Category Archives: International Security

Dealing with China’s increasing assertiveness

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Let the facts speak for themselves

 

India can expect no respite from Chinese strategic pressure, but to adroitly manage its relationship with Beijing, it must let facts speak for themselves, says Brahma Chellaney

 

The Economic Times

September 17, 2010

 

The prime minister has underscored concerns over the perceptible hardening in China’s stance towards India. With its defence spending having grown almost twice as fast as its GDP, China is now beginning to take the gloves off, confident that it has acquired the necessary muscle. Rising power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy not just against India, but also in the region extending from the South China Sea to Northeast Asia.

 

This has been exemplified by several developments — from China’s inclusion of the South China Sea in its “core” national interests, an action that makes its claims to the disputed islands non-negotiable, to its bellicose reaction to the South Korean-US joint anti-submarine exercises in the Sea of Japan. And just the way China has staked its claim to India’s Arunachal Pradesh, it has asserted its sovereignty over Japan’s Senkaku Islands, which were part of Japanese territory all along, even during the US occupation of Japan.

 

Little surprise China’s neighbours are increasingly uneasy about the implications of its growing power. Beijing aspires to shape a Sino-centric Asia, but its actions hardly make it a good candidate for Asian leadership. Leadership can come not from brute force, but from other states’ consent or tacit acceptance.

 

China’s belligerence, significantly, poses a greater threat for India than for any other Asian nation for several reasons. One, China is mounting both direct military intimidation (as underlined by the abnormally high level of continuing cross-border incursions) and proxy threats against India, including by shoring by its longstanding strategic nexus with Pakistan. Two, the largest real estate China covets is in India. Arunachal is almost three times bigger than Taiwan. Three, India has no formal security alliance with any other power and thus must depend on its own defence capabilities. And four, by seeking to badger India on multiple fronts, China is signalling that its real, long-term contest is more with India than with the US. The countries around India have become battlegrounds for China’s moves to encircle India. By assiduously courting these countries as proxies in its geopolitical competition with India, China has managed to make deep inroads into India’s strategic backyard — from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, and Nepal to Burma.

 

Yet, the world knows more about China’s moves in the South China Sea and East Asia than its actions against India. At international conferences, even some experts on Asia are surprised when told simple facts, such as China’s increasingly assertive claim to an entire Indian state and its cross-border military incursions.

 

It is now a year since the Indian government put a lid even on the domestic press coverage of the Himalayan border situation. It was in September 2009 that senior government figures, from the PM down, spoke out against the strident Indian media reporting on Chinese border incursions. Since then, sources of information have dried up and newspapers and television networks have carried little news. It is not that the Chinese cross-border forays have ended or even abated. It is just that Indian media organizations have little information to report, even though the incidence of Chinese incursions remains high.

 

Suppressing news on the border situation serves no interests other China’s. It suits the Chinese agenda that the border situation is kept under wraps.

 

Even in the pre-1962 period, India had made the same mistake by playing down China’s aggressive moves along the border. In fact, there are important parallels between the situation pre-1962 and the situation now. Border talks have regressed, Chinese claims on Indian territories are becoming publicly assertive and Chinese cross-border incursions are common. In fact, commentaries in military journals suggest that some in China believe that a swift, 1962-style victory in a border war with India is attainable to cut to size a peer rival.

 

Take another example: It was in June that the Chinese notified their refusal to allow the Indian northern army command chief to visit Beijing. But the Indian side leaked it to the press only in late August. It is still unclear what has been India’s response to the snub. Beijing has said flatly that it “has received no word that India has stopped military exchanges between the two countries.”

 

In the midst of such developments, the Indian foreign minister gratuitously reiterated on August 21 that Tibet is “part of China.” That the Tibet issue remains at the core of the India-China divide is being underlined by Beijing itself by laying claim to additional Indian territories on the basis of alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links to them, not any professed Han connection. There is absolutely no need for India to periodically renew its commitment to a “one China” policy when China not only declines to reciprocally make a one-India pledge, but also mocks at India’s territorial integrity openly. Little thought has been given that by bringing India’s Tibet stance in complete alignment with China’s demand, New Delhi has undercut its own leverage while boosting China’s.

 

Without contributing to the rising tensions with China, India has to gently allow facts to speak for themselves — whether on the border situation, or Tibet’s centrality, or China’s overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. Facts indeed are an anathema even to schoolyard bullies. By not hiding its intent to further redraw the frontiers, Beijing only highlights the futility of political negotiations. After all, a major redrawing of frontiers has never happened at the negotiating table in world history.

 

India should learn how Vietnam has managed to turn the diplomatic tables on China by not shying away from spotlighting the latter’s aggressive designs. In the process, China stood isolated at the last ASEAN Regional Forum meeting.

 

A stable equation with China is more likely to be realized if India puts premium on leveraged diplomacy and avoids a trans-Himalayan military imbalance. More broadly, China’s trajectory will depend on how its neighbours and distant countries like the US manage its growing power. Such management — independently and in partnership — will determine if Chinese power does not slide into arrogance.

 

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (HarperCollins USA, 2010).

China’s policy: From dumping goods to dumping convicts

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Convicts for Export

Brahma Chellaney

 
© Project Syndicate 

 

China has devised a novel strategy to relieve pressure on its overcrowded prisons: employ convicts as laborers on overseas projects in the developing world. The practice has exposed another facet of China’s egregious human-rights record, which, when it comes to the overseas operations of Chinese companies, includes the government’s failure to enforce its own regulations.

China executes three times as many people every year as the rest of the world combined. Amnesty International has estimated that, in 2007, China secretly executed on average “around 22 prisoners every day.”

In addition to being the world’s leading executioner, China has one of its largest prison populations. The 2009 “World Prison Population List” compiled by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College, London, put the total number of inmates in Chinese jails at 1.57 million – larger than the population of Estonia, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Swaziland, Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji, or Qatar.

The forced dispatch of prisoners to work on overseas infrastructure projects raises new issues regarding China’s human-rights record. It also adds a new element — the dumping of convicts — to its trade and investment policy, which has been much criticized for dumping goods.

