Potential risks and gains of China’s ambitious strategy

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Assessing Regional Reactions to China’s Peaceful Development Doctrine 

Volume 18 Number 5
April 2008
Brahma Chellaney, Jae Ho Chung, Carlyle A. Thayer

China’s peaceful development doctrine is a broad strategy endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose central goal is the transformation of China into a modern and sustainably developed country through rapid economic growth.The greatest challenge for this strategy is that Beijing must reassure regional neighbors that China’s increasing economic, military, and political power do not pose a threat.This issue of the NBR Analysis reveals unique insights by expert scholars into how India, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines perceive the potential risks and gains of China’s ambitious strategy.The assessment of such perspectives provides a valuable opportunity to gauge policy implications in a wide variety of areas, including politics, security, finance, and trade.Such analysis is key both to mitigating the risks of conflict in Asia and to ensuring that China’s rapid development is indeed associated with a peaceful regional environment.The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) solicited these papers in an effort to provide a foundation for future research on this issue and to better inform U.S.policy in the region by raising awareness of Indian, South Korean, Indonesian, Thai, and Philippine views.


Southeast Asian Reactions to China’s Peaceful Development Doctrine: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand Carlyle A. Thayer

South Korea’s Reactions to China’s "Peaceful Development" Jae Ho Chung

Assessing India’s Reactions to China’s Peaceful Development Doctrine Brahma Chellaney

Assessing India’s Reactions to China’s “Peaceful Development” Doctrine

Brahma Chellaney

NBR Analysis, Volume 18, Number 5, April 2008

(c) The National Bureau of Asian Research, USA

China’s diplomatic “charm offensive” in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Persian Gulf region, and India’s immediate neighborhood has involved major political, economic, and strategic investments that have had the effect of bringing Indian interests under pressure. Such diplomatic penetration has, however, also made some of the courted countries wary of China’s strategic ambitions, leading these countries to search for countervailing influences. That change in turn has helped promote the acceptability of India as a player beyond South Asia. The China factor, for example, motivated the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to make India a full dialogue partner. That same factor helped India to become a member of the East Asian Summit (EAS), which will design the proposed East Asian Community (EAC).

The Indian navy now conducts joint exercises with other states far beyond India’s shores, including in the South China Sea and in the Pacific. In April 2007 India, Japan, and the United States held their first trilateral naval maneuvers near Tokyo, and five months later the three teamed with Australia and Singapore for major war games on the Bay of Bengal. With U.S. encouragement, India provided naval escort in 2003 to commercial ships passing through the vulnerable, piracy-wracked Strait of Malacca. The undertaking, code-named Operation Sagittarius, was primarily designed to safeguard high-value U.S. cargo shipped from Japan passing through the Strait of Malacca on the way to Afghanistan. Through this operation the Indian navy not only demonstrated patrolling the Strait of Malacca to Southeast Asian states but also gained approval to operate in the ASEAN waters.

In several other respects, however, China’s charm offensive has either reared new strategic challenges for India or affected Indian economic or political interests. For one, China has been aggressively seizing energy-related opportunities overseas, at times to the detriment of India. For example Beijing persuaded Burma’s military junta in 2006 to sell to China gas from the partly Indian-owned A-1 and A-3 offshore blocks via a planned 2,380-kilometer pipeline to Yunnan.[1] Burma took India unawares by signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with China’s state-run PetroChina Company in early 2006 to supply gas to China from those same partly Indian-owned fields over a 30-year period.[2] To New Delhi’s acute embarrassment, the Burmese decision came just as India announced that New Delhi had reached an agreement with Beijing to jointly cooperate on securing oil resources overseas, a move designed to prevent Sino-Indian competition from continuing to drive up the price of energy assets. The loss of Burmese gas to China has created some bitterness in New Delhi, which has been eager to import gas from Burma via a pipeline through Bangladesh.[3]

Beijing also has aggressively sought oil and gas contracts in Iran, which is now the largest supplier of foreign oil to China, delivering 14% of China’s total oil imports. China has planned a 386-kilometer oil pipeline from Iran to link up with the Atasu-Alashankou pipeline between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang. China’s state-owned oil company, Sinopec (also known as China Petrochemical Corporation), signed a $100 billion deal in October 2004 to buy 10 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Iran annually over a 25-year period. In exchange Sinopec secured a 51% stake in the giant Yadavaran oilfield in Iran’s south, leaving a minority 20% stake for a consortium of Indian companies led by the Oil and Natural Gas Company (ONGC) Videsh Limited (OVL).

China’s advantage over India is that, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Beijing wields considerable international clout and can provide political protection to renegade regimes. The fact that China can veto any UN sanctions proposal has not been lost either on Iran or on Burma. Beijing’s ability to provide political cover is a fundamental element of China’s thriving commercial ties with a host of problem states.

With the country’s new wealth, China also has been resourcefully building trade and transportation links to further larger Chinese interests in the countries around India.[4] Such links around India’s periphery are already bringing India under strategic pressure on separate flanks on both sides of the Indian peninsula:

1. China is fashioning a north-south trans-Karakoram strategic corridor stretching up to Pakistan’s new, Chinese-built Gwadar port, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. Opened in the spring of 2007, the deepwater port at Gwadar represents China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea.

2. Another north-south strategic trail China is developing is the Irrawaddy corridor involving road, river, and rail links from Yunnan Province up to the Burmese ports on the Bay of Bengal.

3. China is also shoring up an east-west strategic corridor in Tibet across India’s northern frontiers, as illustrated by the $6.2 billion China-Tibet railway from Gormu to Lhasa that opened in July 2006. Beijing now plans to extend the Tibetan railway to the Nepalese capital of Katmandu and also to two other points: the tri-junction of the India-Bhutan-Tibet frontiers (in the Chumbi Valley) and the intersection of the India-Burma-Tibet borders.

4. China’s incremental efforts to build a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim symbolize Beijing’s desire for a fourth strategic corridor that would create a challenge to India from the south. China’s seeks to assemble this “string of pearls”—a term first used in a report for the Pentagon by U.S. defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton—through forward listening posts, naval-access agreements and Chinese-built harbors stretching from Pakistan and Sri Lanka to Bangladesh and Burma. The Chinese interest in the Indian Ocean rim now extends to the Seychelles.[5]

The Irrawaddy corridor has brought Chinese security personnel to Burmese sites close both to India’s eastern strategic assets and to the Strait of Malacca. With the Irrawaddy corridor stretching to the Bay of Bengal, Chinese security agencies have positioned personnel at several Burmese coastal points, including the Chinese-built harbors at Kyaukpyu and Thilawa. These security agencies already operate electronic-intelligence and maritime-reconnaissance facilities on the two Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal. India transferred the Coco Islands to Burma in the 1950s, and Burma then leased the islands to China in 1994. Today China operates a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection facility from the Great Coco Island.

Beijing is reinforcing the strategic significance of the new port at Gwadar by linking it with the Karakoram Highway to western China through the Chinese-aided Gwadar-Dalbandin railway, which extends to Rawalpindi. In addition the Chinese-supported Makran Coastal Highway links Gwadar with Karachi, Pakistan’s main port. Gwadar, already home to a Chinese electronic listening post, is a critical link in the emerging chain of Chinese forward-operating facilities that stretch from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal and then to the Gulf of Siam.

