About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Asia’s Growth: The China-India-Japan Strategic Triangle

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Chellaney

With its demography and economy, Asia will be able to help shape the future process of globalization. But it must first deal with its festering territorial disputes and acute competition over natural resources.

By Brahma Chellaney
Vanguardia Dossier, Number 41, October-December 2011, pages 78-82
(Original in Spanish)

Asia, home to more than half of the global population, is likely to help mold the future course of globalization. In fact, with the world’s fastest-growing economies, the fastest-rising military expenditures, the fiercest resource competition and the most-serious hot spots, Asia holds the key to the future global order.

Asia has come a long way since the time two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and India’s partition occurred. It has risen dramatically as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history.

How fast Asia has come up can be gauged from the 1968 book, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, by Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, who bemoaned the manner impoverishment, population pressures and resource constraints were weighing down Asia. The story of endemic poverty has become a tale of spreading prosperity.

Yet, Asia faces major challenges. It has to cope with entrenched territorial and maritime disputes, harmful historical legacies that weigh down all important interstate Asian relationships, sharpening competition over scarce resources, especially energy and water, growing military capabilities of important Asian actors, increasingly fervent nationalism, and the rise of religious extremism. Diverse transborder trends — from terrorism and insurgencies, to illicit refugee flows, and human trafficking — add to its challenges.

Asia, however, is becoming more interdependent through trade, investment, technology and tourism. The economic renaissance has been accompanied by the growing international recognition of Asia’s soft power, as symbolized by its arts, fashion and cuisine.

But while Asia is coming together economically, it is not coming together politically. If anything, with the gulf between the politics and economics widening, Asia is becoming more divided politically. In some respects, China’s rise has contributed to making Asia more divided.

To compound matters, there is neither any security architecture in Asia nor a structural framework for regional security. The regional consultation mechanisms remain weak. Differences persist over whether any security architecture or community should extend across Asia or just be confined to an ill-defined regional construct, East Asia. The United States, India, Japan, Vietnam and several other countries wish to treat the Asian continent as a single entity. China, on the other hand, has sought a separate “East Asian” order.

One important point is that while the bloody wars in the first half of the 20th century have made wars unthinkable today in Europe, the wars in Asia in the second half of the 20th century did not resolve matters and have only accentuated bitter rivalries. A number of interstate wars were fought in Asia since 1950, the year both the Korean War and the annexation of Tibet started. Those wars, far from settling or ending disputes, have only kept disputes lingering. China, significantly, was involved in a series of military interventions, even when it was poor and internally troubled.

A Pentagon report released last year has cited examples of how China carried out military preemption in 1950, 1962, 1969 and 1979 in the name of strategic defense. The report states: “The history of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which China’s leaders have claimed military preemption as a strategically defensive act. For example, China refers to its intervention in the Korean War (1950-1953) as the ‘War to Resist the United States and Aid Korea.’ Similarly, authoritative texts refer to border conflicts against India (1962), the Soviet Union (1969), and Vietnam (1979) as ‘Self-Defense Counter Attacks’.” The seizure of Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 by Chinese forces was another case of preemption in the name of defense. Against that background, China’s rapidly accumulating power raises important concerns today.

In fact, it is the emergence of China as a major power that is transforming the geopolitical landscape in Asia like no other development. Not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji Emperor (1867-1912) has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to impact the global order as China today.

But there is an important difference: When Japan rose as a world power, the other Asian civilizations, including the Chinese, Indian and Korean, were in decline. After all, by 19th century, much of Asia, other than Japan and Taiwan, had been colonized by Europeans. So, there was no Asian power that could rein in Japan.

Today, China is rising when other important Asian countries are also rising, including South Korea, Vietnam, India and Indonesia. Although China now has displaced Japan as the world’s second biggest economy, Japan will remain a strong power for the foreseeable future, given its more than $5 trillion economy, Asia’s largest naval fleet, high-tech industries, and a per-capita income still nine times greater than China’s.

When Japan emerged as a world power, its rise opened the path to imperial conquests. However, the expansionist impulses of a rising China are, to some extent, checkmated by the rise of other Asian powers. Militarily, China is in no position to grab the territories it covets, although its defense spending has grown almost twice as fast as its GDP.

Today, as China, India and Japan maneuver for strategic advantage, they are transforming relations between and among themselves in a way that portends closer strategic engagement between New Delhi and Tokyo, and sharper competition between China on one side and Japan and India on the other.

Yet, given the fact that India and China point across the mighty Himalayas in very different geopolitical directions and that Japan and China are separated by sea, they need not pose a threat to each other, especially if they were to abstain from hostile actions against one another and strive to avoid confrontation. The interests of the three powers are getting intertwined to the extent that the pursuit of unilateral solutions by any one of them will disturb the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their continued economic growth and security depend.

Ensuring that the Japan-China and China-India competition does not slide into strategic conflict will nonetheless remain a key challenge in Asia. That, in turn, demands that a strong China, a strong Japan and a strong India find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper.

Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time. In fact, there is no previous history of the three powers having been involved in a bilateral or trilateral contest for preeminence across Asia.

China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer. By picking territorial fights with its neighbors and pursuing a muscular foreign policy, China is compelling several other Asian states to work closer together with the United States and with each other.

If the Chinese leadership were forward-looking, it would utilize 2011 — the year of the rabbit — to make up for the diplomatic imprudence of 2010 that left an isolated China counting only the problems states of North Korea, Pakistan and Burma as its allies. The onus now is clearly on a rising China to show that it wants to be a responsible power that seeks rules-based cooperation and acts with restraint and caution.

But the People’s Liberation Army’s growing political clout and the sharpening power struggle in the run-up to the major leadership changes scheduled to take place from next year raise concerns that the world will likely see more of what made 2010 a particularly tiger-like year when China frontally discarded Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, tao guang yang hui (conceal ambitions and hide claws).

A tiger’s claws are retractable, but China has taken pride more in baring them than in drawing them in. While manipulating patriotic sentiment, it has pursued hardline policies even at home, tightening its controls on the Internet and media and stepping up repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. China’s domestic policy has a bearing on its external policy, because how it treats its own citizens is an internal dynamic likely to be reflected in the way it deals with its neighbors and other states.

On a host of issues — from diplomacy and territorial claims to trade and currency — China spent 2010 staking out a more-muscular role that only helped heighten international concerns about its rapidly accumulating power and unbridled ambition. But nothing fanned international unease and alarm more than Beijing’s disproportionate response to the Japanese detention of a fishing-trawler captain in September 2010. While Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s standing at home took a beating for his meek capitulation to Chinese coercive pressure, the real loser was China, in spite of having speedily secured the captain’s release.

Japan’s passivity in the face of belligerence helped magnify Beijing’s hysterical and menacing reaction. In the process, China not only undercut its international interests by presenting itself as a bully, but it also precipitately exposed the cards it is likely to bring into play when faced with a diplomatic or military crisis next — from employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of a vital resource, rare-earth minerals.

Its resort to economic warfare, even in the face of an insignificant provocation, has given other major states advance notice to find ways to offset its leverage, including by avoiding any commercial dependency and reducing their reliance on imports of Chinese rare earths. A more tangible fallout has been that China is already coming under greater international pressure to play by the rules on a host of issues where it has secured unfair advantage — from keeping its currency substantially undervalued to maintaining state subsidies to help its firms win major overseas contracts.

No less revealing has been the gap between China’s words and the reality. For example, China persisted with its unannounced rare-earth embargo against Japan for weeks while continuing to blithely claim the opposite in public — that no export restriction had been imposed. Like its denials last year on two other subjects — the deployment of Chinese troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir to build strategic projects and its use of Chinese convicts as laborers on projects in some countries too poor and weak to protest — China has demonstrated a troubling propensity to obscure the truth.

In fact, the more overtly China has embraced capitalism, the more indigenized it has become ideologically. By progressively turning their back on Marxist dogma —imported from the West — the country’s ruling elites have put Chinese nationalism at the center of their political legitimacy. The new crop of leaders, including President Hu Jintao’s putative successor, Xi Jinping, will bear a distinct nationalistic imprint. Xi is known to be a more assertive personality than Hu.

That suggests that China’s increasingly fractious relations with its neighbors, the U.S. and Europe will likely face new challenges.

More broadly, a fast-rising Asia has become the fulcrum of global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now help shape the international economy and security environment.

Yet major power shifts within Asia are challenging the continent’s own peace and stability. With the specter of strategic disequilibrium looming large in Asia, investments to help build geopolitical stability have become imperative.

China’s lengthening shadow has prompted a number of Asian countries to start building security cooperation on a bilateral basis, thereby laying the groundwork for a potential web of interlocking strategic partnerships. Such cooperation reflects a quiet desire to influence China’s behavior positively, so that it does not cross well-defined red lines or go against the self-touted gospel of its “peaceful rise.”

While the U.S. is thus likely to remain a key factor in influencing Asia’s strategic landscape, the role of the major Asian powers will be no less important. If China, India, and Japan constitute a scalene strategic triangle in Asia, with China representing the longest side, side A, the sum of side B (India) and side C (Japan) will always be greater than A. Not surprisingly, the fastest-growing relationship in Asia today is probably between Japan and India.

If this triangle turned into a quadrangle with the addition of Russia, China would be boxed in from virtually all sides. Japan plus Russia plus India, with the U.S. lending a helpful hand, would not only extinguish any prospect of a Sino-centric Asia, but would create the ultimate strategic nightmare for China. However, a Russian-Japanese rapprochement remains far off.

Against this geopolitical background, Asia’s power dynamics are likely to remain fluid, with new or shifting alliances and strengthened military capabilities continuing to challenge the prevailing regional order.

