In an environment of decline of the lone Superpower. China’s rise
is being watched with an unmatched intensity. The liberal democracies
that c onsider the rest of the world almost uncivilised, want India to
be the foil of the Chinese. Both are developing countries with
thousands of year of civilisational history; both with the declared
intent of lifting its millions of poor
On the 50th anniversary of the Sino-Indian border war – the lowest point of the bilateral relationship – when one tries to take a stock of the relationship, since 1962, the issue that emerges as prime is the effort of both countries to leave behind the acrimony and move ahead on issues of mutual interest.
Despite this engagement for the past 50 years, when the existing tension between the two countries have only progressively lessened, large sections of the population in India still believe that they cannot trust the Chinese. However, at the level of the government, the leadership in New Delhi considers China as a “peer competitor.”
That catches the reality in a concise expression of policy. The theme, when expanded, translates into a twin track of competition and cooperation. Small wonder, the two countries – now considered the current flavours of economic expansion – are members of various politico-economic groupings, which carry weight in the global discourse.
These joint memberships range from the initiatives like Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), geared towards cooperative development of the Central Asian countries, to the platform of some developing country muscle-flexing through organisations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
At the bilateral level, China is India’s largest trading partner, having displaced the USA a few years ago. A large number of joint working groups (JWG) operate on various issues of political and economic relationships. The most important is of course the JWG on boundaries dividing the two countries.
The nettlesome problem of the McMahon Line, which China does not accept as a fair border demarcated by the British, is being dealt with almost by inches. There have been various occasions during the past two decades when the two countries have been on the edges of exchanging maps, they have eventually backed off from such positions.
So, the leaderships of the two countries have taken a path of pragmatism: let the JWG keep searching for common ground on the boundary issue, but the two countries will engage themselves on other issues of common concern without waiting for a resolution of the vexing border issue.
A process of normalization, that had begun with the late Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing and his famous meeting with China’s then supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, and consolidated later by a visit in 1990s of then prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao, is continuing without too many glitches. Though, there are occasional blips on the radar when the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) of China crosses what India considers to be the Line of Actual Control (LAC); while the Indian Army too making their own forays across what the Chinese consider to be their territory.
But these conflicting notions about the respective boundaries are quickly resolved through border meetings at the local level, seldom requiring the intervention of the apex level.
Still, the USA and the Western block consider they can hedge against China by entangling India into various security-related arrangements: of note, is the latest US ‘pivot’ in the Asia-Pacific region where Washington sees a role for India, thus ‘containing’ China’s rising influence in the region.
While, for India, the Asia-Pacific region does not fall in their area of strategic interest, as has been defined by many of the leaders, including that of successive Indian Navy chiefs. The recently retired navy chief, Admiral Nirmal Verma had marked it out to stretch from the Malacca Strait in the south-east to the Horn of Africa, in the west on the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea.
For China, Malacca Strait is crucial because through this narrow channel, 80 per cent of oil it imports pass through. For the first time, PLAN (PLA-Navy) has ventured beyond the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, and deployed in the Gulf of Aden for anti-piracy operations. Chinese newspapers like the Global Times have declared that India should not consider the Indian Ocean to be its private waterbody, because the ocean carries its name.
But for India too, the heightened China competition, should make it imperative for New Delhi to study the changing internal dynamics of the Chinese socio-political scene.
Changes in the Chinese Political Discourse:
A comparatively weaker regime of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao has given rise to a new phenomenon within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Central Government. Two factions have emerged in the CCP, one comprised the elitists and the other, that of populists. During the rule of the Hu government that is coming to an end, the former president and general secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin led the elitist group.
Hu himself with all his effort to harmonise the Chinese economic growth for reducing the income differentials and promote more equal distribution of wealth had been the vanguard of the so-called ‘populist’ faction. The premier of his government, Wen Jiabao, led a liberal charge for bringing in more democratic change in the polity. He advocated that line both inside, within the party forum and also outside, in the public space.
On the other hand, the Jiang elitists were against any kind of voting even within the party. They wanted the old system of nominations to remain in place.
Now with the impending 18th Party Congress, scheduled to be held in November, the Chinese topmost government and party hierarchy is slated to undergo virtually a complete overhaul. In the apex, Standing Committee of the Polit Bureau, seven to nine members are to be changed by new faces; in the main Polit Bureau most of the 21 members will be retiring to be replaced by newer faces.
The politics of all these changes lie in the choices made by the CCP during its Fourth Plenum of the 17th Congress in 2009. The mantle of the new president and the general secretary of the government and the party respectively have devolved on Xi Jinping, called a ‘princeling’ because his father was a high functionary of the party during Mao Zhedong’s regime.
The premier of the government will be Li Keqiang, a former leading light of the Communist Youth League, which as an organisation is a party constituency of Hu Jintao. Li is also considered a protégé of the present president.
