Brahma Chellaney

     

Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

International discussion about China’s rise has focused on its increasing trade muscle, growing maritime ambitions, and expanding capacity to project military power. One critical issue, however, usually escapes attention: China’s rise as a hydro-hegemon with no modern historical parallel.

No other country has ever managed to assume such unchallenged riparian preeminence on a continent by controlling the headwaters of multiple international rivers and manipulating their cross-border flows. China, the world’s biggest dam builder – with slightly more than half of the approximately 50,000 large dams on the planet — is rapidly accumulating leverage against its neighbors by undertaking massive hydro-engineering projects on transnational rivers.

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 annexed to the People’s Republic of China. The Tibetan Plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood for mainland China and South and Southeast Asia. Other such Chinese territories contain the headwaters of rivers like the Irtysh, Illy, and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.

This makes China the source of cross-border water flows to the largest number of countries in the world. Yet China rejects the very notion of water sharing or institutionalized cooperation with downriver countries.

Whereas riparian neighbors in Southeast and South Asia are bound by water pacts that they have negotiated between themselves, China does not have a single water treaty with any co-riparian country. Indeed, having its cake and eating it, China is a dialogue partner but not a member of the Mekong River Commission, underscoring its intent not to abide by the Mekong basin community’s rules or take on any legal obligations.

Worse, while promoting multilateralism on the world stage, China has given the cold shoulder to multilateral cooperation among river-basin states. The lower-Mekong countries, for example, view China’s strategy as an attempt to “divide and conquer.”

Although China publicly favors bilateral initiatives over multilateral institutions in addressing water issues, it has not shown any real enthusiasm for meaningful bilateral action. As a result, water has increasingly become a new political divide in the country’s relations with neighbors like India, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Nepal.

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

In fact, by shifting its frenzied dam building from internal rivers to international rivers, China is now locked in water disputes with almost all co-riparian states. Those disputes are bound to worsen, given China’s new focus on erecting mega-dams, best symbolized by its latest addition on the Mekong — the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan Dam, which dwarfs Paris’s Eiffel Tower in height — and a 38,000-megawatt dam planned on the Brahmaputra at Metog, close to the disputed border with India. The Metog Dam will be twice as large as the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, construction of which uprooted at least 1.7 million Chinese.

In addition, China has identified another mega-dam site on the Brahmaputra at Daduqia, which, like Metog, is to harness the force of a nearly 3,000-meter drop in the river’s height as it takes a sharp southerly turn from the Himalayan range into India, forming the world’s longest and steepest canyon. The Brahmaputra Canyon — twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States – holds Asia’s greatest untapped water reserves.

The countries likely to bear the brunt of such massive diversion of waters are those located farthest downstream on rivers like the Brahmaputra and Mekong — Bangladesh, whose very future is threatened by climate and environmental change, and Vietnam, a rice bowl of Asia. China’s water appropriations from the Illy River threaten to turn Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash into another Aral Sea, which has shrunk to less than half its original size.

In addition, China has planned the “Great Western Route,” the proposed third leg of the Great South-North Water Diversion Project — the most ambitious inter-river and inter-basin transfer program ever conceived — whose first two legs, involving internal rivers in China’s ethnic Han heartland, are scheduled to be completed within three years. The Great Western Route, centered on the Tibetan Plateau, is designed to divert waters, including from international rivers, to the Yellow River, the main river of water-stressed northern China, which also originates in Tibet.

With its industry now dominating the global hydropower-equipment market, China has also emerged as the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistani-held Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlashes.

For example, units of the People’s Liberation Army are engaged in dam and other strategic projects in the restive, Shia-majority region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-held Kashmir. And China’s dam building inside Burma to generate power for export to Chinese provinces has contributed to renewed bloody fighting recently, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and the government.

As with its territorial and maritime disputes with India, Vietnam, Japan, and others, China is seeking to disrupt the status quo on international-river flows. Persuading it to halt further unilateral appropriation of shared waters has thus become pivotal to Asian peace and stability. Otherwise, China is likely to emerge as the master of Asia’s water taps, thereby acquiring tremendous leverage over its neighbors’ behavior.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research, is the author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

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).

(C) Japan Times: All rights reserved

Is the Karmapa Lama an agent of Beijing or a political scapegoat?

