 Khrushchev, Nikita 90, 99 Khurshid, Salman 190 Kilachand, Tulsidas 75 Kirby, Bill 29n1 Kishi Nobusuke 397, 400 Klinger, Julie 3, 12 Koizumi Junichiro 404, 405 Komintern propaganda 57 Kong Xuanyou 422 Korean Armistice Agreement 534 Korean War 88, 92, 94, 97, 381, 522 “Koshish Ek Asha” 112 Krepon, Michael 387 Krishna, S. M. 203, 298 Kuczynski, Pedro 489 Kumar, Anand 307 Kung Fu Yoga (Chinese film) 130 Kuomintang (KMT) government 88, 90 Kuwait problem 452 Kyaukpyu Special Economic Zone 310 Lampson, Miles W. 72 Lanba, Sunil (Admiral) 254, 261 Laozi’s Conversion of the Barbarians 39

Index  605 Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC): China ties, BRI 489–92; Chinese and Indian cooperation, problems 484; Chinese support,Venezuela 482; Chinese trade 487; civil society actors 487–8; Colombia’s peace agreement 489; commodity exports 487; food and agricultural products 11; geopolitical dynamics 482; Global India, relations with 492–5; government transformations 489; India, largest oil buyer 482; Indian–Chinese rivalry 486; movies and books 488; multilateral platforms 488; political and cultural dimensions, LAC– Asia ties 487–8; progressive social policies, financing 487; trans-regional cooperation, China 485; triangular relationship approach 484; US imports 482 law of Karma 57 leaders, situation changes 99–100 “Leaning to One Side” ( Yibiandao) 88 Lee Kai-Fu 276 Lee Ka-Shing 338 Lee, Sheryn 10 “left-leaning” foreign policy 100 Lei Yingfu 171 “Letter of Farewell” 67 Leveringhaus, Nicola 3, 12 Levin, Rick 29 Lewin, Kurt 19 Liang Qichao (1873-1929) 48–51, 54–8 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 401 Liberal IR theory 147–8 Libya crisis, 2011 532 Li Deyi 277 light-weight luxury goods 42–3 Li Keqiang 175, 203, 294, 304, 322, 326, 414, 510 Li, L. 145 Line of Actual Control 374 line of actual control (LAC) 170, 173–5, 184, 187, 231, 232, 240, 246, 327–8 Lin Hsiao-Ting 67 Lin, Justin Yifu 303 “Link West” policy 310 Lin Minwang 8 Li Peng 201 liquid petroleum gas (LPG) 563 Liu Jinsong 308 Liu Yu 42 Li Zhaoxing 467 Local Governments Cooperation Forum 357 local-level early warning systems 539 “long-term strategic cooperation partner” 143 Long Wave Broadcasting Station 99 Long Xingchun 263, 431n2 Look East policy 10 “Look East” strategy 256 Lord Linlithgow 73

low-carbon energy technologies 551 lower-middle income countries (LMICs) 589 Lowy Institute’s Asia Power Index 1 “LT Trade Agreement” 399 Luckin coffee 26 Luo Jialun 67 Luo Zhaohui 296, 308 Lu Shulin 387 MacColl, Malcolm 47 MacDonald Line 154 MacKenzie, Robert 48 Macri, Mauricio 489 Maddison, Angus 18 “Made in China 2025” campaign 111, 268, 273 Maduro, Nicolás 482, 489 Maha Bodhi Society in Calcutta 70, 72, 74 Maha Kumbh Mela, Hindu religious gathering 23, 24, 30n15 Mahendra, King 425 Mahindra & Mahindra 298 Mahmood, Ishtiaq 29n1, 29n9 Ma Jiali 176 Major, Ernest 47 “Make in India” program 243, 268, 294 “Make in 2025” industrial policy 342 MakeMyTrip 297 “Malacca Dilemma” 414 “1Malaysia Development Berhad” money 438 Maldives 262, 428; China free trade agreement 430 Malik, J. Mohan 98 Managing Globalization: Lessons from China and India (Kelly, Rajan, and Goh) 2 Managing Global Opportunities 19 Manchu dynasty 46, 51, 52, 53, 54 Mandarin 29 Manjusri 39 Mansingh, Surjit 162 manufacturing ecosystem 26 manufacturing hubs, India 296 Mao Zedong 57, 58, 65, 66, 89, 97, 99, 100, 139, 154, 170, 316, 319, 381, 519, 521; friendly attitude toward India in 1950 139; “left-leaning” foreign policy 100; SinoIndian bonhomie 140; strategic assessment of India’s place 140; Tibetan revolt of March 1959 140 Maritime Capability Perspective Plan 2012– 2027 254 maritime choke points 259 maritime security: China in Indian Ocean region 255–8; China’s maritime presence 260–1; India in Indian Ocean 252–5; maritime presence, China 259–61; SinoIndian maritime competition 261; SinoIndian strategic competition 261–3

