China-India Relations

Contemporary Dynamics

Amardeep Athwal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134074655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the dynamics of the modern relationship between China and India. As key emerging powers in the international system, India and especially China have received much attention. However, most analysts who have studied Sino-Indian relations have done so through a neorealist lens which emphasizes the conflictual and competitive elements within the overall relationship. This has had the effect of obscuring how the China-India relationship is currently in the process of transformation.

Drawing on a detailed and systematic analysis of the interlinked and increasingly important issues of maritime security in the Indian Ocean region, energy demands and concerns, and economic growth and interchange, Amardeep Athwal shows that not only is there an absence of mutual threat perception, but Sino-Indian bilateral trade is increasingly being framed institutionally and China and India are also beginning to coordinate policy in important areas such as energy policy. He concludes that neorealist accounts of Sino-Indian relations have difficulty in explaining these recent developments. However, rather than rejecting neorealist explanations in their entirety, he points towards a theoretical pluralism with an appeal to 'soft' realism and theories of neoliberalism and peaceful change.

China-India Relations will be of interest to scholars of international relations and politics, international business and Asian studies.

1
The history of Sino-Indian relations

Sino-Indian relations after World War II

India achieved independence on 15 August 1947 after a long and nonviolent nationalist movement. China attained independence on 1 October 1949 in what was the culmination of the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). There was a brief period of cooperation from 1949–1957 where diplomatic relations were formally established (1 April 1950) and high-level visits were exchanged. India was the first non-socialist country to establish formal diplomatic relations with the PRC. India also strongly advocated the PRC’s presence in the United Nations Security Council and consistently voted in the PRC’s favor until 1962 (Swamy, 2001: Appendix IV). In 1954, the two states signed an agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India and had an Exchange of Notes. India thus signed away all its inherited privileges in Tibet by virtue of earlier pacts (see, for instance, Ganguly, 2004:105–120). The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Panchsheel) and the Bandung Conference were highlights of Sino-Indian cooperation. However, the cooperation was not to last. By the late 1950s, serious differences between the two states had begun to surface, particularly over the undemarcated border. The unresolved border issue would lead to war by 1962.

Colonial legacy was in many ways responsible for the India-China border dispute. The 1913–1914 Simla Conference, which was attended by representatives from British India, Tibet and the Republic of China, resulted in the conclusion of a vague agreement. Opaque references were made to watersheds and the natural boundaries between British India and Tibet. Later these references were utilized in the creation of the controversial McMahon Line. Although Chinese representatives were involved, the central government in Beijing never formally signed the agreement. Furthermore, though Tibet signed the agreement, the Nationalist Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek as well as the Communist Party under Mao Tse-tung later failed to recognize the agreement’s legitimacy and sought to restore Chinese borders to former historical levels in the early nineteenth century.

In 1950, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China advanced into Lhasa and brought Tibet under Chinese control. The de facto takeover became de jure when the Dalai Lama accepted the seventeen-point agreement of May 1951 with China. This nullified any Tibetan claim to independence (Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:12). For India, with the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the buffer zone provided by the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayan frontier disappeared (Garver, 2001b: Chapter 3).

The Indian leadership was caught off guard with these developments but in response quickly implemented a two-prong strategy. First, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim were incorporated within India’s defensive boundaries. Furthermore, Indian administration was extended into the Tawang tract (a monastery region beyond the McMahon Line). Second, Nehru tried convincing the Chinese to maintain a relationship characterized by suzerainty over Tibet. However, the latter strategy failed and by the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement, India, realized that Chinese occupation of Tibet was a fait accompli. Subsequently, India attempted to use the positive momentum generated by the Panchsheel Agreement to reach a conclusion on the contentious border issue (Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:13). Border talks between India and China failed in 1954 and relations steadily deteriorated. Even India’s army chief as Sidhu and Yuan note, “admitted that Nehru was aware of the Chinese threat but realized that there was very little they could do militarily” and continued to seek a diplomatic solution (ibid.: 13).

