Category Archives: International Security

If engagement has helped create a more-open China, does it make sense to apply different standards to Russia?

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Remember the China lesson

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times

Each visit to China is a reminder of the power of global liberalizing influences. China has come a long way since the Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy activists nearly two decades ago. It has opened up to the extent that it hosted this month an Asia-Europe conference of nongovernmental organizations and scholars that focused in several of its sessions on the global challenges of democratization and human rights.

The old mind-set and suspicion of outsiders, of course, haven’t disappeared. After all, power rests with the same party and system responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and other state-induced disasters and political witch hunts.

That the Communist Party continues to monopolize power despite its past gory excesses indeed is remarkable, if not unprecedented in modern world history. This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. Yet, the China of today is a far cry from the Mao Zedong era or even the Deng Xiaoping period when reforms coincided with brutal political suppression that Tiananmen Square came to symbolize.

What this country has achieved in the last generation in terms of economic modernization and the opening of minds is truly exceptional.

The state’s continuing repressive impulse, however, is mirrored in the tightly controlled domestic media (which, for example, was ordered not to deviate from official accounts in reporting the recent scandal over contaminated infant formula), the pervasive security apparatus and the brutal crackdown of the monk-led uprising across the vast Tibetan plateau.

Since the Tibet unrest flared in March, Beijing has allowed only a small group of foreign journalists to visit the plateau — that too on a Foreign Ministry-guided tour. China also remains highly intolerant of Han dissent, especially of any attempt to challenge the one-party rule.

This shows that although China has moved from being a totalitarian state to an authoritarian state, some things haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some other things have changed for the worse, such as the whipping up of nationalism and turning it into the legitimating credo of the communist rule.

In fact, relentless attempts to bend reality to the illusions that the state blithely propagates risk turning China into a modern-day Potemkin state.

Still, with the wearing away of the hukou system that tied citizens to their place of birth, Chinese can now relocate within the country, enjoy property rights, travel overseas, make use of the latest communications technologies and do other things that were unthinkable a generation ago. Indeed, the biggest change has been in the people’s thinking, reflected in a greater readiness to express oneself freely and shape one’s own destiny.

China’s opening up owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after Tiananmen Square but instead to try 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 Burma — to pursue a penal approach centered on sanctions — in the period following the ruthless suppression of prodemocracy Burmese protests 10 months before the Tiananmen Square killings.

Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China internationally, the result would not only have been a less-prosperous and less-open China, but also a more-paranoid and destabilizing China. Of course, the contradictory approaches were driven by the West’s commercial interests.

Yet, with a new chill setting in on relations between the West and Russia, the lesson from the correct choice made on China is in danger of getting lost. The rhetoric in some quarters in America and Europe for a tougher stance against Moscow is becoming shriller.

Little thought has been given to how the West lost Russia, a now-resurgent power that had during its period of decline in the 1990s eagerly sought to cozy up to the U.S. and Europe. Instead, turning a blind eye to the way the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is being expanded right up to Russia’s front yard and the U.S.-led action in engineering Kosovo’s self-proclamation of independence last February, the new focus is on how to punish Moscow for recently intervening in Georgia and sponsoring the self-declaration of independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The foreign policy-centered first debate between Barack Obama and John McCain stood out for the way each of the two U.S. presidential candidates spit fire on Russia, with not a single question being asked about an increasingly assertive China. It is as if the U.S., not content with setting up military bases and a missile-defense system in Russia’s periphery and seeking to encroach on Russia’s historical dependencies and protectorates, seems intent on rediscovering Moscow as an adversary.

A self-fulfilling prophesy that ushers in a second cold war can only damage long-term U.S. interests. Europe, whose interests are closely tied to peace and cooperation with Moscow, is sadly split and adrift on Russia.

If today there is a push for a policy of containment, it is not against China but against Russia. Even on the democracy issue, it is Russia, not China, that is the target of constant hectoring.

U.S. President George W. Bush, in fact, is leaving the White House in his father’s footsteps — with a China-friendly legacy. Nothing illustrates this better than the way he ignored the bloody suppression of the most-powerful Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule since 1959 and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. It is thus little surprise that President Hu Jintao, in a telephonic conversation with Bush this month, praised the "good momentum" in U.S.-China relations established during the Bush presidency.

China’s rise has been aided by good fortune on multiple strategic fronts. First, Beijing’s reform process benefited from good timing, coming as it did at the start of globalization. Second, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse delivered an immense strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990s was China’s gain. And third, there has been a succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades — a period that significantly has coincided with China’s ascension.

Whether Obama or McCain wins next month’s presidential election, America will continue to have closer economic and political engagement with China than with, say, India, the latest Indo-U.S. nuclear deal notwithstanding.

Today, the American economy is inextricably linked with China. The financial meltdown has only increased U.S. reliance on Chinese capital inflows, thus adding to China’s leverage, even if a possible American recession hits Chinese exports. With Chinese foreign-exchange reserves swelling by one-third in the past year to a world record $1.906 trillion at the end of September, China is better positioned than any other major economy to weather the current global financial crisis.

Any U.S.-led attempt to contain Russia may mesh well with China’s ambitions but can hardly contribute to international security. If engagement has helped create a more-open China, does it make sense to apply different standards to Russia, with Moscow’s 13-year effort to join the World Trade Organization now in jeopardy and the U.S.-Russian nuclear deal put on indefinite hold by Washington?

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

 
The Japan Times: Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008
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The world clearly is at a turning point

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Defining moment in world history

 

Long touted as the twin answer to all ills, democracy and markets today are under serious strain.

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Japan Times, October 16, 2008 

Rising geopolitical risks have been underscored by today’s multiple global crises — from a severe global credit crunch and financial tumult to serious energy and food challenges.

Add to that the international failure to stem the spreading scourge of terrorism and the specter of a renewed Cold War arising from the deterioration in relations between the West and Russia since Moscow’s August retaliatory military intervention in Georgia and subsequent recognition of the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some portray as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

The world clearly is at a turning point, underscored by the ongoing tectonic shifts in political and economic power. Tinkering won’t help because the global crises cry out for fundamental changes in international rules and institutions.

That was the broad conclusion at the Oct. 6-8 World Policy Conference in Evian, France, attended by a number of heads of state or government, policymakers and intellectuals, including this writer. The common theme in many of the presentations was that the grave challenges the world faces today demand major fixes, including the revamping of the institutional structure.

If existing institutions are not adapted to the new power realities in the world, greater instability is likely to ensue. As French President Nicolas Sarkozy pointed out, a 21st-century world is saddled with 20th-century institutions. Consequently, there is great uncertainty over how to address the pressing challenges.

In addition to the imperative to enlarge the U.N. Security Council and the Group of Eight, the failing Bretton Woods system for governing monetary relations needs to be overhauled. The various crises have shown, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev highlighted, that no single power or institution can claim exclusive rights to set the rules.

Changing the international institutional structure, however, is no easy task. The existing institutions were born of crises and now represent entrenched interests of some players. It will be difficult to reform or replace them until a serious, sustained crisis makes change inescapable. The financial meltdown could be one such crisis that facilitates an overhaul of the Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund at a time when Asia and the Middle East have emerged as the world’s main creditors.

As the futile efforts to reform the Security Council for more than two decades illustrate, revamping any institution is a Herculean task. Even reforming the International Energy Agency is proving daunting. Meantime, great powers continue to impose their will on weaker nations or limit their freedom of action.