Thousands of Chinese convicts, for example, have been pressed into service on projects undertaken by state-run Chinese companies in Sri Lanka, a strategically important country for China as it seeks to enhance its regional position in the Indian Ocean. After providing Sri Lanka’s government with offensive weapon systems that helped end the country’s decades-long civil war, China has been rewarded with port-building, railroad, and other infrastructure projects.

Chinese convicts also have been dispatched to the Maldives, where the Chinese government is building 4,000 houses on several different islands as a government-to-government “gift” to win influence. So far, however, China has failed to persuade the country’s president to lease it one of the 700 uninhabited Maldivian islands for use as a small base for the Chinese navy.

Chinese companies’ operating practice for overseas projects, including in Africa, is to keep the number of local workers to a bare minimum and to bring in much of the workforce from China, some of which comprises convicts “freed” on parole for project-related overseas work. Convict laborers, like the rest of the Chinese workforce on such projects, are housed near the project site. That way, if any convict worker escaped, he would be easy to find in an alien setting.

In theory, such practices run counter to regulations promulgated by the Chinese commerce ministry in August 2006, in response to a backlash against Chinese businesses in Zambia following the death of 51 Zambian workers in an explosion at a Chinese-owned copper mine. These regulations called for “local ization,” including hiring local workers, respecting local customs, and adhering to safety norms. During an eight-nation 2007 African tour, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a point of meeting with Chinese businesses to stress the importance of corporate responsibility in their local dealings.

Moreover, in October 2006, the State Council – China’s cabinet – issued nine directives ordering that Chinese overseas businesses, among other things, “pay attention to environmental protection,” “support local community and people’s livelihood cause,” and “preserve China’s good image and its good corporate reputation.”

But Chinese regulations are sometimes promulgated simply to blunt external criticism, and thus are seldom enforced, except when a case attracts international attention. For example, in 2003 China enacted a law on environmental-impact assessments, which was followed in 2008 by “provisional measures” to permit public participation in such assessments. Yet Chinese leaders remain more zealous about promoting exports and economic growth than in protecting the country’s air and water.

Similarly, the State Council’s 2006 nine directives to Chinese overseas companies have been subordinated to the drive for exports and growth, even when it imposes environmental and social costs on local communities abroad. Indeed, as part of the government’s “going global” policy, Chinese companies are offered major incentives and rewards for bagging overseas contracts and boosting exports.

The use of convict laborers adds a disturbing new dimension to this strategy. But even before convicts became part of China’s overseas development effort, some Chinese projects, especially dam-building schemes, were embroiled in disputes with local communities in Botswana, Burma, Pakistan, Ghana, and Sudan. In fact, several small bombs exploded less than three months ago at the site of Burma’s Myitsone Dam, whose construction by a Chinese company in insurgency-torn Kachin State is displacing thousands of subsistence farmers and fishermen by flooding a wide swath of land.

Chinese companies cannot get thousands of prisoners released on their own, let alone secure passports and exit permits for them. It is obvious that the practice of pressing convicts into service on overseas projects has been instituted at the instance of the Chinese government.

Until the Chinese government’s treatment of its own citizens and those of other countries is guided by respect for basic human rights and the rule of law, China is unlikely to command the respect that it seeks on the world stage.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

China now exports its convicts

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HUMAN RIGHTS

CHELLANEY: China’s latest export innovation?

Send your convicts overseas

The Washington Times

By Brahma Chellaney

7:58 p.m., Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Illustration: Chinese labor by Alexander Hunter for The Washington Times

 

       

Relieving pressure on overcrowded national prisons by employing convicts as laborers at Chinese-run projects in the developing world is a novel strategy China has adopted – an approach that is certain to create a new backlash against Chinese businesses overseas in addition to highlighting the country’s egregious human-rights record.

China executes three times as many people every year as the rest of the world combined, according to Amnesty International, which in 2008 estimated that "on average China secretly executes around 22 prisoners every day."

China has evolved in important ways as a result of its economic "opening," with the new social pluralism prompting the state to cut back on totalitarian practices. Yet, with its Soviet-style autocratic structure intact, there is little space for political pluralism. Those who challenge government policies or practices or stage demonstrations against official highhandedness risk long imprisonment.

The forced dispatch of prisoners to work on overseas infrastructure projects raises new issues regarding China‘s human-rights record.

Thousands of Chinese convicts, for example, have been pressed into service in projects by state-run Chinese companies in Sri Lanka, a strategically important country for China, which is seeking a role in the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka sits astride vital sea lanes of communication.China – in return for being allowed to make strategic inroads – providedSri Lanka offensive weapon systems that helped end the long civil war on that island nation. Now, Beijing is being rewarded with port-building, railroads and other infrastructure projects.

Chinese convicts also have been taken to a microstate in the Indian Ocean, the Maldives, where the Chinese government is building 4,000 houses on several different islands as a government-to-government "gift" to win influence there. So far, however, Beijing has failed to persuade the president of the archipelago of 330,000 people to lease it one of the 700 uninhabited Maldivian islands for setting up a small base for its navy.

The Chinese practice in overseas projects, including in Africa, is to keep the number of local workers to the minimum and to bring in much of the workforce from China. The novel twist is that some batches of laborers now being brought in are made up of convicts "freed" on parole for project-related overseas work.

The convict laborers, like the rest of the Chinese workforce, are housed near the project site. The Chinese logic is that if any convict worker escaped, it would be easy to find the runaway in an alien setting.

Chinese firms actually bring in more than just convict laborers and other workers at overseas projects. To help boost Chinese exports, they get all equipment, steel, cement and other construction material from China.

Such practices run counter to the Chinese commerce ministry’s August 2006 regulations – promulgated in response to the backlash against Chinese businesses in Zambia following the death of 51 Zambian workers in an explosion at a Chinese-owned copper mine – that called for "localization," including hiring local workers, respecting local customs and adhering to safety norms. During an eight-nation 2007 African tour, President Hu Jintao made a special point of meeting with Chinese businesses to stress the importance of corporate responsibility in their dealings at the local level.

