Narrowing the Asymmetry

Brahma Chellaney  

© Asian Age March 24, 2007

India and China are not just nation-states but large, ancient civilizations that together represent one-third of humanity today. How their relationship evolves will have an important bearing on Asian geopolitics, international security and globalization. India-China ties thus constitute one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world.

            While both are ascendant powers, enjoying high GDP growth rates, the basis of their rise is different and a pointer to their relative strengths and weaknesses.

            India’s white-collar, services-led economic growth contrasts sharply with China’s blue-collar, manufacturing-driven expansion. More striking is the fact that in India the private sector continues to lead the growth while in China it is a state-driven boom. India does poorly wherever the state is involved, while the strength of the Chinese state as the prime driver of accumulating power carries significant strategic ramifications. In fact, owing to its dynamic centralized economy, China is able to practise a mix of crony capitalism and widespread, state-dispensed patronage.  

            Most startling is the fact that although both states have some similar competitive advantages, such as a large pool of skilled manpower and low wages, China’s ascension has been on the back of an increasing export surge while India’s imports-dependent economy relies primarily on domestic consumption for growth. Indian imports currently exceed exports by as much as 60 per cent. Such dependency on imports sets India apart from the Asian “tiger” economies, which are all export-oriented.

            In contrast to India’s yawning trade deficit, China tripled its trade surplus with the rest of the world just between 2002 and 2005. Given its trade surplus of $201.6 billion with the United States alone in 2005, it is hardly a surprise that Beijing is today sitting on a foreign-exchange hoard of $1 trillion — the world’s largest. It has ploughed more than two-thirds of its foreign-currency reserves into US dollar-denominated investments.

Washington now relies on Chinese surpluses and savings to finance its huge budget and trade deficits, hold down US interest rates and prop up the value of the dollar. Beijing, by financing the US deficits through its purchase of US government bonds, not only buys political clout in Washington but also keeps its currency undervalued so that Chinese exports stay cheap and imports dear. In the face of a rising Sino-US trade imbalance, it sustains the peg it has artificially set between the US dollar and the Chinese yuan by simply recycling its surplus dollars back into the American bond market. 

Beijing shields its currency manipulation through the potential threat to halt financing US deficits and unload its greenbacks. This month’s decision by the Chinese legislature, the National People’s Congress, to set up a new cabinet-led agency for active investment overseas can only help boost China’s international financial clout at a time when its foreign-currency reserves are continuing to soar.

            The India-China contrast is also stark in terms of military capabilities. India’s weaponry remains subcontinental in range, while China’s is intercontinental. Not surprisingly, India has found it difficult to break out of its subcontinental straitjacket. Indeed, far from developing a military reach to underpin its world-power ambitions, India even lags behind its regional-defence needs. Nearly a decade after declaring itself a nuclear-weapons state, India still does not have the retaliatory capability to strike deep into the Chinese heartland.  

            Even when China was poor and backward, it consciously put the accent on building comprehensive national power. It developed its first intercontinental ballistic missile, the 12,000-kilometre DF-5, in the 1970s. New Delhi, in contrast, has yet to start developing its first ICBM, although ICBMs are potent symbols of power and coercion in international relations.

            Today China’s military spending is drawing a lot of international attention for two reasons. Beijing has sustained double-digit increases in such spending for two continuous decades. In that same period, India’s defence expenditure has declined appreciably as a percentage of its GDP. Moreover, China’s military spending has risen the fastest in the world in percentage terms. Its recently unveiled budget, for example, boosted defence outlays by 17.8 per cent even as India announced a modest increase of 7.8 per cent — just above its current inflation rate — in its defence appropriations.

            In absolute terms, however, US military spending has now risen to a level not seen since the Reagan-era buildup. President George W. Bush’s new $622 billion Pentagon budget slips in $40 billion in spending increases. Even without the $142-billion budget component for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for countering terrorism, America alone accounts for 50 per cent of the global military spending.

            Even though the official Chinese military budget (which few believe because it hides more than it reveals) is double the Indian defence-spending level, it is not the size but how defence funds are utilized that makes the India-China contrast attention-grabbing.

           China’s priority for decades has been twofold: boosting its indigenous capabilities, especially its conventional and nuclear deterrence, and working to shift the balance of power in Asia in its favour. Today its increasingly sophisticated missile force is at the heart of its military modernization. And even as it imports high-tech conventional weaponry from Russia, it has emerged as one of the biggest arms exporters in the world, with its three biggest arms clients being India’s immediate neighbours — Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh, in that order. Pakistan’s series of missile tests in recent weeks, including the March 22 test of an extended-range cruise missile, shows that China continues to covertly assist Islamabad in breach of its non-proliferation commitments.