For long, but especially since the end of the Cold War, democracy and markets have been touted as the twin answer to all ills, nationally and regionally. Today, both have come under serious strain.

Democracy is in retreat globally after the successes of the 1990s in spreading political freedoms to Eastern Europe and overturning dictatorships in Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. In fact, China’s dramatic rise as a world power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The financial crisis, for its part, has helped turn free-market principles on their head.

After having dispensed one prescription to all — liberalize, privatize and emulate the Anglo-American practices of financial and corporate governance — the U.S. has taken the lead to precipitously embrace principles of financial socialism in the current crisis. The U.S. has swung from implicit faith in the power of markets to bailing out its troubled financial colossuses in a manner that seeks to keep the profits in private hands but nationalize the losses.

By palming off losses to the masses, the U.S. has not only backed away from its own model of capitalism, but also set in motion new practices that some European economies have been to quick to emulate. Nothing better illustrates the troubling turn of events than London’s use of an anti-terrorism law to freeze the British assets of an Icelandic bank.

The U.S.-government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bailout of AIG and moves to partially nationalize some banks mark the end of America’s trust-the-markets capitalism. Henceforth, the U.S. will have no face to preach laissez-faire capitalism.

In fact, the global financial mayhem has resulted from the excesses of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, symbolized by unbridled risk-taking, which created a liquidity problem before manifesting itself as a solvency problem.

The lesson: High living on borrowed Asian money is just not sustainable.

The gap between principle and practice, unfortunately, has also extended to the political-diplomatic realm. The West, for example, has supported the inviolability of international borders while contradictorily backing the right of self-determination.

Having sponsored Kosovo’s self-proclamation of independence from Serbia in February 2008, the U.S. and some of its allies now find themselves in the awkward position of opposing the right of self-determination of the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — today self-declared independent entities under Russian protection. It is as if the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depends on which great power sponsors the action.

The present global fault lines and crises carry significant security risks. The most pressing challenges today are global in nature and thus demand international responses and solutions. Yet the representational deficit of the existing institutions and their inadequacy to play an effective and forward-looking approach has become glaring.

The events of September 2008 that set in motion the financial meltdown and now threaten global recession have proven no less significant than 9/11.

While 9/11 involved terrorist attacks on symbols of U.S. power, the events since last month are an insidious assault on U.S. financial might, which helps underpin America’s global strategic heft. Along with the other crises, they signal an end to the leadership role the U.S. has played economically and politically since World War II ended. The multiple crises are proof that America, with its own internal mess, is no longer able to play global guardian.

Until a new world order emerges, we will continue to live, to quote Sarkozy, in "a dysfunctional world with outdated set of rules." Only revamped institutions and new rules can deal with the root causes of the present crises, not just the symptoms.

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

The Japan Times
(C) All rights reserved

The Hype on the Rise of China and India

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Is the India and China hype true?

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times
 

Today it has become commonplace to speak of India and China in the same breadth as two emerging great powers challenging the two-century-old Western domination of the world.

How justifiable is the hype on their rise? The future will not belong to China and India merely because they have a huge landmass and together make up more than a third of humanity. Being large in size and population is not necessarily an asset.

In history, small, strategically geared states have wielded global power. The colonial powers that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries were led by small Britain and included tiny Portugal and the Netherlands.

For analysts, it is tempting to make long-term linear forecasts on the basis of current trends. But such projections in the past have rarely come right. Remember the popular concerns in the United States in the 1980s that a fast-rising Japan threatened America’s industrial might?

The reason why such predictions have come wrong is that statistical probability — the sole tool in forecasting — has little application in strategic analyses.

The straight-line projections on the economic growth of China and India may be too one-dimensional.

Goldman Sachs, for instance, forecasts that China’s economy will surpass the U.S. economy around 2035 and that India will do so a decade later.

This could happen but it is hardly certain. To be sure, economic growth is essential to underpin political and social stability. It is doubtful the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power will survive without it continuing to deliver high economic growth. But such growth in any country hinges on several factors, endogenous and exogenous. One factor beyond the control of policymakers in India and China that could slow economic growth and create major policy challenges for them in the years ahead, for example, is climate change.

China and India, of course, have history on their side. These two were the world’s largest economies for centuries up to 1820, after which they went into sharp decline due to their failure to catch up with the industrial revolution and by making themselves easy prey for European colonial interventions.

But world history is replete with instances of small states made powerful by farsighted policies and big states unraveled by weak, unimaginative leaders.

China certainly has a more forward-looking leadership than India, even though Chinese leaders, lacking popular legitimacy, tend to be more insecure. India has to pay a "democracy tax" that weighs down its decision-making and slows its economic development.

When one examines natural endowments — such as arable land, water resources, mineral deposits, hydrocarbons and wetlands — the picture that emerges is not exactly gratifying for India and China in order for them to achieve enduring great-power capacity. Bounteous natural capital is critical for a country to sustain national strength over the long run.

India and China together have more than 35 percent of the global population — or eight times the number of inhabitants in the U.S. — but just 60 percent more usable arable land than America.

The two giants would have had a better balance between land size, population and natural resources had their populations been much smaller. But even as India still adds nearly a million people a month despite a slowing fertility rate, some Indians cheer the "demographic dividend" that awaits their youthful country while the developed world ages. Failure has come to be identified as a success.

At a time when the world is confronting an energy crisis — symbolized both by the spiraling price of crude oil and gas, and the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — India and China stick out for their fast-rising dependency on energy imports and growing contribution to carbon-dioxide emissions. Their energy dilemma causes a growing burden and threatens to slow down their economic rise.

Constraints on resources are likely to become pronounced as more and more Indians and Chinese gain income to embrace modern comforts in everyday life — from gasoline-fueled transport to water-guzzling gadgets like washing machines and dishwashers.

The global demand for resources is set to soar, along with their prices. But unlike the choices that the old economic giants had in their path of development — such as the one exemplified by the shift from scarce timber to abundant coal in 18th-century Britain — the emerging economic giants can avail themselves of no substitutes for some of the resources whose present demand is beginning to lag availability.

Of all the resources, the one with the greatest strategic bearing on the future prospects of India and China is fresh water.

Climate change will have a significant impact on the availability and flow of river waters from the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands, making water a key element in the national-security calculus of China and India. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia’s great rivers is likely to be accelerated by global warming.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle over water resources.

Having entered an era of perennial water shortages that are likely to parallel, in terms of per capita water availability, the scarcity in the Middle East, India and China face the prospect that their rapid economic modernization could stall due to inadequate water resources. This prospect will become a reality if their industrial, agricultural and household demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace.

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

China’s ambitious interbasin and inter-river water transfer projects in the vast Tibetan plateau, and its upstream damming of the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and other rivers, threaten India’s well-being. If President Hu Jintao — a hydrologist by training who has served as party secretary in Tibet — begins China’s long-pending project to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra northward to the parched Yellow River, it would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh.

Water is likely to become a cause of Sino-Indian tensions, reopening old wounds and bringing Tibet to center stage.