In 1958, in a letter to Nehru, Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai suggested that both India and China should “temporarily maintain the status quo” (GOI, 1959:54). However, Zhou maintained that boundary disputes between India and China existed; that there existed a line of actual control (LAC) exercising administrative jurisdiction on both sides; that the two sides should observe the current LAC (which by default was the McMahon Line) pending a final resolution to the dispute; and that both sides should withhold patrolling close to the disputed areas to ensure peace (Liu, 1994:20–26).

While Sino-Indian relations continued to deteriorate, revolts broke out in Tibet over Chinese rule in the late 1950s. The revolts culminated in March 1959 where the Dalai Lama, disguised as a soldier, fled from Lhasa. Having been assured of asylum by Nehru, he reached India on 31 March 1959, and set up the government-in-exile in the northern Indian border town of Dharamsala. The Chinese were outraged and immediately implicated the US and CIA involvement in the affair. As one analyst has noted:

In the Chinese eyes, political asylum given to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan rebels and the warm welcome Nehru himself extended to the Dalai Lama at this moment were at least an unfitting reception, if not a provocative act.

(Liu, 1994:24)

The tensions over Tibet brought the status of the Panchsheel Agreement into question. It indicated the significance of the unresolved status of borders in the Ladakh region of Indian Kashmir and in the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA, now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh) north of Assam and East of Myanmar (Documents … 1960:24; Saigal, 1979:19). China had already occupied the Aksai Chin plateau of Ladakh and built a road through it, connecting its Tibetan region with that of Xinjiang. Correspondingly, India launched “Operation Onkar,” a strategy designed to establish military posts along the McMahon Line to be completed by July 1962 (Saigal, 1979:19).

Armed clashes then occurred in two separate regions, first in Longju (in the eastern sector) and then in Kongka (in the western sector) in 1959. Negotiations in April 1960 to attempt to settle the increasing tensions failed. Shortly thereafter, the Indian army implemented its “forward policy,” pushing northward. Then, in October 1962, war broke out between the two states.¹ PLA troops ousted Indian troops from their post in Dhola in the eastern sector, which was beyond the McMahon Line (on the Chinese side, and established as a part of the forward policy under Operation Onkar). The better-prepared PLA forces overwhelmed Indian troops in both the eastern and western sectors.

In the Ladakh theatre India was essentially routed and by mid-November China was in possession of all the territory that Beijing had previously claimed. In the NEFA, the Indian defense effort completely broke down. The morale of the troops was completely crushed and the army leaders were disgraced. China had reached within 40 miles of Tezpur and 100 miles from the Digboi oil fields. Then, suddenly, on 21 November 1962, the PLA unilaterally withdrew to where the Chinese government thought the territorial boundaries with India should be (Praval, 1990: xi; Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:15). Although the Indian government strongly opposed China’s point of withdrawal, they could do little but appeal, at the least, for a reversion to the status quo ante. However, the war was far more consequential for India for other reasons. The war did not change the status quo of the border but “for all intents and purposes, India had lost the war and was forced to accept both territorial loss and national humiliation on a grand scale” (Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:15). The scale of the defeat and the psychological impact that it had on India cannot be underestimated (ibid.: 17). From a military standpoint, Indian forces proved completely incapable of defending India’s borders. As Sidhu and Yuan (ibid.: 17) note, “The outward sense of optimism that had characterized defense and foreign policy making at the political level between 1947 and 1962 never returned.” Though the United States, Britain and even the Soviet Union criticized Chinese actions, they were all unable or unwilling to commit themselves militarily against the Chinese. India thus made the shift towards developing an indigenous conventional military capability that could deal with the Chinese threat and preserve Indian territorial integrity. After China successfully tested its first nuclear bomb on 16 October 1964, there were additional incentives for India to commence its own nuclear program (Thomas, 1993).

