When the People’s Daily announced the release of China’s seventh Defense White Paper at the end of March, it began by stating that one of the aims was to “boost the world’s trust in [China’s] commitment to peaceful development.” Besides indicating how increasingly important the world’s opinion is to China, this was also a clear acknowledgement by Beijing that the world and its neighbours in particular, continue to view its military modernization as threatening. For India in particular, the Chinese document holds several implications. Continue reading “Interpreting China’s Defense White Paper 2011”
When disaster strikes, politics is not far away
One of the more striking images of the 2008 earthquake in China was of a Japanese destroyer steaming into a Chinese port as part of a relief mission, the first such instance since the end of World War II. The Chinese were quick to reciprocate with a similar offer of aid following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Disaster relief operations as an opportunity to engage in diplomacy is not a new phenomenon but seems certainly to have picked up pace in recent years, particularly in Asia, where disasters are frequent and more often than not are accompanied by heavy losses to life and property.
Continue reading “When disaster strikes, politics is not far away”
China’s ‘Forward Policy’ on Kashmir
Presentation: Jabin T. Jacob, “Interpreting China’s ‘Forward Policy’ on Kashmir,” Conference on Pakistan Occupied Kashmir: Internal Dynamics and Externalities, Department of Strategic and Regional Studies, University of Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, 28 March 2011.
Summary: While Pakistan remains a vital cog of China’s South Asia policy it is important to note that the superlative is not applicable in Sino-Pak relations; rather, a range of factors influence Chinese policy including India, the United States and now the progress and consequences of the American drawdown in Afghanistan. Kashmir is but one factor in the larger Chinese calculus.
Further, as important as China’s geopolitical interests in the region are, it has other wider interests globally on which India, more than Pakistan, is an important actor. Thus, whether on climate change or global trade negotiations and in a variety of multilateral organizations ranging from the Kunming Initiative to the Russia-India-China trilateral and the BRICS grouping, India is a key player that China has to engage with. Against such a backdrop, China tries both to prevent India from truly rising to challenge China as well as to ensure that it can work together with India when necessary. Given Indian sensitivities over Kashmir, China’s Kashmir policy forms a useful leverage with India. But there is a fine balance that China needs to achieve which will be increasingly difficult as India grows more powerful on the world stage and if Pakistan continues to remain unstable. China will therefore, have to make some important choices in this regard, in the future.
Meanwhile, India too can contribute to modifying China’s Kashmir policy in its interests. On the positive side of things, showing greater interest in border trade across the LAC with both Tibet and Xinjiang and through them with the rest of China is one way. But most measures will have to be non-Kashmir-specific in nature including greater openness of the Indian economy as a whole to Chinese investments and trade with China. In the more negative set of actions are of course, classic geopolitical games such as balancing with the US or a host of China’s smaller, neighbours fearful of its rise.
What methods China or India will adopt, however, remain to be seen.
Rising India’s Foreign Policy: A Partial Introduction
Originally published as Jabin T. Jacob, “Rising India’s Foreign Policy: A Partial Introduction,” in D. Suba Chandran and Jabin T. Jacob (eds.), India’s Foreign Policy: Old Problems, New Challenges (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2011): 1-22.
Current Indian foreign policy is informed by a realization that a combination of economic reforms and the end of the Cold War has steered India into a position of some considerable influence in the post-9/11 world. This is influence of a kind that India did not have in the years following Independence. What India had then was a moral standing which it could make little use of, boxed in as it was by the contingencies of a Cold War division of the world. This division allowed very little leeway for the Indian policy of non-alignment, which ended up being not so much an alternative as a means of holding the line, until India could find itself in a more favourable geopolitical situation. Further, unlike in the post-Independence phase, India today often appears reluctant to exercise what influence it has outside South Asia and sometimes even within the region, keenly aware of the several continuing limits on its capabilities and having suffered from blowback on the few occasions it did, as was the case most tragically, in the assassination of former Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi.