Earlier, in October 2006, the State Council – China’s Cabinet – issued nine directives that Chinese businesses overseas, among other things, "pay attention to environmental protection," "support local community and people’s livelihood" and "preserve China‘s good image and its good corporate reputation."

Chinese domestic regulations, however, are sometimes promulgated to blunt external criticism, rather than actually be enforced, except when a case attracts international attention.

For example, China enacted an environmental-impact assessment law in 2003, which was followed up in 2008 with "provisional measures" to permit public participation in such environmental assessments. Yet it remains more zealous about promoting exports and economic growth at home than in protecting its air and water.

Similarly, despite the State Council’s 2006 nine good-conduct directives to Chinese companies engaged in overseas operations, the government and corporate priority still is to boost exports aggressively, even if such a push results in environmental and social costs for local communities. Indeed, as part of the government‘s "going global" policy, Chinese companies are offered major incentives and rewards for bagging overseas contracts and boosting exports.

The use of convict laborers adds a disturbing new dimension to the "going global" strategy, which was first unveiled in 2001.

As it is, some Chinese projects, especially dam-building schemes, have been embroiled in disputes with local communities in several countries, including in Botswana, Burma, Pakistan, Ghana and Sudan. In fact, several small bombs went off less than three months ago at the site of Burma’s Myitsone Dam, whose construction by a Chinese company in the insurgency-torn, northernmost Kachin state is displacing thousands of subsistence farmers and fishermen by flooding a wide swath of land.

China is not only the world leader in building dams at home but also the top dam exporter. It has no qualms about building dams in disputed territories like Pakistan-held Kashmir, in areas torn by ethnic separatism or in other human rights-abusing countries. But its use of convict laborers at dams and other infrastructure projects will create new rifts with local communities.

China‘s declaratory policy of ”non-interference in domestic affairs” serves as a virtual license to pursue projects that benefit governments known to repress their citizens. For example, in Sudan, where China has emerged as the principal backer of a regime accused of committing genocide in the arid western region of Darfur, 13 of the 15 largest foreign companies operating are Chinese, with Beijing making huge investments in the Sudanese economy – from hydropower to oil. It also has sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including tanks and fighter-jets, to help prop up President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur.

Chinese companies on their own cannot get prisoners released in thousands, let alone to secure passports and exit permits for them. It is obvious that the controversial practice of pressing convicts into service at overseas projects has been instituted by the Chinese government.

Until Beijing’s treatment of its own citizens and those of other countries is guided by respect for basic human rights and the rule of law, China is unlikely to command respect on the world stage.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (HarperCollins, 2010).

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Why American policy is hamstrung on China

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China’s mastery of America’s domain

Military might earns Beijing deference on the economic battlefield

Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, June 21, 2010

Success breeds confidence, and rapid success spawns arrogance. That, in a nutshell, is the China problem facing Asian states and the West. But no country faces a bigger dilemma on China than the United States because the present American policy simply isn’t advancing its objectives.

Rising economic and military power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy, as exemplified by several developments – from China’s inclusion of the South China Sea in its "core" national interests, an action that makes its claims to the disputed islands non-negotiable, to its vile protests against the Indian prime minister visiting a state of the Indian Union, Arunachal Pradesh, on which Beijing has resurrected its long-dormant claim.

A new chill in relations between American and Chinese militaries, underlined by a Chinese admiral’s carping lecture on American "hegemony," has torpedoed the Obama administration’s hopes to make China a responsible partner in global affairs by giving Beijing a larger stake in solving international problems.

The shift in Beijing’s South China Sea position has resulted in its conveying to the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian claimants that any discussions between and among them over their claims would amount to interference in China’s internal affairs. But no less significant is that China’s expanding naval role and maritime claims are beginning to collide with U.S. interests, including the traditional emphasis on freedom of navigation.

Having earlier preached the gospel of its "peaceful rise," China is beginning to take off the gloves, convinced that it has acquired the necessary muscle.

That approach has become more marked since the advent of the 2008 global financial crisis. China has interpreted that crisis as symbolizing both the decline of the Anglo-American brand of capitalism and the weakening of American economic power. That, in turn, has strengthened its twofold belief – that its brand of state-steered capitalism offers a credible alternative and that its global ascendance is unstoppable.

Chinese analysts have gleefully pointed out that after having sung the "liberalize, privatize and let the markets decide" line for so long, the United States and Britain took the lead to bail out their troubled financial giants at the first sign of trouble when the global crisis broke out. By contrast, state-driven capitalism has given China economic stability and rapid growth, enabling it to ride out the international crisis. Indeed, despite the perpetual talk of an overheating economy, China’s exports and retail sales are soaring and its foreign-exchange hoarding is approaching $2.5 trillion even as America’s fiscal and trade deficits remain alarming.

That has helped reinforce the Chinese elite’s faith in the country’s fusion of autocratic politics and state capitalism, with the largest companies – all government-owned – aggressively advancing the national strategy to secure long-term resource supplies from overseas.

The biggest loser from the global financial crisis, in Beijing’s view, is Uncle Sam. That the United States remains dependent on Beijing to buy billions of dollars worth of Treasury bonds every week to finance a yawning budget deficit is a sign of shifting global financial power balance – an advantage China is sure to milk politically in the years ahead.

The current spotlight may be on European financial woes, but the bigger picture for Beijing is that America’s chronic deficits and indebtedness epitomize its relative decline. Add to the picture the two wars the U.S. is waging overseas – one of which appears increasingly unwinnable – and what comes to the Chinese mind is a global superpower bogged down in serious troubles.

Against that background, China’s growing assertiveness may not surprise many. Late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s advice, "Hide your capabilities and bide your time," seems no longer relevant. Today, China is not shy to showcase its military capabilities and assert itself on multiple fronts.

Yet America’s economic and military travails are crimping its foreign-policy options vis-a-vis China. Although the Chinese economy is still more dependent for its growth on the U.S. economy than vice versa, Washington seems more reluctant than ever to exercise its leverage to make Beijing correct policies that threaten to distort trade, foster huge trade imbalances and spark greater competition for scarce raw materials.

By keeping its currency ridiculously undervalued and flooding the world markets with artificially cheap goods, China runs a predatory trade policy that undercuts manufacturing in the developing world more than in the West. However, by threatening to destabilize the global economy, China threatens Western interests.

