Asia’s pivotal triangle

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Chellaney

India has to build on its close ties with Japan to counterbalance an assertive China

India Today, June 3, 2013

India, China and Japan, as they manoeuvre for strategic advantage, are transforming relations between themselves in a way that portends growing strategic collaboration between New Delhi and Tokyo but sharper geopolitical competition between China and the other two Asian powers. This had an echo in two virtually back-to-back summit meetings: the genuine warmth and expansion of substantive cooperation that boosted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Japan visit contrasted vividly with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s all-smiles-but-no-compromise approach during his India tour, which, behind the hype, helped to underscore the deep Sino-Indian divide.

Li, who brought a large team of exporters, sought to secure bigger commercial benefits in India—in spite of an already lopsided trade—while safeguarding China’s latitude to box-in India from practically all sides. The visit stood out for the manner it attempted to cloak or underplay the contentious issues and put a positive gloss on the current bilateral relationship.

But just as President Hu Jintao’s 2006 India trip was preceded by Beijing’s jarring resurrection of its long-dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh in the east and Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2010 tour followed China’s challenge to Indian sovereignty in the western sector, Li also delivered a pre-visit gift—a stealthy, 19-kilometre-deep incursion into Ladakh. The daring military raid after more than six years of increasing Chinese territorial assertiveness should have prompted India to link closer political and commercial engagement with China to substantive progress on the territorial disputes. Yet, a politically besieged Singh responded in a way that can only embolden China to step up its pressure on India.

First, China vindicated its coercive diplomacy by ending the intrusion only after India destroyed defensive fortifications at Chumar to the south and suspended patrolling along the critical borderline there. And second, Li had his way on the joint statement, which omits the standard commitment to try and resolve the border dispute “at an early date”; instead it expresses strange “satisfaction” with never-ending border talks that continue to take India round and round the mulberry bush. Beijing has signalled that it will not cede its territorial and border cards against India.

These are also the cards that China is now wielding against Japan. In the way it is trying to furtively disrupt the territorial and international-river flow status quo in the Himalayas, China launched a stealth war in the East China Sea to assert territorial claims over Japan’s resource-rich Senkaku Islands. China’s opening gambit—to compel the international community to recognize the existence of a dispute—has been successful, and foreshadows further disturbance of the status quo.

Far from allowing its booming bilateral trade to come in the way of its stealth wars against Japan and India, China is employing trade as a political weapon. With China serving as Japan’s largest overseas market, Beijing has sought to punish Tokyo through an informal boycott of Japanese products since last September. For China, trade is also about geostrategic interests. It values the lopsided trade with India as a strategic weapon that undercuts its rival’s manufacturing base, yet yields handsome dividends for it.

The more openly China has embraced market capitalism, the more nationalist it has become, encouraged by its leaders’ political-legitimacy need for an indigenous alternative to the imported but worn-out Marxist dogma. An increasingly muscular foreign policy thus has become intertwined with national renewal.

Cartoon in China’s Global Times (http://goo.gl/hzCCT) mocks Japan-India partnership, with accompanying article warning New Delhi that strategic ties with Tokyo can “only bring trouble to India.”

With China’s rise casting the shadow of a power disequilibrium over Asia, Singh’s Tokyo visit highlighted the imperative for Japan and India to lead an effort to build freedom, prosperity, and sea-lane security in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s leading trade and energy seaway. Given China’s mercantilist strategy to assert control over natural-resource supplies and their transport routes, the maintenance of a peaceful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation, has become critical to the well-being of resource-poor Japan and India.

The fast-growing relationship of these two natural allies is remarkably free of any strategic dissonance. However, meaningful strategic collaboration between them hinges on important shifts in their policies. Japan, America’s treaty ally, has established military interoperability only with U.S. forces. Following its 2008 security-cooperation accord with India, Japan—with Asia’s largest naval fleet—must also build interoperability with Indian naval forces, so that, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in New Delhi before returning to power, “Japan’s navy and the Indian navy are seamlessly interconnected.”

Brahma Chellaney is a strategic thinker and author.

Geostrategic risks of lopsided trade

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Chellaney

An asymmetrical trade relationship with China is exposing India to greater strategic pressures and risks while aiding Beijing’s strategy to prevent India’s rise as a peer competitor.

Brahma Chellaney, Mint, May 30, 2013

Chinese territorial assertiveness is obscuring how Beijing is strategically expanding lopsided trade with India to rake in mounting profits while undercutting Indian manufacturing through an avalanche of cheap Chinese-made products. China’s ballooning trade surplus with India is compounded by its import of mainly primary commodities while exporting finished products.

Perpetuating such an asymmetrical relationship presents India in an unflattering light as a raw-material appendage of, and a goods-dumping market for, the Chinese economy. More importantly, the lopsided economic engagement gives China little incentive to bridge a widening political divide with India. If anything, it encourages China to continue with a strategy to keep India under strategic pressure so as to regionally contain it.

With China exporting more than 2½ times as much as it imports, its already large trade surplus will swell if bilateral trade rises from $70 billion currently to the targeted $100 billion in 2015. Economic problems in the West, by contributing to a slowdown in China, have only increased the importance of the Indian market for Beijing. This is what prompted Premier Li Keqiang to choose India as his first overseas destination for an official visit. This factor has also encouraged China’s cash-rich, state-supported banks to offer debt financing to heavily indebted Indian companies that commit to buy Chinese equipment or supply raw materials.

While swamping the Indian market with its products, China has made it difficult for Indian exporters to gain much of a foothold in its own market, including in sectors where India is strong, such as pharmaceuticals and IT. As a result, India’s exports to China largely consist of low-margin, unprocessed commodities. India’s exports have actually slumped since 2012, in part because of legal and other wrangles at home over extraction of iron ore, the leading export item in the past decade to China, which conserves its own reserves of strategic mineral ores to rely on imports.

China’s increasing access to the Indian market has done little to encourage it to pursue a less-adversarial foreign policy. Indeed, the more profits China has reaped, the more assertive it has become. As India’s trade deficit with China has soared from just $1 billion in 2002 to $40 billion in 2013 (or one-third of India’s overall trade deficit), Beijing has, for example, openly challenged Indian sovereignty in the large eastern and western sectors of the Himalayas by playing the Arunachal and Kashmir cards.