Protected by cliffs from three sides and now being extended into a naval base with Chinese assistance, Gwadar will not only arm Pakistan with critical strategic depth against a 1971-style Indian attempt to bottle up Pakistan’s navy, but the port will also open the way to the arrival of Chinese submarines in India’s backyard. Beijing admits that Gwadar’s strategic significance is equivalent to the Karakoram Highway, which since opening in 1969 has helped underpin the Sino-Pakistan nexus and served as the route for covert Chinese nuclear and missile transfers to Islamabad. Linking the Karakoram Highway with Gwadar will likely to create a strategic-multiplier effect. Furthermore, the completion of the Gwadar project will enable the Chinese navy, with its access in Burma, to operate on both sides of the Indian peninsula.

Beijing is planning to build an energy pipeline from Gwadar to western China as a way to reduce the time and distance for transporting oil to China from the Gulf region. Beijing sees Gwadar as providing a more secure corridor for energy imports from the Gulf states. In the event of a strategic confrontation with the United States this safe corridor would prevent the interdiction of oil shipments to China’s resource-hungry economy. Gwadar, along with Burma’s Sittwe port (from where a separate energy pipeline to Yunnan is to be built), would help reduce China’s reliance on the Strait of Malacca, through which 80% of Chinese oil imports now pass. Given Beijing’s decision to substantially widen the Karakoram Highway and upgrade it to an all-weather passageway, China also has displayed likely plans to export and import goods through Gwadar.

In addition China is stepping up military and economic engagement with India’s other immediate neighbors—Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Beijing’s broad-based military cooperation agreement with Dhaka—Bangladesh’s first military accord with any country—has four apparent objectives: to bring Bangladesh into the Chinese strategic orbit, to gain naval and commercial access to the strategically important port of Chittagong to connect Bangladesh with Burma, and to secure a doorway to India’s vulnerable northeast.

Far from moderating Indian fears, Beijing’s deepening ties with India’s neighboring states have made New Delhi increasingly concerned over Chinese activities. There is growing recognition in New Delhi that China’s rising power has become the single biggest cause of qualitative change in the geopolitical landscape. Despite New Delhi’s continuing emphasis on cooperation with Beijing, China is unlikely to shy away from investing more resources into activities and capabilities antithetical to Indian interests and security.

Sino-Indian Relations in the Next Five to Ten Years

India and China are old civilizations but new neighbors. The two countries became neighbors only in 1951 when the disappearance of the traditional buffer—Tibet—brought Chinese troops to what is now the 4,057 kilometer-long Sino-Indian frontier. As relatively new neighbors with no historical experience in dealing with each other politically, India and China face a steep learning curve while seeking to build equilibrium in their relations. Today both countries have a stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which the economic modernization and security of both depend. Yet the wounds of the 1962 Chinese invasion of India have been kept open by Beijing’s public and assertive claims to Indian territories. Nonetheless, compared to the troubled state of Sino-Indian relations three decades ago (before full diplomatic ties were restored following Mao Zedong’s death) relations today are more stable and marked by booming trade.

Looking ahead the China-India relationship is likely to remain complex and difficult, marked by cooperation in some areas but by competition, either latent or overt, in other areas. The underlying wariness or even suspicion that each has of the other’s intentions is unlikely to go away. Yet both countries will continue to feel the need to publicly play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship and emphasize cooperation.

It is in India’s interests to stress cooperation while at the same time working to reduce the power disparity with China by building greater stability and equilibrium in Asia through strategic ties with other democracies, including the United States and Japan. For China, a continued emphasis on cooperation would be consistent with Beijing’s larger “peaceful rise” strategy.[6] Indeed China’s choir book has been centered on one ingenious song—that the country’s emergence as a great power is unstoppable and that it is thus incumbent on other nations to adjust to China’s rise.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that the India-China strategic dissonance is rooted not only in their contrasting political ideals and quiet rivalry but also in Beijing’s relentless pursuit of a classical, Sun Tzu–style balance-of-power strategy. While presenting itself as a see-no-evil, do-no-evil state, Beijing is zealously working to build up China’s power capabilities to engage the world on Beijing’s own terms. In order to avert the rise of a peer rival in Asia, China has sought to strategically tie down India south of the Himalayas.

Over the next decade, India and China are likely to remain business partners rather than become friends. Neither side, however, would like to see their quiet competition slide into confrontation. Managed competition is thus likely to define the relationship between these two demographic titans in the coming years.

Trade

Bilateral trade between China and India—which jumped 15-fold from $2.3 billion in 2000 to $38 billion in 2007, with China enjoying a trade surplus of $10.7 billion last year—is likely to continue to expand, positioning China as India’s largest trading partner within the next couple of years.[7] There is, however, no Sino-Indian congruence on geopolitical issues. That is why the proclaimed “India-China strategic and cooperative partnership for peace and prosperity” remains devoid of any content other than a rapidly growing trade relationship.

Although the official Chinese media claims that the rapid development of Sino-Indian trade is due to “sound political relations,” political issues continue to be an obstacle even in trade.[8] New Delhi is not only wary of the idea of a free trade agreement (FTA) with Beijing but also continues to be concerned over Chinese dumping of goods and investments in strategic sectors in India. To Beijing’s loud protest, New Delhi has excluded from Indian contracts some Chinese firms that are tied to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or the Chinese Communist Party. For example India blacklisted the state-run China Harbour Engineering Company—which has developed the Gwadar deepwater port in Pakistan—from bidding for any Indian port contract.

Additionally the composition of Indian exports to China is not flattering to India. In the first half of 2007 iron ore comprised 52% of Indian exports to China. Overall, raw materials made up 85% of India’s total exports. India has been increasingly exporting low-cost raw materials while importing value-added Chinese goods—a pattern that is not sustainable. Indeed India must guard against becoming a raw-material appendage of the Chinese economy.

Political problems do not constrain interstate economic ties in today’s market-driven world. Even if Sino-Indian trade overtakes U.S.-Indian trade (which is a likely scenario) political issues will continue to divide Beijing and New Delhi. If growing trade was a barometer of political progress, Japan and China—with a trade volume almost ten times higher than that of India and China—would be allies. Similarly, Japan and South Korea, who engage in a much higher volume of trade than China and India, are finding it hard to manage their prickly bilateral political relationship, despite both being military allies of the United States. History testifies that when strategic animosities remain unaddressed, interdependent commercial ties do not guarantee moderation. Therefore, even as trade with China continues to grow, India’s strategic interests will increasingly lead New Delhi to search for ways to countervail Chinese power.