606 Index Maritime Silk Road Shipping Index 303, 343, 451 Marxism–Leninism 319, 386 Marx, Karl 55 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 23 Mastro, Oriana Skylar 3, 7 Ma Tianying (1900–1982) 66 Maung, U. E. 82n13 McMahon Line 95, 96, 101n7, 172, 181, 187, 188, 382, 401 Mearsheimer, John 368 media images: bilateral economic relations 127–8; Bollywood films, Chinese media 128–30; Chinese social media 124–7; Doklam crisis 124–7; mutual antipathy, mainstream media 120–4 Media.net 297 medical mission 66 Mehta, Sureesh (Admiral) 259 Mekong–Ganga Cooperation 441 Mekong River Commission 219 Mekong River projects 440 Meng Wanzhou 127 Menon, K. P. S. 68, 75, 79, 82n11 Menon, Krishna 90 Menon, Shiv Shankar 173, 175, 230, 374 Menon,V. K. 66 “Meritocracy in China and India” 24 methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) 584 Middle East: Asian powers in 450; economic and political model 459; foreign and defense policies 449; Gulf War 452; India’s involvement in 451; limited and sporadic engagement 450–2; oil-exporting Middle Eastern economies 449; Oslo peace process 452; quest for energy and trade 452–6; role change and regional perceptions 456–9 Middle Income Country (MIC) 490 MiG fighter 228, 232, 382, 383 MiG 29K aircraft 233 Military Balance, 2019 254 military balance, China–India: economic resources 242; indigenous production 242–3; local military balances 245–8; military priorities 240–1; modernization to date 241; networked capabilities 244–5; organizational structure 244 military–civil fusion 276–7 military confrontations 1962 6 military engagement 470–1 Military History of the Encroachment on India (Shibue) 51 military impact 7 military modernization 232 Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW) 258

military strategy, China’s approach to: attack India forces 171; primary strategic direction 169, 170; secondary strategic directions 169, 170 “millennium bug” problem 297 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 586 Ming dynasty 43 Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), India 309 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), China 176 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Japan 398 Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), China 274 Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), Japan 400 Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST), China 271, 274 “mirror for the king” (Nizam al-Mulk) 41 Mi Shu (Amir Khan) 115 Missile Technology Control Regime in 2016 390 “mission-based deployments” 248 Mitchell, A. W. 228 Mittal Institute 24 “mixed-motive game” 1 mobile phone market 293 mobilization model 334 The Modern Review (Magazine) 64 Modi, Narendra Damodardas 5, 6, 123, 189, 486, 492–5; “Act East” policies 425, 441, 444; civil society organizations 588; Doklam standoff 125, 144; “extended neighbourhood,” Middle East 454; formal and informal engagements 190; India’s China strategy 159; India’s Tibet policy 204; India–US relationship 356; informal summit meeting in Wuhan 370; “Look East” policy 1990 441; “Make in India” program 243, 342; maritime security 253; New India 359; Project Mausam in India 333–4; provide hydrological information 218; SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) 260, 322, 441, 444; Salma Dam in Afghanistan 317; Skill India 342; South Asia’s connectivity 310; Space Cooperation Mechanism 526; trade and investment relations 299; UN General Assembly argument 351; US, “foundational” military cooperation agreements 369; Weibo account 125; World Heritage Committee 344; 2018 Wuhan Summit 262; Wuhan Summit in 2018 310; Xi Jinping, partners and rivals 143–4; Xi Jinping’s first summit 175 Mohanlal Atal, Madan 65 Mongol confederacy in 1279 43 Mongol Mughal dynasty 45 Mongol ruler 42 Mongol Yuan dynasty 43

Index  607 Monroe Doctrine (1923) 492 Mori Yoshirō 403, 404 Motor Vehicles Agreement (MVA) 327 Mountain Strike Corps 232, 242 Mount Meru 37 Movchan, Andrey 349 “Mud Black-roadist” 68 Mughal dynasty 43 Mughal Empire 51 Muhammad Shah, Emperor in 1721 42 Mukherjee, Anit 7 Mukherjee, Pranab 252, 467, 507 Mullik, B. N. 93, 101n4 Multi-Agent Robotics Framework 271 multi-barrel rocket launchers (MBRLs) 232 Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) 358 Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) 234 multi-stage approach 216 M-777 ultra-light Howitzers 232 Mumbai–Shanghai flight 114 Mumbai terrorist attacks, 2008 159–60, 411, 412 Murray, H. 44, 46, 50 Muslim Arab traders 40 Muslim League 64, 65, 67 Muslim populations 11 mutual antipathy, mainstream media 120–4 Myanmar 305, 306; Aung San Suu Kyi 306; China–Myanmar relations 307; Chinese and Indian investment in 436; economic diplomacy 436; India, maritime security cooperation 444; 2007 Myanmar crisis 538; 2018 refugee crisis 424 Nadkarni,Vidya 9 Nagpur-based South East Asia Educational Services 111 Naidu, Sarojini 68 Namka Chu Valley 181 Nandalal Bose 72 Nanking Treaty 74 Nantong and Jiangsu universities 111 Narasimha Rao, P.V. 158, 190 Narayanan, K. R. 183 Narayanan, M. K. 121 Naresh Chandra Committee 228 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) 524 Natalegawa, Marty 439 Nathu La clash in 1967 169, 170, 172 Nathu La Pass in Sikkim 182 National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) 583 National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) 268 “national champions” program 276, 278, 282 National Day Reception 92