Furthermore, its efforts to lock up supplies of key resources mean it will continue to lend support to renegade regimes. The U.N. Security Council’s latest Iranian-sanctions resolution is a "win-win" outcome for China because it exempts the key sector that matters to both Beijing and Tehran – energy – and opens the path to greater Chinese aid to, and clout in, Iran.

The present U.S. policy on China is a study in contrast to the way Washington unabashedly exercised its leverage when another Asian country – Japan – emerged as a global economic powerhouse in the 1980s. As it rose dramatically to become a potential economic peer to the United States, Japan kept the yen undervalued and erected hidden barriers to the entry of foreign manufacturers into its market. That resulted in the U.S. piling up pressure on Japan and periodically arm-twisting it to make trade concessions.

Today, the United States cannot adopt the same approach against Beijing, largely because China is also a military and political power and Washington depends on Chinese support on a host of international issues – from North Korea and Burma to Iran and Pakistan. By contrast, Japan has remained just an economic power.

It is significant that China became a global military player before it became a global economic player. China’s military power base was built by Mao Zedong, enabling Deng to focus single-mindedly on rapidly building economic power. Before Deng launched his "four modernizations," China had acquired a global military reach by testing its first intercontinental ballistic missile, the 12,000-kilometer DF-5, and developing a thermonuclear warhead.

Over the past three decades, the 13-fold expansion of its economy generated even greater resources for China to sharpen its military claws. But for the growing Chinese military power and political weight, U.S. policy would have treated China as another Japan.

The United States played a critical role in China’s economic rise by not sustaining post-Tiananmen Square sanctions. But the central assumption guiding U.S. policy on China has gone awry – that assisting China’s economic rise would help create both a compatible and cooperative partner and political openness within. The challenge the United States faces today is to reframe its policy before it becomes too late to resist China’s push for a redistributive global order whose institutions and rules respect the centrality of an authoritarian great power.

Brahma Chellaney is author of the international best-seller "Asian Juggernaut" (HarperCollins, New York, 2010).

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

India’s missing hard power

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One missile to rule them all

Developing intercontinental ballistic missiles is crucial if India is to have credible deterrence and power-projection force as it aspires to become a global power

Brahma Chellaney

Mint newspaper, April 21, 2010

With China engaged in ambitious missile force modernization and the US building new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as part of its “Prompt Global Strike” programme, the question we need to ask is: When will India develop its first ICBM? Without such capability, India has little hope of emerging as a major power.

ICBMs are the idiom of power in international relations. Even as economic might plays a greater role in shaping international power equations, hard power remains central both for national deterrence and for power-projection force capability. For example, all countries armed with intercontinental-range weaponry hold permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council, and all aspirants for new permanent seats have regionally confined military capabilities.

India has glaring deficiencies on both the deterrence and power-projection fronts. It urgently needs a delivery capability that can underpin its doctrine of minimum but credible nuclear deterrence. The current heavy reliance on long-range bomber aircraft is antithetical to a credible deterrence posture.
Such a posture bereft of long-range missile reach only helps typecast India as a subcontinental power. In fact, in the absence of “strategic” or long-range missile systems, India’s deterrent capability remains sub-strategic.

If India seriously desires to project power far beyond its shores in order to play an international role commensurate with its size, it cannot do without ICBMs. Indeed, the only way India can break out from the confines of its neighbourhood is to develop intercontinental-range weaponry. With its current type of military capabilities, India will continue to be seen as a regional power with great-power pretensions.

To embark on an ICBM programme, India needs to shed its strategic diffidence. The National Democratic Alliance government told Parliament: “India has the capability to design and develop ICBMs. However, in consonance with the threat perception, no ICBM development project has been undertaken.” That policy inexplicably remains unchanged under the United Progressive Alliance government, even as India faces a growing threat from the new ICBMs in China’s increasingly sophisticated missile armoury.

An ICBM has a range of 5,500km and more. Rather than aim for a technological leap through a crash ICBM programme, India remains stuck in the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) arena, where its frog-like paces have taken it—more than two decades after the first Agni test—to Agni III, a sub-strategic missile still not deployed. Even the Agni V project, now on the drawing board, falls short of the ICBM range.

No nation can be a major power without three key attributes: (1) a high level of autonomous and innovative technological capability; (2) a capacity to meet basic defence needs indigenously; and (3) a capability to project power far beyond its borders, especially through intercontinental-range weaponry.

India is today the world’s largest importer of conventional weapons, ordering weapons worth at least $5 billion per year. Far from making the nation stronger, such large arms imports underscore the manner in which the country is depleting its meagre defence resources and eroding its conventional military edge. The Indian military today can achieve many missions, including repulsing an aggression and inflicting substantial losses on invaders. It can even carry out limited pre-emptive or punitive action and fend off counteraction. But it cannot do what any major military should be trained and equipped for—decisively win a war against an aggressor state.

The reason is not hard to find: Modernization outlays mainly go not to develop the country’s own armament production base, but to subsidize the military-industrial complex of others through import of weapons, some of questionable value. None of the weapon mega deals India has signed in recent years will arm its military with the leading edge it needs in an increasingly volatile and uncertain regional security environment.

Its military asymmetry with China has grown to the extent that it has fostered disturbing fecklessness in India’s China policy, best illustrated by external affairs minister S.M. Krishna’s recent Beijing visit. And in the absence of a reliable nuclear deterrent, India has become ever more dependent on conventional weapon imports. Among large states in the world, India is the only one that relies on imports to meet even basic defence needs.

Last year’s launch of the country’s first nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, for underwater trials received a lot of media attention. A nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-carrying submarine (known as SSBN) is essential for India to bridge the yawning gap in its deterrent force against China. But even if everything goes well, India’s first SSBN will be deployed in the years ahead with a non-strategic weapon—a 700km submarine-launched ballistic missile now under development. That would further underpin the regional character of India’s deterrence.

