Gun, Meet Foot: China’s Self-Defeating India Policy
Ready, fire, aim!
War on the Rocks published an excellent article that illuminates China’s thinking on India, and the recent deadly clashes along the countries’ Himalayan border.
Entitled, “China’s Strategic Assessment of the Ladakh Clash,” the author, Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at Washington’s Stimson Center, has nicely explained Beijing’s calculations. But, I want to deconstruct the arguments, because it exposes China’s India policy as tactically clever, but strategically foolish — an endemic problem of the People’s Republic.
From the article:
“Aksai Chin offers the only direct road connection (National Highway G219) between China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Tibet Autonomous Region. In the event of major unrest in either area, which is home to millions of ethnic minorities, China will have to rely on G219 for access. Losing Aksai Chin, in other words, would jeopardize the stability of China’s entire western frontier.”
Revolutionary Road? The G219
China is worried about restive minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, and is fearful India could cut the military road it needs. Viewed in the deep grass, there’s a logic to this point. Stand-up, look at the rest of the field, and it falls apart quickly.
This presumes that in the event of some sort of uprising in Tibet and Xinjiang, India would cross the border of nuclear armed China, and engage the People’s Liberation Army by blocking a road being used by it. Or hit the road with artillery or bomb it.
Highly, highly unlikely. India is not going to risk New Delhi or Mumbai for Lhasa or Urumqi.
More possibly, India would send support and materials to the rebels cutting off the road. But, let’s look more closely at Tibet and Xinjiang.
All things being equal, would India welcome an independent Tibet hostile to China?
Of course. That would significantly relieve Chinese pressure on India’s border. It could also move Indian troops to strategically good positions if India and Tibet were aligned.
What are the chances Tibet will ever become independent? About 0.00001%.
China has crushed Tibet since annexing it in 1950. Beijing has moved in millions of Han Chinese. Official statistics are unreliable, but Tibetans in exile like the Dalai Lama believe Tibetans are now a minority in their own country.
Why did the American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq fail?
The population had lots of weapons.
It had military know-how. Afghans fought the Soviets for a decade with American weapons. Saddam’s best soldiers put up no fight during the invasion, and disappeared into the cities to fight as guerillas.
The U.S. follows very limiting rules that make successful occupations almost impossible. If you take the approach that God is not making any more land, but we can always make more people, your rules for “occupation” become much simpler.
Tibetans have no weapons. Even if India were to supply them, they have no culture of fighting as in Afghanistan. China has occupied their country for 70 years, and they haven’t mounted a significant rebellion. And China is not the United States. It would ethnically cleanse Tibet in a heartbeat if Tibetans launched a genuine uprising.
In fact, it would be folly for India to supply a Tibetan revolution because the chances of it succeeding are so remote, and the backlash from China would be so great.
What about Xinjiang (also known as Uighuristan)?
Given the Uighurs are being put in concentration camps by China, no better time for an insurrection. You’d think Uighurs could get weapons and know-how to use them from their Muslim brothers across the border in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s not happening, and it tells you how low the Uighurs’ chance of success.
For India, the enemy of my enemy might be my friend. But, an independent Uighuristan is the wildest of wild cards.
As Uighurs are Muslims, their long-term alignment with India is unlikely or very temporary. The only real opportunity for India to build a relationship with the Uighurs is Pakistan is presently cozying up to China while they’re being oppressed, and the Afghans have arrested members of the Uighur resistance and turned them over to China.
Reality is, what India most doesn’t want in Uighuristan is a protracted war like Afghanistan that releases 100,000 or more jihadis. It fears that kind of instability as much as China. It’s the gap between the world as you want it to be, and the world as it is. If anything, India is happy to let China crush those Muslims.
From the article:
“From the perspective of China, not only is India trying to capitalize on China’s moment of distraction, vulnerability, and overextension in its foreign policy, it also puts China in a dilemma between responding to India’s road construction and being labeled “aggressive and provocative” — or acquiescing to it and losing territory in a time of weakness.”
Even if it were true that India has designs on moving the border significantly in its favor, let’s again come out of the weeds and look at the real terrain.
Refer to the map. Let’s say that in a border war, China punches through to Nako in India’s Himachal Pradesh state. That puts it 700 kilometers from New Delhi.
Now let’s say India punches through to China’s Ngari Prefecture. That puts it about 4,500 kilometers from Beijing.
