Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012.

China gave India a “lesson” in 1962. Study it now.

Brahma Chellaney

Column internationally distributed by Project Syndicate.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of China’s military attack on India, the only foreign war that communist-ruled China has won. Yet that war failed to resolve the disputes between the world’s two most populous countries, and its legacy continues to weigh down the bilateral relationship. While their economic heft is drawing increasing international attention, their underlying strategic rivalry over issues ranging from land and water to geopolitical influence in other regions usually attracts less notice.

The international importance of the China-India relationship reflects the fact that together they account for 37% of humanity. Although they represent markedly different cultures and competing models of development, they share a historical similarity that helps shape both countries’ diplomacy: each freed itself from colonial powers around the same time.

Throughout their histories, the Indian and Chinese civilizations were separated by the vast Tibetan plateau, limiting their interaction to sporadic cultural and religious contacts; political relations were absent. It was only after China’s annexation of Tibet in 1950-1951 that Han Chinese troops appeared for the first time on India’s Himalayan frontiers.

Just over a decade later, China surprised India’s ill-prepared army by launching a multi-pronged attack across the Himalayas on October 20, 1962. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai publicly said that the war was intended “to teach India a lesson.”

Taking an enemy by surprise confers a significant tactical advantage in war, and the invasion inflicted an immense psychological and political shock on India that greatly magnified the initial military advances that China achieved. China’s blitzkrieg created a defeatist mindset in India, forcing its army to retreat to defensive positions. India, fearing unknown consequences, even shied away from employing its air power, although the Chinese military lacked effective air cover for its advancing forces.

After more than a month of fighting, China declared a unilateral ceasefire from a position of strength, having seized Indian territory. The Chinese simultaneously announced that they would begin withdrawing their forces on December 1, 1962, vacating their territorial gains in the eastern sector (where the borders of India, Myanmar, Tibet, and Bhutan converge) but retaining the areas seized in the western sector (in the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir). These withdrawal parameters meshed with China’s pre-war aims.

Just as Mao Zedong started his invasion of Tibet while the world was preoccupied with the Korean War, so he chose a perfect time to invade India, as recommended by the ancient strategist Sun Tzu. The attack coincided with a major international crisis that brought the United States and the Soviet Union within a whisker of nuclear war over the stealthy deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba. China’s unilateral ceasefire coincided with America’s formal termination of its naval blockade of Cuba, marking the end of the missile crisis.

Mao’s shrewd timing ensured India’s isolation from sources of international support. Throughout the invasion, the international spotlight was on the potential US-Soviet nuclear showdown, not on the bloody war raging in the Himalayan foothills.

India’s humiliating rout hastened the death of its prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; but it also set in motion the country’s military modernization and political rise.

Fifty years later, tensions between India and China are rising again amid an intense geopolitical rivalry. Their entire 4,057-kilometer border — one of the longest in the world — remains in dispute, without a clearly defined line of control in the Himalayas.

This situation has persisted despite regular Chinese-Indian talks since 1981. In fact, these talks constitute the longest and most futile negotiating process between any two countries in modern history. During a 2010 visit to New Delhi, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao stated bluntly that sorting out the border disputes “will take a fairly long period of time.” If so, what does China (or India) gain by continuing the negotiations?

As old wounds fester, new issues have begun roiling bilateral relations. For example, since 2006 China has initiated a new territorial dispute by claiming the eastern sector (the Austria-size Arunachal Pradesh state), from which its forces withdrew in 1962, describing it as “Southern Tibet.”

A perceptible hardening of China’s stance toward India since then is also reflected in other developments, including Chinese strategic projects and the country’s military presence in the Pakistani-held portion of Kashmir, a region where the disputed borders of India, China, and Pakistan converge.

Indian defense officials have reported increased military incursions by Chinese troops in recent years. In response, India has been beefing up its military deployments along the border to prevent any Chinese land grab. It has also launched a crash program to improve its logistical capabilities by constructing new roads, airstrips, and advanced landing stations along the Himalayas.

The larger strategic rivalry between the world’s largest autocracy and its biggest democracy has also sharpened, despite their fast-rising trade. In the past decade, bilateral trade has risen more than 20-fold, to $73.9 billion, making it the only area in which bilateral relations have thrived.

Far from helping to turn the page on old disputes, this commerce has been accompanied by greater Sino-Indian geopolitical rivalry and military tension. Booming bilateral trade is no guarantee of moderation between countries.

Although China set out to teach India a “lesson,” the 1962 war failed to achieve any lasting political objectives and only embittered bilateral relations. The same lesson is applicable to the Sino-Vietnamese context: In 1979, China replicated the 1962 model by launching a surprise blitzkrieg against Vietnam that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping admitted was designed to “teach a lesson.” After 29 days, China ended its invasion, claiming that Vietnam had been sufficiently chastised.  But the lesson that Deng seems to have drawn from the PLA’s poor performance against Vietnam is that China, like India, needed to modernize every aspect of its society.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012.

Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally distributed.

As senior leaders are purged and retired provincial officials publicly call for Politburo members to be removed, it has become clear that China is at a crossroads. China’s future no longer looks to be determined by its hugely successful economy, which has turned the country into a world power in a single generation. Instead, the country’s murky and increasingly fractured politics are now driving its fate.