Chinese cash seized from the monastery of one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism has stirred fresh intrigue

Brahma Chellaney
The Guardian
guardian.co.uk, 10 February 2011

The seizure by police of large sums of Chinese currency from the Indian monastery of the Karmapa Lama – one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism – has revived old suspicions about his continuing links with China and forced him to deny that he is an “agent of Beijing”.

The Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, and the Karmapa Lama are the three highest figures in Tibetan Buddhism, representing parallel institutions that have intermittently been at odds with each other throughout their history. And China, seeking to tighten its grip on Tibet, has worked to control the traditional process of finding the reincarnation of any senior lama that passes away.

Thus, in 1992, China helped select the seven-year-old Ogyen Trinley Dorje as the 17th Karmapa Lama, installing him at Tibet’s Tsurphu monastery – the Karmapas’ ancestral abode, which was almost destroyed during the cultural revolution. He became the first reincarnated “living Buddha” to be recognised and ratified by Communist China.

But then, in 1999, Dorje staged a stunning escape to India via Nepal, attracting the world’s attention, but also deep suspicion, because of the apparent ease with which he and his entourage managed to flee. The Dalai Lama has hosted him at the Gyuto monastery in Dharamsala, India, ever since.

Earlier, in 1995, China installed its own Panchen Lama after its security services abducted the Tibetans’ six-year-old appointee, who has simply disappeared, along with his family.

Now, China is waiting for the current Dalai Lama – who is over 75 and has had bouts of ill health in recent years – to pass away, so that it can anoint his successor, too. But the Dalai Lama, the charismatic face of the Tibetan movement, has made it clear that his successor will come from the “free world”, thereby excluding Chinese-ruled Tibet. This has set the stage for the emergence of two rival Dalai Lamas, one chosen by China and the other by the Tibetan exile movement.

In fact, the Chinese-appointed Karmapa Lama has a doppelganger Karmapa, who has set up shop in New Delhi. With both the Karmapas in India, the Indian government has sought to maintain peace by barring the contenders from the sacred Rumtek monastery in the Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim.

Against this background, the discovery of large sums of Chinese and other foreign currency has ignited a fresh controversy over Dorje. While his supporters have staged protests against the police raid and interrogation of their leader, Indian officials have expressed apprehension that China may be funding Dorje as part of a plan to influence the Karmapa’s Kagyu sect, which controls important monasteries along the militarised Indo-Tibetan border.

According to Xu Zhitao, an official at the Chinese Communist party central committee’s united front work department, the allegation that “the Karmapa [may be] a Chinese agent or spy shows that India is keeping its mistrustful attitude toward China”. But such an attitude seems warranted: Xu’s Tibet division is tasked with overseeing monastic institutions, inculcating “patriotic” norms among monks and nuns – through re-education when necessary – and infiltrating the Tibetan resistance movement and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries on both sides of the Indo-Tibetan frontier.

Communities in the Himalayan region have historically been closely integrated. But, with Tibet locked behind an iron curtain since the 1951 Chinese annexation, the economies and cultures of the entire Himalayan region have weakened. Tibetan Buddhism, however, still serves as the common link, with the Karmapa’s Kagyu sect a powerful force on the Indian side.

The cash haul has reopened the question that arose in 1999: Was China behind Dorje’s flight to India, or is he a genuine defector who simply got fed up with living in a gilded Chinese cage?

China had several possible motives for staging his “escape”, including a desire to strengthen his claim to the title at a time when the rival contender (backed by important interests in India, Bhutan and Taiwan) appeared to be gaining ground. Had Dorje remained in Tibet, he could have lost out to his rival, because the 280-year-old Rumtek monastery, the Kagyu school’s holiest institution, is where the sect’s all-powerful “black hat”, the symbolic crown of the Karmapa – believed to be woven from the hair of female deities – is located.

China would also have drawn comfort from the fact that, within the murky world of intra-Tibetan politics, its anointed Karmapa, oddly, had the Dalai Lama’s backing. Historically, the Dalai Lamas and Karmapa Lamas vied with each other for influence until the Dalai Lama’s Gelug school gained ascendancy over the Kagyu order. According to Tibetan tradition, however, the Dalai Lama has no role in selecting or endorsing a Karmapa. The Dalai Lama in this case gave his approval for purely political reasons.