          India, pitiably, relies on arms imports for meeting its basic defence needs. Such is its addiction to the import of major weapons and even small arms that it has kept its domestic armament-production base weak and underdeveloped. While China apportions 28 per cent of its military budget for defence-related research and development, India’s share is less than 6 per cent.

Prevention is always preferable (and cheaper) than cure. India’s defence planning, however, is still geared toward fighting the next conventional war when the country’s interests would be better served through a concerted focus on deterring aggression.

Preventing war demands major investments in and political commitment to systems of deterrence, which have to be developed indigenously. India, however, remains more committed to the soft and spendthrift option — buying weapons off-the-shelf overseas to fight the next conventional war, although such a full-fledged war remains remote 35 years after the last one. The threats India confronts are increasingly unconventional in nature, whether it is trans-border terrorism from Pakistan or China’s new anti-satellite (ASAT) prowess. Yet Indian defence planners remain frozen in a conventional mindset. 

India’s addiction to foreign arms — many of questionable value — has become so acute that it has emerged as the world’s largest weapon importer since 2004. Defence Minister A. K. Antony’s comment last month about $8 billion to 10 billion in potential offsets from arms imports during the 11th Five-Year Plan (which begins April 1) indicates that India intends to buy foreign weapons worth between $27 billion and $33 billion in this period. Such arms imports will not make the nation strong but only eat up its meagre defence resources.

The key difference between India and China is that the latter uses its defence funds wisely and intelligently. Had the situation been the converse, with China spending on the military only what India does today but India’s defence expenditure matching the current Chinese level, it would still have been a matter of concern in the regional context for this very reason — the prudent use of funds by Beijing. A China-level Indian defence budget would have been a delectable bonanza for the major military-industrial complexes overseas.

India, lamentably, has yet to grasp the simple truth that the capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a nation has to pass on the way to becoming a great power. Indeed no state can aspire to be a great power if it allows asymmetry with a regional rival to widen to a point where not only its battlefield vulnerability is exposed but also its strategic space and room for manoeuvre come under growing pressure.

What India needs to do is to declare a moratorium on all arms imports for three years or so. That would help save billions of dollars without compromising its defence. Such action is necessary for it not only to kick its addiction but also to clean up the Augean stables.

          More broadly, given China’s deep-rooted authoritarianism, vibrant state-driven economy, accumulating military might and unconcealed aim to dominate Asia, India needs to narrow the power disparity with Beijing through a steadfast focus on developing and exploiting hard power — economic and military.

It is true that India tends to do well in areas where the state is little involved and that China’s development of hard power, in contrast, is a planned, state-driven exercise. But can India emerge as a great power without the state playing its due role in building comprehensive national power? The Indian state continues to be characterized by ad hoc policymaking. Furthermore, without its emergence as a major international manufacturing hub, India will continue to import more goods than it exports while being unable to alleviate unemployment and income disparities. India also should make increasing use of soft power to underpin its diplomacy and image.

India and China, admittedly, have built a mutual stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their continued economic modernization and security depend. Both also seek to emphasize cooperation, for different reasons. Yet given their size, ambitions and proximity, competition is inevitable. This is more so because unlike Europe, where the most-powerful state, Germany, is content with being one among equals, Asia has yet to banish the threat of hegemony by a state within.  

Hindustan Times, February 6, 2007

China’s anti-satellite weapon test should spur India to plug gaps in its defences

It’s not only rocket science

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Three issues stand out on China’s January 11 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon test. First, such is Beijing’s ingrained opacity that it did not own up to the test until diplomatic pressure intensified. Two, a lot of unsafe space debris likely to last years has been left in low orbit by China’s conversion of a rocket to kill one of its aging satellites. And three, the test sets a treacherous precedent by marking the first ASAT kill by any power in more than two decades.

            Whatever its motivation, the test will have lasting global impact like no other military event in recent years. While China’s message, in line with its growing geopolitical ambitions, may have been directed at America, it is its immediate neighbours that are likely to be more rattled by its precision in timing a high-speed rocket carrying a ‘kinetic’ weapon to kill a circling satellite. Although the rocket probably was the KT-1, similar to India’s PSLV, it is the overall sophistication displayed that brings down wishful thinking about averting militarization of space.

To India, the test is not just a reminder of the glaring gaps in its defences but also a wakeup call to start addressing them. That India has lagged behind its minimal-deterrent requirements is conspicuous. But instead of accelerating its space-launch and missile programmes, New Delhi has allowed the asymmetry to widen to a point where China has now laid bare India’s battlefield vulnerability.