One need look no further than the ongoing power struggle in the run-up to this autumn’s planned leadership changes, or official figures showing that rural protests have been increasing at the same rate as China’s GDP. The sudden downfall of Bo Xilai — and the call from Yunnan Province for the removal of the two Politburo members closest to him — is just one example of the no-holds-barred infighting now taking place in Zhongnanhai, the closed leadership compound in Beijing. Indeed, the internecine squabbles are said to be so vicious that there have been rumors, denied by the regime, that the Communist Party’s congress at which a new president and prime minister are to be anointed this autumn, might be postponed.

The Party’s abrupt vilification of Bo after lauding him for his leadership in Chongqing has fueled public cynicism over his orchestrated downfall and laid bare the leadership’s thin ideological core. If China is to preserve its gains in global stature, it must avoid a political hard landing. For the time being, at least five different scenarios are conceivable.

Re-equilibration: The Party protects its legitimacy, keeps the military subordinate, and manages to put a lid on popular dissent. In other words, the status quo prevails for the foreseeable future. This is the least likely scenario, owing to deepening internal Party disagreements and rising popular discontent.

Implosion: This likelihood of political disintegration, economic collapse, and social disorder may be no higher than that of re-equilibration. The government’s fixation on weiwen, or stability maintenance, has resulted in China becoming the world’s only important country whose official internal-security budget is larger than its official national-defense budget.

This underscores the extent to which authorities have to carry out internal repression to perpetuate one-party rule and maintain control over the restive ethnic-minority homelands that make up more than 60% of China’s landmass. But it may also explain why one self-immolation in Tunisia helped to kindle the Arab Spring, whereas some three dozen self-immolations by Tibetan monks and nuns have failed to ignite a similar popular movement against the Chinese state.

The Soviet Union imploded because the party was the state, and vice versa. China, by contrast, has established strong institutional capacity, a multi-tiered federal structure, a tradition of civilian leadership turnover every ten years, and a well-oiled, sophisticated security apparatus that has kept pace with technological advances. Thus, China’s government can pursue a policy of wai song nei jin — relaxed on the outside, vigilant internally.

Guided reform: A process of gradual political change begins, in keeping with outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao’s warning that without “urgent” reforms, China risks turmoil and disruption of economic growth. Can China emulate the recent example of neighboring Myanmar (Burma), which has initiated significant, if still tenuous, political reforms?

As the political heirs of the country’s Communist revolutionaries, the third-generation leaders that are taking over the reins of power in China may possess a strong pedigree, but they are also scarred and limited by it. These so-called princelings are trapped in the same political culture that led to the death of millions of Chinese and the continuing repression of opponents (real or imagined). They do not look like political reformers in the slightest.

Great leap backward: A new “Cultural Revolution” erupts, as the clique in power ruthlessly seeks to suppress dissent within and outside the establishment. As the Dalai Lama recently warned, there are still plenty of “worshippers of the gun” in power in China. Indeed, such is China’s political system that only the strongest advance. One fallen princeling, Bo, has been accused of cruelty and corruption — traits that are endemic in China’s cloistered but fragmented oligarchy, which values family lineage and relies on networks of allies.

Praetorian takeover: The People’s Liberation Army rules from behind a civilian mask, increasingly calling the shots with government officials, who are beholden to it. While the civilian leadership has become diffuse (every Chinese leader since Mao Zedong has been weaker than his predecessor), the military has enjoyed greater autonomy and soaring budgets since 1990. Indeed, the Party, having ceased to be a rigid monolith obedient to a single leader, has become dependent on the military for its political legitimacy and to ensure domestic order.

The PLA’s growing political clout has been manifest in the sharpening power struggle within the Party. In recent weeks, an unusual number of senior military officers have published articles in official newspapers calling for Party discipline and unity, and alluding to the military’s role in containing the infighting.

Another development is the increasing tendency of military generals to speak out of turn on strategic issues and undercut diplomatic strategy. The simple truth is that the foreign ministry is the Chinese government’s weakest branch, often overruled or simply ignored by the security establishment, which is ever ready to upstage even the Party.

China’s internal politics has a bearing on its external policy. The weaker the civilian leadership has become, the more China has been inclined to discard Deng Xiaoping’s dictum tao guang yang hui (hide brightness, nourish obscurity). China has lately taken more to the spotlight than to the shadows. Under any plausible scenario, a restrained and stable Chinese foreign policy may become more difficult.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012.

Brahma Chellaney

A favorite theme in international debate nowadays is whether Asia’s rise signifies the West’s decline. But the current focus on economic malaise in Europe and the United States is distracting attention from the many serious challenges that call into question Asia’s continued success.

To be sure, today’s ongoing global power shifts are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which have no parallel in world history. With the world’s fastest-growing economies, fastest-rising military expenditures, fiercest resource competition, and most serious hot spots, Asia obviously holds the key to the future global order.

But Asia faces major constraints. It must cope with entrenched territorial and maritime disputes, such as in the South China Sea; harmful historical legacies that weigh down its most important interstate relationships; increasingly fervent nationalism; growing religious extremism; and sharpening competition over water and energy.

Moreover, Asia’s political integration badly lags behind its economic integration, and, to compound matters, it has no security framework. Regional consultation mechanisms remain weak. Differences persist over whether a security architecture or community should extend across Asia, or be confined to an ill-defined “East Asia.”