Instead of calibrating China’s market access to progress on the political, territorial, and water-resource issues, a politically adrift India is unwittingly doing just the opposite—allowing Beijing to strengthen its leverage against it. The massive trade imbalance with China is worsening India’s current account deficit, pushing the rupee to record lows against the US dollar since last year.

China has effectively turned asymmetrical trade into another instrument to prevent India’s rise as a peer competitor. In fact, China is now leveraging its trade and financial clout—including its role as a major supplier of power and telecom equipment and its emergence as a lender to financially troubled Indian companies—to limit India’s options on countering the Chinese strategic encirclement. An Indian business community dependent on Chinese product supply and financing is lobbying for a continued soft approach towards China, now India’s largest source of imports.

The paradox is that, despite supply of turbines and other equipment, most Chinese exports are not technology items but cheap products that kill small-scale manufacturing and rob jobs in India, with some of them also posing safety risk or public health concern. The bilateral focus on trade, even as China builds up strategic pressure from multiple flanks, aids the Chinese win-win agenda to reap profits while continuing to hem in India.

Consequently, the politics and economics of the relationship are going in opposite directions, to India’s serious detriment. India wrongly bet on rapidly growing trade helping to mute political disputes and moderate Chinese conduct so as to create an environment conducive for settlement of outstanding issues.

For China, trade is not only about economics but also about geostrategic interests. So, it does not allow booming bilateral trade to come in the way of its territorial assertiveness, as the recent Ladakh incursion highlighted. In fact, as underscored by its commercial actions against Japan and the Philippines, it employs trade as a political weapon. With China serving as Japan’s largest overseas market, Beijing has sought to punish Tokyo through an informal boycott of Japanese products since last September.

In this light, any Indian dependency on Chinese imports will carry geostrategic risks. China encourages economic dependencies and then manipulates them to advance its strategic objectives. In its recent territorial feuds with other neighbours, China has bared the cards it is likely to wield when faced with a diplomatic or military crisis next—from employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of the vital rare-earth minerals.

So what can India do to prevent China from using its trade prowess for political ends? First, it must avoid any commercial dependency that cannot be easily be substituted with imports from elsewhere.

Second, India must aggressively contain the flood of Chinese-made subsidized goods through countervailing duties and anti-dumping measures that bite, or else it will become harder for it to develop a more mature manufacturing base. Its lodging of anti-dumping cases at the World Trade Organization has proven no deterrent.

And third—in the way China unofficially but assertively links economic issues with political matters—India must not shy away from linking market access to concrete progress on border and water issues. But if push comes to shove, it has the option to take a leaf out of China’s playbook by orchestrating an informal consumer boycott of Chinese products.

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

The iron fist in a trade glove

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

The Japan Times, May 28, 2013

Trade as a weapon: China promotes economic dependencies and then manipulates them to advance its geostrategic objectives.

Japan and India are natural allies whose fast-growing relationship is remarkably free of any strategic dissonance. So, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Tokyo visit this week stands in sharp contrast to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s recently concluded India tour, which, behind the hype, helped to underscore the deep Sino-Indian divide.

India, China and Japan, constituting Asia’s pivotal triangle, are transforming relations between themselves in a way that portends growing strategic collaboration between New Delhi and Tokyo but sharper geopolitical competition between China and the other two Asian powers. The Sino-Indian relationship was recently disturbed by a stealthy incursion across the disputed Himalayan border by the People’s Liberation Army, which pulled back its troops just in time to allow Li to go ahead with a scheduled visit to India.

Li’s visit helped shine a spotlight on a negative aspect extending beyond the Himalayan tensions — India’s ballooning trade deficit with Beijing, compounded by China’s import of mainly primary commodities while exporting finished products. A flood of cheap Chinese-made goods has undercut Indian manufacturing.

The lopsided economic engagement gives China little incentive to bridge a widening political divide with India. If anything, it encourages China to continue with a strategy to keep India under strategic pressure so as to regionally contain that country.

With China exporting more than two-and-half times as much as it imports, its already large trade surplus with India will only swell if the two countries meet their target of raising bilateral trade from the current level of nearly $70 billion to $100 billion by 2015. Its recent border incursion notwithstanding, China has focused on raking in more profits from the Indian market. Li himself underscored the difficulty of correcting the fundamental imbalance in trade by taking mainly exporters in his large business team to India.

Economic problems in the West, by contributing to a slowdown in China, have only increased the importance of the Indian market for Beijing. This is what prompted Li to choose India as his first overseas destination for an official visit. This factor has also encouraged China’s cash-rich, state-supported banks to offer debt financing to heavily indebted Indian companies that commit to buy Chinese equipment or supply raw materials.

China’s increasing access to the Indian market, however, has done little to promote a less-adversarial Chinese foreign policy. Indeed, the more profits China has reaped from its trade relationship with India, the more assertive it has become.

As China’s trade surplus with India has soared from just $1 billion in 2002 to $40 billion in 2013, China has openly challenged Indian sovereignty in the large western and eastern sectors of the Himalayas. In this period, China has continued to enlarge its strategic footprint in Pakistani-held Kashmir — a disputed territory — even as sustained Chinese pressure forced India’s state-owned ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) to pull out of a contract to explore for oil in two blocks off the Vietnamese coast in the South China Sea. Beijing had warned India against “any unilateral exploration activities” in the South China Sea.

The Indian assumption that greater trade would make Beijing more amenable to solving the border dispute and more sensitive to India’s other concerns has been belied. While refusing to accept the territorial status quo with India, China is also working to disturb the status quo on international-river flows to its southern neighbor through an aggressive dam-building program.

India is particularly vulnerable to China’s reengineering of transboundary flows because it alone receives nearly half of all river waters that leave Chinese territory. Beijing, however, has repeatedly spurned India’s proposal to conclude a pact or establish an intergovernmental institution to define rights and responsibilities on shared rivers. China wants only to sell flood-related hydrological data.

That China does not allow booming bilateral trade from coming in the way of its territorial assertiveness is also manifest from the way it has ratcheted up disputes in the East and South China Seas. In fact, as underscored by its actions against Japan and the Philippines since last year, it employs trade as a political weapon. With China serving as Japan’s largest overseas market, Beijing has sought to punish Tokyo through an informal boycott of Japanese products since last September.