Without hard power, India will continue to punch far below its weight and be mocked at by critics. One well-known India baiter, journalist Barbara Crossette, claims: “…today’s India is an international adolescent, a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence.” That India still does not have an ICBM project—even on the drawing board—is a troubling commentary about the lack of strategic prudence. China built its first ICBM even before Deng Xiaoping initiated economic modernization in 1978. A generation later, the Indian leadership has yet to grasp international power realities.

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

Planned U.S. Faustian bargain with the Taliban

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Surge, bribe and run

Washington has learned nothing from past policies

By Brahma Chellaney The Washington Times February 16, 2010

What President Obama’s administration has been pursuing in Afghanistan for the past year has received international imprimatur, thanks to last month’s well-scripted London Conference. Four words sum up that strategy: Surge, bribe and run. Mr. Obama has designed his twin troop surges not to rout the Afghan Taliban militarily but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. As his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has admitted, the aim of such troop increases is to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, not to beat back the insurgency. Without a deal with Taliban commanders, the U.S. cannot execute the "run" part.

The Obama approach has been straightforward: If you can’t defeat them, buy them off. Having failed to rout the Taliban, Washington has been holding indirect talks with the Afghan militia’s shura, or top council, whose members, including the one-eyed chief, Mullah Mohammad Omar, are holed up in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province. The talks have been conducted through the Pakistani, Saudi and Afghan intelligence agencies. Gen. McChrystal has cited Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as possible venues for formal talks.

Mr. Obama, paradoxically, is seeking to apply to Afghanistan the Iraq model of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who used a military surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains. But Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and it is a moot question whether the same strategy can work, especially when Mr. Obama has not hidden his intent to end the U.S. war before he comes up for re-election in 2012. In fact, he has reiterated July 2011 as the time for a gradual U.S. military withdrawal to begin.

In a land with a long tradition of humbling foreign armies, payoffs are unlikely to buy peace. All the Pakistan-backed Taliban has to do is simply wait out the Americans. After all, popular support for the Afghan war has markedly ebbed in the U.S. even as the other countries with troops in Afghanistan exhibit war fatigue.

If a resurgent Taliban is on the offensive, with 2008 and 2009 proving to have been the deadliest years for U.S. forces since the 2001 American intervention, it is primarily because of two reasons: the sustenance the Taliban still draws from Pakistan, and a growing Pashtun backlash against foreign intervention. The Taliban leadership – with an elaborate command-and-control structure oiled by petrodollars from Arab sheikdoms and proceeds from the opium trade – operates from the comfort of sanctuaries in Pakistan.

Fathered by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and midwifed by the CIA in 1994, the Taliban rapidly emerged as a Frankenstein’s monster. Yet President Clinton’s administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension to power in Kabul in 1996 and turned a blind eye as that thuggish militia, in league with the ISI, fostered narcoterrorism and swelled the ranks of the Afghan war alumni waging transnational terrorism. With Sept. 11, 2001, however, the chickens came home to roost. In declaring war on the Taliban in October 2001, U.S. policy came full circle.

Now, desperate to save a faltering military campaign, U.S. policy is coming another full circle as Washington advertises its readiness to strike deals with "moderate" Taliban (as if there can be moderates in an Islamist militia that enforces medieval practices).

In the past year, U.S. military and intelligence have carried out a series of air and drone strikes and ground commando attacks from Afghanistan in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region against the Pakistani Taliban, the nemesis of the Pakistani military. The CIA alone has admitted carrying out a dozen drone strikes in Waziristan to avenge the bombing of its base in Khost, Afghanistan. The Khost bombing was carried out by a Jordanian double agent, who said in a prerecorded video that he was going to take revenge for the U.S. attack that killed the Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud.

But, tellingly, the U.S. military and intelligence have not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against the Afghan Taliban leadership in Baluchistan, south of Waziristan. The CIA and the ISI are again working together, including in shielding the Afghan Taliban shura members so as to facilitate a possible deal.

Mr. Obama’s Afghan strategy should be viewed as a shortsighted strategy that unwittingly has repeated the very mistakes of American policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past three decades that have come to haunt U.S. security and the rest of the free world. Washington is showing it has learned no lesson from its past policies that gave rise to monsters like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and to "the state within the Pakistani state," the ISI, which was made powerful during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a conduit of covert U.S. aid for anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas.

To justify the planned Faustian bargain with the Taliban, the Obama team is drawing a specious distinction between al Qaeda and the Taliban and illusorily seeking to differentiate between "moderate" Taliban (the good terrorists) and those who rebuff deal-making (the badterrorists).

The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if such specious distinctions are drawn. India, which is on the front line of the global fight against international terrorism, is likely to bear the brunt of the blowback of Mr. Obama’s AfPak strategy, just as it came under terrorist siege as a consequence of the Reagan-era U.S. policies in that belt.

The Taliban, al Qaeda and groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba are a difficult-to-separate mix of soul mates who together constitute the global jihad syndicate. The only difference is that al Qaeda operates out of mountain caves in Pakistan while the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba operate openly across Pakistan’s western and eastern borders. To cut a deal with any constituent of this syndicate will only bring more international terrorism.

A stable Afghanistan cannot emerge without dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Afghan Taliban and militarily decapitating the latter’s command center in Baluchistan. As U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry put it in his leaked November cables to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, "[M]ore troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain." Instead of seeking to cut off the Taliban’s support, the U.S. is actually partnering with the Pakistani military to win over the Taliban. And, as an inducement, it has upped the annual aid for Pakistan for next fiscal year to $3.2 billion – a historic high.

Even if the Obama administration managed to bring down violence in Afghanistan by making a deal with the Taliban, that would only strengthen the militia’s cause, besides keeping the Taliban intact as a fighting force with active ties to the Pakistani military. Such a tactical gain would exact serious costs on regional and international security by keeping the AfPak region as the epicenter of a growing transnational terrorism scourge and upsetting civilian reconstruction in Afghanistan, where India has emerged as one of the largest bilateral aid donors.

Regrettably, the Obama administration is falling prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: the pursuit of narrow objectives without much regard for the interests of friends. It seems determined to save face even if the United States ultimately loses the Afghan war.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/15/surge-bribe-and-run/

U.S. policy drift on Afpak

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The Dangers of Policy
Myopia

Brahma Chellaney

Mint, February 11,
2010

It may be the lack of a real opposition in the country that
allows the government to make abrupt shifts in foreign policy under external
persuasion without so much as offering a reasoned explanation to the Indian
public for the switch.