Territorial Disputes

India and China have continually disputed the border between the two countries since 1981. The two countries came to blows over the issue in 1962, the wounds from which still persist in negotiations over the border today. China’s assertive claims and overall stalemate in the negotiations have impeded the successful resolution of the border issue. As a result, China continues to occupy one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

China’s recent claim over the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and aggressive patrolling of the border region signify that China is not interested in maintaining the status quo. As a result more than 300,000 Indian soldiers remain tied down in the region. Negotiations have been rich in symbolism but ultimately unproductive as the two parties have struggled to move past developing “principles,” “concepts,” and a “framework” for an overall settlement. Although the border issue ostensibly could be settled with a fairly straightforward compromise—e.g., India foregoing claims to territories lost to China and China abandoning claims to Indian-held areas—China does not seem interested in a settlement based on the status quo. China’s position, furthermore, is unlikely to change over the next decade.

Geopolitics of Oil and Water

In Asia energy is increasingly intertwined with geopolitics. As a result energy and security are inseparable today. With competition for the world’s oil and gas resources sharpening, Asia faces the specter of a 21st-century version of an energy-related Great Game in which India and China are likely to be major players.

A cash-rich China has shown time and again that the country can nimbly outmaneuver India in bids for energy contracts in third countries. Nonetheless, some in India have imaginatively proposed cooperation with China on energy issues. The reality, however, is that China is a larger and more aggressive player willing to take major risks and has a track record of greater success; China therefore has little to gain from such cooperation with India. Thus in the coming years China and India are likely to continue to compete for energy resources to meet the needs of their rapidly growing economies.

The energy-related Sino-Indian rivalry, however, has obscured another emerging area of competition—water resources. Given Chinese control over the aqua-rich Tibetan Plateau (which is the source of most of Asia’s major rivers), China has a clear competitive edge. Tibet’s vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed the region with the world’s greatest river systems. These glaciers represent a crucial water source not only for China and India but also for numerous countries in Asia, including Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Pakistan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The internal disputes that arise over water resources could potentially degenerate into interstate conflict. Many of the current water disputes are related to Chinese damming and redirection of Tibetan water. One such project, the gargantuan South-North Water Transfer Project, aims to redirect billions of gallons of water from the Yangtze River in the south to China’s parched Northern Plain where over-intensive farming, increasing urbanization and industrialization, desertification, and a generally drier climate have strained the region’s major river, the Yellow River, to the breaking point. The project’s stillborn western line aims to divert precious water resources from the Tibetan Plateau, thus threatening to diminish the water flows of other countries’ major river systems, including the Indus, Salween, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Karnali, and Sutlej systems. If such a large-scale rerouting were to begin, the action would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh.

Several Chinese projects in west-central Tibet have a bearing on river water flows into India, but Beijing is reluctant to share information. After flash floods occurred in India’s northern state of Himachal Pradesh, however, China agreed in 2005 to supply New Delhi with data on any abnormal rise or fall in the upstream water level of the Sutlej River, on which China has built a barrage. Discussions are ongoing to persuade Beijing to share flood control data during the monsoonal season for two Brahmaputra tributaries—the Lohit and Parlung Zangbo Rivers—as China has done since 2002 on the Brahmaputra River, which China has dammed upstream at several places. When Chinese president Hu Jintao visited India in November 2006, the two countries agreed to set up a joint expert-level mechanism on interstate river waters. Beijing now seems to be having second thoughts on setting up such a mechanism.[9]

India’s Relations with the United States and Japan

Beijing has not hidden its unease over the larger strategic implications of India’s improving relations with the United States and Japan. The direction of the newly launched Quadrilateral Initiative between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, which is founded on the concept of democratic peace, is still undecided owing to differing perceptions within the group. This quartet, however, represents the likely geopolitical line-up in the Asia-Pacific in the years ahead.

China, India, and Japan represent a strategic triangle in Asia. If China is A, and India and Japan are B and C, the sum of B plus C would be greater than A. India and Japan appear to be natural allies, and China’s accumulation of power will drive the two countries closer together. The relationship between the United States and India is also rapidly changing. In the words of a senior U.S. official, “now that we’ve consummated the civil nuclear trade [agreement] between us [the United States and India], if we look down the road in the future, we’re going to see far greater defense cooperation between the United States and India: training; exercises; we hope, defense sales of American military technology to the Indian armed forces.”[10]

The newly emerging geopolitical equations are likely to reinforce Sino-Indian suspicions and complicate the development of the bilateral relationship between Beijing and New Delhi.

The Economic, Trade, and Security Implications of China’s Peaceful Rise for India

Given the size, ambitions, and proximity of India and China, both countries are naturally concerned by the expansion of each other’s capabilities. India’s greatest concern regarding China’s rapid accumulation of power is not that Beijing would carry out another 1962-style military invasion, but rather that China would employ the threat of such a military invasion to shift the overall regional balance of power in China’s favor. New Delhi wishes to forestall this strategic shift because of the likely adverse implications for India’s security and well-being.

Yet the rapid and wild rise of China is transforming the Asian geopolitical landscape like no other development. Not since Japan’s rise under the Meiji emperor has another non-Western power become as consequential to the future of the international order as China is today. The future of Asian security is likely to be heavily shaped by whether China continues to rise in a linear fashion under an autocratic leadership. For India the implications are stark. Just as India bore the brunt of the rise of international terrorism because of country’s proximity to the Pakistani-Afghan epicenter of global jihad, India will be directly affected by the growing power of an adjacent opaque empire. Therefore, India can ill afford to be complacent.

Despite China’s meteoric rise, conflict between China and India is not inevitable. A peaceful diplomatic environment is essential for the continued economic growth and security of both countries. Furthermore, India and China account for one-third of the world’s population. How their relationship evolves thus will have an important bearing on Asian geopolitics, international security, and globalization.[11]

It has become commonplace to compare the Indian and Chinese economies and project future growth on the basis of the present relative advantage of each country. The comparisons inexorably pit India’s services-driven growth and institutional stability, founded on pluralism, transparency, and the rule of law, against China’s resolute leadership, high savings rate, good infrastructure, and manufacturing strength. Overlooked, however, is that globalization threatens China’s autocracy, not India’s democracy.

Whether China follows a stable or violent path to political modernization will determine the country’s continued unity and strength.[12] In most respects, China knows what is required for becoming a great power. Though India’s emergent realism has yet to overcome traditions of moral posturing, Beijing epitomizes strategic clarity and pragmatism, zealously erecting the building blocks of comprehensive national power.

Although both China and India are ascendant powers, enjoying high GDP growth rates, the conditions for the rise of these countries are different and reflect the relative strengths and weaknesses of each country. That difference in turn underscores the power disparity between the two countries, and points to the economic, trade, and security implications of China’s peaceful rise for India.

India’s white-collar, services-led economic growth contrasts sharply with China’s blue-collar, manufacturing-driven expansion. More striking is that in India the private sector continues to fuel economic growth while China’s economic growth is largely state-driven. India performs poorly wherever the state is involved, while the strength of the Chinese state as the primary catalyst of accumulating power carries significant strategic ramifications.

Most startling is that although both states possess similar competitive advantages, such as a large pool of skilled manpower and low wages, an increasing export surge drives China’s economic growth while India’s import-dependent economy relies primarily on domestic consumption for growth. Indian imports currently exceed exports by as much as 60%. India’s dependency on imports also sets the country apart from the Asian “tiger” economies, which are all export-oriented.

