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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Rising Powers, Rising Tensions: The Troubled China-India Relationship

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Chellaney

From: SAIS Review
Volume 32, Number 2
pp. 99-108 | doi: 10.1353/sais.2012.0030

Abstract: Half a century after China and India fought a bloody Himalayan war, the two demographic titans have gained considerable economic heft and are drawing increasing international attention. Their rise highlights the ongoing shifts in global politics and economy. This growth has been accompanied by rising bilateral tensions, with Tibet remaining at the core of their divide and India’s growing strategic ties with the U.S. increasingly rankling China. Even as old rifts persist, new issues have started to emerge in the relationship, including China’s resurrected claim to the sprawling northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, almost three times larger than Taiwan. Booming bilateral trade has failed to subdue their rivalry. Although in 1962 China set out, in the words of Premier Zhou Enlai, to “teach India a lesson,” the real lesson that can be drawn today is that the war failed to achieve any lasting political objectives and only embittered bilateral relations. China has frittered away the political gains it made by decisively defeating India on the battleground—the only war it has won under communist rule despite involvement in multiple military conflicts since 1950. In fact, as military tensions rise and border incidents increase, the China-India relationship risks coming full circle. World history attests that genuine efforts at political reconciliation and bridge building can achieve more than war. This essay argues that the future of the Asian economic renaissance and peace hinges on more harmonious relations between the important powers, especially China and India.

A fast-rising Asia has become pivotal in global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now actively shape the international security and economic environments, while Asia’s rise serves as an instigator of global power shifts. Asia, paradoxically, bears the greatest impact of such power shifts. Consequently, the specter of a power imbalance looms large in Asia. At a time when it is politically in transition, Asia is also troubled by growing security challenges, apparent from the resurfacing of Cold War-era territorial and maritime disputes.

Against this background, the tense relationship between the world’s two most-populous countries holds significant implications for international security and Asian power dynamics. As China and India gain economic heft, they are drawing ever more international attention. However, their underlying strategic dissonance and rivalry over issues extending from land and water to geopolitical influence usually attract less notice.

The importance of this relationship in international relations can be seen from the fact that China and India make up nearly two-fifths of humanity. They represent markedly dissimilar cultures and competing models of development. However, they freed themselves from colonial powers and emerged as independent nations around the same time. Today, both seek to play a global role by reclaiming the power they enjoyed for many centuries before going into decline after the advent of the industrial revolution. In 1820, China and India alone made up nearly half of the world’s income, while Asia collectively accounted for 60 percent of the global GDP.[1]

Neither China nor India has ever in history been in a position to dominate the other, yet today each views the other as a geopolitical rival. Booming bilateral trade has failed to moderate their rivalry. In fact, as part of their broader geopolitical contest, China and India are becoming active in each other’s strategic backyard in a game of encirclement and counter-encirclement, thereby fostering tensions and mistrust. Borders incidents have markedly increased along the Himalayas in recent years, even as China has faced growing unrest in Tibet, a core underlying issue in Sino-Indian relations. New Delhi’s expanding strategic ties with the United States have actually encouraged China to try and strategically squeeze India. Yet Washington has refrained from taking sides in the Sino-Indian disputes.

Origins of the Indian-Chinese Disputes

The vast Tibetan plateau separated the Indian and Chinese civilizations throughout history, limiting their interaction to sporadic cultural and religious contacts, with political relations absent. It was only after Tibet’s 1950-1951 annexation that Han Chinese troops appeared for the first time on India’s Himalayan frontiers. Tibet’s forcible absorption began within months of the 1949 Communist victory in China. In one of his first actions after seizing power, Mao Zedong confided in Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that Chinese forces were “preparing for an attack on Tibet.”[2] The Chinese military attack on Tibet began in October 1950, when global attention was focused on the Korean War. The rapid success in seizing eastern Tibet emboldened China to enter the Korean War soon thereafter.

As new neighbors following Tibet’s annexation, India and China began their relationship on what seemed a promising note. In fact, India was one of the first countries to recognize the legitimacy of communist China. Even when the Chinese military began eliminating India’s outer line of defense by occupying Tibet, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru continued to court China, seeing it as a benign neighbor that had emerged from the ravages of colonialism like India. Consequently, New Delhi rebuffed then-independent Tibet’s appeal for international help against Chinese aggression, and even opposed its plea for a discussion in the United Nations General Assembly in November 1950.

By 1954, Nehru surrendered India’s British-inherited extraterritorial rights in Tibet and recognized the “Tibet region of China” without any quid pro quo — not even Beijing’s acceptance of the then-prevailing Indo-Tibetan border. He did this by signing a pact with Tibet’s occupying power that was mockingly named after the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine of Panchsheela, or the five principles of peaceful coexistence.[3] This treaty was designed to govern India’s relationship with the “Tibet Region of China” — an implicit, if not overt, recognition of China’s annexation of Tibet a few years earlier.

The pact recorded India’s agreement to both fully withdraw within six months its “military escorts now stationed at Yatung and Gyantse” in the “Tibet Region of China” as well as “to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the postal, telegraph and public telephone services together with their equipment operated by the Government of India in Tibet Region of China.”[4] Up to its 1950 invasion, China had maintained a diplomatic mission in Lhasa, as did India, underscoring Tibet’s independent status.

Nehru’s intense courtship of Beijing was such that he rejected a U.S. suggestion in the 1950s for India to take China’s place in the United Nations Security Council. The officially blessed selected works of Nehru quote him as stating the following on record: “Informally, suggestions have been made by the U.S. that China should be taken into the UN but not in the Security Council and that India should take her place in the Council. We cannot, of course, accept this as it means falling out with China and it would be very unfair for a great country like China not to be in the Council.”[5] The selected works also quote Nehru as telling Soviet Premier Marshal Nikolai A. Bulganin in 1955 on the same U.S. offer: “I feel that we should first concentrate on getting China admitted.”[6]

Yet when China sprung a nasty surprise by invading India in 1962, Nehru publicly bemoaned that China had “returned evil for good.”[7] A more realistic leader would have foreseen that war and taken necessary steps to repulse the invasion. After all, using the 1954 friendship treaty as a cover, China had started furtively encroaching on Indian territories, incrementally extending its control to much of the Aksai Chin, a Switzerland-size plateau that was part of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Sino-Indian relations, in fact, became tense after the Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas to India in 1959, with Beijing using its state media to mount vicious attacks on India. Nehru, however, still believed that China would not stage military aggression against India. The Indian army remained undermanned and ill-equipped.

Just as Mao had started his invasion of Tibet while the world was occupied with the Korean War, he chose a perfect time for invading India, in the style recommended by the ancient treatise, The Art of War, written by Sun Tzu — a general believed to have lived in the sixth century B.C. and said to be a contemporary of great Chinese philosopher Confucius. The launch of the attack, spread over two separate rounds, coincided with a major international crisis that brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union within a whisker of nuclear war over the stealthy deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba. A little over a month after launching the invasion of India, Mao announced a unilateral ceasefire that, significantly, coincided with America’s formal termination of Cuba’s quarantine. Mao’s premier, Zhou Enlai, publicly said that the 42-day war was intended “to teach India a lesson.”[8] India suffered a humiliating rout — a defeat that hastened Nehru’s death, but set in motion India’s military modernization and political rise.

Fifty years after that war, tensions between India and China are rising again amid an intense geopolitical rivalry. Their entire 4,057-kilometer-long border — one of the longest in the world — remains in dispute, without a clearly defined line of control in the Himalayas separating the rival armies. This situation has persisted despite regular talks since 1981 to settle their territorial disputes. In fact, these talks constitute the longest and most-futile negotiating process between any two nations in modern world history. During a 2010 New Delhi visit, Premier Wen Jiabao bluntly stated that sorting out the Himalayan border disputes “will take a fairly long period of time.”[9] If so, what does China (or India) gain by carrying on the border negotiations?

As old rifts fester, new political, military, and trade issues have started roiling relations. For example, since 2006 China has publicly raked up an issue that had remained dormant since the 1962 war — Arunachal Pradesh, a resource-rich state in India’s northeast that China claims largely as its own on the basis of the territory’s putative historical ties with Tibet. In fact, the Chinese practice of describing the Austria-size Arunachal Pradesh as “Southern Tibet” started only in 2006. A perceptible hardening of China’s stance toward India since then is also manifest from other developments, including Chinese strategic projects and military presence in the Pakistani-held portion of Kashmir. Kashmir is where the disputed borders of India, Pakistan, and China converge.

Indian defense officials have reported that Chinese troops, taking advantage of the disputed border, have in recent years stepped up military intrusions. In response, India has been beefing up its military deployments in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim state, and northern Ladakh region to prevent any Chinese land-grab. It has also launched a crash program to improve its logistical capabilities through new roads, airstrips, and advanced landing stations along the Himalayas.