India first fell in line on Afghanistan at the London
conference, organized principally to gain an international stamp of approval for
U.S. President Barack Obama’s strategy to negotiate a deal with the “moderate”
Taliban  (as if there can be moderates in an Islamist
militia that enforces medieval practices). The external affairs minister
returned from London saying India was
willing to give that strategy a try.

Soon thereafter, New Delhi
announced it was resuming dialogue with Pakistan at the foreign secretary
level. What prompted New Delhi
to do that? Mum is the word. What has Pakistan done or delivered on the
anti-terror front to deserve this gesture? The answer: nothing. Yet, once again,
dialogue has been delinked from terrorism, as if the Indian leadership has
learned nothing from the Sharm-el-Sheikh goof.

Government decisions anchored neither in a well-thought-out
strategy nor in principles can only undermine national interests. No sooner had
New Delhi announced its U-turn on Pakistan than Washington upped the annual U.S.
aid for Islamabad from the next fiscal year to $3.2 billion — a historic high. What
Obama is providing Pakistan
in one year is exactly the amount one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, gave Pakistan over
six years. Yet New Delhi
has not made a peep.

It was left to an ex-U.S. senator,
Larry Pressler, to urge India
to speak up on the dangerous drift in Washington’s
Afpak strategy, including propping up Pakistan with generous aid and lethal-arms
transfers. “When the U.S.
leaves Afghanistan, India will have a Pakistan
‘on steroids’ next door and a Taliban state to deal with in Afghanistan,” according to
Pressler.

With Obama pushing for a deal with the Pakistan-backed
Afghan Taliban, Islamabad
already is feeling vindicated.  Obama is
sending an additional 30,000 U.S.
troops not to militarily rout the Taliban but to strike a deal with the enemy
from a position of strength. As his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has admitted,
the aim of the surge is to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, not to
beat back the insurgency.

But as
U.S. Ambassador Karl
Eikenberry has put it in his leaked November cables to Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, “More troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan
sanctuaries remain.” Yet,
Washington already is holding indirect talks
with the Afghan militia’s shura, or
top council, whose members are holed up in Quetta,
capital of Pakistan’s
sprawling Baluchistan province. The talks have
been conducted through the Pakistani, Saudi and Afghan intelligence agencies. McChrystal has cited Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates as a possible
venue for formal talks.

The more sensible thing to do would be to dismantle the
Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Afghan
Taliban and militarily decapitate the latter’s command center in Baluchistan. But Obama has not hidden his intent to end
the U.S.
war before he comes up for reelection in 2012. Indeed, as if to hearten the Afghan Taliban and their
sponsors, the Pakistani military, he has reiterated July 2011 as the
timeline for a gradual U.S.
military withdrawal to begin.

To facilitate his pursuit of such narrow interests, Obama
has been pressuring India
to come on board. And to rationalize the planned Faustian bargain with the
Taliban, the White House has drawn a specious distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban and sought to discriminate
between “moderate” Taliban and those that rebuff deal-making. So, McChrystal classifies the
thuggish Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as a moderate because he is “most likely to cut a
deal.”

The Afghan Taliban
leadership — with an elaborate command-and-control structure oiled by
petrodollars from Arab sheikhdoms and proceeds from opium trade — operates from
the comfort of sanctuaries in Pakistan.
Fathered by Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence and midwifed by the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency in 1994, the Taliban rapidly emerged as a Frankenstein’s monster. Yet
President Bill Clinton’s administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension
to power in Kabul
in 1996 and turned a blind eye as that militia, in league with the ISI,
fostered narcoterrorism and swelled the ranks of the Afghan war alumni waging
transnational terrorism.

With 9/11,
however, the chickens came home to roost. In declaring war on the Taliban in
October 2001, U.S.
policy came full circle. Now, desperate to save a faltering military campaign, U.S. policy is coming another full circle as Washington advertises its readiness to strike a deal with
the Quetta shura.

India,
which is on the front lines of the global fight against international
terrorism, is likely to bear the brunt of the blowback of Obama’s Afpak
strategy, just as it came under terrorist siege as a consequence of the
Reagan-era U.S. policies in that belt. A Talibanized Pakistan with a Taliban
government in Afghanistan would encourage every violent
Islamic group that can inflict mass casualties on civilians in India.

The U.S., separated
by a cushion of thousands of miles, thinks it can get away by playing dangerous
games in the Afpak belt. But as a friend, India
should be openly advising the U.S.
against seeking to unwittingly repeat the very mistakes of past American
policy that have come to haunt Western and Indian security. That’s what friends are for.
To toe the U.S.
line on Afpak deferentially
is to become an accessory in the current lurch toward disaster.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic
studies at the Centre for Policy Research.

Cyberwar: A New Asymmetrical Frontier

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China’s Cyber-Warriors

(c) Project Syndicate, 2010

The world now accepts that protecting our atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere – the “global commons” – is the responsibility of all countries. The same norm must apply to cyberspace, which is critical to our everyday life, economic well-being, and security.

At a time when cyber attacks are increasing worldwide, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was right to declare that an attack on one nation’s computer networks “can be an attack on all.” Indeed, the attacks are a reminder that, as a new part of the global commons, cyberspace already has come under threat.

Cyberspace must be treated, along with outer space, international waters, and international airspace, as property held in common for the good of all. And, like ocean piracy and airplane hijacking, cyber-crime cannot be allowed to go unpunished if we are to safeguard our common assets and collective interests.

Naming China among a handful of countries that have stepped up Internet censorship, Clinton warned that “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.” Her statement, with its allusion to the Cold War-era Iron Curtain, amounted to an implicit admission that the central assumption guiding US policy on China since the 1990’s – that assisting China’s economic rise would usher in greater political openness there – has gone awry.

The strategy of using market forces and the Internet to open up a closed political system simply is not working. Indeed, the more economic power China has accumulated, the more adept it has become in extending censorship to cyberspace.