Brahma Chellaney is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan” (HarperCollins, 2010) and “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield” (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Copyright: Vanguard Dossier

Building resistance to China’s dams

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Chellaney

Export of hydropower projects triggering local backlash

Illustration: China’s dams by
John Camejo for The Washington Times

By Brahma Chellaney — The Washington Times, Thursday, October 7, 2011

China’s frenzied dam-building at home and abroad is emerging as a flash point in interstate and intrastate relations in Asia. The latest case is Burma’s decision to suspend work on a controversial Chinese-funded dam that has become a symbol of China’s resource greed and a trigger for renewed ethnic insurgency in northern Myanmar areas.

The Myitsone Dam, where work is being halted, is one of seven dam projects in northern Burma sponsored by China to generate electricity for export to its own market, even as much of Burma suffers from long power outages every day. China also has been erecting dams on its side of the border on the rivers flowing to Burma and other countries, ranging from Russia to India.

The projects have drawn attention to their mounting environmental and human costs. In Burma, the submergence of vast tracts of land and the forced displacement of thousands of residents have instigated new intrastate disputes, leading to renewed fighting and ending a 17-year cease-fire between the Kachin Independence Army and government forces.

The giant, 3,200-megawatt Myitsone Dam – at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River, the cradle of the Myanmar civilization – was conceived as a Chinese project for China. Burma’s suspension of work on the largest of the dam projects as a means of stemming a groundswell of public anger represents a blow to China and a victory for local communities, which had battled to protect their livelihoods and environment.

Burma is just one of several countries where hydropower projects financed and built by China have triggered local backlashes. China – the world’s biggest dam builder at home and abroad – is erecting giant dams in a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America besides damming transnational rivers on its territory and thereby spurring growing concerns in downstream countries.

China contends that its role as the global leader in exporting dams has created a “win-win” situation for the host countries and its companies. Yet evidence from a number of project sites shows that with Chinese dam builders yet to embrace environmental sustainability standards, those dams are imposing serious social and environmental costs.

Indeed, China is demonstrating that it has no qualms about building dams in disputed territories, such as Pakistani-held Kashmir, in areas torn by ethnic separatism such as northern Burma, or in other human rights-abusing countries. In Pakistani-held Kashmir, it even has deployed thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops at dams and other strategic projects. Yet it loudly protests when foreign firms seek to explore for oil in areas offered by Vietnam and other nations in the disputed South China Sea.

China’s declaratory policy of “noninterference in domestic affairs” actually serves as a virtual license to pursue dam projects that flood ethnic-minority lands and forcibly uproot people in other countries, just as it is doing at home by shifting its dam-building focus from internal rivers to international rivers that originate in the Tibetan Plateau, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria.

Today, as many as 37 Chinese financial and corporate entities are involved in more than 100 dam projects in the developing world. Some of these entities are very large and have multiple subsidiaries. For instance, Sinohydro Corp., which is under the supervision of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council and is made up of 10 holding companies and 18 wholly owned subsidiaries, boasts 59 overseas branches.

The hyperactive dam-building at home and abroad has spawned two developments: First, Chinese companies dominate the global hydropower-equipment export market. Sinohydro alone claims to control half the market.

Second, the growing clout of the state-run hydropower industry in policymaking has led China to seek dam projects aggressively overseas by offering attractive low-interest loans and to increasingly tap the resources of rivers flowing to other countries from Chinese-ruled territories. It was HydroChina, the country’s largest dam builder, that last year revealed government-approved sites for new megadams, including one larger than the Three Gorges Dam, to be built virtually on the disputed border with India.

In a number of nations, ranging from Burma and Congo to Laos and Zambia, Chinese dam construction also is aimed at creating the energy infrastructure for extracting mineral ores and other resources to feed voracious demand in China.

Burma is not the only place where Chinese dam-building has triggered violence. From Sudan to the restive, Shiite-dominated areas of Pakistani-held Kashmir, such projects have sparked violent clashes and even police shootings. In Burma, however, the violence spread from the Myitsone Dam – where several small bombs went off in April 2010 – to other Chinese projects, including the Dapein and Shweli dams.

For China, dam projects in the developing countries showcase its growing economic ties with them. In reality, however, these projects often serve to inflame growing anti-Chinese sentiment in those countries.

China has contributed to such sentiment by refusing to abide by international standards or its own regulations, including the State Council’s 2006 directives that Chinese overseas businesses, among other things, “pay attention to environmental protection” and “support local community and people’s livelihood cause.”

The perception that China is engaged in exploitative practices abroad has been reinforced by the fact that it brings much of the work force from home to build dams and other projects. This practice runs counter to the Chinese Commerce Ministry’s 2006 regulations – promulgated after anti-Chinese riots in Zambia – that called for “localization,” including hiring local workers and respecting local customs.

China can stop its dam builders from further undermining its image by enforcing its regulations and embracing internationally accepted standards.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of the newly released “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Dams muddy China’s image

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Chellaney

The global leader in dam building faces a backlash.

Brahma Chellaney
The Japan Times, October 6, 2011

China’s frenzied dam building at home and abroad is emerging as a flashpoint in interstate and intrastate relations in Asia. Burma’s decision to suspend work on a controversial Chinese-funded dam marks a tactical retreat on a project that has symbolized China’s resource greed and is a trigger for renewed ethnic insurgency in areas of northern Burma (aka Myanmar).