China’s strategic projects around India are sharpening the geopolitical competition, including new ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, new transportation links with Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan, and China’s own major upgrades to military infrastructure in Tibet. American academic John Garver describes the Chinese strategy in these words: “A Chinese fable tells of how a frog in a pot of lukewarm water feels quite comfortable and safe. He does not notice as the water temperature slowly rises until, at last, the frog dies and is thoroughly cooked. This homily, wen shui zhu qingwa in Chinese, describes fairly well China’s strategy for growing its influence in South Asia in the face of a deeply suspicious India: move forward slowly and carefully, rouse minimal suspicion, and don’t cause an attempt at escape by the intended victim.”[10]

One apparent Chinese objective is to chip away at India’s maritime dominance in the Indian Ocean — a theater critical to fashioning China’s preeminence in Asia. China’s strategy also seeks to leverage its strengthening nexus with Pakistan to keep India under strategic pressure. Indeed, given China’s control of one-fifth of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and its new military footprint in Pakistani-held Kashmir, India now faces Chinese troops on both flanks of its portion of Kashmir. Moreover, by building new railroads, airports, and highways in Tibet, China is now in a position to rapidly move additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time of its choosing.

As the aforementioned territorial and maritime issues fester, water is becoming a new source of discord between the two water-stressed countries. India has more arable land than China but much less water. Compounding the situation for a parched India is the fact that most of the important rivers of its northern heartland originate in Chinese-controlled Tibet. The Tibetan plateau’s vast glaciers, huge underground springs, and high altitude make it the world’s largest freshwater repository after the polar icecaps. Although a number of nations stretching from Afghanistan to Vietnam receive waters from the Tibetan plateau, India’s direct dependency on Tibetan waters is greater than that of any other country. With about a dozen important rivers flowing in from the Tibetan Himalayan region, India gets almost one-third of all its yearly water supplies of 1,911 billion cubic meters from Tibet, according to United Nations data.[11]

China is now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau. These projects threaten to diminish international-river flows into India and China’s other co-riparian states. Whereas India has signed water-sharing treaties with both the counties located downstream to it — Bangladesh and Pakistan — China rejects the very concept of water sharing. It does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any neighbor, although it is the source of river flows to multiple countries, including Russia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Myanmar. One environmentally and politically dangerous idea China is toying with is the construction of a dam of unparalleled size on the Brahmaputra River, known as Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans. The proposed 38,000-megawatt dam — almost twice as large as the Three Gorges Dam — is to be located at Metog, just before the Brahmaputra enters India, according to the state-run HydroChina Corporation.[12] In fact, an officially blessed book, Tibet’s Waters Will Save China, has championed the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra.[13]

With water shortages growing in its northern plains, owing to environmentally unsustainable intensive irrigation and heavy industrialization, China has increasingly turned its attention to the abundant water reserves that Tibet holds. China’s hydroengineering projects and territorial disputes with India serve as a reminder that Tibet is at the heart of the Sino-Indian divide. Tibet ceased to be a political buffer when China annexed it more than six decades ago. But unless Tibet becomes a political bridge, there can be no enduring peace — a fact also underscored by the growing Tibetan unrest and self-immolations on the Tibetan plateau.

An Uneasy Triangle: China, India, United States

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters. The more muscular Chinese stance toward New Delhi — highlighted by the anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media — is clearly tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and the deepening military cooperation. As U.S. President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.” But will Washington take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing?

The fundamental U.S. strategic objective in Asia has remained the same since 1898 when America took the Philippines as spoils of the naval war with Spain — to establish a stable balance of power in order to prevent the rise of any hegemonic power. Yet the United States, according to its official National Security Strategy, is also committed to accommodating “the emergence of a China that is peaceful and prosperous and that cooperates with us to address common challenges and mutual interests.”[14] Thus, America’s Asia policy has in some ways been at war with itself.

In fact, the United States has played a key role in China’s rise. One example was the U.S. decision to turn away from trade sanctions against Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and instead integrate that country with global institutions — a major decision that allowed China to rise. By contrast, the opposite policy approach was pursued against Myanmar after it similarly crushed pro-democracy protests in 1988 — escalating U.S.-led sanctions, which are only now beginning to be relaxed after 24 years. China’s spectacular economic success — illustrated by its emergence with the world’s biggest trade surplus and largest foreign-currency reserves — actually owes much to the continuation of supportive U.S. polices since the 1970s. Without the significant expansion in U.S.-Chinese trade and financial relations since then, China’s growth would have been much slower and harder.

U.S. economic interests now are so closely intertwined with China that they virtually preclude a policy that seeks to either isolate or confront Beijing. Even on the democracy issue, the United States prefers to lecture some other dictatorships rather than the world’s largest and oldest-surviving autocracy. Yet it is also true that the United States views with unease China’s not-too-hidden aim to dominate Asia — an objective that runs counter to U.S. security and commercial interests and to the larger U.S. goal for a balance in power in Asia. To help avert such dominance, America has already started building countervailing influences and partnerships, without making any attempt to contain China. Where its interests converge with China, the United States will continue to work closely with it.

In this light, China’s more aggressive stance poses a difficult challenge for India. Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a border settlement. But after the unveiling of the Indo-U.S. defense framework accord and nuclear deal separately in mid-2005, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed. This gave rise to a pattern that has become commonplace since: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think-tanks, and even officially blessed websites ratcheting up an “India threat” scenario. Indeed, the present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments, and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed in the run-up to the 1962 war.

A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership, although it falls short of a formal military alliance, triggered alarm bells in Beijing. That raises the question whether New Delhi helped create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese assertiveness by agreeing to participate in U.S.-led “multinational operations,” share intelligence, and build military-to-military interoperability (key elements of the defense framework accord) and to become America’s partner on a new “global democracy initiative” — a commitment found in the nuclear deal.[15] While Beijing cannot hold a veto over New Delhi’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, could not India have avoided creating an impression that it was potentially being primed as a new junior partner (or spoke) in America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system?

India — with its hallowed traditions of policy independence — is an unlikely candidate to be a U.S. ally in a patron-client framework. But the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to the United States — a perception reinforced by subsequent security arrangements and multibillion-dollar defense transactions. In the decade since President Bush launched the U.S.-Indian strategic partnership, India has fundamentally reoriented its defense procurement, moving away from its traditional reliance on Russia. Indeed, nearly half of all Indian defense deals by value in recent years have been bagged by the United States alone, with Israel a distant second and Russia relegated to the third slot.

New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the United States would offer little comfort to India. Even as Beijing calculatedly has sought to badger India on multiple fronts, President Barack Obama’s administration — far from coming to India’s support — has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the existing territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues — from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal Pradesh issue — Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.

President Obama had stroked India’s collective ego by inviting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his presidency’s first state dinner, leading to the joke that while China gets a deferential America and Pakistan secures billions of dollars in U.S. aid periodically, India is easily won over with a sumptuous dinner and nice compliments. The mutual optimism and excitement that characterized the warming U.S.-Indian ties during the Bush years, admittedly, has given way to more realistic assessments as the relationship has matured. Geostrategic and economic forces, however, continue to drive the two countries closer. Indeed, to lend strategic heft to the Obama-declared U.S. “pivot” toward Asia, closer U.S. strategic collaboration with India has become critical.

While the geostrategic direction of the U.S.-India relationship is irreversibly set toward closer collaboration, such cooperation is unlikely to be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. The United States needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs American consumers — an economic interdependence of such import that snapping it would amount to mutually assured destruction (MAD). Even politically, China, with its veto power in the United Nations and international leverage, counts for more in U.S. policy than India. Against this background, it is no surprise that Washington intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including, for example, holding any joint military drill in Arunachal Pradesh. In fact, Washington has quietly charted a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

Yet the present muscular Chinese approach, paradoxically, reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that engendered greater Chinese assertiveness — that India has little option other than to align itself with the United States. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-U.S. partnership arising from the vicissitudes and compulsions of U.S. policy. Washington is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with India’s regional adversaries, China and Pakistan, that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region. Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of a direct confrontation with Beijing. Discretion, after all, is the better part of valor.

Concluding Observations

The strategic rivalry between the world’s largest autocracy and democracy has sharpened despite their fast-rising bilateral trade. Between 2000 and 2010, bilateral trade rose 20-fold, making it the only area where 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 tensions. This shows that booming trade is no guarantee of moderation or restraint between countries. Unless estranged neighbors fix their political relations, economics alone will not be enough to create goodwill or stabilize their relationship.

How the India-China relationship evolves will have an important bearing on Asian and wider international security. China seems to be signaling that its real, long-term rivalry is not so much with America as with India. It clearly looks at India as a potential peer rival. India’s great-power ambitions depend on how it is able to manage the rise of China — both independently and in partnership with other powers. A stable, mutually beneficial equation with China is more likely to be realized by India if there is no serious trans-Himalayan military imbalance.