Even as some old problems continue to keep India off-balance in international affairs, notably the issue of Kashmir, the world has also not stood still and new problems – both traditional and non-traditional – have emerged that have required India to step up and take a position on. These have included the fall of the monarchy and the ascension of the Maoists in Nepal in the immediate neighbourhood, the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme in the extended neighbourhood, and issues of global import such as climate change. And all this, even as the Indian foreign policy establishment remains woefully ill-equipped and understaffed to meet these challenges. What then are the patterns of Indian foreign policy behavior in the new century?
Continue reading “Rising India’s Foreign Policy: A Partial Introduction”
Sino-Pak Nuclear Deal: American Perfidy?
If the US’ changing the rules of the nuclear world order for facilitating a civilian nuclear deal with India was a case of global hegemony in action, then China’s recent success in getting the Americans to acquiesce to a Sino-Pak civilian nuclear deal is the equivalent of a successful insurgent action.
The fact that the deal comes at a time when the world is still reeling from the radiation leak at the Fukushima plant in Japan following the massive earthquake there earlier this month, is deeply ironical. It is also a sign perhaps of how commercial nuclear energy development is driven, in some parts of the world at least, by concerns more important than issues of safety both of the reactor itself and of the population living in proximity to it or of threats from non-state actors. Continue reading “Sino-Pak Nuclear Deal: American Perfidy?”
India and the Arab Revolutions
The Arab world is in ferment. While issues of democracy and individual rights have cropped up several times in the course of recent events, the US has been considerably circumspect in its pronouncements given its own patchy record in promoting such values in the region. Meanwhile, Chinese propaganda rubbishes talk of any transition to democracy, emphasizing ‘social stability and normal order’ and warning against the chaos of regime change.
Where however, is India in this picture? Continue reading “India and the Arab Revolutions”
China and the Arab Revolutions
“Go ahead sue me, my father is Li Gang!” shouted the unrepentant young son of a senior police officer in a provincial Chinese city last October. His car had just been forced to a stop by passersby after he had mowed down two young girls, killing one. Today, “my father is Li Gang” is a widely used expression in China, to refer to the impunity with which those connected to halls of power, can get away with their crimes. It is an impunity that is familiar to the people of Tunisia, where Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in desperate protest. Continue reading “China and the Arab Revolutions”
Indian Public Opinion and Sino-Indian Relations
Presentation: “Indian Public Opinion and Sino-Indian Relations: Causes and Consequences,” India-China Interface, Department of Foreign Languages – Chinese, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 10 January 2011.
Summary: Former Chinese Ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi’s statement reiterating the Chinese claim over Arunachal on the eve of his President, Hu Jintao’s visit to India in November 2006 might have been the unintentional starting point for a new phase in Sino-Indian relations. Unintentional, because the play that the Chinese envoy’s ordinary, entirely unsurprising statement received in the Indian media, marked the beginning of a heightened popular Indian awareness and engagement with China, that now has perhaps begun to contribute or inform to some extent to New Delhi’s engagement at the higher political level with Beijing. The impact of popular opinion on Sino-Indian relations is nothing new however. In the run-up to the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 and subsequently, popular feelings played an important role constraining the government’s freedom of action and in encouraging political players to make rash statements and promises. There are of course several differences with the present and it is these differences – their reasons and their implications – that will be examined in greater detail.
Sections
- Definitions
- Public Opinion pre-1962
- Government Clampdown post-1962
- China’s Rise
- India’s Rise
- Rise of Indian Television Media and the Globetrotting Indian
Charting India’s China Policy for the Next Decade
Original Article: Jabin T. Jacob, “Alternative Strategies towards China: Charting India’s Course for the Next Decade,” IPCS Issue Brief, No. 162, February 2011.
Summary: Sino-Indian bilateral ties at the start of the 21st century saw the two sides putting behind them the contretemps that followed India’s 1998 nuclear tests and rapid growth of their economic interactions. It soon began to be claimed that economic imperatives would be the new driver in their relationship, one that many held also would be the defining relationship of the new century. However, neither the sentiment nor the expression that it engendered, namely, ‘Chindia,’ retains much salience now at the beginning of a new decade.
What should India’s China policy for the next decade look like? How can India maximize its strengths in diplomatic and other arenas vis-à-vis China in a manner that can push forward the positive aspects of the bilateral relationship while at the same time reduce chances for actual physical conflict of even a limited nature?
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Thinking about China in India 