For China, trade is not only about economics but also about geostrategic interests. Beijing values the lopsided trade with India as a strategic weapon that undercuts its rival’s manufacturing base, yet yields handsome dividends for it.

In fact, China encourages economic dependencies so that it can manipulate them to advance its strategic objectives. In its recent territorial feuds with other neighbors, China has bared the cards it is likely to wield when faced with a diplomatic or military crisis next — from employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of the vital rare-earth minerals.

So what can India do to prevent China from using its trade prowess for political ends

First, it must avoid any commercial dependency that cannot be easily be substituted with imports from elsewhere.

Second, it must aggressively contain the flood of Chinese-made subsidized goods through anti-dumping measures and countervailing duties, or else it will become harder for it to develop a more mature manufacturing base.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

China’s Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, May 26, 2013

Behind the hype and hustle, any India-China summit meeting runs along familiar lines: India flags its concerns sedulously, especially over Beijing’s reluctance to clarify the line of control, the lopsided trade relationship, China’s activities in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), and the opaque Chinese projects on transnational rivers. The Chinese side responds with pious platitudes about friendship and cooperation that win front-page coverage in Indian press. All this is quickly forgotten until the next summit, when India goes through the same motions again.

In the intervening time, however, the trade pattern has turned more unequal, China has unveiled new dam projects on transboundary rivers and enlarged its strategic footprint in PoK, and the number of cross-frontier forays and border incidents staged by Chinese troops to pressure India has increased. This is exactly what happened between the 2010 New Delhi visit of Premier Wen Jiabao and the just-concluded trip of his successor, Li Keqiang.

Take the growing trade asymmetry. The joint statement issued at the end of Li’s visit promises “measures to address the issue of the trade imbalance.” But when Wen Jiabao came calling, China made a similar commitment to level the playing field by taking “measures to promote greater Indian exports to China with a view to reduce India’s trade deficit.”

Yet China’s trade surplus has soared since then, significantly expanding India’s current account deficit. With trade talks that began in late 2010 yielding little, there is little hope of any respite for India from China’s escalating dumping of goods.

Confident that India will continue to do little else other than file anti-dumping cases at the World Trade Organization, Beijing is systematically undermining Indian manufacturing. Moreover, it still largely imports raw materials from India and exports finished products. One new way it is seeking to perpetuate this distorted pattern is by providing debt financing through its banks to financially troubled Indian companies that agree to buy Chinese equipment or supply primary commodities.

Now consider China’s response to India’s exhortations to stem its growing strategic involvement in PoK, a disputed territory. Li, as if to mock India’s pleas, went straight from India to “all-weather” ally, Pakistan, and signed an agreement to build an economic corridor through PoK, where China is already engaged in several strategic projects. To shield these projects, Beijing has stationed its own forces in the rebellious, Shia-majority Gilgit-Baltistan, with the result that India now faces Chinese troops on both flanks of Jammu and Kashmir, one-fifth of which China has annexed.

Contrast China’s refusal to heed New Delh’s PoK-related protestations with the intense diplomatic pressure it mounted after India’s ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) signed a contract with PetroVietnam to jointly explore for oil in two blocks in the South China Sea. Beijing warned India against “any unilateral exploration activities” there. OVL eventually withdrew from one block in 2011 and the other in 2012 after paying millions of dollars in exit fees to PetroVietnam.

Water has emerged as a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord. But like Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier, Li snubbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s plea that water cooperation ought to extend beyond mere data-sharing to institutionalized transparency on dam building.

China is the source of river flows to a dozen countries. But India is the most vulnerable of them to China’s reengineering of transboundary flows because it alone receives nearly half of all river waters that leave Chinese territory. Beijing, however, continues to spurn India’s proposal to conclude a pact or establish an inter-governmental institution to define rights and responsibilities on shared rivers. China wants only to sell flood-related hydrological data.

While working to disturb the status quo on international-river flows, China is clearly unwilling to accept the territorial status quo with India. The Indian assumption that greater trade would make Beijing more amenable to solving the border dispute and more sensitive to India’s other concerns has been belied.

For more than three decades now, India has engaged China in never-ending rounds of sterile discussions on the boundary issue in what has become the longest, most-barren process of negotiations between any two countries in modern history. China has not only derailed the process to clarify the Line of Actual Control (LAC), rendering that term farcical, but it has also signalled unequivocally that it will not accept the LAC as the basis for a boundary settlement.

When Wen Jiabao came in 2010, he delivered a hard message on the border issue — that it will “not be easy to completely resolve the question” and that, in any event, it will “take a fairly long period of time.” These remarks in a prepared speech amounted to a public disavowal of the “firm commitment” enshrined in the joint statement issued just hours earlier to resolve the border dispute “at an early date.”

The latest joint statement, deferring to China, actually drops the “early date” reference. The fact that Li’s visit was preceded by a 19-kilometre-deep Chinese incursion into Ladakh attests to China’s resolve to keep India under sustained pressure by neither clarifying the LAC nor moving towards a border settlement. Beijing earlier sabotaged the Joint Working Group (JWG) on border talks by going back on its 2001 commitment to exchange maps of the eastern and western sectors with India. And by playing the Arunachal and Kashmir cards, it is now seeking to stymie the JWG’s replacement mechanism led by the so-called special representatives (SRs).

Having being shaken by the daring Ladakh incursion, India has every right to tacitly link China’s one-sided market privileges and bilateral political and military exchanges to substantive progress on the border issue. But it is flubbing the opportunity. The joint statement, for example, preposterously expresses “satisfaction” over the decade-long border talks between the SRs, even as it encourages them to “push forward the process of negotiations.” This stance only aids the Chinese game-plan to take India round and round the mulberry bush.

India, however, has done well to counter China’s draft “Border Defence Cooperation Agreement” by proposing its own accord designed specifically to prevent border flare-ups and incursions. The Chinese-drafted agreement, in the name of preserving Himalayan peace and tranquillity, cleverly aims to keep India vulnerable to Chinese military pre-emption by freezing its belated build-up of border defences.