The projects have drawn attention to their mounting environmental and human costs. In Burma, the submergence of vast tracts of land and the forced displacement of thousands of residents have instigated new intrastate disputes, leading to renewed fighting and ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and government forces.

The giant, 3,200-megawatt Myitsone Dam — at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River, the cradle of the Burmese civilization — was conceived as China’s project for China. The suspension of work on the largest dam project, so as to help stem a groundswell of public anger, represents a blow for China and a victory for local communities who had battled to protect their livelihoods and environment.

Burma is just one of several countries where hydropower projects financed and built by China have triggered local backlashes. China — the world’s biggest dam builder at home and abroad — is currently erecting giant dams in a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, besides damming transnational rivers on its territory and thereby spurring growing concerns in downstream countries.

China contends that its role as the global leader in exporting dams has created a “win-win” situation for the host countries and its companies.

Yet, evidence from a number of project sites shows that, with Chinese dam builders still to embrace environmental-sustainability standards, those dams are imposing serious social and environmental costs. Indeed, China is demonstrating that it has no qualms about building dams in disputed territories, such as Pakistan-held Kashmir, or in areas torn by ethnic separatism, like northern Burma, or in other human rights-abusing countries.

In Pakistan-held Kashmir, it has even deployed thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops at dam and other strategic projects. Yet it loudly protests when foreign firms seek to explore for oil in blocks offered by Vietnam and others in the disputed South China Sea.

Today, as many as 37 Chinese financial and corporate entities are involved in more than 100 dam projects in the developing world. Some of these entities are very large and have multiple subsidiaries. For instance, Sinohydro Corporation — which is under the supervision of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council, and is made up of 10 holdings companies and 18 wholly owned subsidiaries — boasts 59 overseas branches.

The frenzied dam-building at home and abroad has spawned two developments:

(1) Chinese companies now dominate the global hydropower-equipment export market. Sinohydro alone claims to control half the market.

(2) The growing clout of the state-run hydropower industry in policymaking has led China to aggressively seek dam projects overseas by offering attractive, low-interest loans and to increasingly tap the resources of rivers flowing to other countries from Chinese-ruled territories.

It was HydroChina, the country’s largest dam builder, that last year revealed government-approved sites for new mega-dams in China, including one larger than the Three Gorges Dam to be built virtually on the disputed border with India.

In a number of nations, ranging from Burma and Congo to Laos and Zambia, Chinese dam construction also is aimed at creating the energy infrastructure to extract mineral ores and other resources to feed the voracious demand in China.

Burma is not the only case where Chinese dam building has triggered violence. From Sudan to the restive, Shiite-dominated areas of Pakistan-held Kashmir, such projects have sparked violent clashes and even police shootings. In Burma, however, the violence spread from the Myitsone Dam — where several small bombs went off in April 2010 — to other Chinese projects, including the Dapein and Shweli dams.

For China, its dam projects in the developing countries showcase its growing economic ties with them. In reality, however, these projects often serve to inflame growing anti-Chinese sentiment in those countries.

The perception that China is engaged in exploitative practices abroad has been reinforced by the fact that it brings much of the workforce from home to build dams and other projects. This practice runs counter to the Chinese Commerce Ministry’s 2006 regulations — promulgated after anti-Chinese riots in Zambia — that called for “localization,” including hiring local workers and respecting local customs.

China can stop its dam builders from further undermining its image by enforcing its regulations and embracing internationally accepted standards.

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

A rising hydro-hegemon raises worries downstream

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Chellaney

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, September 21, 2011

Just as China has aroused international alarm by wielding its virtual rare-earths monopoly as a trade instrument and by thwarting efforts to resolve territorial disputes with its neighbors, it is raising deep concern over the manner it is seeking to fashion water into a political weapon against its co-riparian states.

China, the geographical hub of Asia, is the source of transboundary river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, and from Kazakhstan to the Indochina Peninsula. This unique status is rooted in its forcible absorption of sprawling ethnic-minority homelands, which make up 60 percent of its landmass and are the origin of all the important international rivers flowing out of Chinese-held territory.

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

No country in history has been a greater dam builder than China, which boasts not only the world’s biggest dam (Three Gorges) but also a greater number of dams than the rest of the world combined. China thus is the most “dammed” country in the world, boasting slightly more than half of the nearly 50,000 large dams in the world.

Yet far from slowing its dam-building spree, China has stepped up its re-engineering of river flows by portentously shifting its focus from internal rivers to international rivers. It also has graduated from building large dams to building mega-dams.

Its newest dams on the Mekong are the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan — taller than Paris’s Eiffel Tower and producing more electricity than the installed hydropower-generating capacity of all the lower Mekong countries combined — and the under-construction 5,850-megawatt Nuozhadu, which will be even bigger in storage volume but not in height.

Last summer, China’s state-run hydropower industry published a map of major new dams approved for construction, including one on the Brahmaputra at Metog (or “Motuo” in Chinese) that is to be twice the size of the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges. The Metog site is almost on the disputed border with India.