The contrast between India and China is stark in terms of military capabilities as well. India’s weaponry remains subcontinental in range, whereas China’s weaponry is intercontinental. Even when China was poor and less developed, Beijing consciously emphasized building comprehensive national power. China developed its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the 12,000-kilometre DF-5, in the 1970s. New Delhi, in contrast, has not yet started development of its first ICBM, even though ICBMs are potent symbols of power and coercion in international relations.

Beijing has sustained double-digit increases in military spending for two continuous decades; in terms of percentage of GDP China’s military spending has risen the fastest in the world. By contrast, in that same two-decade period India’s defense expenditure has declined appreciably as a percentage of the country’s GDP.

Even though the official Chinese military budget—a figure few believe—is double the official level of Indian defense spending, how defense funds are utilized, rather than size, is what makes the contrast between the two states interesting. China’s priority for decades has been twofold: boosting the country’s indigenous capabilities, especially with respect to conventional and nuclear deterrence, and working to shift the military balance in Asia in China’s favor. Today Beijing’s increasingly sophisticated missile force is at the heart of China’s military modernization. Even as Beijing imports high tech conventional weaponry from Russia, China has emerged as one of the biggest arms exporters in the world. Additionally, China’s three biggest arms clients are India’s immediate and troubled neighbors—Pakistan, Burma, and Bangladesh, in that order.

India, in contrast, relies on arms imports for meeting basic defense needs. New Delhi’s addiction to weapon imports ensures that the country’s domestic armament-production base remains weak and underdeveloped. Furthermore, though China apportions 28% of the country’s military budget for defense-related research and development, India apportions just 6% for research and development.

Given China’s deep-rooted authoritarianism, vibrant state-driven economy, growing military might, and unconcealed aim to dominate Asia, India must narrow the power disparity with Beijing through a commitment to the development of economic and military power. That need is further underscored by the likely arrival of Chinese submarines in India’s strategic backyard, the Indian Ocean, which is vital to world trade and the supply of oil. Close to half of the world’s overseas commerce, and one-fifth of global oil and gas supplies, pass through the Indian Ocean rim. The region is also critical for energy-poor India, who imports 75% of the country’s oil and gas supplies by sea. The security of sea lanes in the Indian Ocean rim is thus vital to India’s economic and security interests.

As the growing asymmetry in power with China puts New Delhi at a disadvantage when dealing bilaterally with Beijing, broader security arrangements or initiatives will become increasingly attractive to India. Such arrangements or initiatives can help build the security of vital sea lanes and contribute to wider power equilibrium in Asia.

New Delhi’s ability to avert the emergence of a Beijing-oriented Asia will hinge on India’s success in retaining the country’s major role in the Indian Ocean. A China that expands its presence in the Indian Ocean and exerts increasing influence over the regional waterways—as well as over Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Nepal—will pave the way for a Sino-centric Asia and for a greater strategic squeeze of India.[13]

Events in the Indian Ocean rim as much as in East Asia, therefore, will determine the balance of power in Asia.[14] For India to keep the Chinese navy out of India’s backyard, New Delhi must exert naval power at critical chokepoints. If India does not guard the various gates to the Indian Ocean—for instance, through strategic partnerships with key littoral states—the country will have to confront the Chinese navy in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea before long. Not surprisingly, India is now seeking to build defense ties, conduct joint military exercises, cooperate on energy, and hold strategic dialogues with countries in the Indian Ocean rim and beyond. For India the maritime arc stretching from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Malacca to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan constitutes the “new silk route.” Building maritime security in this arc demands cooperation and strategic partnerships among countries sharing common interests and values.

[1] Two Indian energy firms, ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) and Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL), own a combined 30% stake in the adjacent Burmese gas fields A-1 and A-3.

[2] The memorandum of understanding (MOU) was followed by a $84 million soft loan from Beijing and a technical survey by PetroChina for laying the pipeline from the Burmese gas site at Kyaukphyu to Ruili in Yunnan Province. See Sanjay Dutta, “Gas Pipeline: Myanmar Takes India for a Ride,” Times of India, March 27, 2006.

[3] Amitar Ranjan, “Myanmar Gas Bid Lost, MEA and Petroleum in War of Words,” Indian Express, July 30, 2007.

[4] John W. Garver, “Development of China’s Overland Transportation Links with Central, South-west and South Asia,” China Quarterly, no. 185 (March 2006): 1-22.

[5] Brahma Chellaney “China Covets a Pearl Necklace: Dragon’s Foothold in Gwadar,” Asian Age, April 7, 2007, http://chellaney.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!4913C7C8A2EA4A30!249.entry.

[6] The theory of China’s “peaceful rise” originated in a book published in April 1998 by Chinese strategic scholar Yan Xuetong and three of his colleagues. The book discusses China’s strategy to emerge as a great power without facing Cold War–style containment. The theory was quickly embraced by the communist leadership. Yan Xuetong (ed.), Zhongguo Jueqi: Guoji Huanjin Pinggu [For China to Rise: Assessing the International Environment], (Tianjin, China: Tianjin People’s Publishing House, 1998).

[7] The trade pattern, however, disturbingly shows India as a raw-material appendage to China’s rising industrial might. At the end of fiscal 2006-07, more than 50 percent of Indian exports to China comprised just one item—iron ore. When other primary commodities were added, that figure totaled 85 percent of the exports. In return, India has been importing more and more Chinese processed goods, to the extent that it has become import-dependent on China for steel tubes and pipes.

[8] “China-India Trade to Gear Up,” People’s Daily Online, August 2, 2005.

[9] Brahma Chellaney, “Averting Water Wars in Asia,” International Herald Tribune, June 26, 2007.

[10] R. Nicholas Burns, “On-The-Record Briefing on the Status of the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative and the Text of the Bilateral Agreement for Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation (123 Agreement),” (U.S. Department of State press briefing, July 27, 2007, http://www.state.gov/p/us/rm/2007/89559.htm.

[11] Brahma Chellaney, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2006).

[12] Joydeep Mukherji, “China, India, and the Fate of Globalization,” Standard & Poor’s, January 3, 2005, http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/ap/page.article/2,1,1,2,1104429838302.html.

[13] Mohan Malik, “China’s Peaceful Ruse: Beijing Tightens Its Noose Round India’s Neck,” Force, December 10, 2005.

[14] Donald L. Berlin, “India in the Indian Ocean,” Naval War College Review 59, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 58–89.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He can be reached at chellaney@gmail.com .

When nonproliferation is palmed off as disarmament

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Non-Proliferation as Disarmament

 

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, April 26, 2008

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/assets/graphics/proliferation-race

It is the very utility of nuclear weapons that serves as the main proliferation incentive. In the years ahead, it won’t be easy to stop more countries from pursuing nuclear-weapons ambitions if the present nuclear-armed states do not begin to denuke.

Yet, nuclear weapons, as the last U.S. posture review in 2002 stated, will continue to play a “critical role” because they possess “unique properties.” The growing attraction of missiles — which are much cheaper and easier to operate and maintain than manned bomber aircraft — flows from the fact that the attacking nation does not have to bring its forces in harm’s way.
 