One central concern is that, unlike Europe’s bloody wars of the first half of the twentieth century, which made war there unthinkable today, the wars in Asia in the second half of the twentieth century only accentuated bitter rivalries. Several interstate wars have been fought in Asia since 1950, when both the Korean War and the annexation of Tibet started, without resolving the underlying Asian disputes.

To take the most significant example, China staged military interventions even when it was poor and internally troubled. A 2010 Pentagon report cites Chinese military preemption in 1950, 1962, 1969, and 1979 in the name of strategic defense. There was also China’s seizure of the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974, and the 1995 occupation of Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, amid protests by the Philippines. This history helps to explain why China’s rapidly growing military power raises important concerns in Asia today.

Indeed, not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji Emperor (1867-1912) has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to shape the global order. But there is an important difference: Japan’s rise was accompanied by the other Asian civilizations’ decline. After all, by the nineteenth century, Europeans had colonized much of Asia, leaving in place no Asian power that could rein in Japan.

Today, China is rising alongside other important Asian countries, including South Korea, Vietnam, India, and Indonesia. Although China now has displaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy, Japan will remain a strong power for the foreseeable future. On a per capita basis, Japan remains nine times richer than China, and it possesses Asia’s largest naval fleet and its most advanced high-tech industries.

When Japan emerged as a world power, imperial conquest followed, whereas a rising China’s expansionist impulses are, to some extent, checked by other Asian powers. Militarily, China is in no position to grab the territories that it covets. But its defense spending has grown almost twice as fast as its GDP. And, by picking territorial fights with its neighbors and pursuing a muscular foreign policy, China’s leaders are compelling other Asian states to work more closely with the US and each other.

In fact, China seems to be on the same path that made Japan an aggressive, militaristic state, with tragic consequences for the region – and for Japan. The Meiji Restoration created a powerful military under the slogan “Enrich the country and strengthen the military.” The military eventually became so strong that it could dictate terms to the civilian government. The same could unfold in China, where the Communist Party is increasingly beholden to the military for retaining its monopoly on power.

More broadly, Asia’s power dynamics are likely to remain fluid, with new or shifting alliances and strengthened military capabilities continuing to challenge regional stability. For example, as China, India, and Japan maneuver for strategic advantage, they are transforming their mutual relations in a way that portends closer strategic engagement between India and Japan, and sharper competition between them and China.

The future will not belong to Asia merely because it is the world’s largest, most populous, and fastest-developing continent. Size is not necessarily an asset. Historically, small, strategically oriented states have wielded global power.

In fact, with far fewer people, Asia would have a better balance between population size and available natural resources, including water, food, and energy. In China, for example, water scarcity has been officially estimated to cost roughly $28 billion in annual industrial output, even though China, unlike several other Asian economies, including India, South Korea, and Singapore, is not listed by the United Nations as a country facing water stress.

In addition to its growing political and natural-resource challenges, Asia has made the mistake of overemphasizing GDP growth to the exclusion of other indices of development. As a result, Asia is becoming more unequal, corruption is spreading, domestic discontent is rising, and environmental degradation is becoming a serious problem. Worse, while many Asian states have embraced the West’s economic values, they reject its political values.

So make no mistake. Asia’s challenges are graver than those facing Europe, which embodies comprehensive development more than any other part of the world. Despite China’s aura of inevitability, it is far from certain that Asia, with its pressing internal challenges, will be able to spearhead global growth and shape a new world order.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground. Full profile

(c) Project Syndicate, May 2012.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY  The Japan Times   February 20, 2012

Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout which authorities demolished with bulldozers.

A year after the Arab Spring came to symbolize the ascent of people’s power, hope has given way to a bleak sequel. The democratic awakening has fallen prey to murky geopolitics that has cleaved the Arab Spring into two parts, with the U.S.-backed kingdoms escaping change but the non-monarchical republics coming under varying degrees of pressure.

The promise of a new era of democracy has been blighted in much of the region by continuing political repression. Worse, war clouds have appeared on the horizon.

What began as protests against food prices, corrupt leaders and lack of government accountability has assumed ominous dimensions. From the rampant but largely unreported human-rights abuses in the post-Muammar Gaddafi Libya to the increasing bloodshed in multiethnic, autocratic Syria, the developments are making the future of the Middle East and North Africa more volatile and uncertain.

Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, stands out for carrying out the region’s most-successful suppression of an Arab Spring movement, thanks to a Saudi-led military intervention and continuing Western backing. Whereas Cairo’s Tahrir Square has come to epitomize the power of ordinary people to rise up against tyranny, Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout was simply obliterated with bulldozers — an action that was followed up with arrest and torture of activists as well as of the doctors and nurses who treated the injured. Yet a year later, family-run Bahrain’s future looks anything but stable.

Exacerbating the regional instability is the escalating U.S. geopolitical confrontation with Iran, with both sides currently engaged in a psychological war. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s warning of a looming Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s threat to shut down the world’s most important oil-export route — the Strait of Hormuz — are part of this war of nerves. Israel has stepped up its own “shadow war” with Iran, with the two sides ratcheting up a blame game over targeted assassinations and bomb incidents.