Li’s visit has served as a fresh reminder that India-China summits yield little more than hype, spin and reassuring clichés. Imploring China to see reason on border, trade, water and other issues is pointless because Beijing only understands the language of leverage. Combating China’s containment-behind-engagement strategy demands a concerted Indian plan of action that combines beefed-up deterrent capabilities with leveraged diplomacy and military cooperation with friendly countries.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Chinese checkmate

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, May 15, 2013

China has taken no break to savour the triumph of its coercive diplomacy when it caught India unawares by sneaking troops into Ladakh’s Depsang plateau and then, employing the threat of an extended standoff and escalation, extracted military concessions. Not content with that success, Beijing is now pushing a frontier accord that, in the name of Himalayan peace and tranquillity, would freeze India’s belated, bumbling build-up of border defences and troop levels while preserving China’s capability to strike without warning.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) completed the removal of its encampment from Depsang not on May 5, when India said the face-off was over, but on May 7 after Indian troops dismantled a defensive line of bunkers on their side at Chumar, an action that has spawned another concession — suspension of Indian patrolling along that critical borderline. Earlier on May 4, India received a far-reaching, Chinese-drafted “Border Defence Cooperation Agreement” that, in essence, seeks to keep India at a strategic disadvantage and thus vulnerable to Chinese military preemption.

Beijing is stepping up pressure, lest it gets too late, to stop India from plugging gaps in its border defences. China’s recent incursion forced India to dismantle vantage-point fortifications capable of providing early warning of Chinese troop movements, while the draft Border Defence Cooperation Agreement aims to advance broader Chinese interests and ensure that the PLA retains the option to strike at a time and place of its choosing. An emboldened China believes the Ladakh standoff has so softened India that it can now be inveigled into granting more concessions, especially to make Premier Li Keqiang’s visit a “success”.

In the recent episode, Chinese coercion easily trumped Indian diffidence. By merely positioning a single platoon of up to 50 troops across the de facto border, China compelled India — without firing a single shot — to agree to attenuate its border defences at Chumar (the scene of recurrent Chinese intrusion attempts) and to commit to addressing other Chinese concerns in follow-up negotiations.

China had a lot to lose by persisting with the face-off because it would have led to cancellation of Li’s visit and shone an adverse international spotlight on Chinese territorial aggressiveness with multiple neighbours. It was in India’s interest to raise the diplomatic costs for China so as to deter future military provocations.

Instead of letting China stew for a while after beefing up its forces but without encircling the intruders, India rewarded the aggressor with concessions. It also presented itself in the same light as the aggressor by announcing a simultaneous Indian and Chinese troop pullout from the standoff zone.

While New Delhi wilted under coercive pressure, China incontrovertibly vindicated its raid by paying no diplomatic or economic costs. Yet the corruption-tainted Indian government claims quiet diplomacy made China beat a retreat. If such is the power of Indian diplomacy, why is India bleeding itself by remaining the world’s largest arms importer?

In truth, it was India’s feckless decision to respond only by diplomatic means to a grave military provocation that left it no choice but to publicly play down the incursion and to yield ground.

China’s leverage-pivoted, concessions-mining approach stands in stark contrast with the forbearing Indian diplomacy, now stewarded by Salman Khurshid from his cloud-cuckoo-land perch. Imagine if Indian soldiers had intruded even one kilometre into Chinese territory: Would the Chinese foreign minister have survived in office by belittling it as a pimple on the “beautiful face” of India-China relations? And would he have subsequently rushed to New Delhi, renouncing the right to “do any post-mortem or apportion blame” and saying he would love to live in India?

Note also the striking contrast between the two countries’ approach to agreements. Whereas India’s legalistic line treats agreements as sacrosanct in letter and spirit, China regards accords as just political tools to advance its interests, including lulling the other party into complacency so as to create new exploitable opportunities. The 1954 Panchsheel treaty was a classic example: India valued it as heralding a Hindi-Chini bhai bhai era, while China used it as a cover to start encroaching on Indian territories and to solidify its Tibet annexation, paving the way for its 1962 India invasion.

China does not hesitate to renege on a commitment or violate a key pact, whereas India puts up stoically with even an iniquitous agreement like the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan, despite coming under growing water stress. After exchanging maps of the middle sector with India in 2001, China broke its commitment to also trade maps of the other two sectors to help clarify the entire line of control.

No sooner had the dual 2005 border-peace accords been signed than China began infringing them. Now that its Ladakh incursion has nakedly contravened the 2005 pacts, Beijing’s audacious response is to draft a lopsided Border Defence Cooperation Agreement to supplant all previous accords.

China has a knack of disaggregating any issue into multiple parts and then pursuing a shrewd, quid-pro-quo diplomacy to each element, often drawing a linkage with even extraneous pieces. In contrast to India’s itch to settle issues, settlement in Chinese diplomatic chess involves keeping space to possibly unleash leverage by reopening any component part in the future.

If India’s China policy remains driven by wishful thinking, the country is likely to invite more nasty surprises that end with similar Indian submission to the aggressor’s demands. It is past time to inject greater realism and leverage into the policy.

Brahma Chellaney is the author, most recently, of “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” winner of America’s 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

China’s bloodless victory over India

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, May 12, 2013

In a classic replay of its old game, China intruded stealthily into a strategic border area in Ladakh and then disingenuously played conciliator by counselling “patience,” “wisdom” and “negotiations.” The incursion bore all the hallmarks of Chinese brinkmanship, including taking an adversary by surprise, seizing an opportunistic timing, masking offence as defence, and discounting risks of wider escalation. Occurring at a time when India has never been so politically weak, the intrusion was shrewdly timed to exploit its political paralysis and leadership drift.

What China did was to impudently violate border-peace agreements with India by employing coercive power on the ground. Then — armed with the leverage from its encroachment into the Debsang plateau — it embarked on coercive diplomacy by setting out military demands for India to meet.

In doing so, it presented India with a Hobson’s choice: either endure the Chinese ingress into a region controlling key access routes or meet China’s demands at the cost of irremediably weakening Indian military interest in a wider strategic belt extending up to the Karakoram Pass and the Siachin Glacier. After a three-week standoff, China withdrew from the occupied spot but only after India blinked by ceding some ground — an action it has tried to rationalize as granting China a “necessary face saver.”

The plain fact is that India made a concession to end the standoff, while China — in a triumph for its coercive diplomacy — conceded nothing. In fact, placing the aggressor and the victim on the same pedestal, India announced both sides would pull back troops to end the standoff.