The previous Karmapa Lama died in 1981, and the controversy over his successor that has raged ever since also epitomises a struggle for control of the $1.5bn in assets held by the Kagyu order, the richest in Tibetan Buddhism. With control of the Rumtek monastery embroiled in rival lawsuits, the New Delhi-based Karmapa has, not surprisingly, greeted the recent cash seizure as “exposing” his Chinese-appointed rival.

Significantly, in contrast to its increasingly vituperative attacks on the Dalai Lama, China has not denounced (or de-recognised) its Karmapa, despite his flight to India signalling its failure to retain the loyalty of a supposed puppet. The Mandarin-speaking Ogyen Trinley Dorje, now 25, occasionally criticises the Chinese government, including its efforts “to create this ethnic conflict” in Tibet. Nevertheless, China has refrained from attacking him, making clear that it wants him to return eventually.

And the ongoing Karmapa saga, with its shadowy politics and intrigue, could turn out to be only the opening act – a foretaste of what may come when two duelling Dalai Lamas emerge after the incumbent passes from the scene.

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times, February 4, 2011

The Lunar New Year couldn’t have begun on a more edgy note for China’s rulers, who have been quick to add words like “Cairo” and “Egypt” to their list of words banned on the Internet. Haunted by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, China’s leaders are nervously watching the rise of people’s power against some Arab dictatorships. If Egyptians could rise up, despite enjoying a per-capita income three times higher than the Chinese, China certainly risks the same contagion.

China actually lived up to the Year of the Tiger that 2010 represented in its astrology by roaring at its neighbours and picking territorial fights with them. Now in the Year of the Rabbit which started on Thursday, will China emulate that burrowing animal? Will it mean more tunnels being burrowed in the Himalayas for river diversion and other strategic projects? And “carrots” (rabbit’s favourite) being demanded from neighbours and the rest of the world for eschewing irascible behaviour?

If the Chinese leadership were forward-looking, it would utilize the Year of the Rabbit to loosen its political reign and make up for the diplomatic imprudence of 2010 that left an isolated China counting only the problems states of North Korea, Pakistan and Myanmar as its allies. But the military’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 at home, tightening its controls on the Internet and media and stepping up repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. 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 last September. 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 help 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.

At issue is not China’s rise but its selective acceptance of norms and rules, as well as its efforts to protect or enlarge unfair advantage in trade, resource, security, currency and other issues.

The gap between its words and actualities is also widening. 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 Pakistan-held Kashmir to build strategic projects and its use of Chinese convicts as labourers on projects in some countries too poor and weak to protest — China has demonstrated a troubling propensity to obscure the truth.

Despite the battering to its international image — which has sunk to its lowest point since after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors — there is little prospect of 2011becoming a course-correction year for Beijing. The high turnover of leaders scheduled to occur at different levels in China during 2012-13 has set in motion within the Communist Party an intense jockeying for promotion, with senior functionaries engaged in competitive pandering to nationalistic sentiment.

But with the party increasingly dependent on the military to maintain its monopoly on power and ensure domestic order, senior military officers are overtly influencing foreign policy. Is China becoming a militaristic state where the government’s oversight over the armed forces exists only in name?

In truth, the more overtly China has embraced capitalism, the more indigenized it has become ideologically. By gradually turning its back on Marxist dogma — imported from the West — the country’s oligarchy has made Chinese nationalism the legitimating credo of its hold on power. The new crop of leaders, including President Hu Jintao’s putative successor, Xi Jinping, will bear a distinct nationalistic imprint.

As the present leadership prepares for the 18th party congress next year, it may find it difficult to resist flaunting the country’s newfound power, in a bid to play to the public gallery at home. A reminder of the domestic challenges was a recent viral video produced by a Beijing animation firm that showed the masses, portrayed as rabbits, rising up in anger against corruption and repression and killing party cadres.

The challenges could prompt China to go for the home run in 2012, the Year of the Dragon — the monster that has been universal since before biblical times. As the 50th year of China’s military attack on India, 2012 will be especially important in Asia, because the declared intent of that war — “to teach a lesson” — was repeated in the 1979 Chinese aggression against Vietnam and appeared to guide Beijing’s top-heavy response in the more-recent boat incident with Japan.

(c) The Economic Times, 2011