National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 191 National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China 275, 559 “National Institution for Transforming India” (NITI) 268, 586 nationally determined contribution (NDC) 552, 556–8 national oil companies (NOCs) 473 National Security Strategy, 2017, US 367 National Tourism Administration 110 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 540 Naughton, Barry 335 Naval Science and Technology Laboratory (NSTL), India 272 needle and syringe programs (NSP) 583 Nehru, B. K. 398, 399 Nehru, Jawaharlal 6, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73, 140, 467, 493; “area of peace” concept 90; Bandung Conference of 1955 316; border issue with Zhou Enlai 96; Chinese aggression 181; cooperative approach 421; Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence 398; forward policy 100, 170, 171, 181; friendship with China 119; Indian Committee for Space Research 519; India’s foreign policy 381; MacDonald Line 154; Mao, “new bosom friend” (xin xiangzhi) 92; McMahon Line 95–6; Middle East 451; mixedeconomy model 381; Monroe Doctrine 253; Nehruvian tradition 151, 152; non-aligned policy 96, 97; “non-alignment” policy 89; peace area concept 100; political agendas 35; socialist society 101n3; “third force” formation 90; three-point proposal 187; Tibet issue handling 91;Vallabhbhai Patel letter 1950 96; visit to China in 1954 95 Nehruvian foreign policy 536 Nehruvian tradition 151–3, 157 “neighborhood first” policy 426 “Neighbour First” policy 310 Nepal 305; 2017 elections in 428; 2005–2006 policy conflict in 428 Nepal–India bilateral crisis 427 “net security provider” 253, 254, 263n2 “new bosom friend” 92 New Development Bank (NDB) 8, 349, 357–9, 485 “New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” 266, 273 New Silk Road (BRI): Indian–Chinese rivalry 486; India, vocal opponent 486; surpassing BRICS 485 Newton Bhabha Fund 270 New York Times 27, 27, 28, 68, 97 NFU commitment 234 Ngari Prefecture of Tibet 94

608 Index “nine-dash line” 370, 439 Nixon, Richard 157 Nizam al-Mulk (1018–1092) 41 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 402, 493, 504, 523, 536, 537 “non-alignment” policy 89 Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations 258 non-communicable diseases (NCDs) 578, 579 non-cooperation movement 55 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 563 “non-interference” approach 202 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 158, 235, 501, 506; in Argentina 505; in Brazil 505; in South Africa 505 “non-violent resistance” 57 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 386 North China plain 53 North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) 94, 181, 182, 230 North Korea 403 North Korean nuclear program 386 U Nu 70 nuclear capability 227 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 390 nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) 233 nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) 234 nuclear restraint 501, 504, 511 Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) 235, 390, 411; India and Pakistan nuclear tests 502; US– India civilian nuclear deal 506–8 nuclear tests: nuclear tests 1998 (India) 173; in South Asia 505–6 nuclear weapons 12 Obama, B. 368, 460n1, 508 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) 20 offensive defense, India: BrahMos cruise missile system 232; conventional and nuclear strategy 233–5; defensive deterrent 228–30; MiG fighters 228; military balance against China 227; new paradigm 231–3; radar acquisitions from US 227 offshore patrol vessel (OPV) 470 Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) 370, 473 oil crisis 451 Oil India Limited (OIL) 473 Okita Saburo 402 Old Yang 109 Oli, K. P. Sharma 305, 322 Ollapally, D. M. 162n1 Olympic Games, 2008 107, 109 Omar, Mohammed 387 One Belt, One Road (OBOR) 452