India, oddly, wilted just when China was coming under adverse international spotlight for intruding into Indian-controlled territory after expanding its “core interests” and provoking territorial spats with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Instead of raising China’s diplomatic costs for the encroachment so as to deter it from staging another intrusion at a time and place of its choosing, India rewarded the aggression by dismantling its defensive structures at Chumar. It took China just one platoon of up to 50 troops to bring India to heel.

The intruding troops could not have survived the icy wintertime conditions in the temporary shelters they erected. But had the intrusion continued for several more weeks, it would have shone an unlikable international light on China’s territorial revanchism and imperial resurgence.

All that India needed to do was to reinforce its military positions without encircling the intruders, yet standing firm on the demand it initially made while summoning the Chinese ambassador — an unconditional return to the status quo ante. Yet India gratuitously brought itself under pressure over Premier Li Keqiang’s impending visit, instead of feeling insulted that Li was stopping over in New Delhi on his way to Pakistan to bless the newly elected government there.

Making the most of India’s apparent lack of self-respect, Beijing insisted that India degrade its border defences by dismantling a key forward observation post, destroying defensive fortifications such as live-in bunkers for its troops, and suspending infrastructure development near the line of actual control (LAC). For its part, China, seeking to bolster its larger game-plan in eastern Ladakh to encroach on Indian land bit by bit, continues to rapidly build up an offensive capability.

In forcing Indian troops to start demolishing bunkers before officially terminating the standoff and softening up India for further bargaining, China has vindicated its coercive diplomacy while rendering India more vulnerable to Chinese military manoeuvres and raids. The razing of bunkers has already forced Indian troops to suspend patrolling up to the LAC in the Chumar area, a development that threatens to whittle down Indian salience in a critical border region while opening space for China to expand its sovereignty claims.

Having overtly challenged India’s belated, bumbling moves to fortify frontier defences against a rising pattern of Chinese border provocations, China will now hold the threat of unleashing its coercive power again. In fact, with boundary tensions still lingering, Beijing has made it clear that it has “terminated” the standoff, not settled the dispute, with the two sides, according to it, reaching “an agreement on resolving the incident in the western section of the border.” An actual resolution, Beijing has indicated, hinges on India making more border-related concessions, which is why it is pushing a new Chinese-drafted frontier deal — a clear attempt to rub salt into Indian wounds.

More fundamentally, China’s incursion has wreaked lasting damage on the dual Sino-Indian border accords of 2005, a development scarcely conducive to ensuring Himalayan tranquillity and stability. One pact relates to military confidence building and the other defines political parameters for border peace and an eventual frontier settlement.

While the political accord enjoins the two parties to “strictly respect and observe the LAC and work together to maintain peace and tranquillity in the border areas” (Article IX), the military agreement — echoing an earlier accord of 1993 — mandates that “if the border personnel of the two sides come to a face-to-face situation due to differences on the alignment of the Line of Actual Control or any other reason,” they “shall cease their activities in the area, not advance any further, and simultaneously return to their bases,” without putting up “marks or signs on the spots” (Article IV).

China openly violated these accords by pitching tents in Indian-held territory, provoking an extended faceoff, and publicly justifying its actions. Notwithstanding the “face-to-face situation,” the intruding troops refused to retreat and raised provocative banners such as, “This is Chinese Land” and “Go Back.” If one side violates agreements with impunity, how can their sanctity or value be preserved?

Even so, the incursion betrayed the fecklessness of India’s leadership, which has pathetically sought to disguise its capitulation as a win for quiet diplomacy. It is as if history is repeating itself. Today’s national-security disarray mirrors the confusion and mess of 1962.

Just as the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement paved the way for China’s nibbling at Indian territory, culminating in the 1962 invasion, India lulled itself into complacency by signing the 2005 accords. These accords have yielded a sharp escalation by China in cross-LAC forays and border incidents, including the 2007 destruction of Indian army bunkers near Doka La at the Sikkim-Tibet-Bhutan tri-junction.

For China, agreements are just a tool of deception to lull the enemy. As Sun Tzu famously said, “All warfare is based on deception.” Having scored a bloodless victory, the latest intrusion will not be China’s last. Rather, it is just the first major shot China has fired across India’s bows to alter the Himalayan status quo in its favour by employing coercive power short of an open war.

Brahma Chellaney is professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and winner of America’s 2012 Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

Beijing’s Triumph of Coercive Diplomacy

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Chellaney

In exchange for withdrawing from India’s own territory, China wins a slew of military concessions from New Delhi.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2013

When India announced on Monday that Chinese troops would draw back from a disputed Himalayan border region, Indian politicians hailed the retreat as a return to normalcy and a win for quiet diplomacy. In truth, the three-week Sino-Indian standoff on the Debsang plateau gravely weakened New Delhi’s strategic position in a region that straddles key access routes linking China’s rebellious Tibet and Xinjiang regions as well as China to Pakistan, while Beijing conceded nothing of value.

The dispute was a study in Chinese coercive diplomacy and Indian fecklessness. Beijing’s incursion 20 kilometers past the de facto Himalayan borderline in mid-April bore all the hallmarks of modern Chinese brinksmanship, such as a reliance on surprise and a complete disregard for the risks of wider military escalation.

Above all, the move demonstrated a keen sense of timing. India has never been so weak internally, and its response to the crisis was hobbled by political paralysis and leadership drift.

Chinese troops in Ladakh, India, on May 5 — Associated Press

Merely by deploying a single platoon of no more than 50 soldiers, China won military concessions far beyond what it has gained through peaceful negotiations. In exchange for Beijing’s retreat from an area China never had the right to control, New Delhi will dismantle a key forward observation post, destroy bunkers and other defensive fortifications, and potentially halt infrastructure development near the border.

Meanwhile, China will continue to build up its offensive capability in the Himalayas so that it can strike without warning. Over the past decade, an increasingly assertive China has steadily encroached on India’s Himalayan territory in the name of expanding its “core interests”—a tactic reminiscent of its ongoing territorial and maritime spats with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. India’s spineless Himalayan strategy should be a lesson to those other states on how not to respond to Chinese provocations.