Asia’s economic rise and the ensuing shifts in international power equations foreshadow a world characterized by a greater distribution of power. But the hype on China and India needs to be tempered by geopolitical realism centered on a careful assessment of their long-term potential to build and sustain comprehensive power.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of the best-selling "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

 

The Japan Times: Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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U.S. Policy on Burma

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El celo de la primera dama

LA VANGUARDIA, May 31, 2008

Por Brahma Chellaney, profesor de estudios estratégicos del Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi:

Un desastre natural suele ser ocasión propicia para apartar a un lado las diferencias políticas y mostrar compasión. No obstante, la Birmania devastada por el ciclón, gobernada por elites militares ultranacionalistas y rapaces, temerosas de sanciones de parte de Occidente, se ha visto presionada para franquear sus áreas devastadas a la ayuda humanitaria o bien enfrentarse a una intervención armada de signo asimismo humanitario.

La politización de la ayuda ha oscurecido el papel de una protagonista cuyos esfuerzos han contribuido a ejercer mayores presiones sobre los generales birmanos. En cuanto el ciclón Nargis,con vientos de hasta 190 kilómetros por hora, devastó el delta del Irawadi, la esposa del presidente Bush, Laura, lanzó públicamente improperios contra los aislados gobernantes birmanos. En una comparecencia sin precedentes en la sala de prensa de la Casa Blanca – dominio tradicional del presidente y del secretario de Estado- Laura Bush peroró sobre política exterior y acusó a la junta birmana del elevado número de víctimas del ciclón. Y en diciembre, Laura Bush dijo en Nueva Delhi que “India, uno de los principales socios comerciales de Birmania, ya no vende armas a la junta”, para sorpresa de la audiencia.

A decir verdad, siendo China un suministrador de armas de confianza desde hace 20 años y pudiendo abastecerse de armas a través de Singapur y Rusia, la junta apenas precisa de armamento indio. India, en cualquier caso, tampoco llevará la contraria a la primera dama estadounidense, imbuida de furor moral y religioso.

Por otra parte, no es difícil optar por la prédica ética contra Birmania, uno de los países del mundo más endebles y en situación más crítica. Sancionar a Birmania de vez en cuando se había convertido en un pasatiempo tan dilecto al presidente Bush que sólo 24 horas antes del ciclón anunció otra tanda de sanciones. Ninguna instancia mundial, sin embargo, ha llegado a sugerir medidas penales (moderadas) contra China por su permanente represión brutal en Tíbet, pues las sanciones acarrearían pérdida de empleos y otros inconvenientes económicos a Occidente.

De hecho, incitado por su esposa, Bush ha firmado más medidas para sancionar a Birmania en los últimos cinco años que contra cualquier otro país. La cruzada de Laura Bush contra la junta militar que se considera a sí misma defensora de la unidad e identidad cultural birmana, predominantemente budista, obedece a la inspiración encarnada en algunas iglesias cristianas que cuentan con notables minorías étnicas, aparte de una reunión mantenida al parecer en aquel país con una víctima cristiana de una violación. En cambio, tanto Laura Bush como su marido encontraron la senda despejada en relación con una intervención militar en la política de países vecinos de Birmania, como Bangladesh y Tailandia.

Aunque la junta militar birmana accedió al poder en 1962, las primeras sanciones estadounidenses de importancia no llegaron hasta 1997. No obstante, el punto de mira sobre Birmania se fijó con mayor precisión y fuerza bajo el mandato de Bush.

Actualmente, Birmania se halla atrapada entre las sanciones lideradas por Estados Unidos y la creciente influencia de China. Azuzado por el diablo que le pisa los talones, el país se inclina hacia el profundo mar azul de la benevolencia china.

Al tratar a Birmania como un títere en el marco de un juego geopolítico más amplio e intentar llevar al país ante el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas, la Casa Blanca no hace más que aumentar la necesidad de protección política de la junta procedente de una China dotada de poder de veto, con la consiguiente obligación de agradecer tal protección a Pekín. Muestra de ello ha sido la firma de un contrato gasista de 30 años de vigencia.

Las iniciativas estadounidenses no sólo han obligado a Birmania a desplazarse del no alineamiento al alineamiento, sino que han motivado una dependencia mayor de la política estadounidense respecto de Pekín en lo concerniente a Birmania.

Como en el caso de Corea del Norte, Bush externaliza alegremente en China una parte de su política con relación a Birmania. Sin embargo, la política estadounidense acusa también el peso del celo misionero de Laura Bush sobre Birmania. Lejos de mejorar la situación de los derechos humanos en el país, este miope activismo ha contribuido a reforzar a la junta. La amenaza de una invasión por causas humanitarias de Birmania hiede a recurso desesperado y apunta a un deseo de valerse de la herramienta humanitaria para provocar un cambio político.

Ahora resulta que una mujer no electa ni titular de responsabilidad alguna secuestra la política de Estados Unidos para promover paradójicamente elecciones libres y responsabilidad pública en Birmania. Y el doblemente electo y renacido cristiano Bush da fe de hallarse bajo la influencia de su esposa, como se constata mediante la expresión “Laura y yo” en su último anuncio de sanciones contra Birmania.

Pero, como dice la Biblia, “no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver”.

(c) LA VANGUARDIA

Eastward movement of global power and influence

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The Orient Express

Brahma Chellaney

May 29, 2008 India Today

 

Rivals: How The Power Struggle Between China, India And Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade
by Bill Emmott
Allen Lane
Price: Rs 795, Pages: 328

The Second World: Empires And Influence In The New Global Order
by Parag Khanna
Allen Lane
Price: Rs 695, Pages: 496

The eastward movement of power and influence, once concentrated in the West, is now the subject of an increasing number of books that are coming out by the dozen. These two volumes belong to this genre.

While Bill Emmott’s focus is on the three largest Asian powers, Parag Khanna looks at the global geopolitical marketplace and determines the likely winners and losers.

Emmott’s diffidence to put forward a central thesis is more than made up for by Khanna’s boldness in sketching out the next generation of global geopolitics. They symbolise different styles and generations.

The changing global equations are reflected in new realities. These include the waning relevance of the international structures the US helped establish after its World War II triumph; the rise of Asia as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive; and greater international divisiveness, including on core global challenges.

While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar, as it had been from the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse till the end of the 1990s—a period during which America failed to fashion a new liberal world order under its direction. What we have today is a world still in transition.

The ongoing power shifts are linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. The seat of ancient civilisations and home to the majority of the world’s population, Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline in history.  Its share of the world’s economy had totalled 60 per cent in 1820, at the advent of the industrial revolution, declining sharply over the next 125 years. Today, Asia already accounts for 40 per cent of global production—a figure that could rise to 60 per cent by 2050, when three of the world’s four largest economies (China, India, the US and Japan) would be Asian.

Asia’s rise, while promoting greater international equity, need not necessarily mean the decline of the West. There is little evidence to suggest Asia is rising at the expense of the West.

The spread of prosperity will signify more stakeholders in peace and stability. The EU’s attraction, for example, lies in its readiness to share the European pie with new member-states it admits into its fold.

Shared interests entail shared responsibilities. That, in turn, promotes a greater distribution of power.

But like some other authors, Khanna and Emmott have rushed to conclude that the spread of prosperity to more countries implies the diminution of the power of the US.  American pre-eminence, Emmott writes, “will soon be over (if it is not already), and for reasons more fundamental and enduring than America’s post-Iraq weakness”. Khanna is more blunt: the moment of US supremacy is over, replaced by the imperative to “renew American competitiveness”.

According to Khanna, “America’s imperial overstretch is occurring in lockstep with its declining economic dependence, undermining the very foundation of its global leadership”.

