President Xi Jinping commences his India visit from Ahmedabad on September 17, coinciding with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday. While President Xi is a “princeling”, his father being Chairman Mao Zedong’s compatriot, both he and Mr Modi faced privation in their youth, President Xi due to being banished to a village during the Cultural Revolution.
President Xi will arrive via Sri Lanka and the Maldives, India’s two crucial maritime neighbours. What strategic tie-ups are conceded by them to further Chinese entrenchment in the Indian Ocean remains to be seen. President Xi calling off his Pakistan visit is not to be seen as bowing to Indian sensitivities. The Chinese are wary of being seen meddling in the domestic political affairs of another nation. It also indicates ignorance of the democratic processes because had President Xi persisted with the visit, public opinion in Pakistan would have forced the two Don Quixotes, Imran Khan and Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri, to call off their uncivil disobedience for properly receiving Pakistan’s closest ally. However, with a sitin looming in Hong Kong over threatened curtailment of democratic liberties and resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Chinese leaders would rather avoid the issue of mass protest.
Interestingly, as President Xi tours the Indian periphery, President Pranab Mukherjee is in Vietnam, signalling that Chinese penetration of the Indian neighbourhood will not go uncontested any longer. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent visit and Australian willingness to supply uranium to India, a final strategic hurdle, were further evidence of convergence of powers on the Chinese periphery in shared self-interest.
President Xi is reportedly arriving with an economic package to overshadow the $35 billion that the Japanese are committed to investing over the next five years.
National security adviser Ajit Doval, after his China visit, hinted at a “higher orbit” for bilateral relations, implying also that the border issue may be settled during the terms of President Xi and Prime Minister Modi. Caution is needed in dealing with China, as the two People’s Liberation Army (PLA) incursions in Ladakh on the eve of the visit demonstrate obduracy.
Firstly, trade is tilted in China’s favour, dropping from $73.5 billion to $65.7 billion and $65.8 billion in the last three years, and also consisting largely of commodities exported from India and finished products from China. Secondly, the Indian government’s plan for industrial parks for local manufacture of Chinese goods will be useful only if indigenisation and export commitments are imposed. Otherwise they will add only some jobs while opening the door to Chinese goods, further strangling local industry.
India may, in fact, be late in tapping into the global supply chains as many Asian manufacturing hubs already exist, like Bangladesh for garments, the Philippines for electronics, and Thailand and Vietnam for machines and computer parts. It is possible that China may be hedging by shifting some production lines away from the countries around the disputed South China Sea after the attack on Chinese investments in Vietnam.
Similarly, hype over China ramping up Indian infrastructure needs a reality-check. Chinese opaqueness about safety concerns, particularly in the field of high speed railways, needs flagging. Moreover, India, unlike China, has two coasts and a narrowing southern peninsula. China has huge inland connectivity issues.
The Modi model and experience is Gujarat-centric, a coastal state trading abroad for millennia and rich in natural gas, arable land and unpopulated coastline. In a rush to usher in “achche din” India should not import bits and pieces of foreign models. India needs indigenous multiple models tailored to the diversity of its peoples and terrain. Henry Kissinger, in his latest book, World Order, traces Indian and Chinese strategic behaviour to historical and cultural roots. China, a unitary state since 221 BC, has viewed the world as a hierarchical order with China at the centre. The periphery is handled with concealed disdain and guile to create dependencies to turn interlocutors into actual or near tributaries.
Indian thinking rests on the moral dilemmas in the Bhagwad Gita and the amoral pragmatism of Kautilya. Prime Minister Modi and President Xi interact against the backdrop of a global economic and political power shift, making Asia the 21st-century stage for a five-power contest (Russia, China, Japan, India and the United States) much as the five powers of Europe (Russia, Prussia, Austria, France and England), post-German unification in 1871, competed to unleash war and catastrophe.
Japan attacked China in 1937 in the name of a “New Order in Asia” and “East Asian Co-Prosperity Space”. Kautilya talked of a “circle of states” which a ruler constantly encounters in an endless struggle for stability, unlike the European quest for stability via balance of power. Chinese, on the contrary, seek to re-establish a neo-tributary system. Russia’s schizophrenic paranoia about its European and Asian frontiers and US passivity after 13 years of combat add to a strategic vacuum.
Can a new stable Asian Order emerge as a building block of global security? That is the question that President Xi and Prime Minister Modi confront. Mr Kissinger warns that diplomacy for the Chinese historically “was not a bargaining process between multiple sovereign interests but a series of carefully contrived ceremonies”. The aim was to assign the other nation in China’s determination of a “global hierarchy”.
President Xi is not here to attend Mr Modi’s birthday party, though he will play along. He is here to ensure that the powers on its periphery, particularly democracies, do not converge to restrict Chinese conduct while concomitantly creating economic space for China Inc. Kautilyan wisdom, too, would recommend playing along. If China seeks with the US a “new type of great power relations”, it must concede in Asia, as Mr Kissinger recommends, that power is balanced by legitimacy — a dilemma at the heart of the Bhagwad Gita, which, hopefully, shall be Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s return gift to President Xi.
The writer is a former secretary in the external affairs ministry. He tweets at @ambkcsingh