One China policy 491 “One China” policy 204 O’Neill, Jim 352 “One India” policy 204 “one-sided” policy 89, 99 open-door policy, China 291 opioid substitution therapy (OST) 583 Opium War 54 Oppo 293–4 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 483 Oslo peace process 452 Otowa Ōhashi 51 Ottoman Empire 46, 450 “Our Foreign Policies and Our Tasks” (women de waijiao fangzhen he renwu) 88 outer space, India and China: background 518–19; China’s space agency 520–2; India’s space agency 522–5; international space cooperation 525–8; territorial politics 519–20 overseas development assistance (ODA) 398, 436 Ozymandias (Shelley) 20 Pacific Alliance 488 Pai, Nitin 119 Pakistan: atomic diplomacy 235; Brahmaputra Basin of 218; China–India relationship 9; China’s support to 234; Chinese foreign direct investment 296; Chinese security presence in 319; Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement 356; economic and political situation 416; Financial Action Task Force 372; Gwadar Port in 440; India western frontier with 229; Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist groups 355; Jinping’s landmark 2015 visit 410; Kashmir dispute 89; lack of economic logic 318; nuclear weapons program 235, 391; 1970 political crisis 383; 1960s, tested nuclear bomb 156; Uighur agenda 412; US-led Western camp 89 Pakistan Army 319 Pakistan-controlled Kashmir 306, 391 Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) 416 Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) 128, 182, 326, 356 Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) 416 Pakistan–US alliance 89 Pakistan war 1999 7 Palepu, Krishna 21 Palestine–Israel peace process 458 Palestinians, support of 451 Pan-African e-Network 580 Panchariya, Narayan Lal 184 Panchsheel agreement 155, 158; see also Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence Panda, Jagannath 2

Index  609 Pande, Ira 2 Pandit,Vijaya Lakshmi 69 Panikkar, K. M. 69, 91, 101n4 Pan Yunhe 275 Pao,Y. K. 338 Paranjpe,V.V. 74 Paris Accords (PA) 12 Paris Climate Agreement, 2018 358, 552, 555, 558, 564 Parthasarathy, G. 511 Partition of British India 24 “partnership model” 270 Pastakia, Mehernosh 114 Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai 96, 155–6 Patranobis, Sutritho 116 Paul, T.V. 2 Paytm in 2015 297 PDVSA, Indian visit 482 Peace and Prosperity Party (DPT) 428 “peaceful and friendly consultations” 173 peaceful co-existence 181, 423 Peace Treaty at San Francisco 397 “people-centered” approach 351 people living with HIV (PLWH) 583 People’s Daily 144, 533 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 91, 94, 99, 154–6, 160, 161, 170, 199, 228, 230, 232, 240, 242, 277, 389, 401, 437, 532 People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) 241 People’s Liberation Army Daily 143–4 People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) 231, 241, 257, 470 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 19, 63, 79, 80, 139, 159, 201 people-to-people exchanges 92 Perry, Elizabeth 18 Persianate Islamic culture 41 Persian-speaking world 41 Petraeus, David 371 Pew Global Attitudes Project 123 photojournalism development 57 physical connectivity projects 318 P8i maritime patrol aircraft 233 “Pink Tide” phenomenon 487 Piya tu ab to aa ja (Indian film) 109 PLA Daily 122 “Plan for Dealing with the Tibet Issue (Chuli xizang wenti zhi fangzhen)” 90 Policies for a Reform of Governance (Richard) 48 political-economic systems 334 political engagement 466–8 political movements in India 56 political sphere: educational and cultural exchange programs 64; Japanese military threat 64; leadership networks 65–7; PRC, recognition of 69–70; Tibet issue 67–8 politico-economic models 96

politico-economic stakes 436, 439 Pollock, Sheldon 2, 18 Pompeo, Mike 357 post-Cold War 534 post-Cold War Japanese foreign policy 403 post-Dalai Tibet 6 post-independence foreign policy 365 post-mortem educative punishment 38 post-war China’s “net gain” 181–2 post-World War II 366, 380, 396, 397 Powell, Lydia 3, 12 Power Grid Corporation of India (PGCIL) 559 Power Realignments in Asia: China India, and the United States (Ayres and Mohan) 2–3 pre-1939, China and India: England, India–China interaction 43–8; India in Chinese-language reform 48–58; maritime commercial interaction 42–3; massive, visible, and asymmetrical interaction 37–40; political installation moves west 40–2; silent interaction 36–7; transcultural interactions 37 pre-Islamic ruler 41 pre-reform political economy: economy in socialist India 337–8; Mao’s socialism, mobilization and campaigns 335–7 Press Trust of India 108, 124 Primakov,Yevgeny 391 primary health care (PHC) 589 “pro-China” 262, 306 progressive social policies 487 “pro-India” 262 Project Mausam 308, 333, 343 Project Preparation Fund (PPF) 358 “Promoting the Peaceful Neutral Zone” policy 89 The Protestant Ethic (Weber) 18 Public Law 480 521 public–private partnerships (PPP) 578 Pulam Sumda (Bo lin san duo) 94 Pulwama attacks 417 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) 1 Purushothaman, Roopa 159 Qian Xuesen 521, 522 Qin dynasty, First Qin Emperor 36–7 Qing Empire in 1911 63 Qing government 46, 74 Qinghai–Tibet Railway 245, 327 Qingliang shan 39 “Quad” 161 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) 9, 10, 369 quasi-alliance, Soviet Union 141 Radhakrishnan, Koppillil 526 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 156 Rajagopalan, R. 162n1