America’s vulnerabilities can no longer be hidden. Today, the US is the world’s leading debtor and top importer of both manufactured goods and oil, and runs by far the largest current account deficit. A shift towards multipolarity is unstoppable, with the emergence of major new players. But for the next several decades, the US will easily remain the world’s most powerful state militarily and will also be the leader in scientific innovations. In 2050, the US is likely to still be influential enough to do almost anything, but not powerful enough to do everything by itself.

Emmott’s China-India-Japan theme has seemingly been inspired by this reviewer’s 2006 book, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, the first study of that strategic triangle. But Emmott’s book, contrary to its title, focuses not on the “power struggle” between these “rivals” and how that will “shape our next decade”, but on their supposed strengths and their determination to regain their historical power.

More journalistic than scholarly, the book makes desultory recommendations— half of them addressed to the US—that have little to do with its title.

Khanna’s easy-to-read, insightful book offers a rich tour of the emerging geopolitical landscape stretching from Asia and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and South America.

He sees the US, EU and China as the only great powers and clubs dozens of other countries, including India, Russia and Japan, as the new “Second World”, comprising swing-states that will determine which superpower gains the upper hand.

The geopolitics of the 21st century, he writes, will centre on the “new Big Three”—not Russia, a petrostate facing depopulation and run by the “Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy”; not the Islamic world; and not India, which he sees as lacking both clear, long-term goals and strategic appetite.

History testifies that without establishing primacy in its own neighbourhood, no country has sustained itself as a great power. But India continues to be tormented even by smaller neighbours. So Khanna’s scepticism on India may be right.

Khanna’s projected big picture appears less plausible: the Big Three will make the rules for all, and the other states will be left merely to “choose their suitors in this post-American world”. He forgets that his Big Three have interests that won’t be easy to reconcile, posing a hurdle to their rule-setting. While China wants a multipolar world and a unipolar Asia, the US wants a multipolar Asia but a unipolar world.

Despite having travelled to some 40 “Second-World” countries to research the book, Khanna speciously concludes that these states are destined to play second fiddle to the “Big Three”. He couldn’t be more wrong.

(c) India Today, 2007

An Unelected Laura Bush Holds America’s Burma Policy Hostage

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Missionary Diplomacy

 

Laura Bush’s Burma crusade, driven by a moral and religious calling, has increasingly pushed that strategically located country into China’s strategic lap while undercutting Indian interests.


 


Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 24, 2008

 

A natural calamity is usually an occasion to set aside political differences and show compassion. But after a powerful cyclone tore into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on the night of May 2-3, that isolated country — ruled by ultra-nationalistic but rapacious military elites deeply distrustful of the sanctions-enforcing West — came under mounting international pressure to open up its devastated areas to foreign aid workers and supplies or face an armed humanitarian intervention.

 

            Such threats have helped lay a tentative framework for an ASEAN-led aid operation, a middle option that is supposed to end an impasse over the Burmese regime’s refusal to allow the entry of foreign relief teams other than from the Asian states it considers friendly, including India, China, ASEAN members and Japan. But even as the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has toured the cyclone-wracked areas, the World Food Programme has brought in helicopters, and aid teams from India and other neighbouring nations continue their work, the junta still faces intense pressure from the sanctions-applying states to throw open Burma’s borders to Western relief workers.

 

The murky politics of international assistance has helped obscure the role of a key actor whose growing activism in recent years has helped turn up the heat on the Burmese generals. The increasingly outspoken Laura Bush, the first lady of the US, has emerged as the main driver of America’s Burma policy.

 

No sooner had Cyclone Nargis, packing winds up to 190 kilometres per hour, battered the Irrawaddy Delta than President George W. Bush’s wife stepped out in public to toss insults at Burma’s military rulers. In an unprecedented spectacle, the first lady showed up at the White House briefing room — normally the preserve of the president and secretary of state — and held forth on foreign policy, blaming the junta for the high death toll. The next day, as announced by Laura Bush, President Bush presided at a ceremony awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the detained leader of Burma’s democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi.

 

In the twilight of her husband’s presidency, the 61-year-old Laura Bush — a former librarian — has left no one in doubt on who directs Burma policy in Washington. In a prepared statement that she read out at the White House briefing room on May 5 before taking questions from reporters, she thanked “the European Union, Canada and Australia for joining the United States in imposing” sanctions, and went on to “appeal to China, India and Burma’s fellow ASEAN members to use their influence to encourage a democratic transition.”

 

Last December, Laura Bush caught New Delhi by surprise by announcing that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta.” To date, New Delhi has made no such announcement.

 

With China serving as a reliable weapon supplier for the past two decades and access to arms also available via Singapore and Russia, the junta has little need for India’s low-grade, mostly second-hand, arms. But New Delhi has dared not say a word in contradiction to Mrs. Bush’s statement during a December 10, 2007, video teleconference on International Human Rights Day. Who can refute a first lady whose fury on Burma flows from a moral and religious calling?

 

It is easy to play the morality game against Burma, ranked as one of the world’s critically weak states.

 

Slapping Burma with new sanctions every so often has become such a favourite Bush pastime that just one day before the cyclone struck, the president announced yet another round of punitive actions. But no one in the world has suggested any penal measure, however mild, against China for its continuing brutal repression in Tibet because sanctions would bring job losses and other economic pain to the West.

 

In fact, egged on by his wife, Bush has signed more executive orders in the past five years to penalize Burma than any other country.

 

Mrs. Bush’s crusade against the Burmese military, which sees itself as the upholder of a predominantly Buddhist Burma’s unity and cultural identity, has been inspired by three separate elements: (i) information from some of the Christian churches that have sizable ethnic-minority adherents in that country; (ii) a meeting she reputedly had with a Christian Karen rape victim; and (iii) the briefings she received from Elsie Walker Kilborne, a cousin of President Bush. By contrast, she and her husband have had little problem with the military’s intervention in politics in Burma-neighbouring Bangladesh and Thailand.

 

Such is Laura Bush’s activism that last September it was she, not the president, who telephoned Ban ki-moon and called for the UN to be more active on Burma. Earlier, in 2006, she moderated a roundtable discussion at the UN that sought to draw attention to the junta’s political repression. She has condemned the regime not just in official statements and congressional testimony, but also in two opinion articles published last year in the Wall Street Journal.

 

In an October 2007 article, titled “Stop the Terror in Burma,” she put forth her demand clearly: “Gen. Than Shwe and his deputies are a friendless regime. They should step aside to make way for a unified Burma governed by legitimate leaders. The rest of the armed forces should not fear this transition — there is room for a professional military in a democratic Burma. In fact, one of Burma’s military heroes was also a beloved champion of Burmese freedom: General Aung San, the late father of Aung San Suu Kyi.” She added: “The regime’s position grows weaker by the day. The generals’ choice is clear: The time for a free Burma is now.” In an earlier June 19, 2007, op-ed, she said: “The Burmese regime poses an increasing threat to the security of all nations.”

 

In May 2007, Mrs. Bush enlisted 16 women Senators to join her in sending a signed letter to Ban Ki-Moon calling for the U.N. to pressure the Burmese regime to release Suu Kyi. And since last year, she has repeatedly met with the UN’s special envoy for Burma, Ibrahim Gambari.

 

After her phone call to the UN secretary-general created a public stir, she said: “I think that this is sort of one of those myths that I was baking cookies and then they fell off the cookie sheet and I called Ban Ki-moon.” That comment harked back to Hillary Clinton’s famous remark during her husband’s presidency that she was not one to stay home and bake cookies.