In the next decade, according to international projections, the number of dams in the developed countries is likely to remain about the same, while much of the dam building in the developing world, in terms of aggregate storage-capacity buildup, will be concentrated in just one country — China. The consequences of such frenetic construction are already visible.

First, China is now involved in water disputes with almost all its riparian neighbors, ranging from big countries such as Russia and India to weak client-states like North Korea and Myanmar.

Second, its new focus on water megaprojects in the traditional homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered fresh tensions over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by revolts or protests against Chinese rule.

Third, the projects threaten to replicate in international rivers the serious degradation haunting China’s internal rivers.

Yet, as if to declare itself the world’s unrivaled hydro-hegemon, China is also the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlash.

While units of the People’s Liberation Army are now engaged in dam and other strategic projects in the restive, Shiite region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-held Kashmir, China’s dam building inside Burma has contributed to renewed bloody fighting recently, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and the government.

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

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

It is thus no accident that there are water treaties among co-riparian states in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and any of its neighbors. That the country with a throttlehold over the headwaters of major Asian rivers is also a rising superpower, with a muscular confidence increasingly on open display, only compounds the regional security challenges.

In this light, China poses the single biggest obstacle to the building of institutionalized cooperation in Asia to harness internationally shared rivers for mutual and sustainable benefit.

Water indeed has emerged as a source of increasing intercountry competition and discord in Asia, the most-populous and fastest-developing continent whose per capita freshwater availability is less than half the global average.

The growing water stress threatens Asia’s continued rapid economic growth. And for investors, it carries risks that potentially are as damaging as nonperforming loans, real estate bubbles, infrastructure overbuilding, and political corruption.

Because of China’s centrality in the Asian water map, international pressure must be exerted on Beijing to respect the rights of subjacent states and halt further unilateralist appropriation of shared waters.

It should accept institutionalized basin cooperation, which demands a coextensive restraint among all parties so that no country utilizes shared waters in a way to injuriously affect a co-riparian.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of the just-released “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).

DC Events with Brahma Chellaney

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Chellaney

From Georgetown University Press

This past week Brahma Chellaney, author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground, visited Washington, DC, on a book tour. He stopped by the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the East-West Center, John Hopkins University’s SAIS, American University’s SIS, and the Transatlantic Academy. In sum, Dr. Chellaney spoke to 300 audience members, and numerous copies of his book were carried away by their delighted new owners. Those who did not get the chance to hear him speak may watch the video from the Wilson Center here and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here.

Book-related address at the Hong Kong University here.

Talk at the East-West Center here.

The New Delhi release of the book by the Vice President of India here.

Interview conducted by the Georgetown University Press here.

Writeup on the presentation at the Transatlantic Academy here.

Water is the new weapon in Beijing’s armoury

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Chellaney

By Brahma Chellaney
Financial Times, August 31, 2011

China has aroused international alarm by using its virtual monopoly of rare earths as a trade instrument and by stalling multilateral efforts to resolve disputes in the South China Sea. Among its neighbours, there is deep concern at the way it is seeking to make water a political weapon.

At the hub of Asia, China is the source of cross-border river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, Kazakhstan to the Indochina peninsula. This results from its absorption of the ethnic minority homelands that make up 60 per cent of its land mass and are the origin of all the important international rivers flowing out of Chinese territory.

Getting this pre-eminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other co-operative institutional mechanisms has proved unsuccessful so far in any basin. Instead, the construction of upstream dams on international rivers such as the Mekong, Brahmaputra or Amur shows China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns of downstream nations.

China already boasts both the world’s biggest dam (Three Gorges) and a greater total number of dams than the rest of the world combined. It has shifted its focus from internal to international rivers, and graduated from building large dams to building mega-dams. Among its newest dams on the Mekong is the 4,200 megawatt Xiaowan — taller than Paris’s Eiffel Tower. New dams approved for construction include one on the Brahmaputra at Metog (or Motuo in Chinese) that is to be twice the size of the 18,300MW Three Gorges — and sited almost on the disputed border with India.

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already clear. First, China is in water disputes with almost all its neighbours, from Russia and India to weak client-states such as North Korea and Burma. Second, its new focus on water mega-projects in the homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered tensions over displacement and submergence at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been wracked by protests against Chinese rule. Third, the projects threaten to replicate in international rivers the degradation haunting China’s internal rivers.

Yet, as if to declare itself the world’s unrivalled hydro-hegemon, China is also the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistan-held Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China is building dams in disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlash. Dam building in Burma has contributed to renewed fighting, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and government.

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

Worse, although there are water treaties among states in south and south-east Asia, Beijing rejects the concept of a water-sharing arrangement. It is one of only three countries that voted against the 1997 UN convention laying down rules on the shared resources of international watercourses.

Yet water is fast becoming a cause of competition and discord between countries in Asia, where per capita freshwater availability is less than half the global average. The growing water stress threatens Asia’s rapid economic growth and carries risks for investors potentially as damaging as non-performing loans, real estate bubbles and political corruption.

