Two rivals – both ambitious to be a Asian superpower are engaged in a possible face-off on the top of the world. The implications of this possible flare-up are dangerous, considering that one of the countries, China, is also opposing Japan in South China Seas. Both India and China are in a rapid competition to build up military might on a disputed border in the eastern Himalayan Mountains. The field of confrontation is Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh.
This northern province of India, claimed by China has all the appearance of an arms race on the roof of the world. Asia’s two great powers are facing off here in the eastern Himalayan mountains. China has vastly improved roads and is building or extending airports on its side of the border in Tibet. It has placed nuclear-capable intermediate missiles in the area and deployed around 300,000 troops across the Tibetan plateau, according to a 2010 Pentagon report.
India is in the midst of a 10-year plan to scale up its side. In the state of Arunachal Pradesh, new infantry patrols started on the frontier in May, as part of a surge to add some 60,000 men to the 120,000 already in the region. It has stationed two Sukhoi 30 fighter squadrons and will deploy the Brahmos cruise missile. “If they can increase their military strength there, then we can increase our military strength in our own land,” Indian Defence Minister A.K. Anthony told parliament recently.
India is lagging well behind China in building infrastructure in the area. The main military supply route through sparsely populated Arunachal is largely dirt track. Along the roadside, work gangs of local women chip boulders into gravel with hammers to repair the road, many with babies strapped to their backs. Together with a few creaky bulldozers, this is the extent of the army’s effort to carve a modern highway from the liquid hillside, one that would carry troops and weaponry to the disputed ceasefire line in any conflict with China.
India and China fought a brief frontier war here in 1962, and Chinese maps still show all of Arunachal Pradesh within China’s borders. The continuing standoff will test whether these two Asian titans — each with more than a billion people, blossoming trade ties and ambitions as global powers - can rise peacefully together. With the United States courting India in its “pivot” to Asia, the stakes are all the higher.
Insurgency
“With the kind of developments that are taking place in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and infrastructure that is going up, it gives a certain capability to China,” India’s army chief, Gen. V.K. Singh, told Reuters the day before he left office on May 31. “And you say at some point, if the issue does not get settled, there could be some problem.” Indian analysts and policymakers went further in their Non-Alignment 2.0 report released this year. It argues India cannot “entirely dismiss the possibility of a major military offensive in Arunachal Pradesh,” and suggests New Delhi should prepare to fight an insurgency war if attacked. “We feel very clearly that we need to develop the border infrastructure, engage with our border communities, do that entire development and leave our options open on how to respond to any border incursion, in case tensions ratchet up,” Rajiv Kumar, one of the report’s authors, said in an interview. Indian media frequently run warnings of alleged Chinese plots, and both militaries drill near the border. In March, while China’s foreign minister was visiting Delhi, the Indian air force and army held an exercise dubbed “Destruction” in Arunachal’s mountains.
Three weeks later, China said its J-10 fighters dropped laser-guided bombs on the Tibetan plateau in high-altitude ground-attack training.
Some policymakers play down the Arunachal face-off. Nuclear weapons on both sides would deter all-out war, and the forbidding terrain makes even conventional warfare difficult. A defense hotline and frequent meetings between top Chinese and Indian officials, including regular gatherings at the border, help ease the pressure.
Bilateral trade, which soared to $74 billion in 2011 from a few billion dollars a decade ago, is also knitting ties. From China’s perspective, the border dispute with India doesn’t rank with Beijing’s other border or military concerns, such as Taiwan. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin struck an optimistic tone. “China and India are in consensus on the border issue, will work together to protect peace and calm in the border region, and also believe that by jointly working toward the same goal, negotiations on the border will yield results,” Liu said.
Hu Shisheng, a Sino-India expert at the government-backed China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said the border dispute casts an oversized shadow in the Indian media - where the China threat is perceived to be strong. But any voices within the Chinese military that advocate seizing the region are weak, he said. “China’s military could take the territory by force, but maintaining the gains in the long term would be exceptionally difficult,” Hu said, noting the tough terrain. Yet with both nations undertaking massive naval modernisations and brushing up against each other’s interests across South Asia and in the South China Sea, the festering dispute risks being the catalyst for a violent flare-up, some security analysts say. For thousands of years, Chinese and Indian empires were kept apart by the Himalayas. After years of fast economic growth, the rivals now have the resources to consolidate and patrol their most distant regions.
India is starting to feel fenced in by Chinese agreements with its neighbours that are not strictly military but could be leveraged in a conflict. Indians sometimes refer to these as a “string of pearls,” which includes China’s force deployments in Tibet, access to a Myanmar naval base, and Chinese construction of a deepwater port in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, and another in Gwadar, Pakistan.
Some in the Chinese government worry that India is becoming part of a U.S. strategy to contain China. The United States has sold $8 billion in weapons to India, which is spending about $100 billion over 10 years to modernize its military. The two nations are unlikely to go to war, but have no choice but to add to their military strength on the border as they gain clout, a senior Indian official with direct experience of
Sino-Indian relations told Reuters. “It is the currency of power,” he said. In the border negotiations, “we are ready to compromise, but up to a point.”