The danger that this show of threats could escalate to military hostilities has been underscored by the U.S. declaration of an indirect war against Iran — the imposition of an oil-export embargo to financially throttle Tehran. Given that energy exports account for 80 percent of Iran’s foreign-exchange earnings, the U.S. (and European Union) oil embargo and freeze on Iranian Central Bank assets increase the risks of a military confrontation — the very development these sanctions are meant to avert.

History attests to the linkage between an oil embargo and military hostilities. Although the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack took the United States by surprise, the attack was triggered in some measure by a U.S.-British-Dutch oil-import embargo against Japan as part of a larger economic squeeze that began in 1939. The U.S. move to choke off Iranian oil exports, however, is faltering: India, Japan, China and South Korea — accounting for three-fifths of Iran’s oil sales — have given Washington a polite brushoff.

Four trends in the Arab world have become pronounced.

● The first is the way the Arab Spring movements are reopening traditional fault lines along sectarian and tribal divides and fomenting new internal conflict.

Even as intertribal politics threatens the future of post-Gaddafi Libya, sectarian battle lines are hardening in conflict-battered Syria, where the armed opposition claims to represent the Sunni Arab majority and the besieged Alawite-led regime has cleverly played to the fears of the minorities, which account for almost two-fifths of the national population and include the Alawites, Christians, Kurds and Druze. Similarly, the Bahraini regime, seeking to justify its large-scale repression, has stirred fears among the country’s Sunni elite of an Iranian-backed takeover by the disempowered Shiites, who make up 70 percent of the population.

If the once-peaceful, secular Syria becomes another Lebanon or Afghanistan, a sectarian division of that country is not inconceivable, given that the Sunni Arab and minority populations are largely concentrated in geographically separate areas.

● A second trend has exposed a vein of religious extremism and promoted the ascendancy of Islamist influence, including in the states that have experienced regime change. New opportunities have been opened up for Islamist movements to exert influence and bring themselves to the center-stage, as in Morocco, Kuwait, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and Syria.

The new Islamist influence is apparent even in Tunisia, hailed as a model for revolution. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which initially collaborated with Gamal Abdel Nasser after his 1952 coup, is again developing close ties with the military that still holds the reins of power, raising concerns of a military-Islamist nexus in Pakistan style.

The oil sheikhdoms, in any case, are theocratic states, which today are aiding Islamist causes in their own backyard.

This is best exemplified by Saudi Arabia and its new avatar, Qatar, which has developed cozy ties with the Muslim Brotherhood in its various incarnations across the Arab world. Qatar — the seat of current U.S. secret talks with the Taliban — indeed has leveraged its natural-gas wealth and unbridled ambition to emerge as a leading backer of Islamist causes, in parallel to the role Saudi Arabia has long played.

● The third trend is represented by the increasingly ugly regional geopolitics, which pits the powerful “Sunni Crescent” led by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates against the beleaguered “Shiite Crescent” states — Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Turkey, after being rebuffed in its efforts to join the European Union, has turned its attention to the Arab world, seeking to carve a role for itself as the regional hegemon. To help mend ties with Arab countries — which had long been suspicious of Ankara’s close relationship with Israel, as exemplified by the 1996 Military Training Cooperation Agreement and an unconsummated accord to export Turkish bulk water — Turkey has turned against its ally Israel.

Turkey also has come full circle on Syria. Ankara had accused the regime of Hafez al-Assad — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s father — of seeking to build leverage on their bilateral water disputes by actively aiding the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. But now Turkey is waging a proxy war of its own by providing sanctuary and arms to the Free Syrian Army, besides reverting to hardline anti-Kurdish policies, including military incursions into northern Iraq in pursuit of alleged guerrillas.

Today, the regional contest for geopolitical influence between Turkey and Iran — the inheritors of the Ottoman and Persian Empires — has cast a lengthy shadow over the Arab Spring. This shadow has been made darker by the interventionist impulse of the Saudi and Qatari monarchies, which have sought to create puritanical Islamist surrogates in some other Arab states.

Tiny Qatar, for example, has played an important role in the past year in ousting the Qaddafi regime (including by covertly deploying hundreds of troops in Libya), aiding the Sunni insurrection in Syria, backing Tunisia’s Islamist party leader Rachid Ghannouchi, and brokering the departure of Yemen’s brutal dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who, instead of being tried for the killing of hundreds of demonstrators, was recently granted entry into the U.S., in keeping with the foreign-policy maxim, “He may be a bastard, but he is our bastard.”

● A fourth trend is that the Arab Spring has become a springboard for playing great-power geopolitics. Syria, at the center of the region’s sectarian fault lines, has emerged as the principal battleground for such Cold War-style geopolitics. Whereas Russia is intent on keeping its only military base outside the old Soviet Union in Syria’s Mediterranean port of Tartus, the U.S. seems equally determined to install a pro-Western regime in Damascus.

This goal prompted Washington to set up of a London-based television station that began broadcasting to Syria a year before major protests began there. The U.S. campaign, which includes assembling a coalition of the willing, has been boosted by major Turkish, Saudi, Qatari and UAE help, including cross-border flow of arms into Syria and the establishment of two new petrodollar-financed, jihad-extolling television channels directed at Syria’s majority Sunni Arabs.

Moscow continues to arm and politically shield the Assad regime, while Washington has just announced the resumption of military aid to despotic Bahrain, after rewarding Saudi Arabia with a massive arms package. Iran, for its part, wants democracy in Bahrain but status quo in Syria. The Arab League — still the world’s premier organization of tyrants — sent a delegation headed by a tainted military general to monitor Syria’s human-rights situation.

