China and India have long lived peacefully in the Asian continent. But the decision of the Chinese Communist Party to re-establish Chinese authority in Tibet brought their borders together and led to subsequent friction. A decade after this development, the two fought a border war that went badly for India. As a consequence, both sides have militarised their border and continue to enhance their military capacity. The existence of this basic confrontation shapes their current policy and has bested all efforts at minimising its consequences.
From the outset, the 4Cs have shaped the Sino-Indian relationship – conflict, cooperation, competition and containment. The two have an ongoing conflict over their 4,000 km border which is completely militarised and where some border trade is permitted through designated points.
Cooperation, too, is a feature of this relationship beginning with trade which is substantial and has continued to grow despite the eastern Ladakh events of 2020. Other elements of cooperation involve India’s participation in Chinese helmed institutions like the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS or New Development Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, as well as a slew of international and regional bodies.
No matter how great the asymmetry is between the comprehensive national power of the two countries, the reality is that they compete for influence in several parts of the world, and it was this that persuaded India to come out in opposition to the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI).
As for containment, both sides believe that the other is seeking to contain them – China thinks India is part of a US-led policy to contain its power, while New Delhi believes that Beijing is seeking to contain it in South Asia.
P.S. Suryanarayana
The Elusive Tipping Point: China-India Ties For A New Order
World Scientific Publishing (Singapore, March 2021)
The relative weightage of the individual C’s waxes and wanes and the central thesis of the book under review, The Elusive Tipping Point: China-India Ties For A New Order, is to outline the conditions in which they can eliminate conflict and containment and arrive at an equilibrium (the elusive tipping point) shaped by friendly competition and cooperation, one that will be a win-win for their respective countries and give rise to a new world order.
It is significant that the book has been written by P.S. Suryanarayana, an erstwhile correspondent of The Hindu, a paper which has been largely friendly to the kind of agenda he lists out. Equally significant is that Suryanarayana has written this book as a scholar at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. As a matter of policy, the city-state views its self-interest as one of good neighbourliness and peace, notwithstanding its relationship with the United States.
There is nothing in the current trajectory that seems to suggest that we are near that “elusive tipping point.” The recent history of the two countries itself reveals that. Having come to a near conflict over the Doklam region of Bhutan, the two sides embarked on an effort to stabilise their ties through a system of informal summits between their leaders. Two summits took place in 2018 and 2019, yet in the summer of 2020, they were once again locked into a conflict scenario which now seems to be semi-permanent.
Yet another difficult element is the issue of Kashmir. The writer, who was once The Hindu’s correspondent in Islamabad has a keen understanding of its importance in the India-China context. Over the years, China’s attitude towards the Kashmir issue has also waxed and waned, but today, on account of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor it has hardened. Where once Pakistan was an instrument of containing India in South Asia, Beijing now views it as an important element in its larger regional policy relating to Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
No sane person will disagree with the importance of win-win approaches in Sino-Indian relations. Deng Xiaoping famously told Rajiv Gandhi in his path-breaking 1988 visit that there would be no “Asian Century” without the development of India and China.
Though both have been on the development path since then, their trajectories have diverged. China has sky-rocketed into becoming a global economic power, as well as a significant regional military power. India has not been able to keep pace. The gap in the comprehensive national power of the two countries has widened and this, in turn, has persuaded Beijing that it no longer needs to benchmark itself with India. Its ambitions and goals have become global and there is a distinct air of disdain for India in the Chinese discourse.
But their growing estrangement, along with the possibility of conflict also opens up a different possibility. It could, under circumstances, ensure that they get locked into a destructive dynamic where both lose.
Suryanarayana admits in the end, that reaching that elusive tipping point “is easy to imagine and difficult to accomplish.” Increasingly, Beijing expects “India’s total acceptance of the PRC as the leading architect of a post-COVID world order.” On the other hand, New Delhi has aspirations of its own in the same direction. But, the writer is insistent that the search for that tipping point must continue.
Manoj Joshi is a distinguished fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.