Now, both Xi and Li lead separate factions of the party that has led to the saying of ‘One Party, Two coalitions” – a sort of bipartisan politics that has a whiff of democratic norms seeping in a party and State that has been long dominated by individual strongmen.
Though not much is known about what the policies of the two will be; Xi being known as more a leftist than Li. The CCP is at the moment on a cusp of time when it could lead to its own dissolution or it could gain strength and continue to be a practitioner of ‘resilient authoritarianism.’ Cheng Li, the famous US-based Brookings Institution scholar has recently written that the control of the party on the people and institutions has become loose.
The growth of a Chinese middle class, non-existent even at the time of the Tienanmen Square massacre, have now grown into a sizable number by which they are asserting their rights. Those rights also include the ones about ‘free expression.’ Restrictions on that, on top of the prevalent corruption, within the Chinese governance structures, have congealed as issues for the new middle class to be militated about.
The increasing autonomy of the media is a sign of the times. David Shambaugh, director of the China policy programme of the George Washington University, even major sections of the PLA are demanding that they no longer wish to be a ‘party-army’ but ‘national army.’ This is a crucial development that needs to be handled deftly.
On top of this, are the issues of slowing economic growth, growing income disparities, and corruption. The latter is increasingly becoming the bane of governance in China. The totalitarian Chinese government is based on a notion of an efficient government that did not discriminate between its people.
But the case of Bo Xilai, who was at the edge of becoming a Standing Committee of the Polit Bureau member, the apex of decision-making pyramid, was caught along with his businesswoman wife, and charged. While Bo was charged with corruption accusations, his wife was slapped with the charge of murdering an English businessman, who was a close family friend and a business associate.
The case has the potential of opening the Pandora’s box of corruption at high places. Coming as it did just before the 18th Congress, where Bo would have been elected to the Standing Committee, could become an inquisition for those who transgressed the party’s line on the issue of corruption.
All these factors constitute a changing social discourse that was kept sterile for a long time by the party. But now, without an iconic leader, the social dialogues have emerged out of the closets and have become reflection of realities that exist. Hence, one can now find in China academics, criticising government politics, complaining about governmental corruption and issues of social order with significant freedom. This cuts very fine and close to the party’s biggest worry: mass scale social disorder.
The party government, in turn, seek to channelise the politics of the social elements into wide ranging ‘nationalism,’ that often target foreign entitities, which are considered inimical to Chinese interests. But with commercial media boom and the internet access to social media sites are making the middle and upper class Chinese a lot more activistic in their expressions of frustration.
This socio-political and economic milieu of China needs to be appreciated by the Indian decision-makers. The strategies of a China engagement should be formed, stemming from the subtle changes the East Asian giant is undergoing.
On the 50th anniversary of the Sino-Indian border war – the lowest point of the bilateral relationship – when one tries to take a stock of the relationship, since 1962, the issue that emerges as prime is the effort of both countries to leave behind the acrimony and move ahead on issues of mutual interest.
Despite this engagement for the past 50 years, when the existing tension between the two countries have only progressively lessened, large sections of the population in India still believe that they cannot trust the Chinese. However, at the level of the government, the leadership in New Delhi considers China as a “peer competitor.”
That catches the reality in a concise expression of policy. The theme, when expanded, translates into a twin track of competition and cooperation. Small wonder, the two countries – now considered the current flavours of economic expansion – are members of various politico-economic groupings, which carry weight in the global discourse.
These joint memberships range from the initiatives like Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), geared towards cooperative development of the Central Asian countries, to the platform of some developing country muscle-flexing through organisations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
At the bilateral level, China is India’s largest trading partner, having displaced the USA a few years ago. A large number of joint working groups (JWG) operate on various issues of political and economic relationships. The most important is of course the JWG on boundaries dividing the two countries.
The nettlesome problem of the McMahon Line, which China does not accept as a fair border demarcated by the British, is being dealt with almost by inches. There have been various occasions during the past two decades when the two countries have been on the edges of exchanging maps, they have eventually backed off from such positions.
So, the leaderships of the two countries have taken a path of pragmatism: let the JWG keep searching for common ground on the boundary issue, but the two countries will engage themselves on other issues of common concern without waiting for a resolution of the vexing border issue.
A process of normalization, that had begun with the late Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing and his famous meeting with China’s then supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, and consolidated later by a visit in 1990s of then prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao, is continuing without too many glitches. Though, there are occasional blips on the radar when the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) of China crosses what India considers to be the Line of Actual Control (LAC); while the Indian Army too making their own forays across what the Chinese consider to be their territory.
But these conflicting notions about the respective boundaries are quickly resolved through border meetings at the local level, seldom requiring the intervention of the apex level.
Still, the USA and the Western block consider they can hedge against China by entangling India into various security-related arrangements: of note, is the latest US ‘pivot’ in the Asia-Pacific region where Washington sees a role for India, thus ‘containing’ China’s rising influence in the region.
