Uneasy neighbors

It is often the case that countries very similar to each other do not enjoy the best of relations. Take India and China. One would have assumed that two nations with so much in common would have struck up an easy partnership. They share the experience of once having been among the world's most advanced and powerful nations, and now face similar struggles to develop and modernize their countries. After experimenting with economic autarchy, both countries have opened to the outside world and their economies have responded at a gallop.

Despite differences in their internal political systems, it would have been logical to expect India and China to have built economic bridges to each other. They also ought naturally to have built a partnership to lobby the developed world on issues of common concern.

But instead of being partners, India and China have tended to view each other with suspicion for much of the past five decades. Their brief but traumatic border war in 1962 has left scars that have not been erased to this day. The pattern of global politics for much of the last half of the 20th century did not help either. India's close relationship with the former Soviet Union was viewed with distrust by China, while India looked askance at China's attempts to counter Soviet influence in South Asia by building links, including nuclear ones, to Pakistan.

Over the past few years, both countries have begun making concerted efforts to establish better relations. For example, National People's Congress chairman Li Peng's visit to India has led to a joint decision to speed up the tortuously slow pace of trying to delineate their common border.

Their officials have been talking since 1988 about where it should be. India says China occupies 37,700 square kilometers of its territory near the northwestern corner of the frontier, while China says India has illegally occupied some 93,000 square kilometers along their eastern border in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. A rational solution would be for India to accept China's claims in the desolate wastes of the northwest where New Delhi has no strategic interests in return for China giving up its claims in the east.

But surrendering territory is never easy for any country and, in India at any rate, domestic politics make it suicidal for any leader to do this.

The wise course, as both New Delhi and Beijing recognize, is to build links in other areas, such as trade and investment, and to co-operate on global issues as a prelude to solving the border problem.

-- The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong