Monthly Archives: July 2013

China’s game plan is to keep India on the back foot

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Brahma Chellaney, Mint, July 31, 2013

An increasingly assertive China has indisputably emerged as India’s immediate strategic challenge. While erring on the side of caution is prudent, strategic diffidence and tentativeness are likely to exact increasing costs. The more feckless and fearful a policy, the more pressures it is bound to invite.

India’s current China policy indeed exemplifies how meekness attracts bullying. The more timorous India has been, the more belligerent China has become.

A key defining event has been the three-week Chinese military incursion into Ladakh’s Depsang plateau, which ended on May 7 only after India virtually capitulated by demolishing a line of new defensive fortifications in the Chumar region, 400 kilometres to the south, and agreeing to consider a Chinese-drafted “Border Defence Cooperation Agreement”. Since then, an emboldened China has escalated its military pressure on India.

Its provocations have included several military forays into Chumar — a lightening raid on June 17 to smash up surveillance equipment was followed by more incursions on July 16-17, 18 and 20. Depsang was the scene of a 28-kilometre-deep Chinese intrusion on July 12. Border transgressions also occurred this month in Arunchal’s Dichu and Uttarakhand’s Barahoti areas.

Yet this spate of incursions has received little attention as the Indian state, mired in petty politics, remains woefully adrift. Indeed, the government kept the June 17 Chinese raid under wraps for three weeks for fear that news about it would provoke public pressure to cancel the impending separate visits to Beijing of the national security adviser and defence minister. Similarly, to safeguard the Chinese premier’s visit earlier, New Delhi — as if reading from the aggressor’s script in Chinglish — tried to pass off the watershed event at Depsang as a “small little spot” of “acne” treatable with “an ointment”.

China’s newest provocations, in fact, draw encouragement from its bloodless victory when it sneaked troops into Depsang and then, employing the threat of escalation, extracted Indian concessions. One of the concessions — suspension of forward patrolling in Chumar — has created the opening for stepped-up Chinese intrusions, designed to assert claims to that highly strategic area overlooking the Tibet-Xinjiang highway.

By making India remove fortifications and halt forward patrolling in Chumar, China accomplished two objectives — securing India’s acquiescence to Chinese-defined constraints on deployment and surveillance and an Indian acknowledgment, even if tacit, that the area is disputed. Pursuit of the next objective will likely witness Beijing’s call for “mutual accommodation” and “mutual respect” to achieve a dispute resolution on the basis of a now-familiar Chinese dictum — “what is ours is ours to keep, but what is yours must be on the negotiating table to be settled through give-and-take”.

To cover up its entrenched strategic timidity, however, New Delhi has flaunted its go-ahead for establishing a new mountain strike corps — a clearance that should have come several years earlier and without media hype. Yawning gaps in India’s Himalayan defences remain unplugged owing to sluggish decision-making. Even as China develops and deploys capabilities quietly, New Delhi advertises any deterrence move, however nascent.

It will take India probably up to seven years to establish and fully deploy the new strike corps. But the government has already betrayed its trademark meekness by deciding to deploy the new strike corps, or any of its formations, not where most needed — Arunachal Pradesh — but in West Bengal and elsewhere so as not to raise the hackles of Beijing, which calls Arunachal “disputed territory”. This is just one example of how New Delhi allows Beijing to dictate terms to it.

Consider another, more mortifying example: China’s draft Border Defence Cooperation Agreement is receiving India’s fullest consideration. The draft was handed to India in circumstances that amounted to holding a gun to its head and demanding that it enter into discussions on concluding the agreement. It was given on May 4 before Beijing agreed to dismantle its Depsang encampment.

China’s intent is to keep India at a strategic disadvantage and thus vulnerable to Chinese military pre-emption through an agreed freeze on build-up of border defences and troop levels. The aim clearly is to stymie India’s belated and still-bumbling efforts to enhance its defences and military logistics support.

China has a knack of defining important principles in an accord so as to bind the other party to them by fostering a belief that their mere enunciation represents progress, even as Beijing pays lip service to those principles. In the face of belligerent Chinese actions, however, it has become difficult to keep up the pretence of progress. The Depsang encampment represented a shot through the heart of the border-peace concept central to the existing accords concluded in 1993, 1996 and 2005. China thus wants these accords replaced with a new lopsided agreement to aid its containment-behind-engagement strategy.

But why is New Delhi furthering China’s game plan? Can a draft thrust by China at gunpoint be the basis for negotiating an agreement? As if content to play second fiddle to China, India is offering its comments and suggestions on the Chinese draft. In a July 6 joint statement with his Chinese counterpart, General Chang Wanquan, Defence Minister A.K. Anthony even “agreed to the early conclusion of negotiations” on the proposed agreement. Is India a vanquished nation that had little choice but to embrace an imposed draft as the basis for negotiations?

With India’s lame-duck prime minister scheduled to visit Beijing in November, symbolism will again trump substance. Yet, without a fundamental course correction, India seriously risks courting another 1962-style Himalayan debacle.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

(c) Mint, 2013.