The road to Tawang, a centre of Tibetan Buddhism by the border, is one of India’s most strategic military supply routes. Growling convoys of army trucks bring troops, food and fuel through three Himalayan passes on the 320-kilometer (199- mile) muddy coil to camps dotted along the disputed border.
On a road trip in late May and early June, Reuters found much of the 14,000-foothigh road to be a treacherous rutted trail, often blocked by landslides or snow, despite years of promises to widen and resurface it. At its start in the insurgent-hit tropical plains of Assam state, the Tawang road is guarded by soldiers armed with Israeli rifles and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers who sweep for roadside bombs. Near the end - a tough two-day drive - is the 300-year-old white-walled Tawang monastery. In the higher reaches, the army convoys struggle along rock-walled valleys to bases near the McMahon Line, the border agreed to by India and Tibet in a 1914 treaty and now the de facto frontier with China. It is the only way in. Supplies are taken to even remoter army posts by 50-mule caravans on three-day treks.
Along the tortuous road, soldiers can be seen shooting at targets on a firing range. Rows of ammunition sheds behind barbed wire dot the landscape on a chilly plateau shared with yaks. New fuel depots and small bases are springing up. In addition to deploying extra troops, missiles and fighter jets in Arunachal, India plans to buy heavy-lift choppers to carry light artillery to the mountains. China rules restive Tibet with an iron hand, and tightly restricts visits by foreign media, making independent assessments of the military presence in the region hard.
But all signs indicate much more sophisticated infrastructure on the Chinese side of the border. During the last government-organized visit to Tibet, in 2010, a Reuters journalist saw half a dozen Su-27 fighters, some of the most advanced and lethal aircraft China owns, operating from Lhasa’s Gonggar airport. China has been building or extending airports across vast and remote Tibet, all of which have a dual military-civilian use. Meanwhile, residents on the Indian side of the border report the Chinese have built smooth, hard-topped roads stretching to Tibet’s capital of Lhasa. Chinese border posts, like India’s today, were once only reachable by horse or mule. Now they are connected by asphalt.
Beyond the frontier, the Chinese improvements include laying asphalt on a historic highway across the region of Aksai Chin, which is claimed by India. The construction of the Xinjiang-Tibet national highway 50 years ago shocked India and contributed to the 1962 war.
China’s rails are improving, too: Beijing opened a train line from Tibet to the region in 2006, and an extension is planned into a prefecture bordering Arunachal. In a 2010 cable released by Wikileaks, a U.S. diplomat concluded that infrastructure development in Lhoka prefecture, which according to China includes Tawang, was in part to prepare a “rear base” should a border clash arise.
For years, India deliberately neglected infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh, partly so it could act as a natural buffer against any Chinese invasion. That policy was dropped when the extent of development on China’s side became clear.
In 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made his first trip to Arunachal and promised $4 billion to build a 1,700-kilometre highway joining the valleys of the state as well as a train line connecting to New Delhi. These would also make troop movements easier. Around the same time, former army chief Gen. J.J. Singh was appointed governor of the state and is ramping up infrastructure, power and telecom projects. Never before in the history of this region has such a massive development program been conducted there.
But despite 15 rounds of high-level talks, the border issue looks as knotty as ever. Indian media often whip up anger at Chinese border incursions, played down by both governments as a natural result of differing perceptions of where the border lies. India’s defence minister told parliament 500 incursions have been reported in the last two years.
Unable to match China’s transport network, India’s focus is now on maintaining more troops close to the border. “India struggles to build up infrastructure,” said Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has written extensively on the India-China relationship. “They have been trying to do this for the past six or seven years now, and it is progressing far more slowly than they would like. What they have done in the interim is build up the troop strength.” One of main irritants in India-China relations, and a key part of China’s claim to Arunachal, is Tibetan Buddhism. Beijing claims a centuries-old sovereignty over Arunachal and the rest of the Himalayan region.
India hosts the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan government-in-exile. When the Dalai Lama fled Chinese rule in Tibet in 1959, his first stop was the Buddhist monastery in the Arunachal town of Tawang near the border. Three years later, China occupied the fortress-like hilltop monastery in the 1962 war before withdrawing to the current lines. In the 17th century, Tawang district was the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama. Deified as his latest incarnation, the current Dalai Lama visited the monastery in 2009 and has hinted his next reincarnation will be born in India. Some say in Tawang.
Tibetan Buddhists see the Dalai Lama as a living god; China sees him as a separatist threat. Many in the Indian security community worry that instability in Tibet after his death could endanger India.
So, New Delhi is wooing the locals. The intermingling of the Indian army and the Tawang monks is striking. War memorials on the road are built in the style of Tibetan Buddhist stupas, with prayer wheels and flags. Soldiers frequently visit the temple, and advise the lamas about troop movements and developments on the border. Lobsang Thapke, a senior lama at the monastery, says India’s troop buildup has made the monks feel safe, but that India was far from matching China’s road-building prowess.
