China’s decision-making has been a black box. It is seen to be opaque. So, it poses a unique challenge to neighbours, partners and adversaries alike, who struggle to understand the motivations, impulses and factors that shape and influence Beijing’s strategy towards the world.
Vijay Gokhale, who has spent the better part of his diplomatic career dealing with China from three vantage points — Hong Kong, Taiwan and Beijing — has tried to decode Beijing’s black box. He began his career as a young diplomat learning Mandarin in Hong Kong (before the British left), and then served in Beijing during the Tiananmen protests, and went back to Beijing as India’s ambassador in 2016-17. He served as India’s Foreign Secretary till his retirement in 2020. In Delhi, he manned the China desk, as joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs.
In his previous book, The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India (2021), he sought to illustrate the various ways and means in which Chinese negotiators interact, influence the agenda, and shape outcomes — sometimes with deception and subterfuge as essential tools. In the book, he had given a toolkit used by Chinese negotiators — and he has had wide experience in dealing with his counterparts in Beijing — that is useful for practising diplomats, business persons and scholars and students of China to understand their behaviour, and negotiating style.
In the latest book, China’s Wars: The Politics and Diplomacy Behind its Military Coercion, Gokhale takes a step forward: He analyses Chinese motivations and impulses behind their aggressive and kinetic actions with their adversaries.
He uses four case studies: Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958, India-China war of 1962, Sino-Soviet conflict of 1969 and the China-Vietnam War, and seeks to come up with a framework for Chinese behaviour.
While all these cases have been analysed earlier, he is uniquely positioned to conduct the academic analysis that can be useful for current and future diplomats. He says that this is not a book of war history, but a “history of the geopolitics of war”.
With India and China being neighbours, the book has been written to analyse it from the Indian perspective and draw lessons for India in future. At a time when the border-standoff between India and China is still ongoing, Gokhale’s book is a timely scholarly analysis.
India has suffered a war with China in 1962 and come close to conflict on other occasions since. China’s claim on Indian territory has gradually expanded as has, more recently, its encroachment on the ground. How and when China will deploy force in pursuit of its claims in the future is, therefore, a legitimate question in the minds of Indian strategists and thinkers.
Scholars have argued that China uses conflict as a tool of “psychological deterrence” and the Chinese draw no clear distinction between peacetime and wartime. Gokhale notes that fighting and talking go hand-in-hand with the singular objective of securing China’s political goals, which might be territorial, geopolitical or purely related to domestic politics.
Concluding quite candidly that the 1962 war delivered a “psychological-political blow” to India, Gokhale makes a case that the invasion was “not a sudden counter-response to Indian aggression” and had been “carefully planned.” And it sharply “undercuts Indian self-confidence.”
In the current scenario of the border standoff, which is most relevant, he says that the era of peaceful coexistence is at an end, and India must therefore prepare for a prolonged period of armed coexistence.
While he assesses that the India of 2025 is not what it was in 1962, “China knows a total victory is not likely.”
Gokhale’s book argues that China risks potential reputational damage through an open conflict with India and is likely to use more tools of coercion to achieve political goals in future. However, he cautions rightly that there is no circumstance under which large-scale conflict between India and China should be ruled out entirely.
As someone who served in Beijing after Chinese President Xi Jinping assumed office, he makes a case for carefully monitoring internal political developments within the People’s Republic of China.
In this context, this line is telling: “It is not uncommon for beleaguered leaders and regimes to deflect public attention from a serious domestic crisis to an external threat but authoritarian regimes such as China are more likely to do so as they lack legal or popular legitimacy.” He cites that the stand-offs in Depsang and Chumar in 2013 and 2014 coincided with the political transition from pre-Xi Jinping era to the Xi era.
In India’s case, China adopts what he calls a “fight and talk” strategy, where “grey-zone coercion” (military intimidation, including massing of troops on the border, large-scale land, sea or air exercises or threats of force, employment of paramilitary for law enforcement, manipulation of borders through cartographic aggression) and “negotiations” go hand-in-hand to achieve a favourable outcome. He wisely notes that the “grey-zone warfare” is likely to be adopted against India more frequently in the future.
The book eruditely explains Beijing’s strategy but as someone who is deeply aware of the recent crises in Depsang, Demchok, Doklam and Galwan, the book could have been richer if he would have added more insights and granular details from these episodes. Nevertheless, it is an outstanding work for students of Chinese strategy at a time when China’s comprehensive national strength and global role has become key to geopolitics and geo-economics.
Vijay Gokhale's China’s Wars: The Politics and Diplomacy Behind its Military Coercion. 
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