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Are China and India about to start a war in the Himalayas? If historical precedent holds, the continuing standoff involving thousands of troops in multiple places along the contested 2,200-mile boundary likely won’t escalate to armed combat. But one thing is clear: Ties between the world’s two most populous nations are fraying rapidly.
Today’s tensions are the most serious since the Doklam crisis, a 10-week confrontation in 2017 that involved Indian troops intervening to prevent the People’s Liberation Army from building a road on land claimed by both Bhutan and China. Though the precise details of the current face-off remain unknown—experts must parse the tea leaves from official statements, leaks and commercial satellite imagery—media reports from India suggest that thousands of Chinese troops have pitched around 100 tents in territory that India regards as its own. Chinese and Indian soldiers have also reportedly fought using iron rods, an escalation from the pushing and shoving that more commonly marks their encounters.
Should the Chinese stay put, they could cut off a road India built for access to a strategic airfield that boosts India’s ability to move troops to the area. It would also embarrass Prime Minister Narendra Modi while his government struggles to contain the coronavirus. Somewhat ironically, two years ago Mr. Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Wuhan for an informal summit designed to ease tensions. On Wednesday, President Trump tweeted that “the United States is ready, willing and able to mediate or arbitrate their now raging border dispute.”
That may not be necessary. Gautam Bambawale, India’s ambassador to China from 2017-18, views the current standoff as more limited than the Doklam crisis. It doesn’t involve a third country, he points out in a phone interview, and Chinese rhetoric, both official and in state-controlled media, has been more measured than it was three years ago. The Chinese ambassador to India said in a webinar on Wednesday that the “dragon and elephant dancing together is the only right choice for China and India.”
For now, the odds of escalation appear slim. India and China fought a brief and bitter border war in 1962 and have failed to agree to a mutually recognized border despite more than 20 rounds of talks. But they have also prevented localized clashes from spinning out of control while deepening trade and investment links. M. Taylor Fravel, a political scientist and China expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says “putting the border dispute in a box” has been “the great success of the India-China relationship.” No soldier has died on the boundary since 1975.
Nonetheless, the current face-off is only the most recent example of deepening differences between the two Asian countries during the pandemic. On the economic front, New Delhi has moved to woo companies to relocate their factories from China, and now requires an additional layer of government approval for investments from neighboring countries, including China. Last month a cabinet minister, Nitin Gadkari, said India should work to turn the world’s “hatred” toward China into economic opportunity.
At the same time, public opinion in India has turned sharply anti-Chinese. On social media and in WhatsApp groups many Indians blame China for the coronavirus, which has battered India’s economy and strained hospitals in major cities like Mumbai. That Chinese state-owned media such as the Global Times have at times gleefully contrasted China’s high-tech effort to curb the virus with India’s chaotic national lockdown, has only added insult to Indian injury. Earlier this month, the number of Covid-19 cases in India surpassed China’s official total. At publication time, India had reported 160,310 infections and 4,560 deaths, compared with 82,995 infections and 4,634 deaths reported in China.
In terms of global politics, India has joined an informal U.S.-led grouping to combat the pandemic that includes Japan, Australia, Vietnam, South Korea and New Zealand. Some analysts refer to this as the “quad plus,” an expansion of the so-called quad of democracies—the U.S., Japan, Australia and India—that Beijing views with suspicion as an attempt to check its rising power.
What does this mean for India-China relations? Nitin Pai, co-founder of the Takshashila Institution, a Bangalore-based think tank, says Beijing’s aggressive stance toward India, as reflected in its current provocation on the border, is part of the country’s “sharper and more confrontational” foreign policy in the Covid era. Since the start of the pandemic, China has found itself embroiled in spats with, among others, the U.S., Australia and Taiwan. It has also stepped up naval patrols in the disputed South China Sea.
Mr. Pai says Beijing is being foolish by choosing confrontation with India, a nation of 1.3 billion people with a median age of 27. “They are going to live for a long time, and they are going to remember you as an enemy,” he says. “You may win a mountain peak or a valley, but you are going to make enemies for life.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-a-pandemic-china-picks-a-border-fight-with-india-11590687296