New Delhi’s bumbling began in earnest three years ago, when the Congress Party-led government inexplicably replaced army troops with border police to patrol the frontier. More recently, the entire government leadership kept mum for a week on the latest intrusion, only to break its silence with inanities making light of the encroachment. While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it a “localized problem,” Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid described it as “one little spot” of acne on the “beautiful face” of India-China relations—an issue that can be “addressed by simply applying an ointment” because “ointment is part of the process of growing up.” The garrulous Khurshid went on to say that “incidents do happen.”

Had Beijing persisted with the standoff, it would have led to cancellation of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s New Delhi visit on May 20—his first overseas trip since assuming office. It was in India’s interest to raise the diplomatic costs for China so as to deter such intrusions in the future. However, the domestic woes of India’s corruption-tainted government left New Delhi no space for it to stand firm or consider how capitulation could embolden the adversary. A never-ending series of scandals have paralyzed the government and undermined its public credibility.

The result was that India wilted in the Himalayas just as China was coming under an adverse international spotlight for its provocations. Instead beefing up its forces and letting Beijing stew for a while, India rewarded the aggressor with concessions. In all likelihood, New Delhi rushed a deal so that its foreign minister could go ahead with a scheduled trip to Beijing this week to prepare for Li’s visit. It was as if Li’s stopover in New Delhi on his way to visit “all-weather ally” Pakistan is more important for India than for China..

The irony is that every visit of a Chinese leader to India in recent years has been preceded by a new aggressive Chinese move. The jarring revival of China’s claim to the Austria-size northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh came just before President Hu Jintao’s 2006 visit. Before Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2010 visit, Beijing began questioning India’s sovereignty over Kashmir through a new visa policy. And now Mr. Li’s visit has been preceded by a military incursion, which has soured relations.

Instead, the main diplomatic legacy of the Himalayan faceoff will be permanent damage to the Sino-Indian border accords of 2005, in which both states agreed to “strictly respect and observe” the de facto border known as the Line of Actual Control. China openly violated these accords by pitching tents in Indian-held territory and raising banners that read “This Is Chinese Land.” Given New Delhi’s timidity, such proclamations may yet become a reality.

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

Timid India allows China to nibble at Himalayan border

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

The National, May 7, 2013

Intruding Chinese soldiers hold banner asking Indian troops to “Go Back.”

China’s “peaceful rise” is giving way to a more muscular approach as Beijing broadens its “core interests” and exhibits a growing readiness to take risks.

As if to highlight its new multi-directional assertiveness, China’s recent occupation of a 19-kilometre-deep Indian border area, close to where the frontiers of India, Pakistan and China converge, has coincided with its escalating challenge to Japan’s decades-old control of the Senkaku Islands and territorial spats with Vietnam and the Philippines.

China is aggressively conducting regular patrols to support its sovereignty claims in the South and East China seas, while furtively enlarging its footprint in the Himalayan borderlands. While naval and air force units focus on asserting sovereignty claims on the seas, the army stays active in the Himalayas, nibbling at territory.

China is employing novel methods to alter its line of control with India in the mountains and valleys bit by bit – without having to fire a shot. For example, the Chinese army has brought ethnic Han pastoralists to the frontier and given them cover to range across the line. This tactic is designed to drive native herdsmen out of their pasturelands and assert Chinese control over those places.

Such subversion of the status quo, along with China’s ever-expanding “core interests” – which have grown from Tibet and Taiwan to include Xinjiang and now the South China Sea and the Senkakus – is at the root of instability in Asia. This pattern of increasing Chinese assertiveness began when China revived its long-dormant claim to the large, north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh just before the 2006 visit to India of China’s then-president, Hu Jintao.

The resurrection of that claim was followed by territorial spats China provoked with several other neighbours. Together these signalled that China was staking out a more domineering role in Asia. It was as if China had decided that its moment had finally arrived.

For example, playing a game of chicken, China has been posing major new challenges to India, ratcheting up strategic pressure on multiple fronts, including stepping up cross-border military forays and questioning India’s territorial sovereignty in key sectors.

China has repeatedly tried to breach the Himalayan border by taking advantage of the fact that this long, forbidding frontier is difficult for India to patrol effectively, since in many sections Indian troops are based at lower elevations. When an incursion is discovered, Beijing’s refrain is that its troops are on “Chinese land.”

Yet India remains focused on the process rather than on the substance of diplomacy. Process is important only if it buys time to build countervailing leverage. Unfortunately, a rudderless India has made little effort to craft such leverage.

India’s defensive mindset has been on full display in the latest episode. It initially blacked out the April 15 incursion, just as it has suppressed its own figures showing a rising pattern of Chinese military forays across the border.

A whole week went by before New Delhi said a word on the record about the furtive Chinese ingress. The first official Indian comment came only after Beijing issued a bland denial of the incursion, in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources.

India’s cautious, conciliatory response to the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter of a century was revealed in its decision not to scrap its foreign minister’s scheduled trip to Beijing this Thursday and to welcome Li Keqiang, the new Chinese premier on May 20.

This approach has invited rebuke from critics, who portray the intrusion as premeditated, muscle-flexing provocation backed by China’s new leadership.

The immediate crisis eased on Sunday when the Chinese government agreed to end the three-week-old standoff, in return for India’s acceptance of some Chinese demands, including the dismantling of some border-defence structures. China, meanwhile, conceded nothing, in a triumph for its coercive diplomacy.

As China’s coercive power grows, it is beginning to use its capabilities against several neighbours to alter the status quo in its favour, without having to wage open war.

In light of this, India can maintain border peace only by leaving China in no doubt that it has the capability and political will to defend itself. If the Chinese see an opportunity to nibble at Indian land, they will seize it. It is for India to ensure that such opportunities do not arise.

India thus needs a counter-strategy to tame Chinese aggressiveness. Tibet remains at the core of the Sino-Indian divide. And India’s growing strategic ties with the US increasingly rankle China.

To build countervailing leverage, India has little choice but to slowly reopen the central issue of Tibet – a card New Delhi surrendered at the altar of diplomacy. India’s recognition of full Chinese sovereignty over Tibet was based on Beijing’s acknowledgement that Tibet is an “autonomous region” in China. The fact that China has squashed Tibet’s autonomy creates an opening for India to take a more nuanced position.

