Equations with China

Fears over Chinese growth and its influence around South Asia is creating sleepless nights for Indian foreign policy makers. Due to this fear they react bitterly sometimes and sometimes sweetl towards Chinese. This half-heartered reactions are bad for the long term foreign policy matters and national security. It is important to go with China and dig their motives indirectly. Any direct salvo fired against Chinese is deterimental but at the same non seriousness towards Chinese control over India's neighbhours will be explosive.

Dilip Padganokar writes in The Times of India (21 September 2009)

To listen to scholars, journalists and politicians from Japan and South Korea discuss what China's emergence as a world power means
to them is a sobering experience for an Indian. Their thoughtful analyses, presented at a forum hosted by the influential newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, focused on present and future opportunities and challenges rather than on past fears and animosities. This is in sharp contrast to the discourses on China one hears in the corridors of power and influence in New Delhi.

Let us leave aside the Left parties who, given their congenital anti-Americanism, disregard China's sustained efforts to make life difficult for India. It has gained a foothold in our neighbourhood; it has increased its presence in the Indian Ocean; it frowns at our nuclear power status; it opposes India's legitimate quest to gain the permanent membership of the UN Security Council; it shows no genuine interest to solve the boundary issue.

However, important sections of the Indian establishment, unable to forget or forgive China's aggression in 1962, and convinced about that country's expansionist designs, are still wary of a serious engagement with our northern neighbour. They appear to envy China's stupendous achievements in every conceivable field of endeavour bar its political system. Envy, in turn, generates suspicions about its real as against its stated ambitions.

None of this figures in Japanese and South Korean assessments of China. For both, that country's rise to economic, military and even cultural pre-eminence is no more and no less than a fact of life, a reality that needs to be acknowledged, accepted and respected in order to develop mutually beneficial relations. Indeed, China, now poised to become the second most important nation in the world in GDP terms, is destined to grow stronger and stronger in the years ahead.

One paper presented at the forum listed China's plans to expand its economy between now and 2020. They make an Indian squirm in his seat with embarrassment. During the next decade, China hopes to build 500 coal-fired plans, 97 new airports (bringing the total to 244), thousands of kilometres of roads and railways and an ever more extensive communication network. At the end of this period the country will have 160 cities with a population of more than one million as against nine in the US and two in the UK.

To sustain this pace of growth, China leaves no stone unturned to gain access to energy resources and raw materials. Already the country is either the first or the second consumer of most commodities. It is first for nickel, copper, aluminium, zinc, steel, coal, sea-borne iron ore and tin and second for oil and lead.

Coupled with this aggressive buying are China's efforts to enlarge its trained manpower. The figures here are equally revealing. In 1977, 2,70,000 students graduated from Chinese universities. Thirty years later the number stood at 5.7 million. In 2008, China boasted of 30,000 fresh MBAs. Thirty years earlier the number hold your breath was zero. Add to this some 7,00,000 new engineers who join the workforce every year.

Realising the potential of the Chinese market, Tokyo and Seoul moved swiftly to do business with Beijing. Growing economic interdependence gradually paved the way for a better understanding of how the three countries should address their security concerns. Both Tokyo and Seoul are fully aware that their biggest security challenge North Korea cannot be met without the active connivance of Beijing. Its considerable influence in Pyongyang is required to check that country's nuclear weapons ambitions and indeed even to help determine the future course of North Korea once Kim Jong-Il dies.



Therefore, without in any way minimising the problems facing China on the home front seething discontent in Tibet and Xinjiang and social tensions caused by unemployment, regional disparities, large-scale corruption and the grip of the Communist Party on public life they avoid doing anything that might needlessly irk the Chinese. However, both Japan and South Korea are firmly opposed to China's efforts to persuade the two countries to distance themselves from the United States. And this on the grounds that America makes a to-do about human rights, supports the separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang, denies advanced weaponry to modernise the Chinese military and often resorts to unfair trade practices.

To this a Japanese editor gave a telling rejoinder: ''When Japan takes actions either together with the US, or with US backing, China tends to listen to what Japan has to say. If Japan does not have that support, China is unlikely to listen to it.'' That holds good for South Korea too. Under no circumstance is it prepared to loosen its alliance with the US. What these experts propose instead is that the US, China, Japan and South Korea engage in sustained, multi-cornered parleys to address issues of common interest and concern. That alone can reassure Beijing that its neighbours and America are not in cahoots to encircle it. Is New Delhi listening?