Doklam again: India must brace for a more dominant China
One of the striking outcomes of the Doklam standoff was that it exposed how little India had prepared for an eventuality with China along its long border – the longest unresolved border dispute in the world. Although the standoff ended with something of a tactical victory for India, the fact is that the withdrawal by Indian and Chinese forces was not coordinated, nor did the Chinese promise to end their work on the contested China-Bhutan border.
Recent revelations that Chinese troops are not only present very nearby, but that infrastructure work continues, though in different spots, suggests that the Chinese, at most, merely lowered the temperature, but did not remove the cooking pot.
Indian commentators have posited a number of theories as to why China acted the way it did, but they also rolled out a lot of garbage. For example, a number of senior Indian commentators, supposedly well-informed, spoke of the end of “peaceful rise” of China, or that China would be well-served by adhering to the idea in future. The thing is that China had officially set aside this slogan (it was seen as too threatening for some, others argued that China should not unilaterally dismiss the option of war) in 2005 – a dozen years previously. Such shocking ignorance is of a piece with much commentary about China, which then usually devolves into racist ideas of the "inscrutable Asians".
What makes this ignorance more problematic is that a number of commentators have mapped out in the open domain the various threads that drive new Chinese thinking. The problem lies in the fact that Indians have not incorporated such thinking in their foreign policy calculations. This means that things like the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Belt and Road Initiatives as a whole, and the recent Doklam standoff are all discussed separately, as standalone incidents that are not held together in a larger understanding of Chinese strategic aims. Without such an understanding, China remains an unfathomable country which occasionally engages in “enemy action” and occasionally supports India on issues like “International Yoga Day”.
The first thing to understand is China’s nationalism and how it sees its role in Asia. The trope of a “century of humiliation” has been very important for China, and its desire to keep, and surpass the Joneses, is incredibly important. As Yang Jisheng chronicles in Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine, much of Mao’s desire for “rash advance” before initiating the Great Leap Forward seemed to be about surpassing UK’s steel production (the dictat for household to create their own steel furnaces) and to match the USSR’s launching of the Sputnik satellite with “Sputnik harvests”.
To a certain degree this was directed inwards until 2008, the year that the Beijing Olympics announced to the world that China had come into its own. Soon thereafter, Beijing’s belligerent nationalism ended up expressed overseas.
Possibly the best mapping of this for outsiders was done by David Shambaugh in his 2011 article for the Washington Quarterly, titled “Coping with a Conflicted China”. In this excellent article, which begins by saying that the years 2009-10 marked the rise of a China more difficult to deal with, Shambaugh draws out the ideas behind the “Nativist”, “Realist”, “Major Powers”, “Asia First”, “Global South”, “Selective Multilateralism”, and “Globalist” schools of thought within China, and their power.
In ending the essay, Shambaugh predicted that China’s neighbours and its allies will have to deal with a more conflicted China, but one which is likely to be much more aggressive. These have largely come true.
The rise of Xi Jinping, though, has seen that internal conflict being largely subsumed under one man, and a stress on China’s place in the sun. With the striking diminishment of US power due to the Iraq War and now the rise of Donald Trump, The Economist has now put Xi Jinping on its cover as the world’s most powerful man, and yet Indians still seem to have little clue as to what he wants. One way would be to examine what drives the strategic agenda behind Xi’s most important foreign policy initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
While China has pushed the US back a little in East Asia, strikingly so in the Philippines, where it is said Beijing bought itself a new president when the old one challenged it on the South China Sea, the area where China has most obviously expanded its reach is to its west.
In Central Asia and South Asia, the US has little established power. With Pakistan increasingly isolated due to its own behaviour vis-à-vis India on one hand, and Afghanistan, the US and the rest of the ISAF countries on the other, China’s found an excellent opportunity to establish a relationship with a country desperately feeling threatened (whether rightly or wrongly) about its own sovereignty.
In Nepal, China offered trade routes that allowed the landlocked country to dream about connecting itself to the wider world without going through India.
In all such cases, BRI offers China plentiful opportunity to act (in its own thinking) as the central security provider and economic centre in Asia. Nor is this happening in secret. A number of Chinese commentators have written about the security and strategic impacts of BRI, and a useful analysis of it can be found in Joel Wuthnow’s recent paper in INSS, titled “Chinese Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative: Strategic Rationales, Risks, and Implications”. Wuthnow argues that, “Several analyses describe the BRI as a way for China to simultaneously achieve two geopolitical objectives: amassing strategic influence in Eurasia’s heartland while deftly avoiding direct competition with the United States.”
In many ways the Doklam standoff was characterised by the Chinese in a similar manner - as China defending Bhutanese sovereignty. China defined India as the problem, especially as India (and Bhutan) engaged militarily before engaging diplomatically to deal with the standoff. It was also noticeable that whatever happened behind the curtains, no major power questioned Chinese actions with the exception of Japan - a country that China does not really think of as a competitor, merely an obstacle.
In effect, the Chinese found that they could assert that they were the main security provider in the Eurasian area, and no major power would rally against this. India was alone.
As the UK continues to destroy its power through Brexit, and Donald Trump undermines US legitimacy abroad by pulling out of major agreements such as the Paris Accord and the Iran Deal, China will continue to press ahead as the main power in Asia. The one country that may have challenged this role was Russia, which has not. As such, India looks at an Asia to its north as one that will be more and more a Chinese sphere of influence.
Can India do much about this? In a sense, yes. As Wuthnow suggests in his paper, the Chinese party line inhibits the analysts from stating (and maybe understanding) how much of the security problems there really are.
It is worthwhile remembering that while the BRI expands Beijing’s reach to the west of China, it is also an internal expansion. About 94 per cent of the Chinese population lives in the eastern half of China.
The Heihe–Tengchong Line, or Hu Line, separates the Han majority from half of Chinese lands, where the minorities live - principal among them the Tibetans and the Uighur. As the Sikyong, or political leader, of the Tibetan exile community has said, China’s external relations can be judged on how China deals with the communities it governs within its own periphery. It does not govern its minorities across the Hu Line very well.
If India is to challenge China as the principal security provider in Asia it has to show that it can do better. For that India has to manage its own periphery better, a challenge at the best of times, and with the best of governments.