 

This week, as the junta still refuses to accept aid from four US naval ships that have been waiting in the Bay of Bengal with 1,000 Marines, 14 helicopters, and 15,000 water containers and purifying kits on board, Laura Bush went on the Voice of America — a US Congress-funded broadcaster with a Burmese language service — to tell the regime that it has nothing to fear and that “there would be absolutely no strings attached with this aid.”

 

The unpalatable fact is that her angry denunciations right after Cyclone Nargis had struck only contributed to the junta’s resistance to allowing Western relief workers to enter, deepening the aid crisis. As the Los Angeles Times reported on May 10, 2008, quoting several critics, “the administration’s harsh comments were poorly timed and risked reinforcing the government’s suspicions of the outside world and undermining the humanitarian effort.”

 

Although the Burmese military seized power in 1962, the first substantive U.S. sanctions, tellingly, did not come until 1997, when a ban on further American investments to “develop Burma’s resources” was reluctantly clamped by President Bill Clinton. But it was only under Bush that Burma emerged as a major target of U.S. sanctions.

 

Escalating sanctions have compelled a country whose nationalism has traditionally bordered on xenophobia to increasingly rely on China, even as its rulers still suspect Chinese intentions. Today, Burma finds itself trapped between U.S.-led sanctions and growing Chinese leverage over its affairs.

 

But with the devil close on its heels, Burma — which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has labelled an “outpost of tyranny” — has moved toward the deep blue sea of Chinese “benevolence.”

 

For a resource-hungry China, Burma has proven such a treasure trove that some northern Burmese provinces today stand stripped of their high-quality tropical hardwoods and precious gemstones. Beijing also has used Burma as a dumping ground for cheap Chinese products, besides running large trade surpluses with that impoverished country.

 

Aided by Western disengagement from Burma, Chinese entrepreneurs, traders, money lenders, craftsmen and others have flocked to that country, now home to between one to two million Chinese economic migrants. With their higher living standards setting them apart from the natives, these migrants constitute Burma’s new economic class.

 

While unintentionally aiding Chinese interests, the US-led penal campaign has cost New Delhi dear, reflected in China’s setting up of listening posts and other moves in Burma that open a security flank against India. In the Bush years, India has been losing out even on commercial contracts.

 

By treating Burma as a pawn in a larger geopolitical game and seeking to drag it before the United Nations Security Council, the White House only increases the junta’s need for political protection from a veto-armed China, with the consequent Burmese imperative to reward Beijing for such defence.

 

One reward to China for stepping in twice last year to shield Burma in the Security Council has been a 30-year contract to take gas by pipeline from two offshore fields owned by an Indo-Korean consortium. The junta first withdrew the status of India’s GAIL company as the “preferential buyer” of gas from the A-1 and A-3 blocks in the Bay of Bengal and then signed a production-sharing contract with China’s state-run CNPC firm.

 

The U.S. penal measures and moves have not only forced Burma to shift from its traditional policy of nonalignment to alignment, but also driven U.S. policy to become dependent on Beijing for any movement on Burma.

 

This is apparent both from the way the US has pleaded with China this month to use all its influence to press the junta to open up the cyclone-battered areas to outside relief efforts, and from the secret mid-2007 US meeting with Burmese ministers that was held at America’s initiative in Beijing.

 

The Beijing meeting, held without prior US consultations with India, Japan and ASEAN states, came six months after China had torpedoed a Security Council draft resolution tabled by the US and Britain that called on the Burmese regime to halt military attacks on ethnic minorities, release iconic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, and begin a democratic transition. By taking China’s help to set up a meeting between its deputy assistant secretary of state and senior Burmese government representatives, the US only helped validate Beijing’s rationale for maintaining close contact with the junta.

 

Like on North Korea, Bush is blithely outsourcing to China parts of the US policy on Burma. But on Burma, US policy is also weighed down by Laura Bush’s missionary zeal.

 

Far from improving human rights in Burma, the blinkered activism has helped strengthen the military’s political grip. Recent threats of a humanitarian invasion of Burma indeed reeked of desperation, suggesting a callous willingness to employ food aid in a disaster situation to try and effect political change.

 

Today, an unelected, unaccountable woman holds US policy hostage to paradoxically promote free elections and public accountability in Burma. And her twice-elected, twice-born Christian husband — whom she persuaded to quit drinking at age 40 — attests to being under his wife’s sway through the “Laura and I” reference in his latest Burma-sanctions announcement. But as the Bible says, “There is none so blind as he who will not see.”

 

© Asian Age, 2008.

 

(Photograph at top shows Laura Bush meeting Karen and other minority-ethnic representatives from Burma at the White House, along with a U.S. congressman and an American adviser to the Karen National Union. Photograph released by the White House.)

China’s Politicization of the Beijing Olympics

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Publicity stunt on Everest

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times May 2, 2008

(Map of original Tibet as it existed up to the Chinese annexation)

NEW DELHI — As a triumphal symbol of its rule over Tibet, China is taking the Olympic torch through the "Roof of the World" to the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, which straddles the Tibetan-Nepalese border. That publicity stunt will only infuse more politics into the Games, already besmirched by China’s pressure to turn the just-concluded international torch relay into a stage-managed, security exercise to pander to its sense of self-esteem at the cost of the Olympic spirit of openness.

Taking the torch to the tallest mountain is China’s way of reinforcing its tall claim on Tibet, which it invaded in 1950 soon after the communist takeover in Beijing.

The blunt fact is that China, not just on Tibet but also on other territories, employs revisionist history to rationalize its assertive claims and ambitions. Not content that Han territorial power today is at its zenith, Beijing still seeks a Greater China.

The state openly fuels territorial nationalism, centered on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on India’s Arunachal Pradesh state — nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. And as the fairy-tale Middle Kingdom, China also claims to be the mother of all civilizations, weaving legend with history to foster an ultra-nationalistic political culture, with its leadership still steeped in opaque and paternalistic mores despite the profound changes sweeping the country.

To prevent any demonstrators sneaking in from the Nepalese side and spoiling its triumphalism atop the 8,848-meter Everest, China has pressured a politically adrift Nepal to police entry routes to the peak and deploy troops up to the 6,500-meter Camp II. Having eliminated the outer buffer with India by annexing Tibet, China now is set to expand its leverage over the inner buffer, Nepal, where the Maoists will lead the next government following elections marred by large-scale intimidation.

China specially constructed a 108-km blacktop road to Everest to take the torch to the peak, unmindful of the environmental impact of such activities in pristine areas. China’s large hydro projects in Tibet — the source of all of Asia’s major rivers except the Ganges — and its reckless exploitation of the plateau’s vast mineral resources already threaten the region’s fragile ecosystem, with Chinese officials admitting average temperatures are rising faster in Tibet than in rest of China.

The plan to take the torch to Tibet is nothing but provocative. After all, the Chinese crackdown in Tibet continues, Tibetan monasteries remain sealed off, hundreds of monks and nuns are in jail, and the vast plateau is still closed to foreigners. Yet such is the Olympics’ politicization that Beijing has extended the torch relay in Tibet into June. After ascending Everest in the coming days, the torch is to travel to Lhasa on June 19. The torch’s three-month route within China, as compared to just a five-week run through the rest of the world, shows that for the Chinese Communist Party, the Olympics are an occasion not only to showcase national achievements under its rule, but also to help win popular legitimacy for its political monopoly.