Indeed, of all the major countries, the Chinese ASAT lethality arguably holds the greatest import for India The only counter to ASAT weapons is a capability to pay back in kind. The US and Russia, armed to their teeth, can cripple China’s communications and expose its ground assets if it dared strike their space assets. Japan, also concerned over the test, is ensconced under a US security umbrella.

India, by contrast, stands out for a binary lack of deterrent capabilities: it neither has the missile reach for a counter-offensive in the Chinese heartland nor seeks ASAT power to deter the destruction of its space assets. Fighting a 21st-century war with one’s key space assets disabled will be worse than facing an adversary with one hand tied behind. Such assets are critical not just for communications but also for imagery, navigation, interception, missile guidance and delivery of precision munitions.

To be sure, an ASAT scenario can arise only in a conflict situation. But deterrence is required precisely to avert war. India’s commitment was to building a “credible minimal deterrent”. Before long, the ‘credible’ element fell by the wayside. Now, as underscored by India’s increasing vulnerability against China, even the ‘minimal’ part is slipping.

To sustain peace with China, India needs to be able to defend peace. Can it be forgotten that India was caught napping in 1962 because the invasion was totally unexpected? Or that in 1986-87 war clouds emerged out of a clear blue sky on the Sino-Indian horizon? The key lesson of 1962 was that what matters is adversarial capability, not intent, which can change suddenly.

In today’s world, one side can impose its demands not necessarily by employing force but by building such asymmetric capabilities that a credible threat constricts the other side’s room for manoeuvre and ability to withstand pressure. Yet, curiously, the more India has fallen behind minimum deterrence, the more it has sheltered behind calcinatory and delusional rhetoric.

It is not lack of resources but a reluctance to get its priorities right that has left India far short of meeting its minimal-deterrent needs. The way India squanders resources is unspeakable. Embarrassed neither by its emergence as the world’s largest arms importer nor by its continued lack of priority to building an armament-production base at home, India intends to spend at least $20 billion over the next five years to import weapons. Such imports ostensibly will seek to equip India for the next conventional war, when what it faces increasingly are unconventional threats, the latest being ASATs.

Rather than prepare to fight war, shouldn’t India give greater priority to preventing aggression? A full-fledged war remains remote 35 years after the last one India fought. Preventing war demands systems of deterrence. Such systems have to be developed indigenously because no power will sell them. But as they come with no kickbacks, incentives to speedily develop them have been weak. India can easily cut its proposed arms imports by half and invest the savings to build deterrence.

Take another egregious case: India plans to spend $3.4 billion to land a man on the moon by 2020, with its first lunar orbiter scheduled for 2008, first unmanned lunar landing for 2010 and first manned space flight for 2014. Such an ambitious mission can be a priority for a country like China that has met its basic national-security needs and amassed $1 trillion in the world’s largest foreign-exchange hoard. But for India this is an extravagance when it still cannot launch its own telecommunications satellites. Shouldn’t India’s interests on planet earth and its outer space take precedence over a lunar dream?

If it truly aspires to be a great power, India has to meet the first test of greatness — the capacity to defend oneself independently. It is past time it calibrated its priorities to fix defence-related weaknesses. Before it can think of developing a counter-capability to shield itself from an ASAT menace, it will have to deal with two obtrusive mismatches that hobble its deterrence promise.

The first mismatch is between its satellite and launch capabilities. Greater operational capability necessitates large satellites. While India has first-rate satellite-manufacturing expertise, it still needs a foreign commercial launcher like EADS’s Ariane 5 to place its INSAT-4 series satellites in geostationary orbit. Even when the vaunted GSLV becomes operational with indigenous cryogenic technology, its 2,000-kilogram payload limit will fall short of what India’s needs even today.

The second mismatch is in the military realm — between the technical sophistication to build nuclear warheads and the extent to which they can be delivered reliably by missiles. Nearly a decade after it went overtly nuclear and almost a quarter-century after the missile programme launch, India still lacks the full reach against China. The thermonuclear warhead India tested with a controlled yield still awaits a delivery vehicle of the right payload range.

Why should a country with one-sixth of humanity to defend still seek incremental progress in the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) field rather than aim to technologically leapfrog to an intercontinental ballistic missile? Without ICBM capability, India can be neither in the global league nor able to deter ASAT threats. If it were to marshal unwavering political will, India could, with its latent capabilities, build an ICBM in a crash programme with half the lunar-project budget and well before an Indian spacecraft lands an astronaut on the moon.