More broadly, China’s strategy to assemble a “string of pearls” – ports, staging posts and hubs for expanding its interests and presence from East Africa to the Pacific – can be countered by India forming a “string of rapiers” with like-minded Asian-Pacific countries.

At the root of Asia’s growing tensions and insecurity is China’s strategic subversion of the status quo. Only cooperation can shield peace and economic growth; muscle-flexing will not accomplish it.

Brahma Chellaney is a strategic-studies scholar based in New Delhi. His most recent book is Water, Peace, and War.

China’s India Land Grab

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

A column internationally distributed by Project Syndicate

Stoking tensions with Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines over islands in the South and East China Seas has not prevented an increasingly assertive China from opening yet another front by staging a military incursion across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier. On the night of April 15, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) platoon stealthily intruded near the China-India-Pakistan tri-junction, established a camp 19 kilometers (12 miles) inside Indian-controlled territory, and presented India’s government with the potential loss of a strategically vital 750-square-kilometer high-altitude plateau.

A stunned India, already reeling under a crippling domestic political crisis, has groped for an effective response to China’s land-grab — the largest and most strategic real estate China has seized since it began pursuing a more muscular policy toward its neighbors. Whether China intends to stay put by building permanent structures for its troops on the plateau’s icy heights, or plans to withdraw after having extracted humiliating military concessions from India, remains an open – and in some ways a moot – question.

The fact is that, with its “peaceful rise” giving way to an increasingly sharp-elbowed approach to its neighbors, China has broadened its “core interests” – which brook no compromise – and territorial claims, while showing a growing readiness to take risks to achieve its goals. For example, China has not only escalated its challenge to Japan’s decades-old control of the Senkaku Islands, but is also facing off against the Philippines since taking effective control of Scarborough Shoal last year.

What makes the Himalayan incursion a powerful symbol of China’s aggressive new stance in Asia is that its intruding troops have set up camp in an area that extends beyond the “line of actual control” (LAC) that China itself unilaterally drew when it defeated India in the 1962 Chinese-initiated border war. While China’s navy and a part of its air force focus on supporting revanchist territorial and maritime claims in the South and East China seas, its army has been active in the mountainous borderlands with India, trying to alter the LAC bit by bit.

One of the novel methods that the PLA has employed is to bring ethnic Han pastoralists to the valleys along the LAC and give them cover to range across it, in the process driving Indian herdsmen from their traditional pasturelands. But the latest crisis was sparked by China’s use of direct military means in a strategic border area close to the Karakoram Pass linking China to Pakistan.

Because the LAC has not been mutually clarified – China reneged on a 2001 promise to exchange maps with India – China claims that PLA troops are merely camping on “Chinese land.” Yet, in a replay of its old strategy of furtively encroaching on disputed land and then presenting itself as the conciliator, China now counsels “patience” and “negotiations” to help resolve the latest “issue.”

China is clearly seeking to exploit India’s political disarray to alter the reality on the ground. A paralyzed and rudderless Indian government initially blacked out reporting on the incursion, lest it come under public pressure to mount a robust response. Its first public statement came only after China issued a bland denial of the intrusion in response to Indian media reports quoting army sources.

To add to India’s woes, Salman Khurshid, the country’s bungling foreign minister, initially made light of the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter-century. The garrulous minister called the intrusion just “one little spot” of acne on the otherwise “beautiful face” of the bilateral relationship – a mere blemish that could be treated with “an ointment.” Those inept comments fatally undercut the government’s summoning of the Chinese ambassador to demand a return to the status quo ante.

With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s corruption-tainted government tottering on the brink of collapse, there has been no official explanation of how India was caught napping in a militarily critical area where, in the recent past, China had made repeated attempts to encroach on Indian land. In fact, the government inexplicably replaced regular army troops with border police in 2010 to patrol the mountain-ringed plateau into which the PLA has now intruded. Known as Depsang, the plateau lies astride an ancient silk route connecting Yarkhand in Xinjiang to India’s Ladakh region through the Karakoram Pass.

India, with a military staging post and airstrip just south of the Karakoram Pass, has the capacity to cut off the highway linking China with its “all-weather ally,” Pakistan. The PLA intrusion, by threatening that Indian base, may have been intended to foreclose India’s ability to choke off supplies to Chinese troops and workers in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, where China has expanded its military footprint and strategic projects. To guard those projects, several thousand Chinese troops reportedly have been deployed in the rebellious, predominantly Shia region, which is closed to the outside world.

For India, the Chinese incursion also threatens its access to the 6,300-meter-high Siachin Glacier, to the west of Depsang. Pakistan claims the Indian-controlled glacier, which, strategically wedged between the Pakistani- and Chinese-held parts of Kashmir, served as the world’s highest and coldest battleground (and one of the bloodiest) from the mid-1980s until a cease-fire took effect in 2003.

India’s nonmilitary options to force a Chinese withdrawal from Depsang range from diplomatic (suspension of all official visits or reconsideration of its recognition of Tibet as part of China) to economic (an informal boycott of Chinese goods, just as China has hurt Japan through a nonofficial boycott of Japanese-made products). A possible military response could involve the Indian army establishing a camp of its own on Chinese territory elsewhere that China’s leaders regard as highly strategic.

But, before it can exercise any option credibly, India needs a stable government. Until then, China will continue to assert its claims by whatever means – fair or foul – it deems advantageous.

China’s furtive wars of acquisition

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY

In the way China made land-grabs across the mighty Himalayas in the 1950s by launching surreptitious encroachments, it is now waging furtive wars — without firing a single shot — to change the status quo in the South and East China seas, on the long line of control with India, and on international-river flows.

Although China has risen from a poor state to a global economic powerhouse, the key elements in its statecraft and strategic doctrine have not changed.

Since the Mao Zedong era, China has adhered to ancient theorist Sun Tzu’s advice: “The ability to subdue the enemy without any battle is the ultimate reflection of the most supreme strategy.”

This approach involves taking an adversary by surprise by exploiting its weaknesses and seizing an opportunistic timing, as well as camouflaging offense as defense. As Sun Tzu said, “All warfare is based on deception.” Only when a war by stealth cannot achieve the sought objectives should an overt war be unleashed.