India has a bigger stake in the minutiae of that border. But it’s China that keeps crossing it, as it did to start the present crisis in Galwan, in Doklam in 2017 and in the 1962 border war between the countries.
Military planners must act like all wars will be fought without nuclear weapons. But, let’s be real. Neither China nor India is going to let that border move even 50 kilometers without that kind of response. In essence, what we’re taking about here is a border that may move at most a few kilometers in places. China antagonizing India over that kind of minimal leverage in a place almost 10 times further away from Beijing than New Delhi again shows China’s strategic shortsightedness.
Then we must consider which party acts more provocatively.
China is attempting to encircle India with a series of naval bases in the Indian Ocean. It’s made inroads at Sittwe in Myanmar. It may soon secure naval access at Hambronata on the tip of Sri Lanka. And it already operates the port at Gwadar in Pakistan — where it may or may not already be building a naval base. Whatever the present status, it’s believed to be just a matter of time before the People’s Liberation Army Navy is stationed there.
That’s the tip of the iceberg in its budding friendship with Pakistan, the country that poses the most existential threat to India. In fact, the best place to invade India from is not through the Himalayas where the altitude, freezing temperatures and harsh terrain make a war not only logistically hard to sustain, it gives India myriad places to stop a Chinese invasion. It’s across India’s much more forgiving border with Pakistan.
With the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, a vast network of highways and railways which will run from Gwadar to China’s border, China is building the kind of access through Pakistan that could put its tanks and troops on India’s border in a day. Again, this is madness that would leave most of Asia’s most populated cities in nuclear ashes.
But the point is, China surrounding India in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan is far more provocative than India moving a disputed border 500 metres to build a road 4,500 kilometres from Beijing.
The real threat India poses to China is different. Look at a map. In a conflict, India is the best poised country in the world to cut off the flow of oil China needs from Middle East and minerals it gets from Africa. They don’t call it the Indian Ocean for nothing. That’s a legitimate Chinese concern.
What India also needs to do that is a reason. For about 15 years, the U.S. has been trying to get India to join the Quad — a proposed alliance of itself, America, Japan and Australia to deal with Chinese ambitions.
Historically dubious of alliances generally and America specifically, India has been the most reluctant partner in the Quad. Yet, it’s the critical one because India is best positioned to cut off China from those essential resources. If the other three members don’t have to do that in a conflict, it gives them many more assets to use against China in the Pacific. And forces China to deploy many more of its own to the Indian Ocean.
So, China’s best play with India is to let it slumber and stay antipathetic to the West. If the border were to move 10 kilometeres here or there, it would be a small price to pay to keep India somnolent - as it has been for almost three-quarters of a century. Instead, China tries to intimidate India by moving into Pakistan, surrounding it in the Indian Ocean and pressing on the border.
From the article:
“When Chinese officials concluded that India was leveraging China’s weaknesses to make territorial gains in the disputed region, Beijing felt it could not indulge New Delhi, even if it promotes a backlash in Indian amongst a new generation of officials and foreign policy strategists.”
Let’s talk more about the inclinations of Indian policy makers and strategists. For half a century, they were almost exclusively the heirs of Gandhi and Nehru — who fought the “colonial West,” and had no interest in aligning with Western countries after independence in 1947. Indian schools teach the British are to blame for India’s billion people in poverty. (In reality, the caste system is the fundamental problem.) But, whether or not that’s nonsense is irrelevant to how Indians view the West.
In the early days of the Cold War, Indian leaders took the view that there were no significant external military threats to India. Pre-nuclear Pakistan was seen as an irritant that would never overwhelm India. In the absence of such threats, the biggest security risk was being drawn into the conflicts of other nations. With the Soviets far away, and China recovering from its own occupation and civil war, there was a logic to this.
However, whatever the follies of its Marxist economic policies, India is a committed democracy. In an existential struggle between democracies and authoritarians, India’s logical home is with democracy. (Unless its minorities become a problem. As we revealed in our series, "How China Undermines Democracy", with its ready to export authoritarian playbook and Smart City surveillance kit — China is the natural ally of a Hindutva India. Yet, China doesn’t seem to sense the potential.)
In the Cold War, India was a far more natural ally of the U.S. and the West than the Soviets. But, it was generally aligned with the Soviets, and got most of its weapons from Moscow. It did take food and other aid from the U.S. and the West. In general, India took advantage of the great power competition to get the best deal for itself on a case by case basis. This kind of India is in China’s interest.
