India and China in Asia

Between Equilibrium and Equations

Jagannath Panda, Jagannath P. Panda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429755163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études régionales

This book analyses the structure of the India–China relationship and the two prominent powers' positions with and against each other, bilaterally and globally, in a complex Asian environment and beyond. India and China's perceptions of one another are evaluated to reveal how the order of Asia is influenced by engaging in different power equations that affect equilibrium and disequilibrium.

Contributors address three critical perspectives of India and China in Asia which are increasingly shaping the future of Asia and impacting the Indo-Pacific power balance. First, they examine the mutual perceptions of India and China as an integral part of Asia's evolving politics and the impact of this on the emerging Asian order and disorder. Second, they assess how classical and contemporary characteristics of the India–China boundary and beyond-border disputes or conflicts are shaping Asia's political trajectory and leaving an impact on the Indo-Pacific region. Additionally, contributors observe the prevailing power equations in which India and China are currently engaged to reveal that they are not only geographically limited to the Asian region. Instead, having a strong global or intercontinental character attached to it, the India–China relationship involves extra-territorial powers and extra-territorial regions.

This book will be of interest to academics, students and policymakers working on Asian studies, international relations, area studies, emerging powers studies, strategic studies, security studies and conflict studies.

Part I

Bilateral perspectives

1Chinese perspectives on India’s rise

J. Mohan Malik

Conventional wisdom has it that growing power asymmetry, in particular Beijing’s global clout, is the reason for Chinese derision and bellicosity toward India.¹ However, this chapter argues that the roots of the China–India divide are deep-seated and actually pre-date Beijing’s acquisition of economic and military muscle. They originate from China’s historical experience and strategic culture, as well as Beijing’s worldview, perspectives and policies. A country’s foreign policy is often a function of perceptions, beliefs and images. Put simply, one’s particular set of beliefs about “the other” usually defines and shapes a specific policy course. This chapter focuses primarily on the Chinese narrative, views, and perceptions of India in order to derive the roots of Chinese policy toward India and to provide policy-relevant analysis on future developments in Sino-Indian relations.² The key argument is that despite earth-shaking changes in international politics, China’s relationship with India is still characterized more by continuities than changes, with the past continuing to exercise strong influence on China’s present and future policy towards India and with the rest of the world. There remains a major perceptual gap that is now further compounded by the growing power gap resulting in persistent instability in bilateral relations. In China’s future vision of Pax Sinica, India is a total misfit. Their power rivalry and their self-images as natural great powers and centres of civilization drive them to support different countries and causes. Given the fundamental clash of interests rooted in their histories, strategic cultures and geopolitics, the threat of another war is ever present. Consequently, relations between Asia’s two giants remain stymied by a paucity of parallel interests, are dogged by nationalism on both sides, characterized by conflicting worldviews, and marred by an intensifying cold war.

China’s world: Self-image and vision

Beijing looks to its past to chart its future. China’s traumatic experience between the Opium Wars and the Japanese invasion reinforces the quest for overwhelming power and primacy in Asia. In China, the past is ever present. Since the mid-1920s, both Nationalists and Communists have rewritten China’s history to serve their political objectives. China has long seen itself as a superior, unrivalled civilization-state. Lucien Pye, a well-known Sinologist, called China “a civilization pretending to be a state”. I call the People’s Republic of China (PRC) an “empire-state” masquerading as a “nation-state”. Historically, much of China’s territorial expansion took place under non-Han alien dynasties – the Mongols and the Manchus – who conquered and ruled China from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries and the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, respectively. Modern Chinese discourse projects the PRC as a successor state entitled to territorial acquisitions of those non-Chinese empires, such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan. In this version of history, any territory conquered by imperial dynasties in the past remains immutably “Chinese”, no matter when the conquest may have occurred. Beijing’s version of history also blurs the distinction between what was no more than hegemonic influence, tributary relationships, suzerainty, and actual control.³ Such interpretation or rewriting of history from a nationalistic perspective to promote national unity and regime legitimacy has been accorded the highest priority by China’s rulers, both Nationalists and Communists. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership consciously conducts itself as the heir to China’s imperial legacy, often employing the symbolism and rhetoric of empire.

China’s self-image today is thus based on a carefully constructed CCP narrative of an idealized imagined past as a “benign and benevolent power” which has little or no basis in Asian history.⁴ Chinese textbooks preach the notion of the Middle Kingdom as being the oldest and most advanced civilization that was at the very centre of the universe, surrounded by lesser, partially Sinicized states in East and Southeast Asia that must constantly bow and pay their respects. From primary school textbooks to television historical dramas, the state-controlled media has fed generations of Chinese a diet of nationalist bluster and imperial China’s grandeur. As per the official narrative:

China was rarely the aggressor or expansionist, and pretty much never a hegemon. Instead, other countries were drawn toward it by its wealth and brilliance, and if they submitted to it, they did so voluntarily, because this seemed to them to be the natural and proper thing to do. In exchange, China bestowed legitimacy on appropriately deferential regimes, showered those who were interested in them with the fruits of Chinese civilization and allowed them access to its rich markets.⁵

Miles Maochun Yu adds: “At the core of China’s strategic culture lies a Sino-centrism, which places China at the most pivotal spot of the world with a moral responsibility to rule all under heaven with China’s superior and refined culture and institutions” – a political philosophy outlined in the 2010 book The China Dream by Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu, who wrote that “China possesses a superior cultural gene needed to become the world’s leader”.⁶

Xi’s dream: China as number one

The Chinese are certainly not the first or only people in the world to embrace a national narrative of unique civilizational superiority, but President Xi Jinping’s promotion of the “China Dream” is quite telling. In the Chinese conception of international relations, hierarchy leads to harmony. Peace and stability prevails when each country keeps its place in a hierarchical order. As Yan Xuetong notes: “The establishment of a hierarchical system based on a leading state’s superior strength is the sole method of preserving interstate order”.⁷ This concept of a hierarchical order is not much different from the hegemonic stability theory in international relations. The notion of a “benign and benevolent China” at the centre of Asia commanding obeisance from the less civilized to maintain order serves the party’s domestic legitimacy and foreign policy goals but glosses over centuries of incessant warfare, bloodshed, starvation, and turmoil.