“From our side, we have to go through a lot of difficulty,” he said in a carpeted room above the main hall, where child monks chanted morning prayers. “They (India) have not blacktopped. Gravelling has not been done.”
The Indian footprint here isn’t always welcome. India’s new wealth is seen in the multistory hotels mushrooming between traditional wood-and-stone houses in town, and new Fords and Hyundais on the hilly streets. But anger is rising about a lack of jobs and perceptions that government corruption is rampant. Student movements have organized strikes in the state capital. Hotel worker Dorjee Leto says educated young people like himself feel forgotten by India. There is almost no mobile phone coverage, power cuts that last days, and just that long muddy road to the outside world. Anxiety over China, however, outweighs the irritation with India, says Leto, who like most in Tawang is a follower of Tibetan Buddhism. “It’s a fear, because already China has annexed Tibet. We feel part of India, we are used to India,” he said.
This standoff assumes a dangerous proportion when viewed in the context of rising Chienese ambition. Some China scholars have begun to accuse Beijing of “salami tactics” in seeking to seize gradual control of the South China Sea. The term evokes disturbing echoes of Nazi Germany’s incremental aggression until it was ready for all-out war.
Applying Second World War terminology to China’s current behavior may seem overblown, but it is apt. In fact, China’s actions also resemble those of another bad actor of that tragic period: Imperial Japan.
The emerging Japan of the 1920s and ’30s, like today’s China, was steeped in historic resentment of the West’s forcible imposition of commercial and cultural influence. Even as Western interaction hugely benefited Japan’s economy then and China’s now, both countries set about building military capabilities commensurate with their new economic prowess.
Naked military power was seen by imperial Japan, as it is by the Communist Party in China, as necessary to defend and expand industrial achievements and economic influence against hostile western nations, most notably the US.
After attacking and annexing Manchuria on the basis of a minor pretext in 1931, Japanese forces extended their invasion into China proper. By the end of the 1930s, Tokyo was ready to look beyond its controlled land area comprising the home islands, Korea, Taiwan and much of China.
On August 1, 1940, Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka announced his government’s intention to establish a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” under Japan’s physical and/or political control and free of western influence. It would include the former European colonies of Southeast Asia –— what Tokyo called the Southern Regions — and the Pacific Islands.
The Co-Prosperity Sphere would provide a supply of regional raw materials and energy resources to ensure Japanese self-sufficiency while enabling Japan to control the world’s access to these vital areas and commercial routes.
Mirroring the strategy of Japan’s military government prior to Second World War, the newly established People’s Republic of China first consolidated its territory before venturing into wider maritime regions. In 1950, the same year it supported North Korea’s invasion of South Korea, China invaded and incorporated Tibet and East Turkestan (now Xinjiang). In 1962, it invaded India and seized territory which it still holds. In 1969, it engaged in a series of border conflicts with the Soviet Union that almost erupted into all-out war. In 1979, after Vietnam had invaded Cambodia and overthrown China’s ally, Pol Pot, China invaded northern Vietnam to “teach it a lesson” through a scorched-earth campaign.
Having dramatically increased its military and naval power, China now asserts expansive territorial and maritime claims in the East China Sea and South China Sea, maintains its long-standing claim over the Taiwan Strait, and indulges its ally North Korea’s claim to dominance in the Yellow Sea.
It has made claims in the Indian Ocean and implemented a “string of pearls” strategy of bases and diplomatic ties along the Bay of Bengal. Its submarine base and concentration of strategic naval forces near its South China Sea province of Hainan enable it to interdict shipping at the three crucial chokepoints in the Indian Ocean — Bab Al Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Malacca.
The geographic footprint of China’s claims and expanding reach in East Asia, including its strategic aspirations for the first and second island chains extending to Guam, is almost congruent to Imperial Japan’s planned map for its Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Obviously, no historic analogy is ever entirely apposite, and there are many differences between Imperial Japan in the 1930s and ’40s and China ruled by the Communist Party today. But there are more than enough parallels in strategic ambitions to awaken realistic concerns among western policy makers and those who influence them.
As China tries its hand at a new version of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the US needs to lead a united international response that discourages further Chinese adventurism.
Washington began such an approach during the last two years of the George W. Bush administration and has accelerated this Asia “pivot” or “rebalancing” under President Barack Obama. The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was in the region last week, building collaboration among America’s friends and allies to settle territorial disputes jointly with China, which prefers bilateral talks — a strategy that gives it the upper hand.
At a press conference in China, Clinton aptly described the US-China relationship as one in which “Our two nations are trying to do something that has never been done in history, which is to write a new answer to the question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet”.
It’s a question that concerns a great many more countries than these two. Whether the US is led by a President Obama or President Romney, America will have to find the resources and diplomacy to continue its regional collaboration in Asia — ensuring that, this time, the outcome will be something better than war.
At the same time, what is required is a concerted action by joint Indo-Japan axis that needs to be formed.
Dr. Bikram Lamba, is a political and business strategist. He can be contacted at 905 848 4205. Email:torconsult@rogers.com