610 Index Raja Mohan, C. 2–3, 311, 373, 423 Rajan, Ramkishen S. 2 Rajapaksa, Mahindra 262 Raman, C.V. 523 RAND study 2001 410 Rao, Narasimha 10, 510 Rao,V.V. 101n3 Rapga, Pandatsang 78 “rebalance to Asia” policy 304 reduce carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions 551 “Reform of governance” in 1901 51 refugee crisis, 2018 424 “rehyphenation” 9 rejuvenation strategy, 2050 243 Remotely Operated Vehicles 272 “renewable purchase obligations” (RPOs) 559 Renwick, Neil 8 Republic of China (ROC) 55, 63, 67, 72 Republic of Congo 467 Republic of India (ROI) 63 Requests for Information (RFIs) 270 “reset” in India–China relations 354 responsibility to protect (R2P) 12 “Responsible global powers” 552 Reuters report 123 Revolution in Military Affairs 228 Richard, Timothy 47, 48, 55 rights of Muslims in China 457 Rig Veda 36 Rijiju, Kiren 184 Rising India 11 river-water conflicts: Brahmaputra 210; conflict and cooperation 210–13; controversial issues 215–21; MOU on Brahmaputra 212; riverwater cooperation 213–15 Rivkin, Jan 29n8, 29n10 road-building program 246 Rolland, Romain 56 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 67 Rossi, Bruno 524 Rouhani, Hassan 455 Royal Academy of Engineering in the United Kingdom 270 Royal Navy 253 Roy Chowdhury, Debasish 5 Roy Chowdhury, Shankar 127, 128 “run-of-the-river” projects 212 Russia: Cold War, influence during 380–6; Indian public sector 383; Indo-Soviet treaty 383; Moscow’s ambivalence 391; post-cold war realignments 386–91; RIC trilateral 391–2 Russia, India, and China (RIC) 352 Russia–India–China (RIC) 380 Russian-origin Su-30MKI 243 Russian Revolution 76 Russian threat 46, 47

Russia’s defense industry 371 Russo-Georgian War 387, 388 Russo-Japanese War 54, 397 Ryan, Kathleen 29n1 Saalman, Lora 3, 7 SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) 260, 441, 444 Sagar,Vishwajit 111 Salma Dam in Afghanistan 217 Salman, Mohammed bin 453 San Francisco Treaty 397 Sangay, Lobsang 204 Sanskrit 39 Sarabhai,Vikram 523–5 Saran, Shyam 369, 373, 427, 510 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) 581, 582 Saudi Arabia 365, 452, 453 “Science and Technology Innovation 2030 Mega-projects” 274 Scratches on our Minds (Isaacs) 18, 29 sea lines of communication (SLOC) 247, 249, 253, 255, 259, 474 second-largest defense budget, China 242 Secret Superstar (Indian film) 115 “Section 301” investigation against India 371 self-propelled underwater reusable targets (SPURTs) 272 Sen, Amartya 351, 357 Sengupta, Arjun 340 Sen, Satiranjan 74 Sen, Tansen 3 Sephardic Jewish merchants 56 Sepoy Mutiny 46, 48, 51 “Setting up Another Kitchen” (lingqi luzao) 88 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit 173, 355 Shangri-La Dialogue 161 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, 2018 354 Sharif, Nawaz 387, 416 Sharma, Madhav 114, 116 Shastri, Lal Bahadur 100 Sheehan, Michael 518 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 20 Shell Oil 474 Shenbao (newspaper) 47, 50, 55 Shen Congwen 72 Shen, Simon 3, 5 Sheth, Sudev 29n1 Shetty, Devi 22, 23, 30n12 Shibue, Tamotsu 51 Shipki La (Shen pu qi shankou) 94 Shukla,Y. K. 72, 74 Sibal, Kanwal 311n2, 510 Siddiqui, Asif 519 Sikkim–China border 383

