Let’s bone up on China

Is dealing with China different from talking to other nationalities? Most certainly yes, because the Chinese in their private lives are as warm and hospitable as they are distant and ponderously slow in official exchanges. Their ‘system’ is the opposite of ours. While ours runs on the bottom-up approach with bright middle seniority staffers doing the analysing and feeding the analysis upwards, the Chinese staffers are seriously constrained in having to push the line enunciated from above. When Indians push to discuss contentious issues, the Chinese often say, ‘‘But Zhu Rongji or Jiang Zemin visited India, (dammit) what more do you want?’’ The symbolism is greater than content, and this is irritating, although attitudes are now changing.

The PLA still remains the most conservative of the lobbies in Beijing when it comes to policy on India and the reasons are exactly the same as the Pentagon tilt towards Pakistan up to the early ’90s. There were many intimate exchanges between their armies. The South Asia sections of all institutes are still heavily loaded with ex-Islamabad ambassadors and defence attaches. Their support for Pakistan is now growing a little muted and embarrassed, like defending an insane relative.

The deputy chief of the PLA confirms the lingering Pakistan bias as he refers to only one serious subject at lunch, namely, Indo-Pak bilateral relations. The Indian delegation seriously questions the Chinese commitment to fight international terrorism if they cannot see the relationship between Pakistan hosting the Taliban, the East Turkostan Independence Movement in Xinkiang and dead Uighurs in Kashmir.

If the Indians have a package to sell, then so do the Chinese. The Chinese refrain runs thus: they too are dazzled by their own economic success, but they need to be left alone for 20 years to finish what Deng began—economic reform eventually leading to political reform. The last thing they want is to be singled out by the US and diverted into rearming, and taking their minds off what they know is an exploding problem in the countryside.

The new American doctrine created deep gloom in Beijing. The question they ask of us is, which side is India on? Their pre-occupation with their desire to sup with the Americans blinds them to the Indian question of which side is Beijing on in South Asia? Nevertheless, it is clear that their increasing pre-occupation with India could arise from an occasional nightmare that the Indian turtle might just amble past as the Chinese hare crashes into the fence of political reform.

That this is not mere Indian chest beating is clear from the specialised nature of Chinese delegations that visited Indian in the last four years.They included visits to the Accountant General, the Reserve Bank, the parliament, the I&B ministry and the Censorship Board, the police training institutes the agriculture ministry, anti-poverty programmes, grain reserves and small scale industry. The Chinese are obviously studying state building institutions and they see the Indian ones as being more relevant to their scene.

The Indian delegation is well armed with data from the CII whose analysis of China’s entry into the WTO and whose periodical China Report are of a high standard. There is probably no Chinese equivalent, since most Chinese economic delegations seem to originate from the provinces. Their pre-occupation with creating wealth is probably behind their dismissal of Indian great power aspirations. They pointedly single out India’s sad per capita income as being half of theirs in the newspaper supplement brought out to commemorate Hong Kong joining China.

The Chinese respect power, and just as Pokharan II led to the India-China security dialogue, the Indian naval exercises in the South China Seas has them suggesting an ‘‘open border’’ at sea. They are simply disinterested in a weak India, but quite willing to talk when we can punch at our own weight. The CASS is the first organisation to admit to Indians that Chinese reforms are far from over. They admit their inability to predict where China would be in 20 years since they still have to cross the hurdles of Communist party reform and a movement to a political system with more than one party. The CICIR was the first to broach the subject of the land border and this is in answer to our request to put our apprehensions about each other on the table.

To the slow process on solving the boundary, the Chinese add the sabotage activities of the Tibetan community preventing the economic development of Tibet and interminable Indian bureaucratic red tape stifling Chinese investment in India. We effectively answer all of these but the last. CICIR is also the first to give the indication that balancing India and Pakistan has now stopped. All institutions and individuals hinted in an almost negative way that the journey for India to be considered an equal of China was still a long one.

The Chinese are told that treating India as a non-nuclear power is ridiculous and Asian security requires that the nuclear issue be discussed in the bi-lateral security dialogue. We also need to get our geographies right. While China is a Pacific Ocean power, India is an Indian Ocean power. International highways may be necessary for globalising trade but this couldn’t happen without a supporting dialogue to reassure each other. A Mekong-Brahmaputra commercial highway cannot be used to change political geography.

China now has dedicated South Asia specialists. Some of them have been to India over a dozen times. A sustained dialogue with them will become increasingly useful.

(Rear Admiral (retd) Raja Menon has written A Nuclear Strategy for India)