To some extent, the Olympics have never been separate from politics, especially national power and pride. But until this year, politics had not cast such a big shadow since the Soviet-bloc nations boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in reprisal to the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. As if the relay becoming the most divisive in history is not enough, China is stoking more controversy through the torch’s Everest climb and Tibet run. While continuing brutal repression in Tibet, it has made the Beijing Olympics’ success such a prestige issue that it has offered to meet the Dalai Lama’s "private representative."

Blending hardline actions with ostensible concessions has been Chinese strategy for a long time. Even as it was readying to invade India in 1962, China was suggesting conciliation.

Today, while stepping up cross-border incursions and encouraging India-bashing by its official organs, with a recent China Institute of International Strategic Studies commentary saying an "arrogant India" wants to be taught another 1962-style lesson, Beijing offers more meaningless border talks with New Delhi.

Clearly, China has appropriated the Olympic torch for its own political agenda. It never tires from lecturing to the world not to interfere in its internal affairs. Still, during the international relay, it kept interfering in the affairs of other states, wanting to be kept in the loop on the local security arrangements and insisting that pro-Tibet demonstrations not be allowed.

It even helped script some counter-demonstrations by young Chinese along the international route. While Chinese embassies arranged buses to take locally resident Chinese to relay sites, the government in Beijing sent batches of young citizens to some key overseas cities to cheer the torchbearers and wave Chinese flags.

Now a pressured Nepal has been forced to restrict expeditions to Everest in the busiest mountaineering season and station soldiers with authority to open fire as "a last resort." An American mountaineer carrying a pro-Tibet banner has already been ejected from the base camp.

All this is to ensure that not a single protester or Tibetan flag greets the torch on Everest.

Yet the reality, however unpalatable, is that the only occasions in history when Tibet was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from 1644 to 1912. When a dynasty was indeed ethnically Han, such as Ming (founded between the Yang and Qing empires), Tibet had scant connection to Chinese rulers.

For the West, Tibet is largely a symbolic issue. But for India, Tibet’s security and autonomy are tied to its well-being.

Indeed, no event in the 20th century more adversely altered India’s security calculus than the fall of Tibet, which brought Han forces to the Indian frontiers for the first time in history. Until the 1962 Chinese aggression, India had faced invading armies only from the northwestern direction of the Khyber Pass.

Now India is compelled to mass forces along its once-open and idyllic Himalayan frontiers, as China persists with its attempts to nibble at Indian territory. Add to this picture China’s refusal to clarify the frontline with India, its frenetic build up of military capabilities in Tibet, and its latent threat to fashion water as a political weapon against India by damming rivers upstream.

Autocrats, especially those reared in a secretive and suspicious culture, tend to act in ways that ultimately boomerang. Who would have thought two months ago that Tibet would flare up and come to the center of world attention, tormenting China internally, bruising its international image and casting a pall over the Beijing Olympics? The belief was that the weapon of repression was working well there. Many had already labeled Tibet a lost cause, not realizing that history tends to wreak vengeance on artificially created empires.

An Olympic torch relay paradoxically carrying the theme "Journey of Harmony," has helped shine a spotlight on China’s human rights record and the manner ultranationalism has become the legitimating credo of the world’s longest surviving autocracy.

The Chinese regime’s troubles indeed may only be beginning. After the Everest climb could come a fall.

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

The Japan Times: Friday, May 2, 2008

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Contrasting International Response to Repression in Tibet and Burma

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Tibet and Burma:
Dissimilar Response

While a booming China
openly mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and escapes even
international censure, an impoverished Burma reels under widening
sanctions despite smaller-scale repression. 

Brahma
Chellaney

Asian Age, April 5, 2008 

There are
striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located,
endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive
rule, resisting hard power with soft power, and facing an influx of Han
settlers. Yet the international response to the brutal crackdown on monk-led
protests in Tibet and Burma has been
a study in contrast.

When the Burmese crackdown on peaceful protestors in Rangoon last September left at least 31
people dead — according to a UN special rapporteur’s report — it ignited
international indignation and a new
round of U.S.-led sanctions. More than six months later, the tepid
international response to an ongoing harsh crackdown in Tibet by the Burmese junta’s closest ally, China, raises the question whether that country
has accumulated such power as to escape even censure over actions that are far
more repressive and extensive than what Burma witnessed.  

Tellingly, despite growing international appeals to Beijing
to respect Tibetans’ human rights and cultural identity and begin dialogue with
the Dalai Lama, there has been no call for any penal action, however mild,
against China.
Even the leverage provided by the 2008 Beijing
Olympics is not being seized upon to
pressure Beijing
to end its repression in the Tibetan region.

When the Burmese generals cracked down on monks and their pro-democracy
supporters, the outside world watched vivid images of brutality, thanks to
citizen reporters using the
Internet. But China employs tens
of thousands of cyberpolice to censor Web sites, patrol cybercafes, monitor
text and video messages from cellular phones, and hunt down Internet activists.
As a result, the outside world has yet to see a single haunting image of the
Chinese use of brute force against Tibetans. The only images released by Beijing are those that
seek to show Tibetans in bad light, as engaged in arson and other attacks. 

The continuing arbitrary arrests of Tibetans through house-to-house
searches are a cause of serious concern, given the high incidence of mock
trials followed by quick executions in China. That country still executes
more people every year than all other nations combined,
despite its adoption of new rules requiring
a review of death sentences.

The important parallels between Tibet
and Burma begin with the
fact that Burma’s
majority citizens — the ethnic Burmans — are of Tibetan stock. It was China’s 1950 invasion of Tibet that opened a new Han entrance to Burma. But now the
Han demographic invasion of the Tibetan plateau is spilling over into Burma, with Chinese presence conspicuous in Mandalay city and the
areas to the northeast. 

Today, the resistance against repressive rule in both Tibet and Burma is led by iconic Nobel
laureates, one living in exile and the other under house detention. In fact,
the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel peace prize in quick
succession for the same reason: For leading a non-violent struggle. Each is a
symbol of soft power, building such moral authority as to command wide international
respect and influence. 

Yet another parallel is that heavy repression has failed to break the
resistance to autocratic rule in both Tibet
and Burma.
If anything, growing authoritarianism has begun to backfire, as the popular
monk-led revolts in Tibet and
Burma
have highlighted.

Vantage location and rich natural resources underscore the importance of
Tibet and Burma. The
Tibetan plateau makes up one-fourth of China’s landmass. Annexation has
given China control over Tibet’s immense
water resources and mineral wealth, including boron, chromite, copper, iron
ore, lead, lithium, uranium and zinc. Most of Asia’s major rivers originate in
the Tibetan plateau, with their waters a lifeline to 47 percent of the global
population living in South and Southeast Asia and China. Through its control over
Asia’s main source of freshwater and its building of huge dams upstream, China holds out
a latent threat to fashion water into a political weapon. 

Energy-rich Burma is a land bridge between the Indian
subcontinent and Southeast Asia. China, however, has succeeded in strategically
penetrating Burma, which it
values as an entryway to the Bay of Bengal and Indian
Ocean. Beijing is now busy
completing the Irrawaddy Corridor through Burma involving road, river, rail,
port and energy-transport links.

The key difference between Tibet and Burma is that the repression in the
former is by an occupying power. Months after the 1949 communist takeover in Beijing, China’s
People’s Liberation Army entered what was effectively a sovereign nation in
full control of its own affairs.  