Index  611 Sikri, Rajiv 203 “Silk Road Cooperation” 36, 42, 303 Silk Road Economic Belt 304, 315, 344 Simla Agreement, 1914 68 Singapore 436; executive education program 19; “strategic partnership” level 444 Singapore Armed Forces 444 Singh, Manmohan 5, 159, 190, 202, 203, 467, 471, 493; maritime security 253; meet Wen Jiabao 195; meet Xi Jinping 195 Singh, Swaran 383 Singh,V. K. 185 Singh, Zorawar Daulet 91, 97 Sinha, Beohar Rammanohar 72 Sinha, U. K. 210, 211 Sino-African relations 466 Sino-Indian Buddhist studies 4 Sino-Indian “Cold War” competition 425 Sino-Indian conflict 99 Sino-Indian Cultural Society 71 Sino-Indian economic interdependence 151 Sino-Indian economic relationship 159 Sino-Indian military equation 228 Sino-Indian painting exhibition 72 Sino-Indian rapprochement 384 Sino-Indian river-water treaty 215, 217 Sino-Indian Tibet Agreement, 1954 94, 95 Sino-Indian War, 1962 2, 6, 30n23 Sino-Indian water war 209 Sino-Japanese War 48 Sino-Nepalese Transit Transport Agreement 306 Sino-Pakistan agreement, 1963 185 Sino-Pakistani border settlement 411 Sino-Pakistani nuclear nexus 235 Sino-Soviet Crisis, 1969 230 Sino-Soviet relationship 98–100, 381 Sino-Soviet split (1957–1978) 119, 519, 522 “Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance Mutual Assistance” 88 Sino-Tibetan relations 90 Sino-US rapprochement 383 Sino-US security collaboration 142 Sino-US trade war 127 Sino-US understanding 157 Sino-Vietnamese War, 1979 7 Sitharaman, Nirmala 270 “slave” mentality 54, 57 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) 295 Small, Andrew 9 Smith, Jeff 9 smoke-free environments and health education 583 smoking, health risk factors 579 SNWT Project 220 “socialist pattern of society” 90 soft global health norms 583–4 “soft power” 151, 152, 161

Solih, Ibu 262 Somalia 456 Soong Ching-ling 65, 66 Soong Mei-ling 67, 71 Soong, T.V. 75 sorafenib tosylate (Nexavar) 585 South Africa 505 South Asia: India’s balancing efforts in 10; SinoIndia positive engagements in 422 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) 173, 322, 422 South Asian nuclear tests 505–6 South Asia policy 415 South China Morning Post (newspaper) 122, 209, 374 Southeast Asia: China and India presence 435–7; China’s strategy in 437–40; India reacts East 440–4; politico-economic significance 435 South-to-North Water Transfer (SNWT) Project 211 Soviet Interkosmos program 525 Soviet-sponsored Asian Collective Security system 383 Soviet Union 88; America’s Cold War rivalry 365; China’s military actions 99; 1953, India first trade agreement 89; India, MiG fighters from 228; military equipment, India 157; Nehru, “non-alignment” policy 89; nuclear technology support, China 99; quasi-alliance 141; security threat to China 173; 1962 Sino-Indian war 172;Vietnam issue 97 “Special Frontier Force” 157 “spheres of influence” concept 253 “Spice Route” 308 Sreenivasan, T. P. 510 Sri Lanka 262, 305; Chinese foreign direct investment 296; civil war in 2006-2009 424; Colombo Port City project 306; Hambantota port to China 320; Norway’s mediation in 424; port sector 426; 2015 presidential elections 428; Tamil insurgents 424 Sri Lanka Ports Authority 306 Stalin, Joseph 97 Starbucks in China 26 State Bank of India 110 state-centric approach 588 State Council Working Committee 583 State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) 559 2019 State of Southeast Asia survey 440, 444 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) 335, 337 State Tobacco Monopoly Administration (STMA) 581 Stockholm conference 554 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) 470 stove-piped structure in India 266 Strait Times (Singapore) 27

612 Index strategic autonomy, conception of 369 “Strategy for Korea” 47 “strict anti-British boycott” 76 “string of pearls” strategy 259, 307, 420 sub-regional bodies 488 Suez Canal crisis 451 Sui–Tang unification 40 Sullivan de Estrada, Kate 3, 12 Sultan Iltutmish 42 Sumdorong Chu crisis 172, 175, 185, 230, 385 Sundaram, Lanka 96 Sun Yat-sen 65 Sun Yuxi 201 supersonic cruise missile, India 122 Survey of the Development of Liquid Rockets in Germany and their Future Prospects (Qian) 521 “sustainable” connectivity 426 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 586 Sutlej Rivers 218 Suzhou University in 2004 111 Swaraj, Sushma 204 “Symposium on Work in Tibet” 198 Syrian and Yemen crises 456 Syrian civil war 458, 459 Szonyi, Michael 18, 29n1 Tagore, Rabindranath 4, 55–8, 63, 70, 71 Taixu (1890–1947) 66, 72 Tamil insurgents 424 Tan Chung 2 Taneja, Pradeep 8 Tang dynasty 43 Tang Emperor 39 Tan,Y. 69, 71 Tarapore, Arzan 3, 7 Tariff Policy 2006 559 Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) 297, 298 Tata Group in India 22 Tejas light combat aircraft 243 Tellis, Ashley 229 “tent confrontation” standoff 203 Thampi, Madhavi 2 “Thank You India” events 204 The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (Al-Masudi) 41 The Nineteenth Century (MacKenzie) 48 “Think West” policy 454 “third force” formation 90 Third National Conference, Mumbai 92 Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth CPC Central Committee 304 Thirteenth Five-Year Plan 274 Thomas, Catherine 29n8 Thomas, Raju G. C. 156–7, 228 Thornber, Karen 29n1 The Threatened Pacific (Otowa) 51 threaten public health in China 585