By having its hand on Asia’s water tap, China is therefore acquiring tremendous leverage over its neighbours’ behaviour.

That the country controlling the headwaters of major Asian rivers is also a rising superpower, with a muscular confidence increasingly on open display, only compounds the need for international pressure on Beijing to halt its appropriation of shared waters and accept some form of institutionalised co-operation.

The writer is a professor at the independent Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

The Ominous Rise of a Thirsty Dragon

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Chellaney

A Chinese dam under construction.

Brahma Chellaney
Times of India, August 7, 2011

China, the geographical hub of Asia, is the source of transboundary-river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, and from Kazakhstan to the Indochina Peninsula. This unique status is because of its forcible absorption of sprawling ethnic-minority homelands, which make up 60% of its landmass and are the origin of all the important international rivers flowing out of Chinese-held territory.

Getting this pre-eminent riparian power to accept water-sharing arrangements or other cooperative institutional mechanisms has proven unsuccessful in any basin. In fact, as epitomized by its planned or actual construction of a separate cascade of upstream dams on several major international rivers, including the Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Arun, Irtysh-Illy, and Amur, China is increasingly headed in the opposite direction — toward unilateralist actions impervious to the concerns of downstream nations.

No country in history has been a greater dam builder than China, which boasts not only the world’s biggest dam (Three Gorges) but also more total number of dams than the rest of the world combined. Yet far from slowing its dam-building spree, China has stepped up its re-engineering of river flows in two ways: by portentously shifting its focus from internal rivers to international rivers, and by concentrating on mega-dams.

For example, its newest dams on the Mekong are the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan — taller than Paris’s Eiffel Tower and producing more electricity than the installed hydropower-generating capacity of all of the lower Mekong countries together — and the 5,850-megawatt Nuozhadu, which when complete will be even bigger in storage volume but not in height.

Last summer, China’s state-run hydropower industry published a map of major new dams approved for construction, including one on the Brahmaputra at Metog (or “Motuo” in Chinese) that will be larger than even the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges. India’s largest dam — the 2,000-megawatt Tehri — pales in comparison with China’s dams.

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

The consequences of such frenetic construction are already visible. First, China is now involved in water disputes with almost all its riparian neighbours, ranging from big Russia and India to weak clients like North Korea and Myanmar.

Second, its new focus on water mega-projects in the traditional homelands of ethnic minorities has triggered fresh tensions along ethnic fault lines over displacement and submergence issues at a time when the Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have all been racked by revolts or protests against Chinese rule. And third, Chinese projects threaten to extend the serious degradation of internal rivers to international rivers.

Yet, as if to underpin its rise as the world’s unrivalled hydro-hegemon, China is also the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Myanmar’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, even in the face of local backlash. While PLA units are engaged in dam and other strategic projects in restive Gilgit-Baltistan, China’s dam building inside Myanmar has contributed to renewed bloody fighting recently, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and the government.

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

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

It is thus no accident that there are treaties among co-riparian states in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and any of its neighbours. That the country with a throttlehold over the headwaters of major Asian rivers is also a rising superpower, whose muscular confidence is increasingly on open display, only compounds the regional security challenges.

In this light, China poses the single biggest obstacle to the building of institutionalized cooperation in Asia to harness internationally shared rivers for mutual and sustainable benefit.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Cracks on the Chinese Wall

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Chellaney

Jiayuguan, the first pass at the western end of the Great Wall of China.

China’s Ethnic Tremors

Brahma Chellaney
Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate, August 8, 2011

In the face of spreading civil unrest among China’s Uighur population, the Chinese government’s love-fest with its all-weather ally, Pakistan, may be starting to sour. Indeed, the authorities in China’s Xinjiang province are charging that a prominent Uighur separatist that they captured had received terrorist training in Pakistan. No less embarrassing for Pakistan, the charge came while its intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was holding talks in Beijing on securing greater Chinese support to blunt the growing U.S. pressure on Islamabad.

No country has done more than China to prop up the Pakistani state – support that has included transfers of missiles and nuclear-weapons technology. By playing the Kashmir card against India in various ways – even deploying People’s Liberation Army units in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir near the line of control with India – China has clearly signaled in recent years its desire to use its alliance with Pakistan to squeeze India. Given the level of China’s strategic investments in Pakistan, the bilateral relationship is unlikely to change.

Yet the charge of supporting Uighur terrorism, even if leveled only by local Chinese officials, reflects China’s irritation with Pakistan’s inability to contain the cross-border movement of some Uighur separatists. China, however, confronts not a proxy war or even foreign involvement in Xinjiang, but rather a rising backlash from its own Uighur citizens against their Han colonizers.

And the Uighurs are hardly alone. Even in Tibet – where resistance to Chinese rule remains largely nonviolent and there is no alleged terrorist group to blame – China is staring at the bitter harvest of policies that have sought to deny native minorities their identity, culture, language, and the benefits of their own natural resources.