Chinese strategic thinkers perceive the emerging multipolar world to be similar to that of the Warring States era (475–221 bc), which was characterized by intense rivalries, conflicts, betrayals, shifting alliances, with some vying for supremacy and others forming alliances to prevent any state from attaining that dominant status. Deception, opportunism, and perfidy in inter-state relations were accepted as perfectly normal. Maochun Yu argues that “the Warring States period has left an indelible mark on today’s Chinese strategic culture, one that puts its premium on short-term expediency and deception, not on strategic trust and long-term friendship”.⁸ Fundamentally speaking, China’s strategic culture necessitates distrust of strong, powerful neighbours and a preference for small, weak and subordinate or client states. Whether imperial or communist, China has long sought to install either buffer states or to cultivate friendly, and preferably pliant, regimes or tributary states along its periphery. One lesson Chinese history textbooks teach is that “strength leads to expansion and weakness to contraction”. Whenever China was strong, rich and united, it expanded; whenever it was weak, it fragmented and its frontiers contracted. Now that China is prosperous and powerful once again, expansion (e.g. the return of so-called “lost territories”) is quite natural and proper.

A logical corollary of this is: Power trumps law. Who rules makes the rules. Beijing no longer wants to be constrained by bilateral or multilateral pacts or laws and treaties that it signed on to “when China was weak”. Not a completely revisionist power, China does abide by laws, treaties and norms but only those that serve its interests (i.e. those that expand China’s territory, leverage and influence).⁹ Another common refrain is that “other countries need to ‘get used to’ its assertive posture and Chinese maritime forays, whether they like it or not”.¹⁰ Historically, China (“tian xia”) sits as the equal of no one. The concept of sovereign equality of states is an alien concept in the Middle Kingdom. Sinologist Wang Gungwu doubts “the Chinese ever believed that equality really existed in international relations”. Once strong and powerful, “the Chinese may wish to go back to their long-hallowed tradition of treating foreign countries as all alike but unequal and inferior to China”.¹¹ A survey conducted in 2005 revealed that many interviewees thought that “a stronger China will try to restore its traditional vassal system”. Once China emerges as an “unrivalled regional power and a major global actor, it will use its enhanced power to grant assistance and protection to ‘the faithful countries’, in return for their alliance, obedience and inevitable submission and compliance”.¹² Since the 2008 global financial crisis, Beijing’s state media has been propagating the notion that “the China model” of top–down economic and political direction would eventually supplant democracy and its capitalist system. China’s global clout is manifesting itself in a millennia-old sense of superiority in Chinese behaviour as Beijing seeks to recast the world in its own image. Within a very short period of time, China’s vision has evolved from a multipolar world to a bipolar one¹³ and then to a unipolar Sino-centric order underpinned by Xi’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) infrastructure megaproject. Zhang Baohui, professor of international affairs at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, is confident that “by 2030, China will have won the geopolitical race. Everyone will then live under the shadow of Chinese power”.¹⁴ Though all great powers – democratic or authoritarian – tend to behave in a similar hegemonic fashion once they reach the pinnacle of power, the point is that China holds a long historical track record of this type of behaviour.

Classic Chinese statecraft also dictates that “[t]here’s no such thing as friendly foreign powers. Foreign powers are either hostile or subordinate”.¹⁵ Subordinate states are allies who are showered with gifts and offered protection, whereas hostile states, who either do not kowtow to the magnanimous Celestial Emperor or have close military ties with hostile powers (e.g. the United States) are enemies who need to be subdued by involving them in troublesome embroilments and/or “teaching them a lesson”. Whether Imperial, Nationalist or Communist, the aim of Chinese policy has been that neighbours must be respectful, obedient, and in areas immediately adjacent to the Chinese lands, preferably impotent and sufficiently weak. Any country that is seen as blocking rejuvenation of the Chinese nation or restoration of its glory and greatness (or, the realization of the “China Dream”) would invariably invite Beijing’s wrath. The concept of “unrestricted warfare” against external enemies (aka barbarians) which requires penetration and disruption of the infrastructure networks, trade, media, government, businesses and military assets is not much different from Mao Zedong’s concept of “permanent class struggle” against domestic enemies. In the past 15 months alone, state-controlled media has threatened war with Vietnam, the Philippines, and India, and condemned Australia and South Korea. As Martin Jacques observes in When China Rules the World: “Imperial Sino-centrism shapes and underpins modern Chinese nationalism”.

In short, Chinese exceptionalism and expansionism are historical and revivalist. Historically, successive Chinese dynasties waged endless warfare to secure the core (inner subjects: Mostly Han) by dominating the periphery, hence the creation of buffer states and tributaries to protect the core. Following the absorption and transformation of old buffer states (aka “autonomous regions” in Xinjiang,...