Three Gorges Dam 212 Three Idiots (Indian film) 115, 130, 299 three-way discourse 67 Three-Year Action Implementation Plan 274 Three Years of the Eastern Question (MacColl) 47 Thugs of Hindostan (Indian film) 130 Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launch Site, India 520, 522 Tiananmen crisis 339 Tianjin Medical University (TMU) 111 Tibet 2, 4; border issue 6; China–India agreement on 93–6; 1951, China’s action in 316; China’s behavior in 91; China’s, military infrastructure in 228; People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 91, 94 Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) 231 Tibetan autonomy 155 Tibetan Cabinet (Kashag) 67 Tibetan-inspired Lamaism 43 Tibetan Revolutionary Party 78 Tibetan wool trade 76 Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) 195, 198, 201, 318 “Tibet card” 204 “Tibet independence” 198–9 Tibet–India border 198 Tibet issue 7; as bargaining chip 202–3; China– India détente on 200–2; China–India joint statements 196–7; China’s failed policy in 197–9; China’s White Papers on 198; “cultural genocide” in Tibet 202; human rights violations in 197; India’s special status on 200; “non-interference” approach 202 Tibet problem, temporary solution for 90–1 The Times (newspaper) 28 Times of India (newspaper) 115, 121, 122, 124 Tito, Josip Broz 524 Tiwari, N. D. 183 Topychkanov, Petr 353 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) 584 transcultural exchanges 36, 37 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 488 Trans-Siberian Railway 46, 50, 52 “travelogue” style 24 Treaty of Peace 157 Treaty Ports in China 53 triangular diplomacy 2 triangular relationship approach 8–11, 10, 482, 484 Trivedi, Atman 373 “Trucial system” 450 Trump, Donald 9, 126, 127, 367, 368, 460n1, 528; China–US rivalry 370; “Section 301” investigation against India 371; Sino-US trade war 127; traditional military realm 415; US embassy in Israel 458

Index  613 Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries (Khanna) 24 Turakhia, Bhavin 297 Turakhia, Divyank 297 Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) 412 Turko-Persian Delhi Sultanate 45 Turko-Persian Seljuq Empire in 1091 41 “two Dominions of India and Pakistan” 77 “tycoon capitalism” 337 Uighur agenda 412 UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 491 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 469 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) 345 UN General Assembly meetings in 2003 352, 536 Union Budget, 1991 341 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) 380 “unipolar moment” 157 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 451 United Front Work Department (UFWD) 322–4 United Nations Development Programme 163n20 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 471 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 554 United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) 533, 534 United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) 533, 542 United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) 534 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 372, 383, 404 United Nations (UN) Security Council 412, 532 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) 532 United Service Institution (USI) 308 United States: after World War II 552; air to India 75; al Qaeda-led 9/11 387; banning nuclear tests 99; against China 220; with China military competition 235; China threat 366; “diplomatic autonomy” of 398; “domino theory” 89; food aid and fuel for India 89; foreign policy 387; “foundational” military cooperation agreements 369; Gulf War 173; Indian threat 366; India, radar acquisitions from 228; India–US geopolitical cooperation 126; International Centre for Transformational Artificial Intelligence 269;

in Korean War 88; Nehru, “non-alignment” policy 89; oil exports to India 371; Pakistan’s alliance with 89; quasi-alliance 142; strategic disengagement of 449; troops in Afghanistan 231; US Monroe Doctrine 253 universal health coverage (UHC) 586 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) 244 Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) 272 unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) platforms 280 UN Peace and Development Trust Fund 532 UN peacekeeping operations 12; China as troop contributor 532–4; India as troop contributor 534–6; 2011 Libya crisis 532; responsibility to protect 536–41; 2005 World Summit 532 UN Security Council 11, 122, 155, 353, 356 Upadhyaya, Deendayal 156 upriver water-related cooperation 215 upstream–downstream constellation 219 US–China–Pakistan alliance 157 US–Europe–Japan alliance networks 391 Ushiba Nobuhiko 400 US–India civilian nuclear deal 506–8 US–India relationship 157 US intervention in Lebanon, 1958 451 US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) 89, 140 US-led Western camp 89 US Monroe Doctrine 253 US Public Health Service 589 US’s CINCOM policy 397 US–Soviet confrontation 90 US–USSR–China strategic triangle 384 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari 158–9, 186, 505; carefully calibrated approach 341; visited China in 2003 201 Varadarajan, Siddharth 507 Varela, Juan Carlos 489 Vedas 152 Venezuela 482 Venkataramanan K. 74 VFS Global 116 Videsh Limited (OVL) 473, 474 Vietnam War 157, 229, 383, 436 Visva-Bharati 70–1, 82n15; see also Cheena Bhavana Vivo 294 Voroshilov, Kliment 97 Wagner, Rudolf 3–4 Wang, Dan 29n1, 29n2 wangguo 49, 50 Wang Hongwei 95, 96, 98 Wang Jiaxiang 97 Wang Qingfang 72

