You are not being a party-pooper, merely ignorant. I say this not with rancor or to put you down, but as an assessment of fact. If you take the trouble to go through the responses to your several theses below, you will understand that my response to your post is that with sufficient information and knowledge, you might not have written that post; another of its sort, perhaps, that vents your spleen, but not that precise one.
There is no particular necessity for fraternal feeling to be based on shared (not mutual) enmity for the white man. In fact, this is hardly possible given the widespread occurrence of bananas and coconuts.
The only reason why the white man comes in again and again is because they have been the most recent oppressors in South Asia, and the most recent but one in China.
Finally, don't you feel silly quoting Asian disagreements as a reason for fraternal feeling not to be present, given that the example of the European Union stares you in the face? There is nothing that one Asian has done to another that has not been exceeded many times over by the Europeans in their dealings with one another. And yet France and Germany are at peace with one another, support each other in the EU, enter into complex business arrangements and build a whole generation of polyglot businessmen, from whose spoken languages, it is impossible to tell if they are French or German. Sometimes, in spite of there being many shared names, their names are the only way to tell.
Please do a quick check of the order of battle of the Indian Army.
23 divisions out of 33 are oriented towards Pakistan. 10 are oriented to China. China has the capability of the following:
- Deploy one (mountain) brigade in 8 hours at any point of the Sino-Indian frontier;
- Deploy one (mountain) division on the frontier within 24 hours (one phase of an airlift is the way it is phrased in the original, where it also states that a brigade now takes 8 hours to deploy);
- The quick reaction force of 4 divisions within 4 days, to any frontier or any part of the PRC;
- Up to 10 divisions within 15 days, on any frontier;
- Up to 25 divisions within 30 days.
Does this tell you where the focus of the Indian Army is? Does it tell you which potential hostile power it considers more dangerous and unpredictable, above all, unpredictable? Hint: it isn't PRC.
A superb argument. Worthy of your acumen and intellectual grasp of the matter.
Arguing in reverse, therefore, we can re-write sub-continental history, as there is shared culture on the sub-continent, as well as being not only on the same continent, but within the rather narrow confines of the same sub-continent.
Tell us about it!
However, let us read on; the essential indefensibility of this position appears very clearly further on.
The only reason that there hasn't been any significant clash of the two nations is because China's
trajectory of expansion was by way of Qing Hai, Xijang and Xinjiang. If it continues, it will be through Kazakhstan and Baltistan.
China has always sought to consolidate its northern and western boundaries; its western boundaries were forcefully defined by the Arabs first, but subsequently and without let-up, China has challenged those frontiers, fought the Turks to a standstill at a huge distance from her own power centres, and then annexed Xinjiang. There are no explicit threats to the west any more; threats to the north have disappeared, with the crumbling of the Soviets; threats to the south were put on the shelf of history many centuries ago, and threats to the east are its primary concern today.
Note that there is no desire to 'expand' to the east, as Taiwan is already considered part of China, but being ruled by an adversarial political system, still Chinese in every respect.
In contrast, India has always had a defensive and inward-looking mindset; this is staple historical analysis, and is fed with the future history scholar's baby food. In an ironically mistaken posting by one of your good friends from Bangladesh, this was described by the Brookings Institute as a policy of
strategic restraint.
A brilliant phrase, an epigram which sums up the whole situation.
Perhaps you should consider a look at the trade figures and the breakdown of those figures. It might help illuminate the matter.
No, China doesn't need India as an ally at all. China has a perfectly viable alternative; to lock herself into the same gangrened point of view as other, traditional rivals of India, in spite of the dreadful example of what results thereby. On the whole, she might prefer an alliance, or, properly speaking, friendly relations with mutual self-respect.
Why would she wantonly frighten India into building her arsenals to levels that will force the PRC to dedicate some effort to this front?