Reality is, Indian policy makers have every reason to stay focused on the country’s massive internal problems. History still crushes India.
Almost two-thirds of Indians still live in rural areas. That’s about 900 million people. The legacy of the caste system leaves most of them living not only in wretched poverty, but still sneered at by an elite that still exploits and brutalizes them. Uprising is possible.
Muslims in India, by state
Almost 15% of the population is Muslim. That’s 170 million members of a restive minority not beloved by the majority, and a potential fifth column in a conflict with Pakistan. There’s also 20 million Sikhs, most of whom live in strategically important Punjab, and some of whom want an independent country called Khalistan.
India has massive infrastructure problems that mean it still takes days to ship goods from New Delhi to Calcutta when it should take hours. While it has some world class companies, far too much of its economy is shackled by the legacy of Nehru’s socialism.
In other words, China’s best play would have been to keep those Indian policy makers indifferent to the West, and focused on these internal problems. That China only sees India as an existential rival that needs constant humbling speaks more to the Chinese character than the reality of the threat posed by their Indian neighbor.
Narendra Modi is without a doubt the most pro-American Indian Prime Minister, and that alarms Beijing. But, he’s also only pro-American because Beijing has forced it.
He’s also been in the job for six years, and the opposition Congress Party has ruled India for 54 of its 71 years. There’s every chance Indian foreign policy would have reverted to mean before Galwan. There’s no chance now.
From the article:
“Beijing sees the unsettled border as leverage to bog down India in the region and undermine its global potential. For China, the Chinese and Indian demands are different and asymmetrical by design. Key concessions India demands from China on the border settlement are hard commitments that cannot be reversed. By contrast, what China seeks from India, such as its neutrality in the U.S.-Chinese strategic competition, is ephemeral and easily adjustable. While New Delhi sees addressing the border issue as a prerequisite for India to trust China, Beijing doesn’t believe that relinquishing its leverage will in any way stop India from conducting hostile actions down the road, such as aligning with America to undermine Chinese interests in the Indian Ocean region.”
Which China is making come true. As we said above, India needs good reasons to cozy up to the U.S.. And China keeps giving it good reasons.
Facile western academics and policy makers have long overrated Beijing’s strategic acumen. To wit: a year before the famed Nixon-Mao meeting of 1972, American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Kissinger asked him to assess the impact of the French Revolution. Zhou responded with, “It is too early to tell.”
As endlessly retold by Western “elites” over the years, it became the example of the “patient and far-sighted” nature of Chinese leaders, who thought in centuries, as opposed to the short-termism of Western democratic politicians.
Hilariously, as we learned a few years ago from Beijing’s notes, Zhou misunderstood the question and thought Kissinger’s question referred to the student protests that hit Paris in 1968, not the 1789 French Revolution.
Communist China is a paranoid, neurotic, xenophobic and chauvinist country — like Germany from 1812-1945. The reason is the same: a Century of Humiliation.
As China sees itself as the center of the universe, civilizing Asian barbarians, the Kaiser’s Germany saw itself as the rightful master of Europe, and center of European culture as the home of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, von Clausewitz, Hegel, Leibniz, and Kant.
The Quad
As foreign invasion and war shattered China, the Thirty Years’ and Napoleonic Wars crushed the Germanic states. Twenty percent of Germans died in the Thirty Years’ War.
Like rising China, the Kaiser’s rising Germany sputtered and raged about its “containment” by other powers. But its own aggressive, short-sighted and foolish moves resulted in encirclement. In the run up to World War I, the Kaiser managed to get Britain and France to set aside 1,000 years of rivalry and many devastating wars to form an alliance to check Germany; by insulting the Tsar, he then added to the Franco-British coalition the absolute monarchy of Russia, which had a very dim view of the example democratic France and Britain set for the Russian people. The Kaiser got this very unlikely trio to find the one thing they had in common: his Germany.
Finding itself surrounded, the German solution was the Schlieffen Plan — the military strategy to simultaneously attack France and Russia which launched World War I. The Schlieffen Plan was tactically brilliant — Germany won all the opening battles of the war. But it was strategically flawed because even with those resounding initial successes, Germany lost because fighting three major European powers at once was too tall an order.
Beijing risks creating the same kind of strategic noose over what it fears New Delhi might do in a situation where the thing it prefers to do is nothing.
Gun, meet foot.