From 1962 until 1976, tensions between China and India remained high as both sides fought their own Cold War. As a result of India’s huge defense efforts following the 1962 border war, the threat of overt conflict slowly receded. However, the process of normalization still loomed large, despite the fact that both sides had informally accepted the cease-fire line of 21 November 1962 as the LAC (Liu, 1994:176–177). Both sides deployed hundreds of thousands of troops in the remote boundary regions and infrastructure improvements were made on both sides (i.e. construction of roads, airfields, etc, see Mansingh and Levine, 1989). One of the most consequential developments of the 1962 border war was the emergence of important new security dynamics. India and the Soviet Union emerged on one side and China, Pakistan and the United States on the other (Mansingh and Levine, 1989; Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:18).

What started as ideological disputes between Mao and Khrushchev culminated in the Sino-Soviet split by the mid-1960s. Moscow accused Beijing of pursuing a reckless foreign policy agenda and Beijing in turn accused Moscow of becoming ideologically soft towards the West (Athwal, 2004). The Sino-Soviet split coincided with increasing Indo-Soviet cooperation, best embodied by the 1971 Friendship Treaty and with Sino-US rapprochment. This resulted in Kissinger’s famous trip to Beijing in 1971 (N.S. Singh, 1986; Malik, 2002).²

The Sino-Pakistani partnership emerged primarily as the outcome of the Sino-Indian border war and quickly began to take the form of an anti-India alliance. Pakistan and China reached a boundary agreement on 3 March 1963 on their common border, which both parties agreed had not been delimited and demarcated. Moreover, during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War (fought mainly over Kashmir), China sided with Pakistan and accused India of suspicious military activity in Tibet (Vertzberger, 1983:38–40; Rose, 2000:226). During the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, which led to the formation of Bangledesh, Sino-Pakistani cooperation took place at both the diplomatic and military levels. In April when India began backing a guerilla movement in East Pakistan, Premier Zhou offered his support to Pakistan’s dictator General Yahya Khan, contesting that “should the Indian expansionists dare to launch aggression against Pakistan, the Chinese government and people will, as always, firmly support the Pakistani government and people in their struggle to safeguard state sovereignty and national independence” (Vertzberger, 1983:47). Such statements, coupled with news of Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in July were the primary factors pushing India to sign the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty on 9 August 1971 (Hersh, 1983:452; N.S. Singh, 1986:87–89). As one analyst has observed, “Sino-Indian animosity after the 1962 war soon evolved into a dependent antagonism … Any attempts to improve relations between New Delhi and Beijing were constrained by the Sino-Soviet antagonism and the Indo-Pakistani confrontation” (Mansingh and Levine, 1989; Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:18).

Though in rhetoric, Chinese support for Pakistan appeared deep in both 1965 and 1971, the level of their actual military commitments was quite calculated. As Rose has noted, in both the 1965 and 1971 wars, China “merely provided Pakistan with a reasonable deterrent against India’s much larger and technologically superior military” (Vertzberger, 1983:52; Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:21). In other words, China did not want to give aid to the extent that it would enable Pakistan to carry out offensive military operations against India. As another analyst has also commented, “China wanted a policy that would demonstrate all-out support for Pakistan without going beyond a certain limit of actual commitment to military involvement” (Vertzberger, 1983:52).

Relations between India and China began to take a positive turn in the 1970s when in 1976, India and China finally exchanged ambassadors again. Though Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was prepared to improve relations with China by 1969, the Chinese did not respond until 1976 (ibid.: 56). Despite warnings from Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, the Indian government under Morarji Desai continued to make overtures toward China (Liu, 1994:126; Swamy, 2001:101). The Desai-led Janata government sought to distance New Delhi from Moscow by improving relations with Beijing. In turn, the post-Mao Deng Xiaoping government realized that the Indo-Soviet relationship was closely tied to Indo-Chinese hostility. Therefore an improvement in Sino-Indian relations would serve to distance New Delhi from Moscow. Coupled with US military defeats in Vietnam and the subsequent US “retreat” from Asia, the Chinese felt that an improvement in Sino-Indian relations would frustrate Soviet attempts to fill the vacuum created by the US withdrawal and encircle China (Mansingh and Levine, 1989:36; Liu, 1994:124–125).