614 Index Wanguo gongbao 47 Wang Yi 204, 306, 423 war “dug-outs” 66 “war preparation” lines 122 war-time political collaboration 67 “war wastage reserves” (WWR) 242 Washington Post report 355 Wassenaar Arrangement in 2017 390 “water hegemon” in South Asia 218 water management/sharing arrangement 209 water-related cooperation, China and India 216 water-scarce India 220 “water war” 6, 209 Weber, Max 18 Weibo (Website) 125–7, 129, 130, 132n2 Wendt, Alexander 145 Weng Tonghe 48 Wen Jiabao 107, 142, 201, 213, 292, 303, 309, 467, 510; meet Manmohan Singh 195 Western communis opinio 44 “Western”/ “liberal camp” 403 Western Route Project 211 Westward Strategy 304, 311n1 What China and India Once Were (Pollock and Elman) 2 “wheel-turning emperor” 39 Wickremesinghe, Ranil 262 Wilhelm, Richard 56 Wilson, Dominic 159 Winning in Emerging Markets (Khanna) 29n6 “win-win” approach 429, 430 Wolf, Aaron 209 World Anti-Imperialist League 65 World Bank 475 World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) 490 World Economic Forum (WEF) 295, 298, 351 “world guru” (Vishwa Guru) 153 World Health Assembly (WHA) 580, 588 World Health Organization (WHO) 578, 582, 588 World Heritage Committee 344 World Investment Report 2018 469 World Peace Council 92 World Summit, 2005 532, 537 World Summit, 2015 534 World Trade Organization (WTO) 107, 109, 292, 413, 584 World War I 56, 450 World War II 4, 35, 64, 67, 72, 76, 77, 79, 90, 396, 398, 400, 519, 521, 552 WTO IP regime 585 Wu Fuzuo 3, 11, 562 Wu, Gordon 338 Wuhan spirit 369–70 Wuhan summit in 2018 6, 262, 310, 370, 373, 422

Wutai shan 39 Wu Xiaoling 71, 72 Wu Zetian, Empress 39, 40 Wuzong, Emperor 40 Xavier, Constantino 10 Xiamen summit, 2017 355, 356 Xiao Baohua 112 Xiaomi 294 Xie, L. 209 Xi Jinping 5, 6, 139, 143–4, 160, 175, 189, 243, 295, 299, 308, 319, 321, 366–7, 388, 390, 410, 414, 422, 437, 467, 469, 470, 472, 532; AI ecosystem 273; Belt and Road Initiative 303; “centerpiece” foreign policy of 343; Chinese military 245; developments in Tibet 198; Doklam standoff 144; formal and informal engagements 190; informal summit meeting in Wuhan 370; Modi, Narendra, meeting 143; Paris climate summit in 2015 555; Space Cooperation Mechanism 526; 19th Party Congress speech 273; trade and investment relations 299; Westward Strategy 304; World Economic Forum speech 351; 2018 Wuhan Summit 262; Wuhan Summit in 2018 310 Xinhua (news agency) 122 Xishi ji (Record of westward mission) 42 Xuanzang (monk) 39, 59 Xuanzong, Emperor 40 Xu Beihong 71, 72, 74 Xu Fancheng 71, 74 Xu Jiyu 45 Yadong (Chumbi) valley 172, 175, 176 Yafeh,Yishay 29n8 Yameen, Abdulla 262, 306, 307, 428 Yan’an 66 Yang Jiechi 203, 308 Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra (YTB) 5, 6, 210–11 Yatung–Lhasa Road 74 Yee Wing Law 132n1 Yegong 52 Ye Hailin 147 Yeh, Catherine 51 Ye Jianying 66 Yellow Springs 38 Ye Min 3, 8 Ye Qianyu 72 Yeung, Bernard 29n1 Yin Yan 111, 112 yoga 108, 115 Yoga Day 161 “young China” 49 You Yunshan 72, 74 Yuan Dynasty 42, 199

Index  615 Yunnan Minzu University 115 Yunnan–Sichuan region 76 Yu-Xin-Ou E-commerce Company 344 Yu Zhengsheng 199 Zaman, Mohammad 29n1 Zangmu Dam 211 Zeng Yi 277 Zhang Feng 5 Zhang Gaoli 304 Zhang Jianhua 526 Zhang Ruimin 22 Zhang Qun 90

Zhao Gancheng 145, 148 Zhao, J. 460n2 Zhejiang Tide 52 Zheng He 43, 59, 255, 451 Zhou Enlai 35, 88, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 101n5, 140, 171, 187, 382, 383, 398, 399, 422, 587; Bandung Conference of 1955 316 Zhu Cuiping 256 Zhu De 65 Zhu Rongji 297, 298, 391 Zhu Weiqun 198 ZTE Corporation 278