Even as weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terrorism have emerged as the two most pressing issues in international relations, the global strategic environment today is more competitive than ever, with technological advances producing new destructive capacities.

 

It is against this background that one should examine a joint U.S.-Russia proposal to globalize their 1987 Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles (the so-called INF Treaty). That proposal raises at least three basic questions:

 

■ The first issue is whether the U.S. and Russia are seeking to promote non-proliferation or disarmament through their interest in a global treaty outlawing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.

 

■ The second question is whether such a proposal could actually act as a spur to the development of more deadly weapons by encouraging states to rely completely on long-range systems. Conversely, what is the military or technological logic to make strategic missiles preferable to intermediate-range missiles (IRBMs)?

 

■ The third question is whether this proposal is an earnest idea, given the new U.S.-Russian tensions over America’s missile-shield plans in Eastern Europe and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 10, 2007, statement that the INF Treaty no longer serves Russian interest. In fact, just four days after Mr. Putin’s statement, the Russian military’s chief of general staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, had warned that Moscow could pull out of the INF Treaty if the U.S. proceeded to install a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

 

If the INF Treaty does not mesh with Russian interests today, can Moscow seriously be seeking to globalize it? The proposal was first put forward through a scrappy October 2007 U.S.-Russian joint statement in the UN General Assembly. Earlier this month, the proposal was discussed at a workshop at Reykjavik, Iceland.

 

            Let us begin with the first question. With disarmament off the international radar screen, the focus of the major powers increasingly has been on more stringent non-proliferation. Too often, we are seeing non-proliferation proposals being speciously packaged as disarmament.

 

          Historically, technological progress has created the spur to eliminate by bilateral or multilateral treaty a type or class of weapons overtaken by newer discoveries. The Chemical Weapons Convention, for example, became possible only when chemical arms ceased to be militarily relevant for the major powers and instead threatened to become the poor state’s WMD.

 

         During the Cold War era, the unfettered arms racing, with its action-reaction cycle, led to the build-up of such surplus armaments that many of the weapons in national stockpiles became obsolescent or redundant. That encouraged arms-control efforts from the 1970s.

 

The INF Treaty was the product of such efforts to slash destabilizing surpluses by eliminating a class of weapons that threatened peace in Europe. Signed during the height of the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the INF Treaty later created misgivings in Moscow, where some saw it as slanted in America’s favour, both in terms of what it did not eliminate on the U.S. side, and the manner in which the American single-warhead Pershing II system got counted as equivalent to every multiple-warhead RSD-10 Pioneer (SS-20) Soviet missile. To be sure, this treaty contained pioneering on-site inspection provisions.

 

         Tellingly, the INF Treaty was intended not to disturb the most-sophisticated weapon systems held by the two major powers, including long-range missiles and sea- and submarine-launched systems. A globalized INF Treaty, however, would mean decapitation of the nuclear deterrent of India or Israel because neither at present has sophisticated missile assets beyond ground-launched intermediate-range missiles.

 

            Today, the U.S. and Russian interest in working together to stop the proliferation of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles is understandable, given the potentially adverse consequences of such proliferation for their strategic interests. The spread of missile technology impinges on the capabilities of all the five ICBM-armed major powers (the Permanent Five) to police high seas or to intervene without incurring significant political or military costs.

 

          Such proliferation concerns are reinforced by the fact that, unlike other weapon systems, missiles, especially cruise missiles, are difficult to defend against. The progressive tightening of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) controls and the inclusion of civilian space and aerospace technologies within their clasp have only made it more difficult to build international consensus against the proliferation of missiles. Now, all delivery systems (other than manned aircraft) are banned for export.

 

           The MTCR-centred missile non-proliferation regime is actually more inequitable than the NPT due to an absence of any mutuality of obligations between the missile and non-missile states. The MTCR incorporates no commitment on the part of the missile powers — akin to NPT’s Article VI — to work toward complete missile disarmament. Indeed, it facilitates continued missile modernization, with the missile powers now increasingly focusing on advanced submarine-launched ballistic and cruise missiles.

 

        There are also no international monitoring and verification measures to detect and forestall interstate transfers of missile systems and production technology, as underscored by China’s covert transfers of INF-class M-9s and M-11s to Pakistan and its continuing production assistance to that country.

 

            The global INF Treaty proposal, in effect, aims to accomplish what the missile non-proliferation regime has failed to thwart. But given that the MTCR remains largely a cartel of supplier states outside the UN framework, the establishment of a globalized INF Treaty before the advent of a global missile non-proliferation regime is like putting the cart before the horse.

 

            Actually, greater inequities in the international security order risk undermining both nuclear and missile non-proliferation. Concerns are already growing in the developing world that the existing technology controls, through their progressive tightening and extension, are throttling legitimate civilian activities by the “have-nots.”

 

         These concerns centre on the manner key technologies and sensitive commerce are monopolized by a few. Civil nuclear trade today constitutes the world’s most politically-regulated and cartelized commerce, with a tiny syndicate of state-guided firms controlling all reactor, fuel and component sales — a monopoly sought to be only reinforced by the proposed creation of an international fuel bank.

 

       At the same time, MTCR controls are constraining civilian space cooperation, even as space assets are becoming critical for meteorology, civil communications, navigation, mapping of underground water resources, national defence and reconnaissance. Current export controls on inertial navigation system (INS) technology for commercial aircraft are just one example of the extension of controls to civilian fields.

 

            The MTCR guidelines require members-states to consider the “capabilities and objectives of the missile and space programmes of the recipient state” before agreeing to export any item or technology. Since an indigenous space-launch vehicle (SLV) arms its possessor with potential IRBM capability, the civilian space programme of a non-member seeking to independently place satellites in orbit automatically becomes a target of MTCR controls.

 

Against this background, caution should be exercised in promoting yet another layer of discrimination in the international security rules.

 

With nuclear disarmament looking a utopian idea, the world faces fundamental challenges relating to the preservation of norms on non-proliferation in an era marked by major shifts in global economic and political power. Such challenges are accentuated by the fact that surpluses from the past arms racing continue to be glaring. Almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America and Russia together still have nearly 25,000 nuclear weapons, including 6,000 long-range weapons on hair-trigger alert.

 

The growing proliferation and use of missiles does carry serious implications for regional and global security. But a global INF Treaty has to be weighed against some grim realities:

 

♦ First, missiles have come to symbolize power and coercion in international relations. They are useful not only to achieve military objectives, but also to realize aims through political intimidation and coercion.

 

♦ Second, there is no international legal structure to control missiles nor any taboo related to their use. While nuclear weapons have not been employed for more than 62 years, missiles have been used with increasing frequency. The role of cruise missiles is growing the fastest. The low-flying, slower cruise missiles, unlike the much-faster ballistic missiles, strike with a high degree of accuracy.

 

♦ Third, conflicts and interventions since the last decade are a vivid reminder of the high costs of being defenceless against a foe firing missiles and other high-tech, remotely-fired conventional weapons.