If anything, China has proven that a country can blend control, coercion, and patronage to stymie the Internet’s politically liberalizing elements. Through discreet but tough controls, Beijing pursues a policy of wai song, nei jin – relaxed on the outside, vigilant internally.

Google is now crying foul over “ a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China.” But, despite itscorporate motto – “Don’t be evil” – Google itself was instrumental in aiding online censorship in China, having custom-built a search engine that purges all references and Web sites that the Chinese government considers inappropriate. Now Google itself has become a victim of China’s growing cyber prowess, in the same way that appeasement of Hitler boomeranged onto France and Britain.

China deploys tens of thousands of “ cyber police” to block Web sites, patrol cyber-cafes, monitor the use of cellular telephones, and track down Internet activists. But the threat to the new global commons comes not from what China does domestically. Rather, it comes from the way in which the know-how that China has gained in fashioning domestic cyber oversight is proving invaluable to it in its efforts to engage in cyber intrusion across its frontiers.

Canadian researchers have discovered a vast Chinese surveillance system called “GhostNet,” which can compromise computers in organizations abroad through booby-trapped e-mail messages that automatically scan and transfer documents to a digital storage facility in China. This is what happened when computers of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, were attacked last year.

India’s national security adviser recently complained that his office was targeted yet again by hackers. “People seem to be fairly sure it was the Chinese,” he said. Officials in Germany, Britain, and the US have acknowledged that hackers believed to be from China also have broken into their government and military networks.

The state-sponsored transnational cyber threat is at two levels. The first is national, with the hackers largely interested in two objectives. One is to steal secrets and gain an asymmetrical advantage over another country. Cyber intrusion in peacetime allows the prowler to read the content and understand the relative importance of different computer networks so that it knows what to disable in a conflict situation. The other objective is commercial: to pilfer intellectual property.

The second level of cyber threat is against chosen individuals. The most common type of intrusion is an attempt to hack into e-mail accounts. The targets also can face Trojan-horse attacks by e-mail intended to breach their computers and allow the infiltrators to corrupt or transfer files remotely.

To be sure, if a cyber attack is camouflaged, it is not easy to identify the country from which it originated. Through the use of so-called “false-flag espionage” and other methods, attacks can be routed through the computers of a third country. Just as some Chinese pharmaceutical firms exported to Africa spurious medicines with “Made in India” labels – a fact admitted by the Chinese government – some Chinese hackers are known to have routed their cyber intrusion through computers in Russia, Iran, Cuba, and other countries.

But, like their comrades in the pharmaceutical industry, such hackers tend to leave telltale signs. Then there are many cases in which the attacks have originated directly from China.

It seems unlikely that these hackers, especially those engaged in cyber espionage, pilferage, and intimidation, are private individuals with no links to the Chinese government. It is more likely that they are tied to the People’s Liberation Army. In war, this irregular contingent of hackers would become the vanguard behind which the PLA takes on the enemy. Systematic cyber attacks constitute a new frontier of asymmetrical warfare at a time when the world already confronts other unconventional threats, including transnational terrorism.

With national security and prosperity now dependent on the safekeeping of cyberspace, cybercrime must be effectively countered as an international priority. If not, cyberspace will become the new global-commons battlefield.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
http://www.project-syndicate.org
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A rising power hides behind the poor

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A Smoking Dragon in Sheep’s Clothing

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

International Herald Tribune, January 14, 2010

NEW DELHI — China presents itself as a schizophrenic power: a developing country on select international issues, but in other matters a rising superpower with new muscular confidence that supposedly is in the same league as the United States.

At the recent Copenhagen climate-change summit, China was the former: It loudly emphasized its membership in the developing world and quietly used poor countries, especially from Africa, to raise procedural obstacles in the negotiations.

Make no mistake: China, the world’s largest polluter whose carbon emissions are growing at the fastest rate, was the principal target at Copenhagen. But China cleverly deflected pressure by hiding behind small, poor countries and forging a negotiating alliance with India and two other major developing countries, Brazil and South Africa, who together are known as the BASIC bloc.

China escaped without making a binding commitment on carbon-emissions cuts, at least for now. But carbon-light India, with per-capita emissions just 26 percent of the world average, undercut its interest by getting bracketed with the world’s largest polluter.

Let’s be clear: On climate change, trade liberalization, currency and related issues, China — despite its emergence as a financial and trade Goliath — defines itself as a developing country and expediently seeks to join hands with poor nations so it can shield practices like manipulating the value of its currency, the renminbi, maintaining an abnormally high trade surplus, restricting goods manufactured by foreign companies in China from entering its markets, and continuing to bring on line two new coal-fired power plants every week.

But on political and security issues, it sees itself as without a peer in Asia, and is greatly enthused by the idea of a U.S-China “Group of Two.”

If a U.S.-China global diarchy were needed on any issue, it is on countering accelerated global warming. But on that issue, as Copenhagen revealed, China is not the self-touted rising superpower but a scheming power that uses poor states as a front to obstruct progress through procedural wrangling.

To impede decision-making, it sent only a vice foreign minister to meetings set for the level of heads of state. And even though it hid behind the developing nations, Western leaders did blow its cover after the summit, with the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, taking the lead to call it the principal wrecker at Copenhagen.

With climate talks set to resume this year, India has to learn the lesson from its folly at Copenhagen in joining hands with the wrong power. With its carbon-intensive, manufacturing-based economy, China’s per-capita carbon emissions are four times higher than India’s. China now is responsible for 24 percent of global carbon emissions with 19.8 percent of the world population, but India’s current contribution does not match even half its population size.

China also rejects India’s approach that per-capita emission levels and historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases should form the objective criteria for carbon mitigation. China, as the world’s back factory, wants a different formula that marks down carbon intensity linked to export industries.

How much it suits China to be seen in the same class as India on carbon issues than with its real polluting peer, the United States, was made clear by the hurried post-Copenhagen telephone call the Chinese foreign minister made to his Indian counterpart to emphasize continuing Sino-Indian collaboration. But when it comes to global or Asian geopolitics, China insists India (like Japan) is in a junior league.