The larger Asian balance of power will be shaped by developments not only in East Asia but also in the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries and other trade. Nontraditional security issues in the Indian Ocean region — from energy security and climate security to transnational terrorism and environmental degradation — have become as important as traditional security issues, like freedom of navigation, security of sea lanes, maritime security, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and ocean piracy. The Indian Ocean region indeed is becoming a new global center of trade and energy flows and geopolitics. If China were to gain the upper hand in the Indian Ocean region at India’s expense, it will mark the end of India’s world-power ambitions.

The United States can play a key role in stabilizing the India-China equation, including through U.S.-China-India trilateral dialogue and initiatives for stability and security in the vast Indian Ocean region. If Tibet is to serve as a political bridge between China and India, its strategic significance must be clearly recognized in policy. It is past time to stop treating Tibet as a moral issue and instead elevate it as a strategic issue that impinges on Asian and international security.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi; a fellow of the Nobel Institute in Oslo; and an affiliate with the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London.

Notes

[1]Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001); and Haruhiko Kuroda, president, Asian Development Bank, “The Financial Crisis and Its Impact on Asia,” speech to a Conference in Montreal, June 9, 2008.

[2]Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).

[3]What is popularly known as the Panchsheel Treaty is the Agreement between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India, signed on April 29, 1954, in Beijing; ratified August 17, 1954.

[4]Item Nos. 1 and 2 in the “Notes Exchanged” concurrently with the 1954 “Agreement between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India.” Fot full text, see Brahma Chellaney, Asian Juggernaut (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2010), appendixes.

[5]H.Y. Sharada Prasad, A.K. Damodaran and Sarvepalli Gopal (eds.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 29, 1 June–31 August 1955 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 231.

[6]Ibid.

[7]Address to the Nation on All India Radio, October 22, 1962, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, September 1957–April 1963, vol. 4 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1964), pp. 226–30.

[8]Zhou Enlai’s 1962 comment cited, among others, in Asad-ul Iqbal Latif, Three Sides in Search of a Triangle: Singapore-America-India Relations (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2009), p. 117; and Chellaney, Asian Juggernaut, p. 165.

[9]Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, “Working Together for New Glories of the Oriental Civilization,” Speech at the Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, December 16, 2010, http://www.icwa.in/pdfs/Chinapm_Lecture.pdf.

[10]John W. Garver, “The Diplomacy of a Rising China in South Asia,” Orbis (Summer 2012), p. 392.

[11]Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Aquastat online data, http://goo.gl/83tfb.

[12]HydroChina Corporation, “Map of Planned Dams,” http://www.hydrochina.com.cn/zgsd/images/ziyuan_b.gif.

[13]Li Ling, Xizang Zhi Shui Jiu Zhongguo: Da Xi Xian Zai Zao Zhongguo Zhan Lue Nei Mu Xiang Lu (Tibet’s Waters Will Save China), in Mandarin (Beijing: Zhongguo Chang’an chu ban she, November 2005), book sponsored by the Ministry of Water Resources.

[14]The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: White House, March 2006), p. 41.

[15]Nuclear deal: Joint Statement between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Washington, DC, July 18, 2005, http://usinfo.state.gov/sa/Archive/2005/Jul/18-624598.html; and defense framework agreement: “New Framework for the U.S.-India Defense Relationship,” Agreement signed in Arlington, Virginia, on June 28, 2005, http://www.indianembassy.org/press_release/2005/June/31.htm.

Historical issues weigh down East Asia

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally syndicated. This column also in Arabic; Chinese; Russian; and Spanish.

Political transitions in East Asia promise to mark a defining moment in the region’s jittery geopolitics. After the ascension in China of Xi Jinping, regarded by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as its own man, Japan seems set to swing to the right in its impending election — an outcome likely to fuel nationalist passion on both sides of the Sino-Japanese rivalry.

Japan’s expected rightward turn comes more than three years after voters put the left-leaning Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in power. By contrast, South Korea’s election — scheduled for December 19, just three days after the Japanese go to the polls — could take that country to the left, after the nearly five-year rule of rightist President Lee Myung-bak, who proved to be a polarizing leader.

These political transitions could compound East Asia’s challenges, which include the need to institute a regional balance of power and dispense with historical baggage that weighs down interstate relationships, particularly among China, Japan, and South Korea. Booming trade in the region has failed to mute or moderate territorial and other disputes; on the contrary, it has only sharpened regional geopolitics and unleashed high-stakes brinkmanship. Economic interdependence cannot deliver regional stability unless rival states undertake genuine efforts to mend their political relations.

The scandals surrounding the top aides to Lee — nicknamed “the Bulldozer” from his career as a construction industry executive — have complicated matters for the ruling Saenuri Party’s candidate, Park Geun-hye, and buoyed the hopes of her leftist rival, Moon Jae-in of the Democratic United Party. Park is the daughter of former president, General Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a military coup in 1961.

Reining in South Korea’s powerful chaebol (family-run conglomerates) has become a key issue in the presidential election, with even Park favoring tighter control over them, although it was her father’s regime that helped build them with generous government support. Her populist stance on the chaebol suggests that, if elected, she might similarly pander to nationalist sentiment by taking a tough stance against Japan, especially to play down her father’s service in Japan’s military while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule.

But, even if Moon becomes president, the new strains in South Korea’s relationship with Japan, owing to the revival of historical issues, may not be easy to mend. Earlier this year, Lee, at the last minute, canceled the scheduled signing of the “General Security of Military Information Agreement” with Japan, which would have established military intelligence-sharing between the two countries, both US allies, for the first time. Lee also scrapped a bilateral plan to finalize a military-related Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement. Weeks later, he provocatively visited the contested islets known as the Dokdo Islands in South Korea (which controls them) and the Takeshima Islands in Japan.

China, meanwhile, has cast a long shadow over the Japanese parliamentary elections. In recent months, China has launched a new war of attrition by sending patrol ships frequently to the waters around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands, which China calls Diaoyu. This physical assertiveness followed often-violent anti-Japanese protests in China in September, while a continuing informal boycott of Japanese goods has led to a sharp fall in Japan’s exports to China, raising the risk of another Japanese recession.

The DPJ’s 2009 election victory had been expected to lead to a noticeable warming of Japan’s ties with China. After all, the DPJ came to power on a promise to balance Japan’s dependence on the US with closer ties with the People’s Republic. But its bridge-building agenda foundered on growing Chinese assertiveness, leading successive DPJ governments to bolster Japan’s security ties with the US.

China’s behavior has fueled a nationalist backlash in Japan, helping to turn hawkish, marginal politicians like Shintaro Ishihara into important mainstream figures. Japan may be in economic decline, but it is rising politically. Indeed, Albert del Rosario, the foreign minister of the Philippines, which was under Japanese occupation during WWII, now strongly supports a re-armed Japan as a counterweight to China.

But the resurgence of nationalism in Japan is only fanning Chinese nationalism, creating a vicious circle from which the two countries are finding it difficult to escape. Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party, who is likely to become Japan’s next prime minister, has vowed to take a tougher line on Senkaku and other disputes with China. More important, the LDP has called for revising Article 9 of Japan’s US-imposed post-1945 constitution, which renounces war.

The risks posed by increasing nationalism and militarism to regional peace have already been highlighted by the rise of a new Chinese dynasty of “princelings,” or sons of revolutionary heroes who have widespread contacts in the military. The real winner from the recent appointment of the conservative-dominated, seven-member Politburo Standing Committee is the PLA, whose rising clout has underpinned China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy.

In fact, what distinguishes Xi from China’s other civilian leaders is his strong relationship with the PLA. As Xi rose through the Communist Party ranks, he forged close military ties as a reservist, assuming leadership of a provincial garrison and serving as a key aide to a defense minister. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is also linked to the military, having served as a civilian member of the army’s musical troupe, and carries an honorary rank of general.

Against this background, the central challenge for East Asia’s major economies — particularly Japan and South Korea — is to resolve the historical issues that are preventing them from charting a more stable and prosperous future. As a Russian proverb warns, “Forget the past and lose an eye; dwell on the past and lose both eyes.”

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, 2012. Reprinting this article without written consent from Project Syndicate is a violation of international copyright law. To secure permission, please contact us.

The art of war, Chinese style

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Chellaney

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY Japan Times December 14, 2012

The recent 50th anniversary of China’s invasion of India attracted much discussion, especially within India. Yet the debate shied away from drawing the broader, long-term lessons for Asian security.

The lessons are also relevant for China’s other neighbors because the 1962 war helped uncover the key elements of Beijing’s war-fighting doctrine — a doctrine it brought into play in 1969 (provoking bloody border clashes with Soviet forces), 1974 (occupying the Paracel Islands), 1979 (invading Vietnam), 1988 (seizing Johnson Reef), and 1995 (grabbing Mischief Reef). In each of those aggressions, the major 1962 elements were replicated.

