Partners, not rivals. That’s how the two men who lead India and China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Premier Wen Jiabao, described the relationship this December. Yet just two weeks later, two other men on a motorbike laid bare the difficulties of achieving that goal. After reports that Chinese soldiers had transgressed into the Demchok area of Ladakh, fears of an “incursion” set off alarm bells. It took statements from the ministry of external affairs, the army chief and even the air chief to put things into perspective. The incident, small as it was, and diplomatically controlled as quickly as it was, is just one of many pinpricks on the India-China road that deflates relations, and diverts New Delhi from both the nature of the “rival” and the avenues for “partnering” it.
Both aspects came sharply into focus on a recent visit to Beijing, to attend a conference organised by the international department of the Chinese Communist Party and the Observer Research Foundation. China, especially its youth, wears its nationalism on its sleeve. According to a Pew survey in 2009, 87 per cent of Chinese respondents were satisfied with the direction the country was headed in. That adds up to considerable gross domestic confidence, a sense of zonghe guoli, that is, of China becoming a “comprehensive, major power”.
Much of the confidence comes from the world’s recognition of China’s strength. In 2009, China became the world’s largest exporter. In 2010, it became the second-largest economy. In 2011, it will be the world’s debt-keeper. When Vice-Premier Li Keqiang travelled to Europe in January, he was given a head of state’s reception, after China’s bailout of Spain’s national debt, and saving Greece and Portugal from bankruptcy. China now holds an estimated 10 per cent of the eurozone’s national debt. A CCTV report called Li, “Europe’s knight on a white charger.” President Hu’s trip to Washington too was dominated in the press by China’s trillion-dollar holding of US securities.
Perhaps the greater sense of pride, and a greater sense of worry for the world, is the confidence of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). China now has the world’s largest army, with 10 per cent of the world’s military personnel marching in its ranks. The PLA is seen as driving China’s external relations too — from the flexing of muscles in South China Sea that rattles Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and Indonesia, to the stapling of visas for Indians and sending troops and nuclear reactors to Pakistan. As one US-based Chinese professor put it, “Economically, China and these countries have never been closer. Strategically, they’ve never been farther apart.”
Eventually, it is this new face of brash China that India must recognise and engage with. After all, India will soon develop its own confidence as a power whose growth rate will soon outstrip China’s, and one that will have a demographic edge after 2015 (with China’s one-child policy burdening its youth six-fold — two parents and four grandparents for each child to support). While foreign ministry officials and their think tanks in Beijing will stick to the old themes of boundary disputes and India’s asylum to the Dalai Lama, interactions with the younger party leadership are marked instead by new possibilities.
So, instead of concerns over tunnels and roads constructed close to the Line of Actual Control, the conversation turned to the joint control of the $2 billion Myanmar gas pipeline agreed on last year. ONGC’s international arm OVL and GAIL are investing more than a billion dollars for a 12.5 per cent stake in the pipeline to be built by China’s National Petroleum Corporation.
Also in discussion was the possibility of jointly developing hydel projects in Nepal, especially projects that India already holds lien on. Three Indian and three Chinese companies are vying for the Nepali 450 MW Upper Tamakoshi Hydropower project, for example. Since most of the hydropower generated in Nepal will have to be bought downstream here, India may do well to use the technological expertise of the country with the world’s largest hydropower capacity, China, for win-win solutions.
Finally, it is the possibility of bringing Chinese Railways across the Himalayas to India that excites officials in this “New Chinese” dispensation. In 2010, China produced the fastest train in the world, and began to make good on its dream of a rail-line from Kunming to Singapore, cutting across Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Taking advantage of China’s considerable abilities in rail-building will require many in India to let go the fear factor and consider what such infrastructure could mean for developing our north-east instead.
“India and China must show the world they can work together,” Ai Ping, the Vice Minister for South Asia in the CCPC’s international department told CNN-IBN, “They must get together and do one big infrastructural project in the region.”
Ai’s focus on partnerships beyond the two countries is futuristic, and a far cry from the present situation where China is outbidding India on port, road, mines and electricity projects in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, while India has blocked granting contracts to Chinese companies in the recently concluded TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan.
The interesting part is young Indians and Chinese aren’t waiting for the governments to collaborate before finding ways to deal together. Language for starters: On this visit our delegation functioned at official meetings without interpreters for most part, and hundreds of Indians now throng Chinese language courses.
A young Indian businessman in Delhi who frequently travels to Shanghai, and is fluent in Mandarin, summed up the way forward in partnering a rival who is also a close neighbour. When asked if there was an upgraded, Chinese equivalent to the worn-out phrase “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai”, he said, “Xiongdi shuiyou xiaofeng er bufei yiqing”. “Big friendship,” he explained, “mustn’t be disturbed by small winds.”
The writer is deputy foreign editor, CNN-IBN