New Delhi can be sure that when criteria for mitigation action is defined in renewed negotiations, China will work to unduly burden India by insisting that weight should be given to elements other than per-capita emission levels and historic contributions. Having unwittingly aided the Chinese game-plan in Copenhagen, India needs to embark on a correction course.

More broadly, the post-Copenhagen Western attacks on China suggest that Beijing is likely to find it increasingly hard in the future to blunt criticism of its policies and practices by jumping on the developing world’s bandwagon or by claiming to be entitled to a bit of slack as a developing country. After all, China’s practices are hurting poor and rich countries alike.

By keeping its currency ridiculously undervalued and flooding the world markets with artificially cheap goods, China has emerged as a global economic power, with its foreign-exchange coffers overflowing. But its large-scale dumping of goods has throttled competition from other developing countries and added to the economic woes in the developed world by undercutting fiscal stimulus efforts.

Worse, as the chairman of India’s largest engineering company recently complained, China is “systematically killing” manufacturing in India and other developing countries.

The serious global recession has made such unfair or assertive practices less acceptable.

Copenhagen thus was a turning point in that respect. China, the world’s largest and longest-surviving autocracy that still flouts international norms on trade, human rights and currency, is likely to come under greater pressure to fall in line or be seen as a self-serving power whose interests are at odds with the rest of the world — both developed and developing.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of “On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications.”

(c) International Herald Tribune and New York Times.

Dragon steps beyond the Great Wall

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What China needs now
is political modernization

Brahma Chellaney
Economic Times, December 20, 2009

SIX DECADES after it was founded, the People’s Republic
of China
has emerged as a major global player. In fact, China’s
rise in one generation as a world power under authoritarian rule has come to
epitomise the qualitative reordering of power in Asia
and the world. As the 2009 assessment of US intelligence agencies predicted, China is
“poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other
country.” 

    The ascent of China, while a symbol of the ongoing global
power shifts, has been accentuated by major geopolitical developments — from
the unravelling of the Soviet Union that eliminated a mighty empire to China’s north
and west, to the manner the American colossus has stumbled after the
triumphalism of the 1990s. China’s
economy has expanded more than 13-fold over the last 30 years. Consequently,
its state-owned corporate behemoths are frenetically buying foreign firms,
technologies and resources. Add to the picture its rapidly swelling
foreign-exchange coffers, which now total over $2.1 trillion. Beijing thus is well-positioned
geopolitically to further expand its influence.

    China
also became militarily powerful even before it sought to become economically
strong.

    China’s economic rise, however, owes a lot to
the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but
instead to integrate Beijing
with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign
investment and trade. That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful
impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Myanmar from the late 1980s — to
pursue a penal approach centred on sanctions.

    Also, without
the expansion in US-Chinese trade and financial relations, China’s growth
would have been much harder. Its phenomenal economic success has been
illustrated by its emergence with the world’s biggest trade surplus, largest
foreign-currency reserves and highest steel production. Today, having vaulted
past Germany to become the
world’s biggest exporter, China
is set to displace Japan
as the world’s No 2 economy.

    In today’s
context, the single biggest factor aiding Chinese foreign policy and currency
manipulation is US
dependence on large capital inflows from China. The US-China relationship
has a deeper base than US-India relations. From being allies of convenience in
the second half of the Cold War, they have gradually emerged as partners tied
by interdependence. Just as the beleaguered US
economy cannot do without continuing capital inflows from China, the
American market is the lifeline of the Chinese export juggernaut. America indeed depends on Chinese surpluses to
finance its supersized budget deficits, while Beijing
depends on its huge exports to America
both to sustain its high economic growth and subsidize its military
modernization.

    It was thus no
surprise that US President
George W. Bush left the White House with a solid China-friendly legacy, best
illustrated by the manner in which he ignored the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and
showed up at the Beijing Olympics. It isn’t a surprise either that his
successor, Barack Obama, has gone further by demoting human rights and by
emphasizing economic, environmental and security relations with China. Today,
there is talk even of a US-China diarchy — a G-2 — ruling the world.

    Obama indeed
seems fixated on the very country whose rapidly accumulating power and
muscle-flexing threaten Asian stability. The new catchphrase coined by US
Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, “strategic reassurance,” signals an
American intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions. China’s primacy
in the Obama foreign policy has become unmistakable even though the president,
soon after assuming office, invited then Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso as
his first foreign guest at the White House.

    US policy has either encouraged some of Beijing’s international actions (such as China’s first-ever deployment of a naval task in
the Indian Ocean rim under the anti-piracy banner) or turned a blind eye to
some others (including the growing Chinese economic and strategic presence in Africa). China’s
covetous hunt for oil and other resources in Africa,
however, has helped portray it as the new colonial power in that continent,
leading to a backlash in some areas. Emulating Japan
and the US in the earlier
decades, China
is underpinning its commodity outreach through financial muscle by offering
soft loans to primary-commodity producers. Through such aid diplomacy, China has won access to key resources — from
gold in Bolivia, to coal in Indonesia, to nickel in the Philippines and Myanmar,
to oil in Ecuador and Indonesia, to copper in Chile, and to gas in Myanmar. China is already the world’s
largest consumer of iron ore, aluminium, steel, copper and cement.

    For more than
three decades, China
has driven its remarkable economic growth by becoming the world’s back factory,
exporting low-value products across the globe. In the process, it has built up
a mammoth trade surplus. However, China is now reaching the point
where this approach can no longer continue to deliver high returns. Besides
moving to higher-value productivity, China needs to reduce its reliance
on exports by stoking domestic consumption.

    Sustaining China’s
economic miracle demands a dynamic, continually evolving, forward-looking
approach. More broadly, political modernization, not economic modernization, is
the central challenge staring at China. If it is to build and
sustain a great power capacity by 2030, it has to avoid a political hard
landing.

    Given China’s
territorial size, population (a fifth of the human race) and economic dynamism,
few can question or grudge its right to be a world power. China can also be a positive influence in Asia. But it can just as easily become the biggest
geopolitical problem. China’s
rise thus presents both an opportunity and a threat.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies,
Centre for Policy Research.