As a 2010 Pentagon report citing the 1962 war, among others, put it, “The history of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which China’s leaders have claimed military pre-emption as a strategically defensive act.” In fact, a 2010 essay in the Qiu Shi Journal — the ideological and theoretical organ of the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee — underscored the centrality of “offense as defense” in Chinese policy by declaring that “Throughout the history of new China, peace in China has never been gained by giving in, only through war. Safeguarding national interests is never achieved by mere negotiations, but by war.”

Unlike India, which still naively believes that it gained independence through nonviolence, not because a war-debilitated Britain could no longer hold on to its colonies, “new China” was born in blood after a long civil war. And it was built on blood, with Mao Zedong and other revolutionaries ever ready to employ force internally and externally. No sooner had the new China been established than it doubled its territorial size by forcibly absorbing Xinjiang and Tibet. Domestically, countless millions perished in witch-hunts, fratricidal killings and human-made disasters.

In fact, Mao attacked India after his “Great Leap Forward” created the worst famine in recorded world history, with the resulting damage to his credibility serving as a strong incentive for him to reassert his leadership through a war. The military victory over India indeed helped him to consolidate his grip on power, besides raising his international stature.

Yet, like a rape victim being scolded for inviting the attack, India was repeatedly rapped by some analysts during the anniversary debate for having brought on the Chinese aggression through “provocative” gestures and moves.

When the Chinese military marched hundreds of miles south to occupy the then-independent Tibet, bringing Han soldiers in large numbers to the Himalayan frontiers for the first time and setting the stage for China’s furtive encroachment on Indian territory, this supposedly did not constitute sufficient grounds for India to try to guard its undefended Himalayan borders. So when India belatedly deployed some units of its army, the action became, in Beijing’s words, a “forward policy” — a term lapped up by biddable analysts and still being bandied about.

The duplicity in China’s claims indeed became clear some years earlier. For example, after a 1959 Chinese border attack killed some Indian soldiers, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev raised that issue with Mao Zedong at their summit in Beijing on October 2 1959. “Why did you have to kill people on the border with India?” Khrushchev asked Mao after arriving straight from his historic Camp David summit with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. Sarcastically rejecting Beijing’s claim that India started it, he commented: “Yes, they [the Indian soldiers] began to shoot and they themselves fell dead.”

The Soviet transcript of that meeting, published by the Washington-based Cold War International History Project Bulletin, indicates that Khrushchev believed that Mao deliberately designed that border attack and new tensions with India to sabotage Moscow’s efforts to reach detente with the U.S.

India does not commemorate war anniversaries the way the United States does — with annual ceremonies honoring its fallen heroes. For example, at the exact time the Japanese began bombing Pearl Harbor 71 years earlier, commemorations were held last weekend at Pearl Harbor and memorials elsewhere, drawing thousands of Americans. India, in fact, has not built a single memorial to honor those who were martyred in 1962 or any of its other wars. China, by contrast, has a 1962 war memorial in Tibet and its Beijing military museum depicts India as the “aggressor.”

In this light, the 50th anniversary of what American scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed “Mao’s India War,” which killed 3,270 Indian troops and 725 Chinese, ought to have served as a time for reflection on its larger lessons. By baring key features of Beijing’s warfighting doctrine, the 42-day war indeed holds lasting lessons for India and other countries locked in territorial disputes with China.

Here are six of the 1962 principles China replicated in its subsequent aggressions: (1) take the adversary by surprise to maximize political and psychological shock; (2) strike only when the international and regional timing is opportune; (3) hit as fast and as hard as possible by unleashing “human wave” assaults; (4) be willing to take military gambles; (5) mask offense as defense; and (6) wage war with the political objective to “teach a lesson” — an aim publicly acknowledged by Beijing in the 1962 and 1979 attacks.

The Chinese strategy to choose an opportune moment to strike became evident before 1962 when China invaded Tibet in October 1950 while the world was preoccupied with the Korean war. China’s rapid success in seizing eastern Tibet emboldened it to intervene in Korea.

The classic case of opportunistic timing, however, was 1962: The attack coincided with the Cuban missile crisis, which threatened to trigger nuclear Armageddon and helped cut off India from potential sources of international support. But no sooner had the U.S. signaled an end to the faceoff with the Soviet Union by terminating Cuba’s quarantine than China declared a unilateral cease-fire. Such was the shrewd timing that throughout the Chinese attack, the international spotlight remained on the U.S.-Soviet showdown, not on China’s bloody invasion of India.

Similarly, China seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam in 1974 after the U.S. military withdrawal from there had created a strategic vacuum. It occupied the disputed Johnson Reef in the Spratlys in 1988 when Moscow’s support for Vietnam had petered out after the Soviets stopped using Cam Ranh Bay as a major forward deployment base. And in 1995, China seized Mischief Reef when the Philippines stood isolated after having forced the U.S. to close its major military bases at Subic Bay and elsewhere on the archipelago.

The 1979 attack on Vietnam occurred after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping convinced U.S. President Jimmy Carter during his Washington visit that a “limited military action” against Vietnam was essential to contain Soviet and Vietnamese influence in Southeast Asia and to force Hanoi to withdraw its forces from Cambodia. After 29 days, China ended its Vietnam invasion and withdrew, claiming Hanoi had been sufficiently chastised.

It is apparent that new China hews to ancient theorist Sun Tzu’s advice: “All warfare is based on deception. … Attack where the enemy is unprepared; sally out when it does not expect you. These are the strategist’s keys to victory.”

Brahma Chellaney is the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (Harper, 2010) and “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

The shock value of North Korea’s satellite launch

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Chellaney

BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Globe and Mail, December 13, 2012

The success of impoverished, sanctions-battered North Korea in placing a satellite in orbit is a major political boost and propaganda boon for its untested leader, Kim Jong-un, especially because rival South Korea has twice failed in similar efforts. But Wednesday’s launch, just days before Japan and South Korea elect new governments, threatens to make the already tense regional geopolitics murkier and complicate U.S. diplomatic strategy in northeast Asia.

The launch shows the rapid strides the reclusive communist country has made in rocket technology. Just last April, a similar rocket exploded 90 seconds after liftoff. But in barely eight months, North Korea fixed the technical glitches and successfully launched its Unha-3 rocket.

For a country that already has an arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and claims to possess nuclear arms, the launch of a satellite was clearly a political project designed to earn prestige at home and abroad. Coming a year after the death of his father, it allows Kim Jong-un to consolidate power by presenting himself as a tough leader who openly defied United Nations Security Council resolutions and international pressures.

The launch’s political fallout promises to bring U.S. President Barack Obama’s North Korea policy under withering criticism at home. It could also have a bearing on Sunday’s Japanese parliamentary election and next Wednesday’s South Korean presidential election but in diametrically opposite ways – by aiding the campaign of the leftist Moon Jae-in of the opposition Democratic Unity Party in South Korea, and bolstering support for Japanese nationalist and other rightist candidates.

Mr. Moon is locked in a close contest with the ruling New Frontier Party’s candidate, Park Geun-hye, the daughter of former president Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a military coup in 1961. The rocket launch has come as a fresh reminder to voters of the failure of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s policy to squeeze North Korea.

After the neo-conservative Mr. Lee took office in February of 2008, he reversed his country’s decade-long “sunshine policy” toward North Korea, choosing to cut off bilateral aid and step up pressure on Pyongyang. That, in turn, prompted the North to scale back inter-Korean contact, carry out provocative actions that included missile tests, and ratchet up bellicose rhetoric. Relations between the two Koreas dropped to a low in 2010 after the death of 46 South Korean sailors in the sinking of a warship – blamed on a North Korean torpedo attack – and the North’s shelling of the South’s Yeonpyeong Island.

In Japan, the North Korean launch only reinforces the likelihood of a new right-wing government after more than three years of rule by the left-leaning Democratic Party of Japan. Shinzo Abe, the probable next prime minister, and his Liberal Democratic Party have vowed to take a tougher line on North Korea. They have also called for revising the war-renouncing Article 9 of Japan’s U.S.-imposed Constitution.

The North Korean rocket’s military significance is small compared with the expected political fallout. Theoretically, the Unha-3 gives Pyongyang an intercontinental ballistic missile capability. But, in practice, it will take the North Koreans years to try to translate that latent capability into a reality, chiefly for two reasons.

First, a launch vehicle is merely fired into outer space, while any long-range ballistic missile is designed to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space – a task that demands a sophisticated re-entry vehicle that can withstand the heat and stress. And second, the Unha-3 carried a tiny satellite weighing less than 100 kilograms, while compact nuclear warheads on ICBMs weigh, on average, more than 10 times that.

There’s little room for the international community to slap additional sanctions on Pyongyang: North Korea is already one of the world’s most heavily sanctioned countries, with China its only economic partner. Even Western food aid has been used as leverage against North Korea, despite the larger risks of turning food into a political weapon.

