India's China policy seeks to court foe

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI (JP): The recent visit to India by Wei Jianxing, the sixth-ranking member in China's hierarchy, underscored efforts by the world's two most populous nations that went to war in 1962 to build closer, mutually beneficial relations. Sino-Indian ties have improved considerably since Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's groundbreaking trip to Beijing in 1988. But the relationship remains uneasy behind a calm surface.

The trip by Wei, who as a communist party politburo standing committee member is more senior than Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, will be followed in the next few months by a state visit to China by Indian President K.R. Narayanan, who once served as India's ambassador to Beijing.

India has an important stake in improving ties with its largest neighbor so that it can concentrate on its long-term economic and military development. India's China policy, however, confronts some harsh realities.

While the power equation between India and China is becoming more and more adverse to long-term Indian interests, relations between the two Asian giants have not improved to the extent that Beijing is willing to pursue a forward-looking policy without the current accent on the containment of India.

Although it would be unrealistic for New Delhi to expect China to shed its India-containment approach altogether, Indian diplomacy has to try to convince Beijing that its India policy should focus more on engagement than containment. How India manages its relations with China will significantly determine New Delhi's future security needs and concerns and also help shape the regional and extra-regional strategic landscape.

China's growing assertiveness on global and regional matters flows from its rapidly rising power. China ranks as the world's fastest growing nation in economic and military terms. The fact that the Chinese economy is largely unaffected by the current economic travails affecting much of Asia indicates that Chinese power will not only continue to expand, but will cast an increasingly long shadow over Asia in the years ahead, including the subcontinent. As Chinese power strengthens, so will the Chinese determination to ensure that India does not emerge as a political and economic rival.

Beijing is already suspicious of the nascent U.S.-Indian strategic cooperation and will closely monitor developments in this area.

A major foreign policy goal of Beijing is to ensure that India remains neutral and does not ally itself with the United States or any other major power which could threaten long-term Chinese interests. To India, however, close strategic cooperation with countries with which it shares common interests in Asia is vital to its national security. Such cooperation need not lead to a formal military alliance with any nation. The Israeli-Turkish strategic partnership is a case in point.

India, however, has to move cautiously in this area without increasing Chinese concerns or provoking Beijing to step up direct or indirect threats to Indian security. Moreover, strategic cooperation with any country cannot be pursued on a halfhearted or unstructured basis. That is the lesson for India from the 1950s when U.S. intelligence activities in Tibet spurred sharpened Chinese hostility toward India.

While India needs to overcome the main weakness of its China policy -- the lack of leverage against Beijing -- it would be counterproductive if efforts to build such leverage through strategic cooperation with other countries bolsters China's India containment strategy. While security cooperation with the United States is important, India has to pay closer attention to Asian countries with which it shares common strategic interests. These include Russia, Japan and Southeast Asian nations.

The establishment of an enhanced dialog with China in different areas is important to help remove mutual misunderstandings and misperceptions. President Jiang Zemin's visit to New Delhi in late 1996 raised the promise of achieving faster progress in building better relations, but little has happened since that trip.

While bilateral tensions have eased and relations are on a firmer footing, there is still the danger that a major misunderstanding could suddenly reverse the current process of rapprochement. Nothing can better illustrate that danger than the events of 1986/1987 when, out of a clear blue sky, war clouds unexpectedly emerged, bringing the two countries to the brink of an unwanted war and triggering a crisis that prompted the Rajiv Gandhi visit.

While relations have continued to improve qualitatively since that visit, India still does not figure in China's global scheme of things. China continues to regard India as a country to be dealt with regionally. China's growing military activities in Myanmar and its continued conventional and nonconventional military assistance to Pakistan seek to bind India to the subcontinent.

New Delhi has to try and influence Beijing to adopt a more broad-minded India policy that aims to exploit the potential and opportunities of the bilateral relationship. That is why the visit of Wei was more than symbolic.

The interests of both nations demand that they build a relationship based on equilibrium, not overt competition or confrontation. While economic relations are growing steadily, with bilateral trade expected to increase to US$2 billion annually in a year or two, political and military ties are still underdeveloped.

Unless China adopts a forward-looking policy, many of the misgivings in India will remain. Regarding the Chinese independent state, for example, India's Tibet policy has never sought a quid pro quo from China. In fact, Beijing has cleverly put New Delhi on the defensive over Tibet by regularly whipping up diplomatic pressure on the Dalai Lama's activities in India.

Sino-Indian negotiations over their disputed Himalayan border have become stuck despite periodic meetings of the joint working groups that were set up to help resolve the differences. China seems in no hurry to settle the border dispute, which arms it with additional leverage against India.

China wants to maintain the status quo as far as the border is concerned. Its forces are where it would like them to be. To India, however, the present frontier situation does not serve its security interests. Since any line of control tends to congeal over time, making change difficult, India has more to lose from the deadlock on the border issue.

The recent Sino-Russian border settlement, which leaves only a 50-kilometer western stretch unresolved, puts the spotlight now on the Sino-Indian border dispute. However, unlike the Sino- Russian border issue, the Sino-Indian border feud involves large chunks of territory. What makes the Sino-Indian border situation unstable despite unilateral, marginal redeployment of forces is that Beijing has yet to even clarify the line of actual control with India by exchanging maps.

While pushing for a multifaceted, sustained dialog with China, India has to develop a credible China policy underpinned by leverage, gained both from external strategic relationships as well as domestic military and economic muscle. The only language China understands and respects is one based on national strength. A vulnerable India can never persuade China to join it in an equal partnership.

The writer is a professor of security studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, an independent think tank.