While, for India, the Asia-Pacific region does not fall in their area of strategic interest, as has been defined by many of the leaders, including that of successive Indian Navy chiefs. The recently retired navy chief, Admiral Nirmal Verma had marked it out to stretch from the Malacca Strait in the south-east to the Horn of Africa, in the west on the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea.
For China, Malacca Strait is crucial because through this narrow channel, 80 per cent of oil it imports pass through. For the first time, PLAN (PLA-Navy) has ventured beyond the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, and deployed in the Gulf of Aden for anti-piracy operations. Chinese newspapers like the Global Times have declared that India should not consider the Indian Ocean to be its private waterbody, because the ocean carries its name.
But for India too, the heightened China competition, should make it imperative for New Delhi to study the changing internal dynamics of the Chinese socio-political scene.
Changes in the Chinese Political Discourse:
A comparatively weaker regime of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao has given rise to a new phenomenon within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Central Government. Two factions have emerged in the CCP, one comprised the elitists and the other, that of populists. During the rule of the Hu government that is coming to an end, the former president and general secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin led the elitist group.
Hu himself with all his effort to harmonise the Chinese economic growth for reducing the income differentials and promote more equal distribution of wealth had been the vanguard of the so-called ‘populist’ faction. The premier of his government, Wen Jiabao, led a liberal charge for bringing in more democratic change in the polity. He advocated that line both inside, within the party forum and also outside, in the public space.
On the other hand, the Jiang elitists were against any kind of voting even within the party. They wanted the old system of nominations to remain in place.
Now with the impending 18th Party Congress, scheduled to be held in November, the Chinese topmost government and party hierarchy is slated to undergo virtually a complete overhaul. In the apex, Standing Committee of the Polit Bureau, seven to nine members are to be changed by new faces; in the main Polit Bureau most of the 21 members will be retiring to be replaced by newer faces.
The politics of all these changes lie in the choices made by the CCP during its Fourth Plenum of the 17th Congress in 2009. The mantle of the new president and the general secretary of the government and the party respectively have devolved on Xi Jinping, called a ‘princeling’ because his father was a high functionary of the party during Mao Zhedong’s regime.
The premier of the government will be Li Keqiang, a former leading light of the Communist Youth League, which as an organisation is a party constituency of Hu Jintao. Li is also considered a protégé of the present president.
Now, both Xi and Li lead separate factions of the party that has led to the saying of ‘One Party, Two coalitions” – a sort of bipartisan politics that has a whiff of democratic norms seeping in a party and State that has been long dominated by individual strongmen.
Though not much is known about what the policies of the two will be; Xi being known as more a leftist than Li. The CCP is at the moment on a cusp of time when it could lead to its own dissolution or it could gain strength and continue to be a practitioner of ‘resilient authoritarianism.’ Cheng Li, the famous US-based Brookings Institution scholar has recently written that the control of the party on the people and institutions has become loose.
The growth of a Chinese middle class, non-existent even at the time of the Tienanmen Square massacre, have now grown into a sizable number by which they are asserting their rights. Those rights also include the ones about ‘free expression.’ Restrictions on that, on top of the prevalent corruption, within the Chinese governance structures, have congealed as issues for the new middle class to be militated about.
The increasing autonomy of the media is a sign of the times. David Shambaugh, director of the China policy programme of the George Washington University, even major sections of the PLA are demanding that they no longer wish to be a ‘party-army’ but ‘national army.’ This is a crucial development that needs to be handled deftly.
On top of this, are the issues of slowing economic growth, growing income disparities, and corruption. The latter is increasingly becoming the bane of governance in China. The totalitarian Chinese government is based on a notion of an efficient government that did not discriminate between its people.
But the case of Bo Xilai, who was at the edge of becoming a Standing Committee of the Polit Bureau member, the apex of decision-making pyramid, was caught along with his businesswoman wife, and charged. While Bo was charged with corruption accusations, his wife was slapped with the charge of murdering an English businessman, who was a close family friend and a business associate.
The case has the potential of opening the Pandora’s box of corruption at high places. Coming as it did just before the 18th Congress, where Bo would have been elected to the Standing Committee, could become an inquisition for those who transgressed the party’s line on the issue of corruption.
All these factors constitute a changing social discourse that was kept sterile for a long time by the party. But now, without an iconic leader, the social dialogues have emerged out of the closets and have become reflection of realities that exist. Hence, one can now find in China academics, criticising government politics, complaining about governmental corruption and issues of social order with significant freedom. This cuts very fine and close to the party’s biggest worry: mass scale social disorder.
The party government, in turn, seek to channelise the politics of the social elements into wide ranging ‘nationalism,’ that often target foreign entitities, which are considered inimical to Chinese interests. But with commercial media boom and the internet access to social media sites are making the middle and upper class Chinese a lot more activistic in their expressions of frustration.
This socio-political and economic milieu of China needs to be appreciated by the Indian decision-makers. The strategies of a China engagement should be formed, stemming from the subtle changes the East Asian giant is undergoing.
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