If anything, the rocket launch reflects a failure of international efforts to rein in North Korea through United Nations-sponsored sanctions. These sanctions, far from disciplining Pyongyang, have acted as a spur to its missile launches, nuclear tests and covert weapons trades with other problem states such as Pakistan and Iran.

Nuclear, missile and space programs symbolize strategic autonomy and heft, and it’s not an accident that today’s main proliferation threats emanate from countries that have come under increasing international pressure – North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. This is a reminder that pressure and sanctions alone will not deliver results.

Engagement is usually necessary to influence developments within any problem state. Mr. Obama’s reversal of America’s long-standing sanctions policy on Myanmar has set in motion positive developments and helped dispel proliferation-related concerns about that country’s ties with North Korea. It’s now time for Mr. Obama to review his sanctions-only approach toward North Korea if that country is to be dissuaded from committing more acts of defiance.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Scorched by the dragon

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Chellaney

Hindustan Times, December 13, 2012

Brahma Chellaney

The recent October 20–December 1 fiftieth anniversary of China’s invasion of India attracted a lot of Indian discussion, yet the debate shied away from drawing the broader, long-term lessons. The lessons are also relevant for China’s other neighbours because 1962 helped uncover the key elements of Beijing’s war-fighting doctrine — a doctrine it brought into play in 1969 (provoking border clashes with Soviet forces), 1974 (occupying the Paracel Islands), 1979 (invading Vietnam), 1988 (seizing Johnson Reef), and 1995 (grabbing Mischief Reef). In each of those aggressions, the major 1962 elements were replicated.

As a 2010 Pentagon report citing 1962 put it, “The history of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which China’s leaders have claimed military pre-emption as a strategically defensive act.” In fact, a 2010 essay in the influential Qiu Shi Journal — the ideological and theoretical organ of the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee — underscored the centrality of “offense as defence” in Chinese policy by declaring that, “Throughout the history of new China, peace in China has never been gained by giving in, only through war. Safeguarding national interests is never achieved by mere negotiations, but by war.”

Unlike India — which still naïvely believes that it gained independence through non-violence, not because a world-war-debilitated Britain could no longer hold on to its colonies — “new China” was born in blood after a long civil war. And it was built on blood, with Mao Zedong and fellow revolutionaries ever ready to employ force internally and externally.

No sooner had the new China been established than it swiftly doubled its territorial size by forcibly absorbing Xinjiang and Tibet. Domestically, countless millions perished in witch-hunts, fratricidal killings and human-made disasters. In fact, Mao attacked India after his “Great Leap Forward” created the worst famine in recorded world history, with the resulting damage to his credibility, according to Chinese scholar Wang Jisi, serving as a strong incentive for him to reassert his leadership through a war.

Yet, like a rape victim being scolded for inviting the attack, India was repeatedly rapped during the anniversary debate for having brought on the Chinese aggression through “provocative” gestures and moves. When the Chinese military marched hundreds of miles south and occupied Tibet, resulting in a major Han military presence along the Himalayas for the first time in history and setting the stage for China’s furtive encroachments on Indian territory, this supposedly did not constitute sufficient grounds for India to try to guard its undefended Himalayan borders. So when India belatedly deployed some units of its then scrappy army, the action became, in Beijing’s words, a “forward policy” — a term lapped up by biddable analysts and still being bandied about.

India does not commemorate war anniversaries the way the U.S. does — with an annual ceremony honouring its fallen heroes. For example, at the exact time the Japanese began bombing Pearl Harbour 71 years earlier, commemorations were held last weekend at Pearl Harbour and memorials elsewhere, drawing thousands of Americans. India, in fact, has not built a single special memorial to honour those who were martyred in 1962 or any of the other wars it has fought. China, by contrast, has a 1962 war memorial in Tibet and its Beijing military museum exhibits depict India as the “aggressor.”

In this light, the fiftieth anniversary of what American scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed “Mao’s India War” ought to have served as a time for Indian reflection on its larger and enduring lessons. Instead, it regrettably became an occasion for some commentators to recycle myths about 1962, including that it was a “brief war.”

Actually, this was one of the longest and bloodiest of all wars India has faced since 1947. The length of a war, however, is usually irrelevant to its outcome: Israel fundamentally changed the land and water map of its region in a six-day war in 1967, while India carved out Bangladesh in a 13-day war in 1971.

The 1962 war lasted 42 days, longer than the 1965 war (38 days). Even after China unilaterally declared a ceasefire on November 21, 1962, its troops kept firing on the outgunned and outnumbered Indian troops in the east. The war really ended on December 1 when China, while holding on to its territorial gains on the Aksai Chin plateau, began withdrawing its forces from the east, simply because it did not have the logistics capability to maintain forces across the McMahon Line once snow cut off mountain passes.

The war — which ranks as the world’s highest-altitude full-blown war in post-World War II history — left 3,270 Indian troops dead, compared with over 1,100 military men killed in the 1947-48 war; 3,264 in 1965; 3,843 in 1971; 1,157 in Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka; and 522 in Kargil. Yet a couple of analysts at a Mumbai seminar last week had the temerity to call 1962 a “skirmish.”

By baring key elements of Beijing’s strategic doctrine, 1962 indeed holds lasting lessons for India and other countries locked in territorial disputes with China. Here are just some of the 1962 principles China replicated in its subsequent aggressions:

take the adversary by surprise to maximize political and psychological shock.
strike only when the international and regional timing is opportune.
hit as fast and as hard as possible by unleashing “human wave” assaults.
be willing to take military gambles.
mask offense as defence.
wage war with the political objective to “teach a lesson” — an aim publicly acknowledged in the 1962 and 1979 invasions.

New China hews to ancient theorist Sun Tzu’s advice: “All warfare is based on deception … Attack where the enemy is unprepared; sally out when it does not expect you. These are the strategist’s keys to victory.”

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

China’s military crossroads

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Chellaney

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, November 30, 2012

At a time when China’s economy and society are under considerable strain and the country is embroiled in increasingly tense border disputes with its neighbors, the relatively peaceful once-in-a-decade political transition in Beijing has helped deflect attention from the underlying turbulence in the Chinese system. The fact is that China is at a turning point, and the next decade under the new leadership of Xi Jinping is likely to decisively shape the country’s trajectory.

Power transition rarely has occurred without bloodshed and chaos in Chinese history. From the first Shang dynasty, political change is usually violent, with force also being employed to retain power. Chinese analyst Xiao Han has called this the “ax gang” tradition — the ax has been the symbol of power since ancient times. In modern times, as Mao Zedong once famously said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

The People’s Republic of China — born in blood in 1949 — has pursued endless domestic witch hunts and political purges. Mao and Deng Xiaoping between them got rid of at least five anointed successors who were discarded abruptly, or died mysteriously or under detention.

The first leadership transition without turmoil or bloodshed was in 2002, when Jiang Zemin stepped down in favor of Hu Jintao. This year, Mr. Xi’s ascension was preceded by a vicious power struggle that led to the ouster and disappearance of a rising star, Bo Xilai, and the swift conviction of his wife for the murder of a British national in what probably ranks as the mother of all orchestrated trials.

Power in China today may not flow from the barrel of a gun to the extent it did under Mao — who was responsible for the deaths of countless millions — but it is significant that Mr. Xi has risen to the top with close military ties and support. In fact, what sets Mr. Xi apart from China’s other civilian leaders is his strong relationship with the military, which regards him as its own man.

As Mr. Xi rose through the Communist Party ranks, he forged close ties with the military as a reservist, assuming leadership of a provincial garrison and serving as a senior aide to the defense minister. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is also linked to the military, having served as a civilian member of the army’s musicale troupe.

The real winner from the appointment of the conservative-dominated, seven-member Politburo Standing Committee is the military, whose rising clout in policy already has created an increasingly assertive China. The party has ceased to be a rigid monolith obedient to a single leader. Instead, it has become dependent on the military for its political legitimacy and to ensure domestic order. With rural protests increasing officially by more than 10 percent a year, and separatist unrest growing in the sprawling Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, China is now the only important country whose annual internal security budget surpasses its national defense spending.

The rise of a new dynasty of “princelings,” or sons of revolutionary heroes who have widespread contacts in the military, is another indicator that nationalism and militarism likely will strengthen in China. The princelings such as Mr. Xi, numbering in the hundreds, dominate the new Standing Committee and play a key role in the government and economy, in spite of their internecine power squabbles.

An examination of the new members of the 205-member Central Committee, the 25-member Politburo and the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee shows that political patronage and family connections were critical factors in their selection.

Indeed, the new leadership lineup is pretty much what the foreign media reported beforehand, suggesting that despite a secretive selection process, some party bosses had an interest in leaking out the information in advance of the official announcement.

Another striking feature is the dominance of ethnic Han men in the party’s upper levels in a country that claims to represent 56 nationalities and trumpets gender equality. Although the restive ethnic-minority homelands make up more than 60 percent of China’s landmass, there is not even one token minority representative in the Politburo.