Just as several Indian companies are emerging as global players in their own right, the Indian state will be a behemoth on the world stage if it remedied its vulnerability problem. It has a lot to learn from China on how to take care of its security. Indeed it owes a thank-you to Beijing for delivering another reminder of its shortcomings. The ASAT test, at a minimum, ought to help clear the policy cobwebs arising from India’s defence indolence.

                                                                                                            b@vsnl.net

Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006 Japan Times

Japan-India partnership key to bolstering stability in Asia

Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI — Japan and India are natural allies because they have no conflict of strategic interests and actually share common goals to build stability, power equilibrium and institutionalized multilateral cooperation in Asia. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Tokyo this week offers an opportunity to the two countries to add real strategic content to their fast-developing relationship.

The ascension of Shinzo Abe as postwar-Japan’s youngest prime minister has symbolized the rise of an assertive, confident Japan eager to shape the evolving balance of power in Asia. Faced immediately with the crisis triggered by North Korea’s provocative nuclear test, Abe has pursued a pragmatic foreign policy while seeking to accelerate the nationalist shift in policy instituted by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi.

India, for its part, has moved from doctrinaire nonalignment to geopolitical pragmatism, reflected in the greater realism it displays in its economic and foreign policies. It has come to recognize that it can wield international power only through the accretion of its own economic and military strength. A close strategic and economic partnership with Japan chimes with its vision of a dynamic, multipolar Asia.

Close ties with Japan is an objective dear to Singh, whose host in Tokyo is a friend of India. Abe, in his book, Toward A Beautiful Country, published last July, declares that, “It is of crucial importance to Japan’s national interest that we further strengthen our relations with India.” Indeed, Abe optimistically states that “it will not be a surprise if in another 10 years, Japan-India relations overtake Japan-U.S. and Japan-China relations.”

To realize that scenario, Tokyo and New Delhi have to focus sustained attention on boosting their now-stagnant trade and building a multidimensional political relationship. The two also need to hold closer consultations on Asian economic and political issues, given that neither would like to see the emergence of a Sino-centric Asia.

Such is the international hype about China’s growth that it is frequently forgotten that Japan remains the world’s largest economic powerhouse after the United States, with an economy that is today double the size of China’s, with only a tenth of the population.

Tokyo may not share Beijing’s obsession with measures of national power, but Japan’s military establishment, except in the nuclear sphere, is already the most sophisticated in Asia.

            Encouraged by economic recovery, with a 2% yearly Japanese growth translating into an additional output almost the size of the entire annual gross domestic product of Singapore and the Philippines, Japan is going through a quiet transition from pacifism to being a “normal” state. Today, even as it has reinvigorated military ties with the United States, it is beginning to cautiously shape an independent foreign policy and rethink its security.

            India has also strengthened its relations with America. But from being non-aligned, India is likely to become multi-aligned, even as it preserves the kernel of nonalignment — strategic autonomy.

A key challenge for both Tokyo and New Delhi is to manage their increasingly intricate relationship with an ascendant China determined to emerge as Asia’s dominant power. Yet it makes sense for Japan and India to play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship with Beijing and put the accent on cooperation. This is what Abe and Singh have sought to do.

An emphasis on cooperation also suits China because it is in accord with its larger strategy to advertise its “peaceful rise.” China’s choir book indeed has been built around a nifty theme: its emergence as a great power is unstoppable, and it is thus incumbent on other nations to adjust to that rise.

A strong Japan, a strong China and a strong India need to 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. China’s emergence as a global player, however, is dividing, not uniting, Asia.

The sharpening energy geopolitics in Asia also undergirds the need for a strategic partnership between Japan and India, both heavily dependent on oil imports by sea from the Gulf region. Mercantilist efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes, and strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along vital sea-lanes of communication, certainly risk fueling tensions and discord.

Before the United States and India unveiled plans to build a global strategic partnership, it was Tokyo and New Delhi that agreed in August 2000 during Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s visit to develop a “Global Partnership of the 21^st Century.” Yet that proposal has moved forward rather slowly, even as India has overtaken China as the largest recipient of Japanese Overseas Development Assistance (ODA).

A recently released global-opinion poll by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed the high positive rating Japan enjoys in India, and India in Japan, reflecting their close historical and cultural ties.

There is expectation that a true Indo-Japanese strategic partnership will now take off, given the foundation laid by an increasing number of high-level visitors. In the past year alone, Japan’s chief of joint staff as well as the chief of each of the three self-defense forces has visited India, while the Indian defense minister and the navy and air force chiefs have been to Japan.

Their partnership should seek to build greater defense cooperation, intelligence-sharing and joint initiatives on maritime security, counterterrorism, disaster prevention and management, and energy security. To maintain a peaceful environment that promotes security and economic growth, Tokyo and New Delhi need to promote institutional cooperation in Asia.