The harsh reality is that such geopolitics has effectively hijacked the Arab Spring.

Today, it is the Arab states with a presidential form of government that are at the center of the ongoing profound changes, which, paradoxically, are sought to be influenced by the iron-fisted but deep-pocketed oil monarchies. Their already-swelling coffers — thanks to the U.S. energy embargo against Iran and rising oil prices — are set to overflow, increasing their leverage in the region and beyond.

The experience of the past half a century shows that the greater the transfer of oil wealth to these monarchies, the more they have funded fundamentalism and extremism, thereby contributing to the rise of international terrorism. In fact, the more wealth they have accumulated, the more the price of freedom has risen in the region.

In this light, the U.S. attempt to give international effect to its new Iran-sanctions law constitutes a double whammy for its close partners, Japan and India. It will sabotage their energy-import-diversification strategy by making them place all its eggs in the basket of the wrong regimes — the ones that bankroll Islamist groups. And, at a time when America is quickening its Afghanistan disengagement with little regard for Indian interests, it will rupture India’s relations with the very country central to its Afghanistan strategy — Iran.

More broadly, the Arabs’ democratic aspirations will likely remain unrealized unless the sharpening geopolitics backfires and the oil sheikhdoms’ insulation from change wears away. Given the way well-entrenched autocratic presidents have fallen from power in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, the durability of the region’s monarchs is anything but assured.

Brahma Chellaney is an Asian geostrategist and the author of six books.

(c) Japan Times, 2012.

Date of the hearing: January 26, 2012

Title of the hearing: China’s Global Quest for Resources and Implications for the United States

Name of panelist: Brahma Chellaney

Panelist’s title and organization: Professor of Strategic Studies, Center for Policy Research, New Delhi

Testimony by Professor Brahma Chellaney before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission

Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 562
Washington, DC 20510

China has pursued an aggressive strategy to secure (and even lock up) supplies of strategic resources like water, energy and mineral ores. Gaining access to or control of resources has been a key driver of its foreign and domestic policies. China, with the world’s most resource-hungry economy, is pursuing the world’s most-assertive policies to gain control of important resources.

Much of the international attention on China’s resource strategy has focused on its scramble to secure supplies of hydrocarbons and mineral ores. Such attention is justified by the fact that China is seeking to conserve its own mineral resources and rely on imports. For example, China, a major steel consumer, has substantial reserves of iron ore, yet it has banned exports of this commodity. It actually encourages its own steel producers to import iron ore. China, in fact, has emerged as the largest importer of iron ore, accounting for a third of all global imports. India, in contrast, remains a major exporter of iron ore to China, although the latter has iron-ore deposits more than two-and-half times that of India.

But while buying up mineral resources in foreign lands, China now supplies, according to one estimate, about 95 percent of the world’s consumption of rare earths — a precious group of minerals vital to high-technology industry, such as miniaturized electronics, computer disk drives, display screens, missile guidance, pollution-control catalysts, and advanced materials. In a calculated way, Beijing has cornered the international market for these strategic minerals, which include cerium, neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium and dysprosium. It built its virtual monopoly by first quietly making some major foreign investments to get hold of important processing and manufacturing technologies for rare earths, which it mines largely in Inner Mongolia.

The international focus on China’s hydrocarbon and mineral-ore acquisition strategy, however, obscures the way it has systematically sought to corner the resources of international rivers. Its aggressive water strategy has resulted in water becoming a new divide in its relations with several of its neighbors, including India, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam.

Much of Asia is now at or near water-stressed conditions. This stress holds important implications for Asia’s continued rapid economic growth, socioeconomic stability, and environmental sustainability. China’s aggressive strategy is only helping to compound Asia’s water challenges.

While China can scour the world for oil, natural gas, and mineral ores to keep its economic machine humming, it does not have the same choice on water, which cannot be secured through international trade deals. So, it has started damming international rivers in a major way.

To be sure, China faces a growing gap between water supply and demand. In the Han heartland, the south is water-rich but the north is plagued by serious water shortages. The north is largely semiarid, yet the introduction of large-scale irrigated agriculture has turned the north into a breadbasket. This has created a strange paradox: the north now is seeking to rely on water transfers from the south via the Great South-North Water Diversion Project while remaining a food exporter to the south.

China’s over-damming of internal rivers and its inter-river and inter-basin water transfer projects are exacting heavy environmental costs, besides causing river depletion and pollution of water. With China now shifting its focus to transnational rivers that flow to neighboring countries, there is a serious risk that these international rivers could also become seriously degraded.

Some water-related facts about China stand out. China, the geographical hub of Asia, is the source of transboundary-river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, and from Kazakhstan to the Indochina Peninsula. It is thus an upper riparian vis-à-vis almost all its neighbors. This unique status is rooted in China’s forcible absorption since 1949 of sprawling ethnic-minority homelands, which make up 60 percent of its landmass and are the origin of all the important international rivers flowing out of Chinese territory. The Tibetan Plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood for mainland China and South and Southeast Asia.