In February 1979, India’s Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee strategically visited China during the Sino-Vietnamese War (or Third Indochina War) and then in June 1980, Deng Xiaoping suggested to Indian journalists that a resolution to the border issue could be based on a mutual recognition of the status quo: Indian acceptance of Chinese control of Askai Chin and Chinese recognition of Indian control of territory in the eastern sector. For the first time as well, as one analyst notes, “China also departed from its previous position on Kashmir, declaring it to be a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan instead of unequivocally backing the latter” (Sidhu and Yuan, 2003:22; also Garver, 1996:323–40). Despite counter-pressure from Moscow in the final year of the Leonid Brezhnev period (1964–1982), the process of Sino-Indian normalization continued in the pattern of: regular summit meetings between heads of state and government, high-ranking military and nonmilitary officials and with the institutionalization of confidence-building measures (CBMs). This ongoing process has been highly significant and led to the 1993 Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility and the 1996 Agreement on Confidence-Building Measures.

The period, however, was not without its tensions. For instance, in December 1986, India granted statehood to Arunachal Pradesh, formerly NEFA, an act that was seen by China as an attempt to impose the controversial McMahon Line (one of the causes of the original 1962 border dispute, Liu, 1994:142). On the other hand, Chinese movements in western Ladakh across the LAC prompted protests from New Delhi. Border tensions began to heat up once again to the point where India mobilized troops (as a part of Operation Chequerboard in Sumdorong Chu in the eastern sector), making the prospect of war ever more real (Garver, 1996). There was also China’s rapidly developing nuclear missile program and reports about the supply of nuclear and missile technologies to Pakistan (Sidhu and Yuan, 2001:23).

As the Cold War drew to a close, the prospects for Sino-Indian détente also improved. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms brought Moscow and Beijing closer and also meant that the “India” card was becoming less relevant in Sino-Soviet relations. Though Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and emphasized India’s policy of noninterference, China was still concerned about renewed nationalist sentiment in Lhasa and moreover the links between Tibetan nationalist groups and right-wing Hindu parties (Mansingh, 1994a: 299).

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing in December 1988, the first since Nehru’s in 1954, was a definitive moment in Sino-Indian relations. During the visit, the two states established a framework for cooperation. India accepted China’s position that bilateral relations (especially economic) could be expanded and improved before the resolution of the border issue. And China accepted India’s position that a joint working group headed by deputy foreign ministers be created to settle the border dispute with an acceptable time frame. Sino-Indian ties reached a new high in 1996 when Jiang Zemin became the first Chinese president to pay an official visit to India. During this time, both India and China agreed to reduce troops along the LAC and signed the Agreement on Confidence-Building Measures. In this period of cooperation, increasing institutional links were established not only at the military level but also within the strategic, journalistic and political communities. Research and scholarship opportunities increased markedly between the two states and an agreement on bilateral cooperation in science technology and space was signed (ibid.: 296).

The biggest change to Sino-Indian relations from the 1980s through to the 1990s was the large increase in bilateral trade. It increased from $117.4 million in 1987 to $700 million in 1993–1994. It now stands at $13.4 billion (CIA World Fact Book, 2004). Though both states export similar goods such as carpets, garments, textiles, industrial components and handicrafts, there are areas where each state enjoys comparative advantages and where trade can be expanded. As basic infrastructure continues to improve in both states (e.g. telecommunications, shipping lines and banking channels), the prospects of en...

Table of contents

• Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The history of Sino-Indian relations
• 2 The Indian Ocean and China and India’s naval strategy and modernization
• 3 Chinese and Indian economic liberalization and the nature of the Sino-Indian economic relationship
• 4 China’s and India’s energy policies
• 5 The positive trends in the Sino-Indian bilateral dialogue
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index