These developments have important internal and external implications. Internally, with several reformers losing out to old conservatives in the power struggle for top positions, prospects for major reforms look bleak.

The factional infighting, recently witnessed for the slots in the party’s upper echelons, is even more intense at the provincial level, making bold policymaking difficult despite greater social instability and slower economic growth. The messy politics is an important driver of the flight of capital and professionals from China.

Since the Deng era, China has dumped the Marxist half of Marxism-Leninism but retained the Leninist part. Dictatorship is one thing that is not open to reform. China’s corrupt, faction-ridden political culture and bloody history, in any event, are conducive not to political reform but to political revolution.

China’s internal politics has an important bearing on its external policy. Stepped-up internal repression and aggressive external moves to change the territorial status quo in China’s favor are two sides of the same coin.

The stronger the military has become at the expense of the civilian leadership (every Chinese leader since Mao has been weaker than his predecessor), the more muscular Beijing’s approach has been toward its neighbors. Recent revelations about how some senior civilian leaders have amassed vast wealth even as their privileged children remain unbound by law or consequences only help to accentuate the party’s legitimacy problem.

China’s future is likely to be determined not by its hugely successful economy, which has turned the country into a global player in just one generation, but by its murky politics and the growing sway of the People’s Liberation Army. The leadership transition, far from cleaning up or stabilizing China’s politics, may actually allow the military to increasingly call the shots. We may see more military generals speak out of turn on strategic issues. The plain fact is that the foreign ministry is the weakest branch of the Chinese government because it is often overruled or simply ignored by the military and security establishments.

In this light, China’s neighbors and the U.S. military would be wise to brace themselves to face a less restrained China championing ever-expanding “core interests.”

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

Asia’s Power Balance

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Chellaney

A U.S.-India-Japan cooperation bloc can ensure stability in Asia, especially vis-à-vis a rigid China

Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, November 21, 2012

The ascendancy of a new dynasty of “princelings” in China, the political uncertainty in Japan and India, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s “pivot” toward Asia underscore the challenge of building Asian power equilibrium at a time of resurgent border disputes and growing nationalism. Obama, by undertaking an Asian tour shortly after his re-election, has signalled that Asia will move up in importance in his second-term agenda.

Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar will aid India’s “Look East” policy because it formally ends a 24-year U.S. policy of punitively isolating a country that is the Indian gateway to continental Southeast Asia. The U.S. shift on Myanmar is as much about seizing trade and investment opportunities as it is about the geopolitical objective of weaning that strategically located country away from Chinese influence. Paradoxically, it was the U.S. sanctions policy that penalized Myanmar but condoned China for crushing pro-democracy protests in 1988 and 1989, respectively, that helped push the former into the latter’s strategic lap.

Obama’s “pivot” toward Asia actually chimes with India’s “Look East” policy, which has graduated to an “Act East” policy, with the original economic logic of “Look East” giving way to a geopolitical logic. The thrust of the new “Act East” policy — unveiled with U.S.’s blessings — is to contribute to building a stable balance of power in Asia by reestablishing India’s historically close ties with countries to its east.

India, in fact, has little choice but to look east because when it looks west, it sees only trouble. The entire belt to India’s west from Pakistan to Syria is a contiguous arc of instability, volatility and extremism. An eastern orientation in its policy can allow India to join the economic dynamism that characterizes Southeast and East Asia. It is in the east again that Indian and U.S. interests now converge significantly, in contrast to their bilateral dissonance on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.

India’s new strategic ties with countries as varied as Japan, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam are important moves on the grand Asian chessboard to increase its geopolitical leeway. The U.S., for its part, has strengthened and expanded its security arrangements in Asia in recent years by making the most of the growing regional concerns over China’s increasingly muscular approach on territorial and maritime disputes.

Both the U.S. and India have deepened their strategic ties with Japan, which has Asia’s largest naval fleet and a $5.5 trillion economy. The first serious Indo-Japanese naval exercise, involving a search-and-rescue operation, was held off the Japanese coast just five months ago. India and Japan, despite their messy domestic politics and endemic scandals, actually boast the fastest-growing bilateral relationship in Asia today.

The stage has been set for building closer Indo-Japanese security cooperation in the wider Indo-Pacific region. At a time when India is reflecting on the lessons of its rout by the invading Chinese forces 50 years ago — the only foreign war Communist China has won — Japan has been concerned by a new war of attrition China has launched by sending patrol ships daily to the waters around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku island group. This physical assertiveness, which coincidentally began around the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Chinese military attack on India, followed often violent anti-Japanese protests in China in September and a continuing informal boycott of Japanese goods that has led to a sharp fall in Japan’s exports, raising the risk of renewed Japanese recession.

With Asia troubled by growing security challenges, trilateral U.S.-India-Japan security cooperation is also beginning to take shape. These three democratic powers recently held their third round of security consultations in New Delhi, underlining their shift from emphasizing shared values to seeking to jointly protect shared interests. Their trilateral cooperation could lead to trilateral coordination, with a potentially positive impact on Asian security and stability.

The nascent trilateral security cooperation may signal moves to form an entente among the three leading democracies of the Asia-Pacific, along the lines of the pre-World War I Franco-British-Russian “Triple Entente,” which was designed to meet the challenge posed by the rapid rise of Germany. The present steps, however, are still tentative. Such an entente’s geopolitical utility, however, is likely to transcend its military value. A geopolitical entente, for example, can help strengthen maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region — the world’s leading trade and energy seaway — and contribute to building a stable Asian power equilibrium.

A fast-rising Asia has become the defining fulcrum of global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now help to shape the international security and economic environment. Yet Asia, paradoxically, is bearing the greatest impact of such shifts. A constellation of powers linked by interlocking bilateral, trilateral, and possibly even quadrilateral strategic cooperation has thus become critical to help institute power stability in Asia and to ensure a peaceful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation.

AFTERTHOUGHT
“Asia is rich in people, rich in culture, and rich in resources. It is also rich in trouble.”
— Hubert H. Humphrey, former vice-president of the U.S.

America’s Unhinged “Pivot”

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally distributed

President Barack Obama’s first foreign trip since winning a second term highlights Asia’s new centrality to America’s economy and security. But Obama’s Asian tour also underscores the main question about American policy in the region: Will the United States’ “pivot” to Asia acquire concrete strategic content, or will it remain largely a rhetorical repackaging of old policies?

The United States, quick to capitalize on regional concerns triggered by China’s increasingly muscular self-assertion, has strengthened its military ties with existing Asian allies and forged security relationships with new friends. But the heady glow of America’s return to center-stage in Asia has obscured key challenges in remaining the region’s principal security anchor in the face of China’s strategic ambitions.

One challenge is the need to arrest the erosion of America’s relative power, which in turn requires comprehensive domestic renewal, including fiscal consolidation. But the need for spending cuts also raises the prospect that the US might be unable to finance a military shift toward the Asia-Pacific region — or, worse, that it be forced to retrench there.

The US under Obama has increasingly ceded ground to China, a trend that admittedly began when the Bush administration became preoccupied with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This has spurred doubts about America’s ability to provide strategic heft to its “pivot” by sustaining a higher level of commitment in the Asia-Pacific region, where it already maintains 320,000 troops. The proposed deployment of an additional 2,500 Marines in Australia is largely symbolic.

In fact, after raising Asians’ expectations of a more robust US response to China’s growing assertiveness, the Obama administration has started to tamp down the military aspects of its “pivot,” emphasizing instead greater US economic engagement with Asian countries. That change has come as a relief to those in the region who fear being forced to choose between the US and China. But, for the countries bearing the brunt of China’s recalcitrant approach to territorial and maritime disputes, this emphasis raises new doubts about America’s commitment.

In fact, the economic reorientation of the US “pivot” corrects a policy that had overemphasized the military component and put the US on a path toward conflict with China. It was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who signaled a more hawkish US stance on China with her tough talk at the 2010 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum in Hanoi; now she is moderating that position by promoting trade and investment during her visits to Asian countries.

Obama, too, is highlighting the economic aspects of the U.S. “pivot,” portraying his Asia tour as an effort to generate more domestic manufacturing jobs through higher exports to “the most rapidly growing and dynamic region in the world.” But his historic visit to Myanmar — the first ever by a U.S. president — is as much about trade as it is about weaning a strategically located, resource-rich country from Chinese influence. Paradoxically, it was the U.S. sanctions policy that penalized Myanmar but condoned China for crushing prodemocracy protests in 1988 and 1989, respectively, that helped push the former into the latter’s strategic lap.

The refocus on trade and economic issues has also prompted Washington to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which aims to create a new Asia-Pacific free-trade group that excludes China. Moreover, the U.S. is emphasizing the importance of the East Asia Summit and ASEAN, whose summit overlaps with the EAS meeting in Phnom Penh that Obama will be attending.