Getting this preeminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other cooperative institutional mechanisms has proved unsuccessful so far in any basin. Instead, its construction of upstream dams on several major international rivers, including the Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Arun, Irtysh, Illy, and Amur, shows that China is increasingly headed in the opposite direction — toward unilateralist actions impervious to the concerns of downstream nations.

By building giant dams near the borders on the major rivers flowing to Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, China is acquiring the capability to control cross-border flows and fashion water into a potential political weapon. Water is as essential as the air we breathe, and China is acquiring the capability to control the lion’s share of Asia’s cross-border river flows. This will give it tremendous leverage over its neighbors. In fact, with the rapid accumulation of Chinese economic and military power and the growing regional power asymmetry, Beijing has been emboldened to embark on water-diversion plans.

China’s frenzied dam building, far from slowing, has only picked up more momentum in the name of increasing its renewable-energy capacity. Even with 25,800 of the world’s approximately 50,000 large dams, China remains on a dam-building spree, with a plan to boost its hydropower-generating capacity from 170 gigawatts to 250 gigawatts by 2020. Renewable energy now serves as a useful plank to pursue what China has been doing for long — over-damming its rivers. The silting of the reservoir of the world’s biggest dam, Three Gorges, has only prompted the construction of more dams upstream, including in ecologically sensitive areas, to help flush the silt.

The plain fact is no country in history has been a greater dam builder than China. The dam-building spree started under Mao Zedong but it has accelerated in the post-Mao period. Although China already boasts more dams than the rest of the world put together, it has recently unveiled a mammoth 4-trillion-yuan ($635-billion) fresh investment in water infrastructure over the next decade, more than a third of which will be utilized for building dams, reservoirs, and other water-supply structures. Its vice minister of water resources announced October 12, 2011, that the new investment would be aimed at harnessing the waters of the country’s rivers, rebuilding or reinforcing more than 46,000 reservoirs, and extending the irrigation networks. The vice minister also admitted China’s uncontrolled economic growth has left up to 40 percent of its rivers badly polluted and that the country faced “huge pressures” on supplies of water. “Industrialization and urbanization, including ensuring grain and food security, are exerting higher demands on water supplies … while our water use remains crude and wasteful,” Jiao Yong said at a press briefing.

Yet, China has stepped up its reengineering of river flows in two ways: by portentously shifting its focus from internal rivers to international rivers; and by graduating from building large dams to building mega-dams. For example, its newest dams on the Mekong River are the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan — taller than Paris’s Eiffel Tower and producing more electricity than the installed hydropower-generating capacity of all of the lower Mekong countries together — and the 5,850-megawatt Nuozhadu, which when complete will be even bigger in storage volume but not in height.

In mid-2010, China’s state-run hydropower industry published a map of major new dams approved for construction, including one on the Brahmaputra River at Metog (or “Motuo” in Chinese) that is to be twice larger than the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges Dam, which Beijing likes to trumpet as the greatest architectural feat since the Great Wall was built despite the dam’s increasingly damaging effects on the Yangtze River system. The Metog site is close to the disputed border with India.

Daduqia, almost on the border with India, has been officially identified as the site for another mega-dam to impound the Brahmaputra’s waters. Both Metog and Daduqia are to harness the force of a nearly 3,000-meter drop in the river’s height as it takes a sharp southerly turn from the Himalayan range into India. This area is in the Brahmaputra’s “Great Bend,” so called because the river there makes a hairpin-style turn around Mount Namcha Barwa, forming the world’s longest and steepest canyon in the process. The Brahmaputra Canyon — twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the U.S. — holds Asia’s greatest untapped water reserves.

China’s state-owned media has not tried to conceal the linkage between the ongoing infrastructure development in this remote, high-altitude region around the canyon and official plans to harness the Brahmaputra’s resources. For example, Xinhua has quoted a tourism official as saying that the new highway from Metog to Bomi, which links up with the Sichuan-Tibet highway, will permit the tapping of the rich water resources in the Brahmaputra canyon. A high-altitude airport in Nyangtri city not far from these two dam sites has also been built. The next goal is to build a railroad to the region.

In addition, China has planned the “Great Western Route,” the proposed third leg of the Great South-North Water Diversion Project, whose first two legs in the Han heartland are scheduled to be completed in 2014. The “Great Western Route,” by contrast, is centered on the Tibetan Plateau. It is designed to take the waters of the Brahmaputra, the Salween, the Mekong, and three Yangtze tributaries to the Yellow River, the main river of northern China which also originates in Tibet. Work on the Great Western Route — or least some components of it — is likely to begin after the first two legs of the Great South-North Water Diversion Project are complete. Despite their staggering environmental and social costs, China is fast completing the first two legs. Along the middle route, which starts in Hubei Province and snakes 1,300 kilometers to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for this diversion.

Yet another fact sticks out: In the next one decade, according to international projections, the number of dams in the developed countries is likely to remain about the same, while much of the dam building in the developing world, in terms of aggregate storage-capacity buildup, will be concentrated in just one country — China.

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already visible. First, China is now involved in water disputes with almost all its riparian neighbors, even North Korea, with which it shares two border rivers. Beijing reacted angrily to the recent decision of the government in Burma (Myanmar) to halt a controversial Chinese-led dam project on Burmese territory. The now-stalled $3.6 billion Myitsone Dam, located at the headwaters of Burma’s largest river, the Irrawaddy, was designed to pump electricity into China’s power grid, despite the fact that Burma suffers daily power outages. The State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council, in fact, had hailed Myitsone as a model overseas project serving Chinese interests. The Burmese decision thus shocked China’s government, which had begun treating Burma as a reliable client state (one where it still has significant interests, including the construction of a multibillion-dollar oil and natural-gas pipeline).