To help Sinicize China’s minority lands, the government has used a strategy made up of five key components: cartographic alteration of ethnic-homeland boundaries; demographic flooding of non-Han cultures; historical revisionism to justify Chinese control; enforcement of cultural homogeneity to blur local identities; and political repression. The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the locals in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and the Turkic-speaking Uighurs as holdouts.

But the renewed Tibetan revolt since 2008, the Uighur rebellion since 2009, and the recrudescence this year of large-scale protests by ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia have shown that the strategy of ethnic and economic colonization is beginning to backfire. While a monk-led campaign on the Tibetan Plateau continues to challenge the Chinese crackdown, several dozen people have been killed in Xinjiang since last month as Uighur-Han clashes have spread from the desert town of Hotan to the Silk Road city of Kashgar.

Xinjiang, bordering Afghanistan, Russia, the countries of Central Asia, and the Kashmir areas occupied by Pakistan and China, was annexed by the newly established People’s Republic of China in 1949, a year before it began its invasion of Tibet. That put an end to the East Turkestan Republic in Xinjiang, which Muslim groups, aided by Josef Stalin, established in 1944, while World War II was raging. In the six decades since then, millions of Han Chinese have moved to Xinjiang, sharpening interethnic competition for land and water, not to mention control of the region’s abundant hydrocarbon resources.

The Great Wall was built by the Ming Dynasty (1369-1644) mainly to demarcate the Han Empire’s political frontiers. Today’s China, however, is three times as large as it was under the Ming – the last Han dynasty – with its borders having extended far west and southwest of the Great Wall.

Thus, Han territorial control is now at its zenith: Xinjiang’s cultural capital, Kashgar, is closer to Baghdad than to Beijing, and Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, is almost twice as far from the Chinese capital as it is from New Delhi. Indeed, forced assimilation in Tibet and Xinjiang began only after China created a land corridor between these two regions by gobbling up India’s 38,000-square-kilometer Aksai Chin, part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, following an invasion of India in 1962.

Yet China’s policies are now exacting rising internal-security costs, as the resurgence of separatism in several regions shows. Given that the restive homelands of ethnic minorities make up 60% of the PRC’s territory – together, Tibet and Xinjiang constitute nearly half of China’s landmass – internal-security problems loom much larger than they do next door, in India.

While India celebrates its diversity, China seeks to impose cultural and linguistic uniformity, although it officially comprises 56 nationalities. And, in enforcing monoculturalism, China is also attempting to cover up the cleavages within the Han majority, lest the historical north-south fault lines resurface. In fact, China is the world’s only major country whose official internal-security budget is higher than its official national-defense budget.

This fixation on what the government calls weiwen, or stability maintenance, has spawned a well-oiled security apparatus that extends from state-of-the-art surveillance and extra-legal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood “safety patrols” on the lookout for troublemakers. Although the challenge of weiwen extends to the Han heartland, where rural protests are increasing at the same rate as China’s GDP, the traditional ethnic-minority lands have become the country’s Achilles heel.

Uighurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians in China face a stark choice: fight for their rights or be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. With or without external assistance, the readiness of an increasing number of them to stand up to China’s decades-old policy of ethnic and economic colonization does not augur well for weiwen.

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

India’s biggest problem is its old and tired leadership

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Chellaney

Financial Times, July 20, 2011

Corruption in India is not only pervasive but threatens to reach predatory levels. This has spurred pessimism in some quarters about India’s future. Such gloom, however, misses the larger picture.

No nation’s potential can be measured by one yardstick alone. Corruption poses a serious challenge to India, but to contend that it will block India’s great-power ambitions is to forget history. The United States, for example, rose as a world power in spite its robber barons. And now China is demonstrating that rampant corruption is no barrier to a country’s dramatic rise on the world stage.

The pessimists also miss out one key development in India – there is already a public backlash against corruption that has galvanised judicial activism, sent several important politicians to jail, put the government on the defensive, and created new crusading icons. Contrast this with the Chinese system, which reeks of unbridled and unchecked corruption, with the public helpless.

In world history, periods of rapid economic growth have often been accompanied by rising wealth and income inequality and widespread corruption. It took the US more than half a century to bring the era of robber barons to an end, although big-bucks corruption still remains a challenge. In India, the backlash against crooked politicians and entrepreneurs – and the public campaign for cleaner politics and business practices – has started in earnest barely two decades after the advent of rapid growth.

India’s economic and military rise is threatened neither by corruption nor by its ethnic diversity. India has demonstrated that unlike the traditionally homogenous societies of East Asia, a nation can manage diversity – and thrive on it. As one of the oldest and most-assimilative civilisations in the world, India can truly play the role of a bridge between the East and the West.

Rather, India’s rise is threatened by a political factor – a leadership deficit, which is compounded by a splintered polity. India is still governed by a pre-independence leadership – an anomaly even in Asia, where age is supposed to be wisdom. India today boasts the world’s oldest head of government and oldest foreign minister. Old, tired, risk-averse leadership can hardly propel any country to greatness. Worse, India’s coalition federal governments, which have become a norm, tend to function by the rule of parochial politics – in fact, by the lowest common denominator.