China did stage overt military interventions even when it was poor and internally troubled. A Pentagon report has cited Chinese military preemption in 1950, 1962, 1969 and 1979 as examples of offense as defense. There was also China’s seizure of the Paracel Islands in 1974, the Johnson Reef in 1988, the Mischief Reef in 1995, and the Scarborough Shoal last year.

However, for a generation after Deng Xiaoping consolidated power, China actively promoted good-neighborly ties with other Asian states so as to concentrate on rapid economic growth. This strategy allowed Beijing to accumulate considerable economic and strategic heft while permitting its neighbors to spur their own economic growth by plugging into China’s dramatic economic rise.

The good-neighborly approach began changing from the past decade as the Chinese leadership started believing China’s moment in the sun had finally come.

One of the first signs was China’s 2006 revival of its long-dormant claim to the large northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Other evidence of a shift to a muscle-flexing approach followed, with China picking territorial fights with multiple neighbors and broadening its “core interests.” And last year, China formally staked a claim under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to more than 80 percent of the South China Sea.

From employing its trade muscle to inflict commercial pain on a rival to exploiting its monopoly on the global production of a vital resource like rare-earth minerals, China has staked out a more muscular role, heightening Asian and wider concerns. In fact, the more openly China has embraced market capitalism, the more indigenized its political ideology has become. The country’s elites — by turning their back on Marxist dogma, imported from the West — have put Chinese nationalism at the center of their political legitimacy. As a result, China’s new assertiveness has become more and more linked with national renewal.

Against this background, China’s increasing resort to furtive war to accomplish political and military objectives is turning into a principle source of strategic instability in Asia. The instruments employed are diverse, ranging from waging economic warfare to creating a new class of stealth warriors under the aegis of paramilitary agencies, such as the Maritime Safety Administration, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, and the State Oceanic Administration.

These agencies, with the support of the Chinese navy, have been in the vanguard to change the status quo in China’s favor in the South and East China seas. China has already scored some successes, encouraging it to pursue multidirectional assertiveness against more than one neighbor at the same time.

For example, after a months-long standoff with the Philippines, China took effective control of the Scarborough Shoal since last year by deploying ships around it and denying its adversary any access. Philippine fishermen can no longer enter a lagoon that served as their traditional fishing preserve.

With the Chinese ships staying put, the Philippines has been faced with a strategic Hobson’s choice: accept the new Chinese-dictated reality or risk open war.

Even as China has effectively changed the status quo on the ground, the U.S. has done little to come to the aid of its ally, the Philippines. The U.S. kept urging restraint and caution on both sides after a Philippine warship squared off with Chinese vessels near the shoal a year ago, prompting China to embark on economic warfare.

Beijing sought to bankrupt many banana growers in the Philippines and hammer the tourism industry there by curbing banana imports and issuing an advisory against travel to that country. The shoal lies more than 800 kilometers from the Chinese mainland but is well within the Philippines’ “exclusive economic zone,” as defined under the Law of the Sea Convention.

In China’s furtive offensive to contest the decades-old Japanese control over the Senkaku Islands, Beijing has already succeeded in its opening gambit — to make the international community recognize the existence of a dispute. In that sense, the new war of attrition China has launched against Japan over the Senkakus has helped shake the status quo.

By sending patrol ships frequently to the waters around the islands since last fall — and by violating the airspace over them — Beijing has ignored the risk that an incident could spiral out of control, with dire consequences. Indeed, it engaged in a recklessly provocative act early this year when a Chinese vessel locked its weapon-targeting radar on a Japanese ship — an action equivalent to a sniper locking the little red dot of his laser sight onto the forehead of a chosen target.

The campaign against Japan has also spawned economic warfare, with an informal Chinese boycott of Japanese goods leading to a fall in Japan’s exports to China and a decline in sales of Japanese products made in China.

What has been the U.S. response to all this? It has urged both its ally Japan and economic-partner China to tone down their political crisis over the uninhabited islands. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters while traveling to Japan in September 2012 that, “I am concerned that when these countries engage in provocations of one kind or another over these various islands that it raises the possibility that a misjudgment on one side or the other could result in violence and could result in conflict.”

China, in addition to seeking hegemony over the South China Sea and much of the East China Sea, has stepped up strategic pressure on India on multiple flanks, including by ratcheting up territorial disputes. Unlike Japan, the Philippines and some other Asian states that are separated from China by an ocean, India shares with that country the world’s longest contested land border. It is, therefore, more vulnerable to direct Chinese military pressure.

The largest real estate China seeks is not in the South or East China seas; it is not even Taiwan. It is in India — Arunachal Pradesh, which is three times as large as Taiwan and twice bigger than Switzerland. The tensions over China’s territorial disputes with India arise for the same reason as in the South and East China seas — moves to disturb the status quo.

Although the Indian government chooses to underplay Chinese actions so as not to provoke greater aggressiveness, its figures reveal that — in keeping with a pattern witnessed since 2007 — the number of surreptitious Chinese forays into Indian territory again increased last year. With the Himalayan frontier vast and inhospitable and thus difficult to effectively patrol in full, Chinese troops repeatedly attempt to sneak in, both to needle India and to possibly push the line of control southward.

In the latest aggression that has cast a pall over the China-India relationship, a platoon of Chinese troops quietly intruded 19 kilometers across the line of control into disputed land in the Ladakh sector of Kashmir on the night of April 15, setting up a camp. The brazen intrusion into a highly strategic area controlling key access routes has triggered a dangerous military faceoff with India rushing troops to that area. How has the U.S. State Department responded? By urging India and China to work “together to settle their boundary disputes bilaterally and peacefully.”

As in the case of the territorial and maritime disputes, China is seeking to disturb the status quo on international-river flows to its neighbors. Just as it has furtively encroached on disputed land in the past to present a fait accompli, China is seeking to reengineer cross-border river flows by starting dam projects almost by stealth.

China values controlling transboundary water flows to gain greater economic and political leverage over neighboring countries. Power, control and leverage are central elements in Chinese statecraft. Once its planned dam cascades on transnational rivers are completed, it will acquire implicit leverage over neighbors’ behavior.

In this light, China’s increasingly fractious relations with its neighbors and the U.S. — characterized by a security deficit and a norms deficit — are set to face new challenges. Persuading China to accept the status quo has become pivotal to Asian peace and stability.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (HarperCollins) and “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield).

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.