 

♦ Fourth, only nations without the capability to hit back are falling victim to missile strikes. In some cases, such states — as the history of the past two decades testifies — have been targeted as guinea pigs to test out new missile systems or to help correct flaws in existing ones.

 

♦ Fifth, there is only one effective way to deter missile terror and blackmail — a reliable missile-deterrent capability to ensure a calibrated but proportional response. Without the capacity to effectively strike back with missiles, a state would be vulnerable to the type of blackmail China mounted against Taiwan in 1996 or the kind of missile warfare that has been waged one-sidedly in other theatres.

 

♦ Sixth, a missile-defence shield is a far more expensive, complex and dubious scheme than a missile deterrent. Such a shield makes sense only for states that are already armed with a robust missile deterrent. Indeed, the institution of missile defences is likely to compel states to build more-sophisticated missiles that can foil defences of any kind, including by arming ballistic missiles with decoys and other countermeasures.

 

In that light, how realistic is the idea of globalizing the INF Treaty?

 

Firstly, a global INF Treaty would be a spur to the development of, and reliance on, intercontinental-range weaponry, even when a state’s security threats emanate from the immediate neighbourhood. What may be a proposal to preserve the technological superiority of a few may actually help speed up a challenge to such ascendancy. 

 

ICBMs are already an idiom of big-power status, playing a primary role in power-projection strategies. But with a global INF Treaty, the attraction of ICBMs would multiply.

 

Secondly, a global INF Treaty proposal runs counter to Russian threats to renew interest in intermediate-range missile forces if the U.S. installs a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

 

Would a globalized INF Treaty, as an incentive, sell surplus U.S. and Russian ICBMs to other states in lieu of the shorter-range missiles they eliminate? Such a trade-off might be a good way both to bring down the “overkill” arsenals that the U.S. and Russia still maintain, and to promote international cooperation and peace on the based of shared capabilities.

 

In the absence of tangible, compensatory incentives, the seriousness of the proposal is open to question. India, for example, has modest deterrent capabilities against a multitude of missile threats that few other countries face. Why would it accept decapitation under a globalized INF Treaty?

 

To effectively tackle proliferation challenges, the world needs genuine disarmament. However, what a globalized INF Treaty would offer is the reinforcement of the present power and prerogatives of the P-5, armed as they are with intercontinental missile-strike capabilities and other power-projection assets, such as naval forces that patrol far from their shores, instruments of precision strike in the form of cruise missiles, and space-based information systems.

 

Those who cite hypothetical threats to justify continued WMD modernization should not be seen as seeking to disarm those that confront real threats. A central tenet of international law and the UN Charter is that it is the sovereign right of every nation to defend its security by appropriate means.

 

Today, it has become more difficult than ever to palm off non-proliferation as disarmament, or to label a cutback of surpluses as disarmament. What the world seeks today are concrete measures that would turn growing concerns about rearmament into new hopes for common security.

 

(c) Asian Age, 2008

Red Star Over Nepal

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Revolution By Intimidation

Brahma Chellaney

Guest column, India Today, April 28, 2008




The Maoist victory in Nepal elections represents another setback for India in a troubled neighbourhood and calls into question the sustainability of its open-border policy.

Having helped sow the wind in Nepal, India now will reap the Maoist whirlwind. New Delhi first ceded strategic space in Nepal to outside powers and the United Nations and then, in an intimidation-plagued environment, encouraged a process that has sprung a nasty surprise.

Yet, no sooner had the Maoists triumphed in the elections than New Delhi’s after-the-fact rationalizations began.

Nepal is not just another neighbour but a symbiotically linked state with close cultural affinity and open borders with India that permit passport-free passage. The Indo-Nepal equation is deeper than between any two European Union members. Indeed, ever since the1950 Chinese annexation of Tibet eliminated the outer buffer, Nepal has served as an inner buffer between India and China.

The Maoist victory presents India with new potential challenges. It is likely to embolden other revolutionaries in the red corridor from Pashupati to Tirupati that the way to secure power is to wage unbridled violence until the established order gives in to a political and constitutional restructuring.

Equally significant is that India now will have to openly vie with China for influence in a state that had been its security preserve for more than half a century. Maoist leader Prachanda’s pledge of “equidistance between India and China” despite Nepal’s 1950 security treaty with New Delhi underscores Beijing’s gain. At a time when China is still battling a Tibetan uprising, the Nepal events arm it with additional leverage to dissuade New Delhi from playing the Tibet card.

It is karmic justice that the monarchy, which for long sought to play the China card against India, now faces extinction from the very forces — the Maoists — it initially helped rear to counter the India-friendly Nepali Congress.

The poll outcome raises the spectre that radicalization could extend from the polity to the military, as the victors seek to integrate their former fighters into the security forces. The Maoists’ stint in office, however, could help gradually defang them by making them indistinguishable from other politicians.

The new situation signals three likely developments. First, Nepal’s rocky and troubled path to democracy since 1990 is unlikely to end, with the polls marking only the newest chapter in a blemished experiment. Second, India’s relationship with Nepal is set to become more complicated, with little progress likely on addressing Indian security concerns or harnessing hydropower reserves for mutual benefit. And third, the Maoists’ hard part comes now on the twin issues of governance and Constitution framing.

Those who sought to bring about a revolution by chipping away at state institutions are being called upon to reverse state atrophy. It won’t be easy for them to embrace what the situation demands — consensus building. If anything, they are likely to make India a convenient scapegoat for their failures in office.

Despite its proverbial aversion to hard decisions, India today is left with no soft options. An open-border policy is sustainable only if India moves its security perimeter to the Nepalese frontier with Tibet. The onus must be placed on the Maoists to show through actions that the government they lead deserves sustained Indian assistance, or else these revolutionaries will take Indian aid and also damn India.

New Delhi ought not to shy away from employing the immense leverage it holds: Nepal’s topography, with mountainous terrain sliding southward into plains, shapes its economic dependence on India. The ethnic Madhesis who populate the Terai, Nepal’s food bowl, are India’s natural constituency, and that card is begging to be exercised.

The author is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research.

Tibet and Burma: A Study in Contrast

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Contrasting responses to crackdowns in Tibet and Burma

Japan Times, April 9, 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 protesters in Yangon last September left at least 31 people dead — according to a U.N. 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.

Despite growing international appeals to Beijing to respect Tibetans’ human rights and cultural identity, and to 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 help end the repression in the Tibetan region.

When the Burmese generals cracked down on monks and their prodemocracy 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 agreeing to 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 U-Tsang and western Kham, or roughly half of the Tibetan plateau. Yet China has changed even the demographic composition of TAR, where there were hardly any Han settlers before the Chinese annexation.

TAR, home to barely 40 percent 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 Macau. 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 Macau. 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. Not content with the Dalai Lama’s 1987 concession in publicly forsaking Tibetan independence, Beijing insists that he also affirm that Tibet was always part of China. But as the Dalai Lama said in a recent 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 Macau. 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 behavior is applied only to powerful autocratic countries, while sanctions are a favored 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.

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

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.