In that context, Abe’s idea of a four-sided strategic dialogue among Japan, India, Australia and the United States deserves careful reflection. A constellation of democracies tied together by strategic partnerships can help build Asian power equilibrium.

In the emerging Asia, the two major non-Western democracies, Japan and India, are set to become close partners. Their strategic relationship would help adjust balance-of-power equations in Asia and aid long-term stability.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

Japan-China: Nationalism on the Rise

With China and South Korea expressing anger after the visit Tuesday by Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to the Yasukuni war shrine, it will be tempting for the rest of the world to draw a simplistic message. A halt to such pilgrimages, one might think, could put an end to strategic antagonisms in East Asia.

The reality is that revisionist history is being employed as a political tool not only by Japan but also by those who have turned Yasukuni, where 14 top war criminals are honored, into a potent symbol of friction between countries. In fact, resurgent nationalism has become the single biggest threat to Asia’s renaissance.

For more than half a century, both China and Japan have been dominated by a single party that now finds pandering to nationalistic sentiment attractive in the face of an eroding political base. The spats over history also represent a tussle for leadership in East Asia at a time when China’s dramatic rise has begun to influence geopolitics.

China uses the Nanjing massacre and Japan uses the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as national symbols of crimes by outsiders. Since China became Communist, it has employed purported history to gobble up Tibet, seize Indian territories, assert its claims in the East and South China Seas, and demand Taiwan’s "return."

Today, unassuaged historical grievances not only engender ugly nationalism but also help spread the virus of xenophobia to the homogenized societies of East Asia. Focusing on unsavory history amplifies mistrust and runs counter to the liberalizing elements of globalization.

Yasukuni, a private Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead, is a symptom of the Asian malady, not the cause.

Koizumi’s annual visits as prime minister to Yasukuni, a legacy of pre-1945 Japanese militarism, have certainly been provocative, particularly his latest – his first on the highly symbolic Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender. Yet it would be naïve to assume that nationalism-mongering in East Asia will end if his successor were to avoid the shrine.

China’s use of the history card against Japan predates Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits. Even if Koizumi’s successor were to change course, Beijing would still be able to exploit the issue of controversial Japanese history textbooks and what it sees as Japan’s insufficient penitence for its 1931 occupation of Manchuria and 1937 invasion of Han China.

In fact, it was in the 1990s, when Japan was still China-friendly and the main aid provider to Beijing, that the Chinese Communists began a "political education" campaign demonizing Japan for its past atrocities. That campaign laid the groundwork for the upsurge of nationalism and the deterioration of China- Japan relations.

In seeking to address domestic political imperatives to replace the increasingly ineffectual Communist ideology with fervent nationalism, China’s rulers have helped whip up Japanese nationalism. That is the kind of political shortsightedness that could one day spell doom for the Communist hold on power.

Those who seek to turn Yasukuni into a bigger issue than it really is are not only taking sides but also playing into the hands of Japanese nationalists, gratuitously arming them with leverage and even encouraging them to raise the stakes.

It is thus little surprise that Foreign Minister Taro Aso last week called for turning Yasukuni into a state memorial, while Koizumi’s most likely successor, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, publicly questioned the legitimacy of the Allied tribunal that convicted as "Class A" war criminals – guilty of "crimes against peace" – 14 leading figures who in 1978 were added to Yasukuni’s rolls. For his part, Koizumi has used Yasukuni to stand up to China and fashion an extraordinary legacy pivoted on a nationalist shift in policy.

In his five years in office, Koizumi has not only built popular support for revision of the U.S.-imposed pacifist Constitution but also laid the foundation for the emergence of a more muscular Japan. To the nationalists, his Yasukuni visits epitomize Japan’s return to being a "normal" state.

Both Japan and China need to break free from history. Yet in April 2005, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China demanded that Japan "face up to history squarely," setting the stage for his country’s scripted anti-Japanese mob protests.

While railing against the risk of renewed Japanese militarism in Asia, Wen appeared oblivious to the fact that while Japan has fought no conflict in the past 60 years, China has waged wars on several flanks in the years since it came under Communist rule. Before asking Japan for yet another apology for its atrocities, China should face up to its more recent history of aggression by apologizing to the Tibetans, Indians and Vietnamese.

Disputes over Yasukuni, history textbooks, war museums and xenophobic cultural programming need to be resolved through quiet diplomacy, not an outpouring of inflammatory rhetoric that incites more forbidding nationalism.

Brahma Chellaney, author of the forthcoming "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan," is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

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