At the root of the present Tibet crisis is China’s failure to grant the
autonomy it promised when it imposed on Tibetans a “17-Point Agreement for the
Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” in 1951. Instead of conceding autonomy, Beijing has actually done the opposite: It has pursued
Machiavellian policies by breaking up Tibet as it existed before the
invasion, and by seeking to reduce Tibetans to a minority in their own homeland
through the state-supported relocation of millions of Han Chinese.

It has gerrymandered Tibet by making Amdo (the present Dalai Lama’s
birthplace) Qinghai
province and merging eastern Kham
into the Han provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. More recently, Chongqing province was carved out of Sichuan. 

The traditional Tibetan region is a
distinct cultural and economic
entity. But with large, heavily Tibetan areas having been severed from Tibet, what is
left is just the 1965 creation — the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the central
plateau comprising Ü-Tsang and western Kham, or roughly half of the Tibetan
plateau. Yet China
has changed even the demographic composition of TAR, where they were hardly any
Han settlers before the Chinese annexation.

            TAR, home to barely 40 per cent of
the 6.5 million Tibetans in China, was the last “autonomous region” created by
the Chinese Communists, the others being Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang
(1955), Guangxi Zhuang (1958) and Ningxia
(1958). In addition, China
has 30 “autonomous prefectures,” 120 “autonomous counties” and 1,256
“autonomous townships.”  

All of the so-called autonomous areas are in minority homelands, which
historically were ruled from Beijing only when China itself
had been conquered by foreigners — first by the Mongols, and then the Manchu.
Today, these areas are “autonomous” only in name, with that tag designed to
package a fiction to the ethnic minorities. Apart from not enforcing its
one-child norm in these sparsely populated but vast regions (which make up
three-fifths of China’s landmass),
Beijing grants
them no meaningful autonomy. In Tibet,
what the ravages of the Cultural Revolution left incomplete, forced “political
education” since has sought to accomplish.

China grants local autonomy just to two
areas, both Han — Hong Kong and Macao.
In the talks it has held with the Dalai Lama’s envoys since 2002, Beijing has flatly refused to consider the idea of making Tibet a Special
Administrative Region like Hong Kong and Macao.
It has also rebuffed the idea of restoring
Tibet,
under continued Chinese rule, to the shape and size it existed in
1950.  

Instead it has sought to malign the Dalai Lama for seeking “Greater
Tibet” and pressed a maximalist historical position vis-à-vis him. Not content
with the Dalai Lama’s far-reaching 1987 concession to forsake Tibetan independence, Beijing insists
that he also affirm that Tibet
was always part of China. But as the
Dalai Lama said in a recent Newsweek interview,
“Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement
will not change past history.”

Contrary to China’s claim that its present national political structure
is unalterable to accommodate Tibetan aspirations, the fact is that its
constitutional arrangements have continued to change, as underscored by the
creation of 47 new supposedly “autonomous” municipalities or counties in
minority homelands just between 1984 and 1994, according to the work of Harvard
scholar Lobsang Sangay. 

Until the latest uprising, Beijing
believed its weapon of repression was working well and thus saw no need to bring
Tibetans together under one administrative unit, as they demand, or to grant Tibet a status equivalent to Hong Kong and Macao. President Hu
Jintao, who regards Tibet as his core political base from the time he was the
party boss there, has ruled out any compromise that would allow the Dalai Lama
to return home from his long exile in India. Following the uprising, Hu’s line
on Tibet
is likely to further harden, unless effective international pressure is brought
to bear.

The contrasting international response to the repression in Tibet and Burma brings out an inconvenient
truth: The principle that engagement
is better than punitive action to help change state behaviour is applied only to
powerful autocratic countries, while sanctions are a favoured tool to try and
tame the weak. Sanctions against China are also precluded by the
fact that the West has a huge commercial stake in that country. But Burma, where
its interests are trifling, is a soft target.  

So, while an impoverished Burma
reels under widening sanctions, a booming China openly mocks the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Even the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre of countless hundreds of
students did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions against Beijing. 

No one today is suggesting trade sanctions. But given that Beijing
secured the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the promise to improve its
human-rights record, the free world has a duty to demand that it end its
repression in Tibet or face an international boycott, if not of the Games, at
least of the opening ceremony, to which world leaders have been invited. By
making the success of this summer’s Olympics a prestige issue, China has
handed the world valuable leverage that today is begging to be exercised. This
rare opportunity must not be frittered away.

© Asian Age, 2008.

Tibet exposes China’s Achilles heel

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Repression May Unravel China’s Monocracy

Beijing faces moment of truth on its brutal occupation of the vast Tibetan
plateau

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age,
March 29, 2008

Growing authoritarianism
more often than not rebounds. The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which has spread
across Tibet and beyond to
the traditional Tibetan areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, marks a
turning point in communist China’s
history. It comes as a rude jolt to the world’s biggest and longest-surviving
autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven efforts to pacify Tibet through
more than half a century of ruthless repression, in which as many as a million
Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives.

The
open backlash against the Tibetans’ economic marginalization, the rising Han
influx and the state assault on Tibetan religion and ecology constitutes, in
terms of its spread, the largest rebellion in Tibet
since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced to flee to India. Even in
1989, when the last major Tibetan uprising was suppressed through brute force,
the unrest had not spread beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing since 1965 calls the Tibet Autonomous
Region. Now, the state’s intensifying brutal crackdown across the Tibetan
plateau — an area more than two-thirds the size of Western Europe — dwarfs
other international human-rights problems like Burma
and Darfur, Sudan.

Indeed,
the latest revolt is a challenge to China’s totalitarian system in a
year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to showcase the autocracy’s
remarkable economic achievements. It is a defining moment for a system that has
managed to entrench itself for 59 long years and yet faces gnawing questions
about its ability to survive by reconciling China’s contradictory paths of market
capitalism and political monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has
survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet
Union.

The recent events have laid bare the strength of the Tibetan grassroots
resistance despite decades of oppression, including the demolition of
monasteries, the jailing of independent-minded monks and nuns, the state’s
wanton interference in the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism, and the forced
political re-education of Tibetan youth and monks. Tibet’s rapid Sinicization today
threatens to obliterate the Tibetan culture in ways the previous decades of
repression could not. That threat has only sharpened the Tibetan sense of
identity and yearning for freedom. 

For President Hu Jintao, who owes his swift rise to the top of the party
hierarchy to his martial-law crackdown in Tibet in 1989, the chickens have
come home to roost. The fresh uprising, coinciding with Hu’s re-election as
president, epitomizes the counterproductive nature of the Hu-backed policies —
from seeking to change the demographic realities on the ground through the “Go
West” Han-migration campaign, to draconian curbs on Tibetan farmland and
monastic life. The Tibetans’ feelings of subjugation and loss have been
deepened as they have been pushed to the margins of society, with their
distinct culture being reduced to a mere showpiece to draw tourists and boost
the Han-benefiting local economy.

Tibetans
also have been incensed by atheistic China’s growing intrusion into their
religious affairs, as exemplified by Beijing’s 2007 proclamation making itself
the sole authority to anoint lamas — traditionally a divine process to select a
young boy as a Buddha incarnation. Having captured the institution of the
Panchen Lama, the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing is preparing the ground to install
its own puppet Dalai Lama after the present aging incumbent passes away. So
short-sighted is this approach that the rulers in Beijing
don’t realize that such a scenario will surely radicalize Tibetan youth and
kill prospect of a peaceful settlement of the Tibet issue, thereby spawning an
enduring violent campaign.