The U.S. course correction is being dictated by another consideration as well: America has nothing to gain from taking sides in China’s disputes with its neighbors – unless, of course, U.S. interests are directly at stake, as in the South China Sea, where Chinese maritime claims pose a threat to freedom of navigation.

Regard for its own national interest explains why America has charted a course of tacit neutrality on the revival of Sino-Indian territorial disputes, including China’s sudden resurrection of a claim to the large Himalayan Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Similarly, the U.S. has urged both China and Japan to resolve peacefully their dispute over the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands. America’s main goal is to prevent the Sino-Japanese standoff from escalating to the point that it would be forced — against its own interests — to take Japan’s side.

When U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in China in September, he got “an earful” that the U.S. should stay out of the Sino-Japanese dispute. Indeed, amid the orchestrated anti-Japanese protests in China in September, Panetta — instead of advising China to rein in the often-violent demonstrations — publicly reiterated America’s neutrality in the struggle over control of the islands.

The correction in U.S. policy actually extends even to terminology. American diplomats have now abandoned the term “pivot” altogether, owing to its military connotation, in favor of “rebalancing.”

Whatever one calls it, the new policy approach is all about China, with America bolstering alliances and friendships with countries around China’s periphery, including India, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Korea. Yet the Obama administration continues to deny that China is at the center of its strategy. In fact, it is reluctant to say or do anything publicly that might raise China’s hackles.

The Asia-Pacific region will loom larger in Obama’s second-term agenda, especially as the ongoing U.S. troop withdrawal ends the Afghanistan war by 2014. But Obama will have to define a clearer U.S. policy, addressing address China’s rapid rise under an authoritarian regime that aggressively pursues border claims and whips up nationalism at home. The U.S. and the rest of Asia must not merely adjust to China; they must seek to shape a China that plays by the rules.

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.

Maintaining a power balance in Asia

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Chellaney

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, November 14, 2012

At a time when Asia’s power dynamics remain fluid, with new military capabilities and resurgent border disputes challenging regional stability, U.S. President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are embarking on separate Asian tours that culminate with their participation in the East Asia Summit meeting in Phnom Penh. Singh’s Tokyo visit seeks to cement a rapidly growing relationship between Japan and India — two natural allies — while Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar promises to aid India’s “Look East” policy by marking a formal end to a 24-year U.S. policy of punitively isolating a country that is the Indian gateway to Southeast Asia.

By undertaking an Asian tour shortly after his re-election, Obama has signaled that Asia will move up in importance in his second-term agenda. His previously announced “pivot” toward Asia actually chimes with India’s “Look East” policy, which has graduated to an “Act East” policy, with the original economic logic of “Look East” giving way to a geopolitical logic.

The thrust of the new “Act East” policy — unveiled with the United States’ blessings — is to contribute to building a stable balance of power in Asia by re-establishing India’s historically close ties with countries to its east. India, in fact, has little choice but to look east because when it looks west, it sees only trouble. The entire belt to India’s west from Pakistan to Syria is a contiguous arc of instability, volatility and extremism. A “Look East” policy allows India to join the economic dynamism that characterizes Southeast and East Asia.

It is in the east again that Indian and U.S. interests now converge significantly. The fundamental shift in the U.S. policy on Myanmar eliminates an important constraint on India’s closer engagement with continental Southeast Asia.

India’s new strategic ties with countries as varied as Japan, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam are important moves on the grand Asian chessboard to increase its geopolitical leeway. The U.S., for its part, has strengthened and expanded its security arrangements in Asia in recent years by making the most of the growing regional concerns over China’s increasingly muscular approach on territorial and maritime disputes.

Both the U.S. and India have deepened their ties with Japan, which has a $5.5 trillion economy, impressive high-technology skills and Asia’s largest naval fleet. The first serious Japan-India naval exercise was held five months ago involving a search-and-rescue operation.

India and Japan, despite their messy domestic politics and endemic scandals, actually boast the fastest-growing bilateral relationship in Asia today. Since they unveiled a “strategic and global partnership” in 2006, their engagement has grown dramatically. A free-trade agreement between the two countries entered into force last year. Their 2008 security declaration was modeled on Japan’s 2007 defense-cooperation accord with Australia — the only other country with which Japan, a U.S. military ally, has a security-cooperation arrangement. The India-Japan security declaration, in turn, spawned a similar India-Australia accord in 2009.

Singh’s Tokyo visit will likely set the stage for building closer bilateral security cooperation in the wider Indo-Pacific region, marked by the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At a time when India is reflecting on the lessons of its rout by the invading Chinese forces 50 years ago — the only foreign war communist China has won — Japan has been concerned by a new war of attrition China has launched by sending patrol ships daily to the waters around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands group that Beijing claims.

This physical assertiveness, which coincidentally began around the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Chinese military attack on India, followed often violent anti-Japanese protests in China in September and a continuing informal boycott of Japanese goods that has led to a sharp fall in Japan’s exports.

India and Japan are set to sign a formal agreement for the joint development of rare-earth minerals in India. This will be the latest of several such international agreements since China used its monopoly on rare-earths production to cut off such exports to Japan and restrict sales to Western countries in 2010, prompting the U.S., the European Union and Japan to file a World Trade Organization complaint alleging that Beijing was using that monopoly as a weapon. Thanks to the various new agreements, production of these critical minerals is expanding at plants outside China, undercutting the Chinese monopoly.

At a time when Asia is troubled by growing security challenges, trilateral U.S.-India-Japan security consultations and cooperation are also taking place. These three democratic powers recently held their third round of security consultations in New Delhi, after similar meetings earlier in Washington and Tokyo.

These consultations are just one sign of their shift from emphasizing shared values to seeking to trilaterally protect shared interests. Their trilateral cooperation could lead to trilateral coordination, with a potentially positive impact on Asian security and stability.

The U.S. has conducted more joint defense exercises with India than with any other country. Japan has twice joined the annual U.S.-India Malabar naval exercises, and may do so again next year. U.S. defense sales to India, meanwhile, are booming, with America emerging as the largest arms seller to India. But now Japan could bag its first defense contract with India: In response to the Indian Navy’s global request for information for nine amphibious search-and-rescue aircraft, Japan has offered to sell its ShinMaywa US-2, which can land on and take off from water.

More broadly, the nascent trilateral security cooperation may signal moves to form an entente among the three leading democracies of the Asia-Pacific, along the lines of the pre-World War I Franco-British-Russian “Triple Entente,” which was designed to meet the challenge posed by the rise of an increasingly assertive Germany. The present steps, however, are still tentative, and meaningful trilateral security collaboration can emerge only in response to important shifts in the U.S., Japanese and Indian strategic policies, including a readiness to build trilateral military interoperability.

Such an entente’s geopolitical utility, however, is likely to transcend its military value. A geopolitical entente, for example, can help strengthen maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region — the world’s leading trade and energy seaway — and contribute to building a stable Asian power equilibrium.

A constellation of powers linked by interlocking bilateral, trilateral, and possibly even quadrilateral strategic cooperation has thus become critical to help institute power stability in Asia and to ensure a peaceful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

Interview: Schwartz Book Award Winner Brahma Chellaney on Asia’s Water Future

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Chellaney

Asia Society, November 9, 2012, by Suzanne DiMaggio

Future site of the Xayaburi Dam in Laos. (International Rivers/Flickr)

Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and one of India’s leading strategic thinkers and analysts, was awarded Asia Society’s 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award for Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press), in which he describes water stress as Asia’s defining crisis of the 21st century. Chellaney will be honored and presented with a $20,000 prize at a special event to be held at Asia Society New York on January 23, 2013.

After being named the 2012 Award winner, Chellaney spoke to Asia Society Vice President of Global Policy Programs Suzanne DiMaggio about Asia’s water security challenges.

As compared to other regions in the world, what makes Asia particularly susceptible to conflict over water resources?

Water has emerged as a critical issue that will determine if Asia is headed toward greater cooperation or greater competition. Asia, with the lowest per capita freshwater availability among all continents, is at the center of global water challenges. In an ever-deeper search for water, millions of pump-operated wells threaten to suck Asia’s groundwater reserves dry, even as the continent confronts river depletion.

Few seem to know that the driest continent in the world is not Africa but Asia, where availability of freshwater is not even half the global average. Asia has less than one-tenth of the water of South America, Australia, and New Zealand, less than one-fourth of the water of North America, almost one-third of the water of Europe, and 25% less water than Africa per inhabitant. Yet it has the world’s fastest-growing demand for water for food and industrial production and municipal supply. To compound matters, Asia already has the world’s largest number of people without basic or adequate access to water, in addition to very high water-distribution losses, a lack of 24/7 supply in many cities, and drinking-water contamination due to unregulated industrial and agricultural practices.

Where in Asia is the potential for interstate water conflict greatest? What priority measures are needed to prevent “water wars?”