India’s Feckless China Policy

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Stop Being Bullied

 

Present slipshod approach belittles India, eggs on China

 

Brahma Chellaney

Times of India, April 4, 2008

 

Beijing’s provocations against India continue unabated. Arrogant authoritarianism blinds China to counterproductive actions. Surprisingly, India plays into Beijing’s hands and compounds the indignities. Recent instances underscore the manner India is being belittled from within.

 

            What is discreditable is not that Beijing summoned the Indian ambassador post-midnight, but that the envoy — a distinguished woman diplomat — docilely turned up at the Chinese foreign office at 2 am. No host government can compel a foreign diplomat to appear before it at an odd hour, that too in peacetime. The correct response to that imprudent, bureaucratic-level call would have been for the ambassador to say politely but firmly that she would visit the foreign office during regular business hours.

 

            Worse, it was not Beijing but New Delhi that revealed the post-midnight summons and the ambassador’s South Block-cleared compliance. Had New Delhi retaliated or wanted to prepare public ground to retaliate, such disclosure was unavoidable. But to have revealed that without any intent to respond amounted to inflicting self-humiliation. It brought home the unmistakeable softening of the Indian state. When Beijing in the early 1960s summoned Indian chargé d’affaires P.K. Banerjee at an unreasonable hour, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) called in the Chinese chargé d’affaires at 3 am on two separate occasions, after which the Indian envoy faced no further harassment.

 

            In the present case, New Delhi did not take umbrage that in handing to its ambassador a list of places where Tibetan exiles purportedly planned to hold protests, Beijing was not only asking the world’s largest democracy to deny Tibetans the right to protest, but also revealing the existence of a Chinese intelligence network in India (and suggesting it was superior to India’s). Far from retaliating, a feckless New Delhi actually rewarded Beijing, by granting its ambassador an audience with the home minister to discuss the Olympic torch’s safety, even as China’s brutal crackdown in Tibet mocks the Olympic Charter’s “human dignity” principle.

           

When the Chinese made a protest over the Prime Minister’s Arunachal tour, it was again not Beijing but New Delhi that leaked the news. In doing so, New Delhi helped put the spotlight — to Beijing’s delight — on China’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh. A wiser New Delhi would not have given publicity to China’s low-key action in presenting, as External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted recently, “not formally, but informally, a démarche to our Embassy”. But it just could not resist the urge to use the démarche to pat itself on the back for the PM’s Arunachal trip, although the tour conspicuously skipped Tawang and came after, rather than before, his China visit.

 

            Yet, when Chinese forces last November provocatively destroyed some Indian army bunkers at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet tri-junction, New Delhi did the opposite: It tried to sweep the grave episode under the rug, employing “sources” to discredit reports about the attack inside Sikkim. It took New Delhi four full months to acknowledge that attack, with Mukherjee admitting in the Rajya Sabha on March 19 that, although China accepts the Sikkim-Tibet border “as settled in the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of 1890”, “some bunkers have been destroyed and some activities have taken place”. This is the latest example of New Delhi first gratuitously downplaying a belligerent Chinese action, only to sheepishly admit the truth later.

 

Take another shocker: The Army chief had the gall to say recently that India is as culpable as China in committing cross-border intrusions. His statement not only made light of official assertions about growing Chinese incursions — about 300 in the past two years, or more than three per week — but also flew in the face of a glaring fact: China’s continuing refusal to clarify the frontline, in order to keep India under military pressure. Beijing’s breach of promise to exchange maps has brought the bilateral process to define the line of control to a grinding halt. Instead of stressing China’s intransigence, General Deepak Kapoor witlessly justified Chinese cross-border forays by saying the “Chinese have a different perception” of the frontline. The Chinese have a different perception because it suits them.

 

            Earlier, Gen. Kapoor betrayed his ignorance of India’s security commitment to Bhutan by saying that Chinese military intrusions into Bhutanese territory are “a matter between China and Bhutan”. When the Army chief does not seem to know (or care) that India is responsible for Bhutanese defence, which neighbour can bank on this country? Bhutan, in any event, is the only friend India is left with.

 

            The defence ministry has contributed its own bit to lowering India’s esteem, earning in the process a grudging compliment from China’s official Xinhua news agency, which in a March 25 Mandarin commentary states: “India’s defensive and cautious attitude toward China appears to have permeated its defence ministry”. The ministry has completely watered down the China section in its latest annual report, as if India’s concerns have just vanished.

 

The more power China accumulates, the more it will seek to humiliate India. It is past time India got its act together to deal with Chinese provocations deftly. Asymmetry in inter-state relations does not entail the propitiation of the stronger. Diplomacy is the art of offsetting or neutralizing power imbalances. Consistency and confidence help obviate flipping and whining. India’s present slapdash approach is not only an invitation to greater trouble, but nationally demeaning.

 

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

 

© The Times of India, 2008

Sanctions against Burma have only strengthened the junta

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Engage, don’t isolate 

 

Burma illustrates that sanctions are not just a blunt instrument but counterproductive

 

By Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, April 2, 2008

 

This week’s visit of the Burmese junta’s vice-chairman, General Maung Aye, who is also the Army chief, will formalize an agreement to launch an India-funded multi-nodal transportation corridor linking northeast India with Burma’s Sittwe port. The $135-million Kaladan Corridor has been made imperative by Bangladesh’s refusal to grant India transit access — a blinkered approach holding up the BIMSTEC free-trade area accord.

 

Maung Aye’s visit is an occasion to remember that Burma today is one of the world’s most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its junta scheduling a referendum next month on a draft constitution. The junta’s reclusive chairman, Than Shwe, announced last week that the military would hand over power to civilians after elections in two years’ time. But the junta still holds out the threat to debar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from contesting.

 

            Burma is an important state. First, size matters: this is not a Bhutan or a Brunei but a country that boasts the largest Indochina land area. Second, it is a resource-rich nation with copious natural-gas reserves. And third, it is a natural land bridge between South and Southeast Asia, and thus critical to the economic advancement of India’s restive northeast. Such is its vantage location that Burma forms the strategic nucleus between India, China and Southeast Asia.

 

            Burma’s present problems and impoverishment can be traced back to the defining events of 1962, when General Ne Win deposed elected prime minister, U Nu, an architect of non-alignment. Ne Win, a devotee of Marx and Stalin, sealed off Burma, banning most external trade and investment, nationalizing companies, halting all foreign projects and tourism, and kicking out the large Indian business community.

 

            It was not until more than a quarter-century later that a new generation of military leaders attempted to ease Burma’s international isolation through modest economic reforms. Such attempts, without loosening political controls, came after the military’s brutal suppression of the 1988 student-led protests that left several thousand dead or injured — a bloodbath that coincided with the numerology-dedicated Ne Win’s announcement of retirement on the ‘most auspicious’ day of August 8, 1988 (8.8.88).

 

Twenty years later, China, also addicted to the power of number 8, may be courting trouble by launching the Beijing Olympics on 8.8.08 at 8.08 am. The Games —   communist China’s coming-out party — have already been besmirched by the brutal crackdown on the monk-led Tibetan uprising, just six months after Burmese monks spearheaded a challenge to authoritarianism in their own country through street protests that had an underlying anti-Chinese tenor. In fact, Burma’s majority people, the ethnic Burmans, are of Tibetan stock. The resistance against repressive rule in both Burma and Tibet is led by an iconic Nobel laureate — a symbol of soft power standing up to hard power.