The
ongoing Chinese crackdown, behind the cover of a Tibet
that has been cut off from the outside world, symbolizes what the communist
leadership itself admits is a “life and death struggle” over Tibet. The
likely further hardening of the leadership’s stance on Tibet, as a
consequence of the uprising, will only help mask a serious challenge that
carries wider political implications for the Chinese state. In the Tibetan
plateau — about half of which has been hived off from Tibet and merged with Qinghai,
Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces — the crackdown by a regime wedded to the
unbridled exercise of state power promises to exacerbate the situation on the
ground.

The tepid global response thus far to the bloodletting and arbitrary
arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China’s growing international clout,
underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military power and
unrivalled $1.5 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, largely invested in U.S.
dollar-denominated assets. Given that even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre did not
trigger lasting international trade sanctions, the lack of any attempt to
penalize China for its
continuing human-rights violations in Tibet should not come as a
surprise.

But Tibet’s future
will be determined not so much by the international response as by developments
within China.
After all, the only occasions in history when Tibet
was clearly part of China
was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when China itself had been conquered by
outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing
dynasty, from 1644 to 1912. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel
that Tibet
once again became an independent political entity. 

What Beijing today asserts are regions
“integral” to its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier
foreign dynastic rule in China.
Yet, revisionist history under communist rule has helped indoctrinate Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires as Han, with
the result that educated Chinese have come to feel a false sense of ownership
about every territory that was part of those dynasties.

The truth is that the once-idyllic Tibet
came under direct Han rule for the first time in history following the 1949
communist takeover in China.
Just as the politically cataclysmic developments of 1949 led to Tibet’s loss of its independent status, it is
likely to take another momentous event in Chinese history for Tibet to regain
its sovereignty. 

That event could be the unravelling of the present xenophobic
dictatorship and the synthetic homogeneity it has implanted, not just in
institutional structures but also in the national thought process. Today, the
Chinese autocrats are able to fan ultra-nationalism as a substitute to their
waning communist ideology because the central tenet of the communists’
political philosophy is uniformity, with Hu’s slogan of a “harmonious society”
designed to underline the theme of conformity with the republic. The Manchu
assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the natives in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and
Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts.

With 60 per cent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic
minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the
Great Wall represented the Han empire’s outer security perimeter.
Territorially, Han power is at its pinnacle today. Yet, driven by
self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centred on
issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas
and on India’s Arunachal Pradesh state — nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. Few
realize that China occupies
one-fifth of the original state of Jammu
and Kashmir. 

Tibet, however, is a reminder that
attempts at forcible assimilation can backfire. That was also the lesson from Yugoslavia, a
model of forced integration of nationalities. But once its central autocratic
structure corroded, Yugoslavia
violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening of the
central political authority in China
for Tibet
to reclaim independence. Until then, the Tibetans’ best hope is to strive for
the kind of autonomy Beijing has granted Hong
Kong and Macao.

Those who gloomily see the battle for Tibetan independence as
irretrievably lost forget that history has a way of wreaking vengeance on
artificially created empires. The Central Asian states got independence on a
platter, without having to wage a struggle. Who in Central
Asia had dreamt of independence in mid-1991? Yet months later, the
Soviet empire had unravelled. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania twice lost their independence to an expanding Russian empire, only to
regain it each time due to a cataclysmic event — World War I, and the 1991
Soviet collapse. 

The post-1991 flight of Russians from large parts of Central
Asia is a testament that the Sinicization of the Tibetan region is
not an unalterable process.

The Tibetan struggle, one of the longest and most-powerful resistance
movements in modern world history, exposes China’s Achilles heel. The
reverberations from the latest bloodshed on the land of the pacifist Tibetan
Buddhist culture will be felt long after Chinese security forces have snuffed
out the last protest.  

Hu knows that the Tibetan uprising has the potential to embolden Han
citizens in China
to demand political freedoms — a campaign that would sound the death knell of
the single-party rule. The last time he suppressed a Tibetan revolt, his then
boss, Deng Xiaoping, had to borrow a
leaf from Hu’s Tibet book to
crush pro-democracy protestors at Tiananmen Square
two months later. Hundreds were slain.

This year could prove a watershed in Chinese history. Just as the 1936
Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Beijing
Games — communist China’s coming-out party, already besmirched by the Tibet
crackdown — may be a spur to radical change in that country. Given that
recurring protests are likely to greet the Olympic torch during its global tour
of 135 cities, 2008 promises to be, at a minimum, the year Tibet came back
into international spotlight.

Rudderless Rudd’s uranium-export decision throws a spanner in Indian goal

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Rudd’s uranium reversal irks India

Bruce Loudon, New Delhi | March 03, 2008

The Australian

KEVIN Rudd was lashed yesterday by one of India’s most influential foreign affairs commentators over the Prime Minister’s ditching of his predecessor’s pledge to sell uranium to the emerging economic powerhouse.

Brahma Chellaney launched a searing denunciation of Mr Rudd’s "abstruse, retrograde ideology" over his reversal of a decision made last year by John Howard to sell uranium to India.

Mr Chellaney accused Mr Rudd in The Asian Age newspaper of striking "a jarring note amid a growing convergence of strategic interests" between the two countries.

Under the headline "Rudd’s rudderless reversal", Mr Chellaney noted that Mr Rudd was the free world’s first Mandarin-speaking head of government, saying he "has made plain his intent to cosy up to the world’s largest autocracy, China, while nullifying an important decision that his predecessor took to help build a closer rapport with the world’s largest democracy."

The stridency of Mr Chellaney’s attack reflects the widespread annoyance at high levels in New Delhi over the Rudd Government’s reversal on the uranium issue.

The Indian Government was irked when, in January, it sent special prime ministerial envoy Shyam Saran to see Foreign Minister Stephen Smith in Perth and found itself being bluntly told – even though it had not asked – there would be no sale of Australian uranium to India.

Indian sources insist Mr Saran was taken aback by the minister’s forthright stance as he had gone to Perth only to brief Mr Smith on New Delhi’s negotiations with Washington over its civilian nuclear deal and specifically not to ask to buy Australian uranium.

"Chellaney is saying what many of us feel about the Rudd Government’s pathetic hypocrisy on this issue," one highly-placed official told The Australian yesterday.

The criticism of the Rudd Government is in sharp contrast to the significant strides made in Indo-Australian relations in the Howard years, which are praised by Mr Chellaney.

But in overturning the decision to sell uranium to India, Mr Chellaney says, Mr Rudd has been "notably regressive".

"Driven by misplaced non-proliferation zealotry, Rudd not only went ahead with cancelling Howard’s decision, but his Government also continues to parrot the same lame excuse, as if he has not read the Non-Proliferation Treaty text.

"In touting its ideological resolve to uphold the NPT, the Rudd Government wants to be more Catholic than the Pope. Far from the NPT forbidding civil exports to a non-signatory, the treaty indeed encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states.

"Rudd has no qualms about selling uranium to China but will not export to India, even though the latter is accepting what the former will not brook – stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of material to weapons use."

Mr Rudd’s office would not be drawn on claims his Government had mishandled Australia’s relationship with India.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister said only that it remained government policy not to sell uranium to countries who had not signed the NPT.

Shadow foreign minister Andrew Robb said the Government’s handling of the relationship with India had been "clumsy".

Additional reporting: Paul Maley

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23308272-2702,00.html