China’s upstream dam building on the Mekong on a massive scale has rightly attracted a lot of attention. The Mekong, whose watershed is shared by six countries, is the lifeblood for continental Southeast Asia. Ignoring the concerns of downstream states, China has continued work on a cascade of giant dams in Yunnan Province just before the river enters the area where the borders of Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. Through a cascade of 12 planned dams, China has sought the tap the river’s hydropower reserves as it gushes from the high gorges on its route from the Tibetan Plateau to lower Yunnan. Transparency has become an important interstate issue, with the governments in Southeast Asia calling upon Beijing to shed its opacity and provide detailed technical information on its existing and upcoming dams.

Dam building on the Mekong, of course, extends beyond China. Emulating the example set by China, Laos and Cambodia have proposed building several dams either on the Mekong or its tributaries. In fact, Laos, whose catchment region generates 35 percent of the Mekong’s annual flows, has drawn an ambitious program to power its development through hydropower exports by becoming “the battery of Asia.” Interestingly, the majority of the planned Laotian and Cambodian dams involve Chinese financial, design, or engineering assistance, with the projects designed to export electricity to China. Yet it is China’s cascade of upstream mega-dams that promises to wreak the greatest ecological damage, besides affecting cross-border flows.

China’s increasing exploitation of the resources of the Irtysh, Illy, and Amur rivers has turned water into a major bone of contention with downstream Kazakhstan and Russia. The Amur River (known as Heilong Jiang in Chinese) separates the Chinese and Russian parts of Manchuria. The Irtysh is the main tributary of the Ob River, which traverses the Omsk Region in southwestern Siberia. China has pursued a series of canals, dams, and hydropower stations on the Irtysh and Illy rivers as part of its western development program, spurring Russian and Kazakh concern. Kazakhstan has officially expressed deep concern that the Chinese projects on the Illy River, for example, could turn Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash into another Aral Sea, which has shrunk to less than half its original size.

As part of its new renewable-energy drive unveiled in the recent five-year plans for 2011-2015, China has clearly signaled that mega-dams on the Salween and Brahmaputra would be taken up as priority strategic projects, in addition to dams on the Arun River, which flows into Nepal before becoming a major tributary of the Ganges in India.

The concerns over the Chinese dam building on the Salween, known as Gyalmo Ngulchu in Tibetan, Thanlwin in Burmese, and Nu Jiang (“the Angry River”) in Chinese, have centered on the threat to the Three Parallel Rivers area, which was added to the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 2003. But no sooner had that decision been made by UNESCO than China announced plans to build 13 mega-dams on the Salween in Yunnan, nine of them in its National Nature Reserves. That led to an international uproar, which prompted the Chinese government to shelve the dam-building plans. But since last year, in the name of boosting renewable energy and combating climate change, the same plans are being revived. The Three Parallel Rivers area, located on the southeastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau in Yunnan Province, is inhabited by 16 different ethnic groups and is rated as one of the world’s most biologically diverse temperate regions.

China has dammed the Salween in Tibet — where it originates on the outer Himalayan rim — as exemplified by its 34-meter-high dam at Chalong in Nagchu Prefecture. It has also completed half of the 88 planned water projects, many of them small or medium-size hydropower plants, on the Salween and its tributaries in Yunnan Province’s Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture. The current concern is focused on the cascade on giant dams it intends to build on the Salween in Yunnan near the Three Parallel Rivers area, where the Salween, the Mekong, and the Jinsha (a Yangtze tributary) run roughly parallel, north to south.

China already has built 11 dams on the Brahmaputra River, which flows from Tibet to Bangladesh via northeastern India. Most of these dams are modest in size, with some of them linked to the Three Rivers Development Project involving the Brahmaputra and its two key tributaries, the Kyichu (or the Lhasa River) and the Nyangchu. In March 2009, however, the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government unveiled plans for major new hydropower stations on the Brahmaputra. A series of six major dams will now come up in the upper-middle reaches of the Brahmaputra, to the southeast of Lhasa, with construction of the first — the run-of-the-river Zangmu hydropower project — beginning in 2009 itself. India, through its technical-intelligence capability, however, has identified 24 Chinese projects in progress on the Brahmaputra, a majority of them small- to medium-size dams. The larger dams are coming up at Jiacha, Lengda, Zhongda, Langzhen, and Jiexu.

If China proceeds to build a dam twice larger than the Three Gorges Dam at Metog, it will have a devastating impact on Bangladesh, whose very future is threatened by environmental and climate change. The Chinese diversion would mean environmental devastation of large parts of Bangladesh, which is not a small state but the world’s seventh most populous nation, with more than 167 million citizens. Although tiny Monaco boasts the world’s highest population density, the country with the greatest population density other than a microstate is Bangladesh.

The Brahmaputra is the most important river of Bangladesh. With its indigenous renewable water resources estimated at just 105 cubic kilometers (km³) per year — of which the groundwater part is limited to 21.1 km³ — Bangladesh heavily depends on the inflowing rivers from India that originate either there or in Tibet. That the waters of the Brahmaputra are the lifeblood for the largest number of Bangladeshis can be seen from the fact that more than half of Bangladesh’s total quantity of transboundary waters is delivered by this river alone.

