By 2014, PresÂident Xi Jinping will have completed one year as China’s supreme leader. Xi has successfully consolidated his position within the Communist Party by quickly removing his potential adversaries and ensured that he, along with Premier Li Keqiang, will stay in power for a full ten years, until 2023. In the recent plenum, Xi outlined China’s direction for economic reforms and foreign policy priorities for the next decade.
Six month from now India, too, hopefully will have a new political leadership equally powerful to carry out forceful reforms measures that are long due. The global slowdown apart, domestic political debacle has plunged India into a deep economic crisis in 2013.
The India-China story at the end 2013 sound more good than bad. China’s new leaders have displayed “positive vibes” — missing since the 1950s bonhomie — towards India. There have been sufficient pronouncements of intent to deepen the relatively stable and cooperative relationship. Although the Depsang-type border tensions have overshadowed the positive news, the exchange of visits by leaders indicates the importance of the relationship. Premier Li, for instance, chose India as his first overseas stop. This was a deliberate choice.
The new leadership in China has indicated that cooperation with India will be a ‘strategic choice’ and ‘greater efforts’ will be made toward a boundary settlement. President Xi believed that the Chinese and Indian dreams for becoming strong, developed and prosperous nations are inter-connected and mutually compatible. Interestingly, New Delhi, too, has rejected the relevance of ‘containment’ and believes that ‘cooperation’ can bring more gains, instead. Essentially it means, the time for confronting and containing China is over and wisdom lies in cooperating and benefiting from China’s rise. It should be easy for the new Indian leadership to build on these foundations.
The question whether India should join with others to offset China’s influence or should it cooperate with China to shape the new world order will always arise. There will certainly be pressures on the leadership not to be soft on China. Beijing also faces increasing jingoism as the Chinese media view Indian infrastructure build-up on the borders as provocative. There also remain lingering issues, especially the boundary dispute, though some ways have been found to manage the differences until a solution is found. Hopefully, this can be sustained. But leadership on both sides should move quickly to find a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable boundary settlement. On both the boundary and the trans-border rivers issues, out-of-the-box thinking could be available.
What drives relationships are economic dynamics. That’s why, the trade imbalance of $40 billion against India remains an issue. Significantly, some of the fears have become matters of the past. India is getting receptive to Chinese proposals. The Border Defence Pact is a case in point. The prospects of a Regional Trade Agreement (RTA), Regional Comprehen-sive Economic Partnership (RCEP), setting up industrial zones and aligning the (BCIM) Economic Corridor are being positively looked into. Importantly, the new Indian leadership will do well to learn from China’s ability to spur internal economic development through regional and global linkages.
The overarching obstacle, however, is the trust deficit. This is strange, though, for two nations that have shared three thousand years of civilizational partnership. Both sides have lived under the shadow of ignorance about their shared cultural and even spiritual past. India must focus more on this civilizational aspect. China seems to be already taking steps to revive the spirit of that relationship. There could be broader strategic communication beyond leaders and diplomats to include people from every walk of life, including people on both sides of the borders. Can the new leadership in 2014 pursue the cultural channel to revive the India-China bond and intimacy of the twelfth century pre-Bakhtiyar Khilji days?
The threat of China’s increased influence in South Asia, of encircling India, forays into the Indian Ocean, etc., continue to loom large and creates mistrust. The global powers have so far tended to pitch India as a counterweight to China. India was seen as a linchpin in the US’s ‘pivot to Asia’ strategy. However, increasingly, there is a view that each country’s strategic partnerships with other countries must not be seen as directed against each other. A closer relationship with Japan and the US may have served some purpose, but America’s reliability as a partner and a balancer has come under scrutiny recently. The idea of India joining the contestation in the Asia-Pacific is a “development fraught with uncertainty” and it may be best to stay out of it. The new Indian leadership will do well to recognise the overlapping, rather than conflicting, interests in this uncertain global strategic environment.
To team up to expand the strategic opportunities, the new leadership could build upon existing strategic mechanisms on economic, military and regional issues. They could start with impending issues such as Afghanistan, Central Asia, West Asia and terrorism. A calibrated move by India and China to work together in Afghanistan post-2014 could become a harmonizing influence. Both have high stakes in Afghanistan’s stability. Similarly, both could fill the strategic vacuum in West Asia for the common good. Not just for the energy interest, but also to stem the spread of radicalism, terrorism, arms proliferation and sectarian conflict from there across Asia through violent Jihadi means.
The two countries already have convergence on a broad range of global issues, and that should be leveraged to broaden mutual understanding and trust. China, through its recent reforms, seeks to alter the rules of global economic competition beyond trade and investment. When India and China venture out globally, they should jointly face challenges and seek to form new norms of relationship on issues of global importance. It should be possible, through joint efforts, to remove the strategic disparities and faultlines created by the globalisation process.
2014 will bring greater opportunities for the leadership of both countries to embark on a road to solve the long festering India-China strategic dilemma for the common good.
(Prof. Phunchok Stobdan is a former Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan)