 

            Western penal actions against Burma began no sooner than the junta refused to honour the outcome of the 1990 elections, won by Suu Kyi’s party. But Burma became a key target of US sanctions policy only in this decade, as underlined by the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act (which bans all imports from that country) and a series of punitive executive orders. The new missionary zeal is due to a Burma activist in the White House — not the president but his wife.

 

            Laura Bush’s activism has only been aided by the junta’s remarkable short-sightedness. The regime invited a new wave of US-led sanctions by killing at least 31 people during last September’s mass protests. It continues to detain Suu Kyi, besides isolating itself from the public by moving the national capital to remote Nay Pyi Taw. With Burma’s 58 million people bearing the brunt of the sanctions, China — a friend to every pariah regime — has emerged the only winner.

 

            The oversized military fancies itself as the builder of a united Burma. In a country that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence, the military has used the threat of Balkanization to justify its hold on politics. It trumpets its successes between the late 1980s and early 1990s in crushing a four-decade-long communist insurgency and concluding cease-fire agreements with other underground groups that left just a few outfits in active resistance. The period since has been viewed by the military as a time to begin state-building, while to the opposition it has been an unending phase of repression.

 

Given Burma’s potent mix of ethnicity, religion and culture, democracy can serve as a unifying and integrating force, like in India. After all, Burma cannot be indefinitely held together through brute might. But make no mistake: The seeds of democracy will not take root in a stunted economy, battered by widening Western sanctions.

 

Also, if the Burmese are to break their military’s vise on power, why has much of the world accepted the 1989 name change to Myanmar? As was evident from Ceylon’s 1972 renaming as Sri Lanka to give it a distinct Sinhala identity — a move that helped further alienate the Tamil minority — a name change represents powerful symbolism. The junta restored the traditional name, Myanmar, for nationalistic reasons. But a name change ought to have an elected government’s imprimatur.

 

The grim reality is that sanctions have put the Burmese society in a downward spiral of poverty and discontent while strengthening the military’s political grip. Burma is proof that sanctions hurt those they are supposed to protect, especially when they are enforced for long and shut out engagement. A calibrated approach is called for, with better-targeted sanctions and room for outside actors to influence developments within. Instead of targeting the junta, the widening sanctions have sought to choke off industries — from tourism to textiles — on which the livelihood of millions of Burmese depends. Many female garment workers made jobless by sanctions are being driven into prostitution, as one US official, Matthew Daley, warned as far back as 2003.

 

Yet, in the face of a visibly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Burma, Laura Bush has championed more sanctions, roping in the EU. Her husband, underscoring how power respects power and the weak get bullied, spits fire at Burma but accepts despotic China’s invitation to the Olympics. He should see how the Burma sanctions are holding its people “economic hostage”, as Burmese author Ma Thanegi told Stanley Weiss in an interview.

 

Such is Laura Bush’s ability not only to influence US policy but also to orchestrate an international campaign that she announced last December 10 that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta”. New Delhi has still to confirm that. Nor has it repudiated the ban. Who can contradict a first lady whose fury on Burma reputedly flows from a meeting with a minority-Karen rape victim and information from a relative with an erstwhile connection to that country?

 

If the Burmese are to win political freedoms, they need to be first freed from sanctions that rob them of jobs, cripple their well-being and retard civil-society development. Years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution. To avert a humanitarian catastrophe, the same international standard applicable to autocratic, no-less-ruthless regimes in next-door China, Laos and Bangladesh should apply to Burma — engage, don’t isolate.

 

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=a9c9f792-f519-4cb3-9505-8e0c45ae326c&&Headline=Engage%2c+don%u2019t+isolate+

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.

Beijing faces moment of truth on its brutal occupation of Tibet

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Prolonged unrest in Tibet could unravel China’s monocracy

The scrutiny that will accompany the 2008 Beijing Olympics could be the spur that brings change to China.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, March 27, 2008

The monk-led Tibetan uprising,
which spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas
incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist
China’s history. It is 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 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 current revolt openly challenges 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 dual 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 latest 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 Chinese 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 local economy, which benefits the Hans.

The natives also have been incensed by atheistic
China’s growing intrusion into Tibetan Buddhist affairs, as exemplified
by Beijing’s recent 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 shortsighted 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.

The ongoing 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 with wider political implications. At a minimum, the
crackdown by a regime wedded to the unbridled exercise of state power
promises to exacerbate the situation on the ground.

The muted global response thus far to the bloodletting
and arbitrary arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China’s growing
clout, underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military
power and unrivaled $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 mid-17th century
onward. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel at the
beginning of the 20th century 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 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 unraveling 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 ultranationalism
as a substitute for the 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’s 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 percent 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, centered on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims
in the South and East 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 progressively but
violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening
of the central political authority in China for Tibet to reclaim
autonomy.

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 dreamed of independence in mid-1991?
Yet months later, the Soviet empire had unraveled. 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 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 prodemocracy
protesters 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
that has already been besmirched by the crackdown in Tibet — may be a
spur to radical change in that country.

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
(C) All rights reserved

Tibet: Core Issue Between India and China

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India should bring the Tibet issue to the centrestage

 

 

Brahma Chellaney

Expert, strategic affairs

Economic Times, March 21, 2008

 

No event since independence has more adversely affected India’s security than the fall of Tibet. Tibet’s annexation by China created a new geopolitical reality by bringing Han forces to India’s frontiers for the first time in history. Within 11 years of extending its full control over Tibet, China invaded India — a war whose wounds have been kept open by Beijing’s aggressive claims to additional Indian territories.

 

Today, China’s occupation gives it control over Tibet’s vast mineral and water resources. Tibet not only has 126 different minerals, but is also the source of rivers like the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Indus — the ongoing damming of which allows Beijing to fashion water into a political weapon against India. Indeed, China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s natural resources carries serious ecological and climatic implications for India.

            The occupying power now is creating new demographic realities on the ground that would help accentuate India’s security challenge. Not content with having turned Lhasa into an overwhelmingly Han city, Beijing is pursuing a vigorous “Go West” Han-migration campaign, which is being facilitated by the new railway. Tibet’s Sinicization is helping marginalize Tibetans, sympathetic to India. Is it any surprise thus that Tibetans have risen in revolt against Beijing’s relentless repression?

            With the Tibetan rebellion having spread to remote parts of Tibet, and even beyond to the areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, China has responded with brute force, cutting off the Tibetan plateau from the rest of the world, killing scores of protestors and arbitrarily arresting many in an ongoing crackdown. India cannot stay a mute spectator to the bloodletting on the land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture. The autocrats in Beijing will not ease their crackdown unless international pressure is brought to bear on them. The world has no second option.

            Tibet is the core issue between India and China. So India should not hesitate to bring Tibet to the centerstage, and plan for the time when its ally, the aging Dalai Lama, is no longer on the scene.

(c) Economic Times, 2008