The People’s Liberation Army remains an enthusiastic backer of the plan to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra. The plan comprises two projects: the construction at the river’s “Great Bend” of a dam more than twice as large as the Three Gorges Dam, and the Brahmaputra’s diversion northward as part of the so-called Great Western Route. PLA generals were the first to encourage federal authorities to examine the idea of rerouting the Brahmaputra’s waters northward. The mega-plan proposal not only received the support of a number of PLA generals, but the technical assessments that had been carried out until then prompted the influential General Zhao Nanqi in October 2000 to declare: “Even if we do not begin this water diversion project, the next generation will. Sooner or later it will be done.”

In 2006 Li Ling, the author of Tibet’s Waters Will Save China (Xizang Zhi Shui Jiu Zhongguo: Da Xi Xian Zai Zao Zhongguo Zhan Lue Nei Mu Xiang Lu) and an ex-army officer himself, was quoted as saying that PLA generals support the diversion project. In fact, the publication of Li Ling’s book Tibet’s Waters Will Save China in November 2005 and its government-sponsored distribution among policy and engineering circles signaled an official interest in launching the Greater Western Route project. The book details the ambitious Brahmaputra-to-Tianjin diversion plan. Li’s plan has sought to overcome the obstacles posed by the tall mountains and the world’s longest, steepest canyon at the “Great Bend” by moving the main diversion point farther upstream.

Domestically, China new focus on water megaprojects in the traditional homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered fresh tensions along ethnic fault lines over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan Plateau, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by protests against Chinese rule. The projects, as mentioned earlier, threaten to replicate in international rivers the serious degradation haunting China’s internal rivers. Having extensively contaminated its own major rivers through reckless industrialization and overexploitation of resources, China now threatens the ecological viability of river systems tied to other Asian nations in its bid to meet its thirst for water and energy.

Significantly, China is also the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistan-held Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlash. Units of the People’s Liberation Army are engaged in dam and other strategic projects in the restive, Shiite region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-held Kashmir.

Thirty-seven Chinese financial and corporate entities are currently involved in more than 100 major dam projects in the developing world. Some of these entities are very large and have multiple subsidiaries. For instance, Sinohydro Corporation, the world’s largest hydroelectric-equipment exporter, boasts 59 overseas branches.

For downriver countries, a key concern is China’s opacity on its hydroengineering projects. It usually begins work quietly, almost furtively, and then presents the project as an unalterable fait accompli and as holding transboundary flood-control benefits.

Worse still, China rejects the very notion of a water-sharing arrangement or treaty with any riparian neighbor. The terms “water sharing,” “shared water resources,” “treaty” and “common norms and rules” are an anathema to it. It is one of only three countries that voted against the 1997 United Nations Convention that lays down rules on the shared resources of international watercourses.

So, there are water treaties among states in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and any of its neighbors. That the country with a throttlehold over the headwaters of major Asian rivers is also a rising superpower, with a muscular confidence increasingly on open display, only compounds the regional security challenges.

China is willing to share hydrological data with riparian neighbors (that is, the statistics on river water flows) but not their waters. In fact, China deflects attention from its refusal to share water, or to enter into institutionalized cooperation to manage common rivers sustainably, by flaunting the accords that it has signed on sharing flow statistics with riparian neighbors. These are not agreements to cooperate on shared resources, but rather commercial accords to sell hydrological data that other upstream countries provide free to downriver states.

Yet, despite such a record, China continues to employ public diplomacy to try and assuage concerns in neighboring countries. Its public-relations machine keeps repeating the message that China has no intention of pursuing projects that would be “detrimental” to the interests of neighboring countries. Even as it builds new dams on international rivers, it speciously contends that they are not detrimental to downriver countries’ interests.

Jiao Yong, the Chinese vice minister of water resources, said on September 12, 2011: “The Yarlung Tsangpo [Brahmaputra] river flows across China’s Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Many Chinese citizens have been calling for greater usage of this river. However, considering the technical difficulties, the actual need of diversion, and the possible impact on the environment and state-to-state relations, the Chinese government has no plans to conduct any diversification project in this river.” Although the vice minister spoke of no “diversification” plan on Brahmaputra, some Indian newspapers misinterpreted his remark as no “diversion” plan. The minister, in his terse and inscrutable comment, began by emphasizing “the actual need of diversion.” The point is that China usually begins quietly on any project and then presents the project as an unalterable reality.

Against this background, there is a significant risk of greater inter-riparian tensions and politicization of water in Asia. The time has come to exert concerted external pressure on China to rein in its dam frenzy and embrace international environmental standards and water-sharing arrangements.

In March 2010, the State Department rightly upgraded water as “a central U.S. foreign policy concern,” noting that as rising populations face diminishing water resources, “the probability of conflict will increase.” The State Department must now spotlight the threat to Tibetan waters from China’s hydroengineering projects and its refusal to accept institutionalized cooperation with co-riparian states. Water, in fact, is a geopolitical weapon in China’s hands that it can potentially use against lower-riparian countries, whose economies depend on the flow of river waters from the Tibetan Plateau.

(c) U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.