Yet, democracy remains India’s greatest asset. It not only helps instil fear among the corrupt, but also makes India’s future less uncertain than China’s.

The writer is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and the author of ‘Asian Juggernaut’ and ‘Water: Asia’s New Battlefield’.

Why Mumbai Was Attacked

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Chellaney

India is an easy terrorist target

Brahma Chellaney
The Daily Beast, July 14, 2011

It is not a mere coincidence that Mumbai, India’s commercial hub, has repeatedly been struck by terrorists since 1993. Mumbai has become the favored target because the terrorist aim is to undermine India’s booming economy and its status as a rising power by rattling foreign investors and driving away tourists.

India’s economic rise has intersected with Pakistan’s descent into chaos. Each terror strike on Mumbai raises fresh international concerns about security in India and prompts a sizable number of foreign tourists to abandon or delay travel plans.

Undercutting India’s strength by repeatedly targeting its economic capital is a geopolitical objective that only a state sponsor of terrorism can seek to pursue, not street gangs, underworld figures, or local fundamentalists. And that sponsor — which made the mistake of leaving its marks on the three-day Mumbai terrorist siege in November 2008 that killed 166 people — is the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s notorious military intelligence agency.

The latest explosions that ripped through Mumbai at the height of the evening rush may have had an additional objective behind them — to blunt international pressure to bring the Pakistan-based coordinators of the 2008 siege to justice. With India now saddled with another terrorist attack to investigate, the international profile of the 2008 siege is bound to decline.

At a time when the U.S. has ratcheted up pressure on the Pakistani army and ISI, including by putting the release of further military aid on hold, those behind the latest bombings may have had yet another motive — to shift the focus from the deteriorating U.S.-Pakistan relations to the India-Pakistan context so as to raise concerns in Washington about potential subcontinental hostilities and to persuade the U.S. not to lean too heavily on the Pakistani military establishment.

But unlike the 2008 siege by heavily armed commandos from Pakistan on a suicide mission, the bombs in the latest attack were planted and detonated stealthily. This marks a return to an earlier pattern witnessed, for example, in the 1993 and 2006 Mumbai serial blasts. This pattern not only obviates the need for a high level of training and logistical sophistication, but also precludes telltale signs of external involvement by permitting a terrorist undertaking to be outsourced to proxy figures in the criminal or fundamentalist world in Mumbai.

The latest bombings actually raise wrenching questions about India’s Pakistan and counterterrorism policies. The unparalleled 2008 siege was supposed to be India’s 9/11 and serve as a tipping point in India’s forbearance with terrorist violence. This week’s explosions are a reminder that little has changed.

For New Delhi, the chickens have come home to roost. Its decision early this year to resume political dialogue with Pakistan at all levels was made without having secured any anti-terror commitment. Even though the Pakistan-based masterminds of the 2008 siege remain untouched and Pakistani terrorist-training camps near the border with India, according to Indian officials, continue to operate with impunity, New Delhi returned to square one by resuming comprehensive dialogue.

After the 2008 attack, an array of options was available to India, especially in the diplomatic, economic and political spheres. Between the two extremes — empty talk and war — New Delhi could have invoked measures commonly available to nations to step up pressure, such as recalling its ambassador from Islamabad and invoking trade sanctions. Yet a feckless Indian leadership did not take the smallest of small steps even as a symbolic expression of India’s outrage over Pakistan’s role as the staging ground for that attack.

New Delhi actually responded to the 2008 siege by fashioning a new and unique tool — dossier bombing. The weighty dossiers — delivered at regular intervals and containing documented evidence of the involvement of the ISI and its front organization, the Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group, in that attack — only persuaded Pakistan to stay its ground, with India eventually climbing down.

Today, the now-familiar Indian cycle of empty rhetoric is repeating itself — ritual condemnation of the latest bombings and a worn-out promise to defeat terror. Yet the bombers have driven home a clear message: India, despite its rising international stature, is powerless to stop terror attacks. The bombings also have the potential to further undercut the flagging credibility of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Singh is the latest in a succession of weak, aging prime ministers whose absence of decisive leadership over the past 22 years has resulted in India’s failure to formulate a prudent counterterror strategy backed by firm resolve.

The fundamental mistake Singh’s government has made is to separate its Pakistan policy and counterterrorism strategy and put them on separate tracks. The two are simply not separable.

Increasingly, terrorism has been treated as a law-and-order issue requiring more policing and better intelligence. To regard terrorism as a law-and-order problem is to do what the terrorists want — to sap national strength. No amount of security can stop terrorism if India is reluctant to go after terrorist cells and networks and those that harbor extremists.

The ugly truth is that transnational terrorists see India as an easy target because it imposes no costs on them and their patrons.

What India needs is a concerted, sustained campaign against the forces of terror. But what a succession of leaders has offered are only words to comfort the nation. If India does not break out of this straitjacket, it will only be a matter of time before terrorists strike yet again.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Stagecraft and Statecraft

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