China India Conflict And Their Implications on Indo Pacific Region Arena
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
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One of the most dreaded issues to face Asia and the Indo-Pacific region today, said Professor Graham Allison, at Harvard University, is the prospect of the Thucydides Trap. Although this was articulated five years ago (ie 2015), the likelihood of the Sino-US conflict has become more and more unstinting, if not pronounced, especially in the run up to the American presidential and congressional election.
In the Thucydides Trap, especially in the current form, China would be wary of the United States, and mutatis mutandis, the United States would be suspicious about China, over a range of issues. Their fear would pervade the entire spectrum of bilateral issues, ranging from trade to theft of intellectual property, the latter being the charge unilaterally imposed on China; by passing the World Trade Organization (WPO) or the World Intellectual Properties Organization (WIPO). This is why the dynamic of the relationship has been constantly on a downward spiral; notwithstanding the merits of some charges as China has indeed raced ahead in many innovations, leading one to wonder if the companies and corporate entities in the United States had accidentally let down their guards after winning the Cold War with the former Soviet Union.
Thus, the recent on again, off again, indeed on again flare-up, between China and India on June 15 2020, within the larger scope of geopolitics, will have an impact on the whole of the Indo-Pacific region per se. Much as India is famously known for being one of the pioneers of Non Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961, New Delhi is not beyond the persuasion of the Australia, the United States, and Japan, to form what is known as a “Quads,” an abbreviation of Quadrilateral, to counter-check China in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
As things are, however, while China and India are two nuclear armed powers poised against one another, their border also spans 3448 KM; of which the Line of Control (LOC), an area where big ticket weapons and arms are banned.
In fact, the LOC remains loosely defined yet tightly patrolled. Since the borders are long, and physically challenging, it is not easy to go to war at all. Ironically, this leads to more, not less, rivalry, especially at sea and potentially in space. Thus, just as it was not easy to send the Chinese troops into India in their first conflict in 1962, as the terrain is still intimidating and formidable now for any significant land-based military operations, invariably, by both sides, this remains the case now. But the mercury of geo-political temperature will not stop rising.
The latest conflict, on June 16 2020, which had resulted in the casualties of some 20 Indian soldiers to date, with another 17 of them critically wounded by China, existed in Galwan Valley of the LOC, an area bordering Kashmir and Jammu.
Oddly, it is important to understand the history of the two countries’ relationship too. China and India, were once characterized by the late Prime Minister Jawalhal Nehru in 1950s as “Sini-Chini bhai-bhai,” essentially two countries that can be brothers. But the 1962 border conflict ended any illusion to that instantly, and this sense of enmity continues to hold true, even with the former Defense Minister of India from the BJP party, George Fernandez, once calling China a “(serious) threat.”
To be sure, since the release of the Indo Pacific Strategy on May 31 2019, coupled with the ASEAN Outlook on Indo-Pacific (AOIP), South China Sea and the Indian Ocean are joined. They have become a contiguous theater of future conflict and maritime command. The two oceans are now construed or seen increasingly by many great powers as one. But beyond just being an enlarged maritime basin, the Indo- Pacific command of the United States in Honolulu, Hawaii, has been cultivating India to stand up to China. Japan, under Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has done the same to this day. However, whether the two learn to work with, or, “war” against each other, both India and China would have much to lose, if not the rest of the world too, when they seek to fight.
More importantly, as the scholar Sergey Radchenko pointed out, the roots of the China-India conflict was also triggered by China’s problem with Tibet. As he wrote in Foreign Policy in 2014, “Tibet was the trigger; following China’s brutal suppression of the Tibetan uprising in 1959, thousands of Tibetans, and their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, sought asylum in India. From there, the Chinese government alleged, they continued to instigate rebellion, moving across the border to carry out subversion and sabotage. The Chinese responded by increasing their military presence in the border area, which in August and October 1959 (alone) led to a series of skirmishes that resulted in the deaths of several Indian border guards.”
As China and India faced- off across the Himalayas, they started reminding each other and the rest of the world about their territorial disputes too, which even now remains unresolved, hence the ambiguous use of the phase LOC to separate the two giants. China claims roughly 32,000 square miles of the Indian-administered territory, in what is now the state of Arunachal Pradesh, south of the McMahon line, which marks the de facto Sino-Indian frontier in the east.
While India disputes China’s possession of a nearly 17,000 square mile area further northwest in the strategically important Aksai Chin region that links Xinjiang and Tibet.
It was at the latter’s location that tensions heated up in April 2013 too, when China’s border troops allegedly breached the LOC, briefly setting up an encampment on what India deemed to be her side of the line; in mid-September of 2013, Indian officials claimed that hundreds of Chinese troops had recently crossed the border again.
Whatever it is, Debasish Chowdhury, formerly with This Week In Asia in South China Morning Post, who is himself a perceptive observer of Sino-Indian conflict, spoke of “twelve perspectives,” of this titanic struggle. This implies that there are more than one optics to look at the issue affecting China and India.
Neville Maxwell, another scholar, has also affirmed that ever since the bilateral conflict in 1962, there have been persistent talks of a “revenge” by India against China. Regardless of the permutations of the conflict, countries either envious or intimidated by the phenomenal growth of China over the last forty years, namely the United States, Japan, Australia, not excluding India, if not Canada, New Zealand, Norway and Denmark too, have all formed the Five Eye and Nine Eye Initiatives, to counterbalance the grand political designs and ambitions of China.
Genuine or not, even the Belt and Road Initiative of China has been described by the Quads as a manifestation of “predatory economics.” Elsewhere, it has also been defined as a “debt trap diplomacy,” by the Belfer Center of Harvard University and Center for Global Development; although this debate remains undefined as yet in the view of Rhodium Group.
While there are academics who believe that China’s commercial lending practices can be further improved, the stigma has nonetheless stuck.
Given the persistence of China and India’s skirmishes, smaller Asian neighbors that are wary of China’s size and massive military power in the Indo-China region, especially the likes of Vietnam and Myanmar, such countries do welcome a stand-off between China and India, that in their calculations, can provide the region of Southeast Asia with some semblance of balance of power; especially when China is trapped in the LOC all the way up to the Himalayans. The latter will make China more averse to showing it’s military muscles in the nine dash line of China in South China Sea.
There are no questions that the top leadership of China and India do know how to “de-escalate” the conflict. The assertion by Singapore scholar Bilahari Kausikan that China and Indian conflict will go awry, is patently mistaken. China and India have wrestled with each other before, numerous times over, and they know how to cease and desist too. What both countries are struggling with is the perennial balance of threats and power, which are timeless dynamics.