Water — the most essential of all natural resources — is vital to produce virtually all the goods in the marketplace, to generate electricity, to mine energy resources, and to refine oil and gas. Most states in Asia, other than China and archipelagos like Japan and Indonesia, have a high national dependency on waters from transnational rivers or aquifers. Often, securing a larger portion of the shared water resources has become a flashpoint in inter-country relationships.

Water indeed is a new arena in the Asian Great Game. Water shortages were relatively unknown in Asia — other than in arid regions — before the era of rapid economic growth began in earnest about three decades ago. Thanks to Asia’s dramatic economic rise, water resources have come under increasing pressure in almost all of the important Asian economies. As a result, the risk of water becoming a trigger for conflict or diplomatic strong-arming is high across large parts of the continent.

The security risks are underlined by the fact that only four of the 57 transnational river basins in continental Asia have treaties covering water sharing or other institutionalized cooperation. These four are the Mekong, where the non-participation of upper-riparian China has stunted the development of a genuine basin community; the Ganges, where there is a treaty between Bangladesh and India; the Indus, which boasts the world’s greatest water-sharing treaty in terms of the quantum of cross-border flows; and the Jordan, a four-nation basin whose resources are the subject of a peace-treaty-related arrangement between Israel and Jordan. The exact number of transnational groundwater basins in Asia is unknown because there has been no scientific assessment. But a number of the transnational river basins in Asia have emerged as potential flashpoints for serious water conflict — a specter reinforced by the strained inter-riparian relations in several basins and the broader absence of an Asian security architecture. In fact, Asia is the only continent other than Africa where regional integration has yet to take hold, largely because Asian political and cultural diversity has hindered institution building. Managing the water competition in Asia is thus becoming increasingly challenging.

You note that water disputes are also fueling conflict within countries. Where are the potential “hot spots” for instability? What solutions can governments in the region implement in order to reduce internal tensions?

Intra-country water disputes are rife across much of Asia — from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent to Central Asia and China. In fact, intrastate water conflicts tend to be more frequent and violent than interstate conflicts. Yet intrastate conflicts rarely get the kind of international attention that interstate discords do. This is partly because inter-country water disputes carry greater security and economic risks.

As Asia illustrates, water conflict within multi-ethnic nations often assumes ethnic or sectarian dimensions, thereby accentuating internal-security challenges. One frequent source of intrastate water conflict is a government or corporate decision to set up a water-intensive plant in an already water-stressed area, or a national supply-side project. When water availability is already low, new plants or projects tend to spur greater competition over scarce water resources. Yet the lopsided availability of water within some Asian nations (abundant in some areas but deficient in others) has given rise to megaprojects or grand diversion plans. The building of large dams and other diversion structures has run into grassroots opposition in a number of Asian nations, especially those that are democratic, due to displacement and submergence issues.

You make the case that viewing water scarcity issues through an environmental lens is insufficient and call for a more comprehensive approach framed within the context of peace and security. Do you see any evidence that policymakers in Asia or other parts of the globe are moving in this direction?

In Asia, water has gone from being just an environmental issue to becoming a strategic issue. Governments have been slower than public opinion in recognizing this shift. Yet the rise of nontraditional security issues has promoted the quiet “securitization” of water.

What is needed is a holistic, long-term approach so that national policies on water, energy, and food are harmonized to help achieve greater water efficiency. Whereas Asia’s population growth has slowed, its consumption growth has taken off due to rising prosperity. An average Asian is consuming more resources, including water, food, and energy. What were luxuries earlier have become necessities today, bringing the availability of water and other natural resources under strain. To protect Asia’s economic growth and development goals, private-public partnerships are necessary to create synergy in the water, energy, and food sectors, to improve water productivity, and to optimize water availability. A comprehensive framework is also required to help advance internal and external security, including through inter-riparian cooperation.

Another issue that must be addressed is the increasingly apparent environmental impact of the Asian economic-growth story, including on watersheds, riparian ecology, and water quality. Rising prosperity in Asia, by aggravating the environmental impacts of human activities, is deepening the water crisis.

State policies have unwittingly contributed to the environmental degradation. State subsidies, for example, have helped weaken price signals, encouraging farmers to over-pump groundwater. Provision of subsidized electricity and diesel fuel to farmers in several Asian countries has promoted the uncontrolled exploitation of groundwater.

Water abstraction in excess of the natural hydrological cycle’s renewable capacity is affecting ecosystems and degrading water quality in large parts of Asia. The overexploitation of groundwater, for example, results not only in the depletion of a vital resource, but also leads to the drying up of wetlands, lakes, and streams that depend on the same source. The human alteration of ecosystems, in fact, invites accelerated global warming.

In the interstate context, a dam-building race is now on. The countries likely to bear the brunt of such water diversion are those located farthest downstream on rivers like the Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Tigris-Euphrates: Bangladesh, whose very future is threatened by climate and environmental change; Vietnam, a rice bowl of Asia; and Iraq, still internally torn. China’s water appropriations from the Illy River threaten to turn Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash into another Aral Sea.

The book recommends a cooperative, rule-based approach to addressing water resource concerns in Asia. How realistic is it to expect regional cooperation on water when countries are so focused on pursuing their own national interests?

This is a good question. There is little incentive to conserve or protect supplies for users beyond national borders, unless, of course, specific water-sharing arrangements are in place. The focus on narrowly defined national interests is the main reason why most transnational basins lack any cooperative regime. Often, commercial contracts, joint research, flood-control projects, and non-binding memorandums of understanding masquerade as water agreements. Yet there are just a handful of water treaties in Asia that actually incorporate a sharing formula on transboundary basin resources or provide for institutionalized cooperation.

Inter-country water institutions facilitate constructive dialogue and structured cooperation and thereby help moderate the risk of disputes flaring into overt confrontation or armed conflict. The way to avert or manage water disputes in Asia is to build basin-level arrangements involving all important riparian neighbors. The arrangements must be centered on transparency, information sharing, equitable distribution of benefits, dispute settlement, pollution control, joint projects, and a mutual commitment to refrain from building projects that would materially diminish transboundary flows. If a dominant riparian refuses to join or the common rules are breached, an institutional arrangement can hardly be effective.

Admittedly, it is not easy to build water institutions because of the complex physical, geopolitical, and economic factors usually at play. Still, to contain the security risks, Asian states have little choice but to invest more in institutionalized cooperation. Only such collaboration can help underpin peace and security, protect continued economic growth, and promote environmental sustainability.

You argue that “the big issue in Asia, apart from climate change, is whether China will exploit its control of the Tibetan Plateau to increasingly siphon off for its own use the waters of the international rivers that are the lifeblood of the countries located in a contiguous arc from Vietnam to Afghanistan.” What is required of China for these policies to change?

Asia clearly is on the frontlines of climate change. In the nearer term, however, China looms large as a common factor in more than a dozen crucial river basins in Asia that lack any kind of institutionalized cooperation among all key co-riparian states. China does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any co-riparian country, and is currently involved in water disputes with multiple neighbors, including Kazakhstan, Russia, India, Nepal, Myanmar, and Vietnam.

Asia’s water map fundamentally changed after the 1949 Communist victory in China. Most of Asia’s important international rivers originate in territories that were forcibly absorbed by the People’s Republic of China. The Tibetan Plateau is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood for mainland China. Although China is now the source of cross-border water flows to the largest number of countries in the world, it rejects the very notion of water sharing or institutionalized cooperation with downriver countries.

With several nations jockeying to control transnational water resources, the political obstacles in Asia go beyond China. Still, given China’s unique riparian position and its assertion of absolute territorial sovereignty over the upstream waters, it will not be possible to transform the Asian competition into cooperation without China’s participation in water institutions. Persuading China to halt further unilateral appropriation of shared waters has emerged as a central challenge.

How is the United States affected by water resource concerns in Asia? What policies can the U.S. adopt or support to help address these concerns?

U.S. officials have spotlighted Asia’s water challenges, and the State Department announced in 2010 that it was upgrading water scarcity to “a central U.S. foreign policy concern.” A 2012 report reflecting the joint judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies pointed to the water-related security risks in several Asian basins.

Water discord impinges on U.S. interests, including by impeding collaboration between U.S. allies and friends in the region. For example, dam building is creating new inter-country tensions and challenges in Asia and complicating U.S. diplomacy.

The United States, although relatively well-endowed with water resources, is itself facing increasing water stress, especially in the southwest. But it has old, functioning water institutions with Canada and Mexico. The Canada-U.S. International Joint Commission (IJC) has successfully managed the world’s largest water resources governed by a bilateral mechanism. U.S. policy could seek to promote institutionalized water cooperation in Asia that draws on the ICJ’s productive features. At a time when new upstream Chinese dams have helped stir popular passions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, the United States has sought to diplomatically cash in on downstream concerns by launching the Lower Mekong Initiative, or LMI. Seeking to promote integrated cooperation among Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam in the areas of environment, education, health, and infrastructure, LMI emphasizes sustainable hydropower development and natural-resource management, including improving institutional capacity to address connected transnational issues.

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