China’s salami-slice strategy

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, July 26, 2013

China’s furtive, incremental encroachments into neighboring countries’ borderlands — propelled by its relative power advantage — have emerged as a key destabilizing element in the Asian security landscape. While China’s navy and a part of its air force focus on asserting revanchist territorial and maritime claims in the South and East China Seas, its army has been active in the mountainous borderlands with India, trying to alter the line of control bit by bit.

Beijing’s favored frontier strategy to change the territorial and maritime status quo is apparently anchored in “salami slicing.” This involves making a steady progression of small actions, none of which serves as a casus belli by itself, yet which over time lead cumulatively to a strategic transformation in China’s favor.

By relying on quiet salami slicing rather than on overt aggression, China’s strategy aims to seriously limit the options of the targeted countries by confounding their deterrence plans and making it difficult for them to devise proportionate or effective counteractions.

This, in part, is because the strategy — while bearing all the hallmarks of modern Chinese brinksmanship, such as a reliance on surprise and a disregard for the risks of wider military escalation — seeks to ensure the initiative remains with China.

Changing the territorial status quo has been the unfinished business of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949. The early forcible absorption of the sprawling Xinjiang and Tibetan plateau more than doubled the landmass of China.

This was followed by the advent of the earliest incarnation of the salami-slicing strategy, which led to China gaining control, step by step between 1954 and 1962, of the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. An emboldened China then went on to seize the Paracel Islands in 1974, the Johnson Reef in 1988, the Mischief Reef in 1995 and, most recently, the Scarborough Shoal (2012).

At the core of the challenge posed by China to Asian security today is its lack of respect for existing frontier lines. In other words, China is still working to redraw political boundaries.

Along land frontiers, rodent-style surreptitious attacks usually precede its salami slicing. The aim is to start eating into enemy land like giant rodents and thereby facilitate salami slicing. The use of this strategy is becoming increasingly apparent along the Himalayan border with India, the world’s longest disputed frontier.

Here one form of attacks has involved the Chinese military bringing ethnic Han pastoralists to the valleys along the Himalayan line of control and giving them cover to range across it, in the process driving Indian herdsmen from their traditional pasturelands and opening the path to salami slicing. This strategy, which can also begin with the Chinese military nibbling at an unprotected border area, has been especially employed in the two highly strategic Buddhist regions located on opposite ends of the Himalayan frontier — Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.

To assert its claims in the South and East China Seas, China unabashedly plays salami slicer. The tools of salami slicing here range from granting hydrocarbon-exploration leases to asserting expansive fishing rights — all designed to advance its territorial and maritime claims.

In the East China Sea, China has employed paramilitary agencies, such as the Maritime Safety Administration, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, and the State Oceanic Administration, in a campaign of attrition against Japan over the Senkaku Islands, which it calls Diaoyu — an offensive that has already succeeded in shaking the status quo by making the rest of the world recognize the existence of a dispute. This has emboldened Beijing to gradually increase the frequency of Chinese maritime surveillance ships sent into the 12-nautical-mile zone regarded as the territorial waters of the Senkaku Islands and to violate the airspace over them.

Taking on Japan, its former occupier and historical rival, is part of China’s larger search for new seabed resources and for strategic ascendancy in the western Pacific by breaking out of what it perceives to be “first island chain” — a string that includes the Senkakus, Taiwan, and some islands controlled by Vietnam and the Philippines.

China’s aim in the South China Sea is to slowly but surely legitimize its presence in the 80 percent of the sea it now claims formally. Through repeated and growing acts, China is etching a lasting presence in the claimed zones.

Among the ways Beijing has sought to establish new “facts” on the ground in the South China Sea is to lease hydrocarbon and fishing blocks inside other disputant states’ 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs), as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Such leases are designed to circumscribe the UNCLOS-granted economic rights of states such as Vietnam and the Philippines while expanding China’s control of the region’s oil-and-gas wealth.

China has even established “Sansha City” on Woody Island in the Paracels as its administrative base for the South China Sea, setting up a local civilian government and a military garrison there to oversee the entire region. And in its latest effort to present a fait accompli over its occupation of the Paracels, it has started tourist cruises to those disputed islands.

To be sure, Beijing usually is careful to slice very thinly so as to avoid any dramatic action that could become a cause of war. Indeed, it has has a knack of disaggregating any action into several parts and then pursuing each element separately in such a manner as to allow the different pieces to fall in place.

This shrewdness helps to keep its opponents off balance and in a bind on how to respond. In fact, as a skillful salami slicer that acts insidiously, camouflaging offense as defense, China acts in ways not only to undercut its opponents’ deterrence but also to cast the burden of starting a war on them.

Any targeted state is presented with a strategic Hobson’s choice: either endure the salami slicing or face a dangerous and costly war with an emerging great power. This is the choice, for example, Manila has faced over China’s effective seizure of the Scarborough Shoal.

China’s tactics and strategy thus pose an increasing challenge to several of its neighbors who face a deepening dilemma over how to thwart the salami slicing. Exchanging notes with each other — and with the United States, the geographically nonresident Asian power — may be necessary to find ways to try and stop this creeping, covert warfare.

After all, China’s multipronged actions, cumulatively, carry the potential of fundamentally altering the Asian power dynamics to shape a Sino-centric region.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield). 

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.