Why We Should Worry About China and India’s Border Skirmishes
"US diplomat's comments on India-China border issue 'nonsense', says China "Analysis | What’s behind Trump’s China attacks?""
This opinion seems to sit in fairly stark contrast to the China position of the previous.
Three decades ago, the two countries reached an understanding not to fight. But Beijing is now a much stronger power.
By Sumit Ganguly, Manjeet S. Pardesi | May 23, 2020, 2:09 PM
An Indian soldier communicates with colleagues on a walkie-talkie at Nathula Gate, leading to the Nathu La border crossing between India and China on July 4, 2006. Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP/Getty Images
Tensions between India and China are not new. The two countries—which share the world’s longest unmarked border—fought a full-fledged war in 1962 and have since engaged in several small skirmishes. Not since 1975 .. https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/05/16/the-chinese-and-indian-armies-settle-a-clash-by-fisticuffs .. has a bullet been fired across their shared border. As a result, the theory that Sino-Indian clashes are flashes in the pan and unlikely to lead to more extensive fighting has become a widely held consensus. Recent events, however, suggest that escalations are highly possible. Both sides have substantial—and growing—military deployments along a mostly disputed border. And for more than a decade, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been testing India’s military readiness and political resolve along several strategic areas. Peace can no longer be taken for granted.
The most recent clashes took place earlier this month. On May 5, Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed near the Pangong Tso lake in Ladakh. It is believed that the skirmish took place because the PLA had objected to Indian military patrols in the area. Most of these clashes apparently stem .. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-pangong-tso-lake-theatre-india-china-lac-scuffles-army-5989785/ .. from differing assessments of the location of the so-called Line of Actual Control—the de facto international border. And then on May 9, at an altitude of 15,000 feet, in the Naku La region near Tibet, soldiers from both sides came to blows and threw stones at each other mostly in efforts .. https://www.businessinsider.com/afp-india-china-troops-in-high-altitude-clash-officials-2017-8 .. to induce the Indian troops to move back from the areas they were patrolling. No arms were used but several dozen soldiers were injured, including a senior Indian officer who was required to be airlifted to a hospital.
In 2017, when Indian and Chinese troops faced off for two months in Doklam, an area claimed by both Bhutan and China, a serious military clash was a distinct possibility. While that particular crisis abated, it is perhaps instructive to see the standoff not as an aberration but as part of a new phase in relations between the two countries. The old phase dates back to 1988, a year after a military skirmish between India and China in the Sumdorong Chu Valley in Arunachal Pradesh, when Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited his counterpart Deng Xiaoping in Beijing to mend ties. The two leaders agreed to establish a forward-looking relationship even as important issues such as the border dispute were temporarily set aside. The reason for this pragmatism was rooted in economic and strategic factors: Both China and India needed a stable external environment to promote domestic economic development. China was already a decade into the dramatic economic reforms that Deng had initiated, while Gandhi’s India had also embarked on a similar path, albeit hesitantly.
- After a long period of relative quiet along the Sino-Indian border, militarized incidents have come to the fore again -
The 1988 compromise between India and China, helped in part by New Delhi’s studious silence on developments within Tibet, was driven by the fact that the two countries were near equals on the world stage. According to the World Bank .. https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators , India’s gross domestic product was $297 billion compared with China’s $312 billion that year, while India’s defense spending .. https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex .. , at $10.6 billion, was also close to the Chinese allocation of $11.4 billion.
The material balance of power between China and India has dramatically changed since then. At $13.6 trillion in 2018, China’s GDP is now more than five times India’s $2.7 trillion. Similarly, China spent $261.1 billion on defense expenditure in 2019, almost four times India’s total of $71.1 billion. While India has risen as an economy and a global power in the past three decades, its relative strength to China has in fact greatly declined.
A new economic dynamic means that the underlying bedrock of the Gandhi-Deng bargain—of similar means and goals—is fizzling out .. https://www.brookings.edu/research/indias-foreign-affairs-strategy/ . Although it remains unclear when exactly the understanding between New Delhi and Beijing began to fade—most likely after the 2008 global financial crisis—China has become far more assertive in its foreign affairs in recent years, from artificial-island-building activities in the South China Sea to its muscular diplomacy amid the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, some scholars have argued .. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/ .. that an impending power transition is underway between China and the United States, the current global hegemon. While New Delhi has also become a more assertive player in global politics its rise has not been of much concern to the United States.
- While India has risen as an economy and a global power in the past three decades, its relative strength to China has in fact greatly declined -
China and India’s material capabilities remain in flux; China continues to outstrip India along most axes of power even as New Delhi seeks to boost its own capabilities. According to the World Bank .. https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators , India recorded higher growth rates than China every year between 2014 and 2018. While the long-term economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic remains unclear, India’s smaller economy and marginally faster growth rates mean that it has the potential to narrow its power gap with China—at least in the long term. In other words, India is the only major power that is rising with respect to China—even as China grows faster than other major powers such as Japan and the United States.
As China and India continue with their ascent, China will increasingly see India as an impertinent rival unwilling to settle the border dispute on terms favorable to China. The ongoing fragmentation of the global trading system (through tariffs and restrictions on investments), as well as a trend of rising nationalism around the world, will further test Sino-Indian relations because trade negotiations are likely to become more fraught and contentious. Indeed, given that Beijing sees New Delhi as the principal impediment to the realization of its ambitions to dominate Asia, a more violent clash along the volatile, poorly demarcated Sino-Indian border is highly likely. Unless China emerges as the dominant power in South Asia (and the Indian Ocean), China is likely to remain a regional power in East Asia. Put another way, China’s quest for pan-Asian dominance will intensify the ongoing Sino-Indian rivalry as India itself is seeking primacy—but not hegemony—in southern Asia.
To avert a conflict spiral India will need to pursue a multifaceted strategy which will need to include cooperative elements such as summit diplomacy and working together in international institutions such the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Cooperation_Organisation ], the New Development Bank [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Development_Bank , https://www.ndb.int/ ], and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Infrastructure_Investment_Bank ]. But while these cooperative endeavors could forestall more border violence, they will not address core outstanding issues in Sino-Indian relations. Short of making significant territorial concessions, there is little that India can do to assuage the underlying sources of the rivalry.
Sumit Ganguly is a distinguished professor of political science and the Rabindranath Tagore chair in Indian cultures and civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Manjeet S. Pardesi is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and the Acting Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
