Chinese insularity v Indian insecurity: a recipe for trouble
There is a very thorough overview of the fractious China-India relationship in this week’s Economist which describes the face off between the two Asian giants as the “Contest of the Century”.
This might sound a rather hyperbolic title, but when you consider the fact these nations account for roughly a third of the world’s population and an ever-growing portion of global economic heft, the relationship between these two nations is at least as crucial as the US-China relationship that currently fills the spotlight.
As the Economist contends – and correctly, I think – “How China and India manage their own relationship will determine whether similar mistakes to those that scarred the 20th century [will] disfigure this one.”
And yet, viewed from this side of Himalaya, it is extraordinary (to a former India correspondent, at least,) how little importance China attaches to India – in terms of column inches, in academic forums in the basic headspace set aside to consider the relationship. India is the Elephant in the Chinese room, except that you often wonder if China even knows it.
In India, by contrast, China features heavily in the media, looming massively over the endless conferences and academic talking shops set up to discuss, in rather navel-gazing fashion, who’s going to win the race to the top of the Asian superpower stakes.
India, with its favourable demographic and rising household savings rate, likes to fancy itself as the tortoise in a race that at present is being lead by the Chinese hare. Perhaps it is unfair to say so, but India is so far behind it doesn’t have much option but to hope that China’s rise will sink under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
The contrasting attitudes of each to the other reflect on the one hand Indian insecurity and on the other, Chinese insularity. This is a dangerous mix.
Indo-Chinese trade is growing, but as the Economist points out, it is a lop-sided, subservient relationship (Indian iron ore for Chinese finished goods) that deepens Indian fears of Chinese encirclement, as they are outflanked again and again in their own neigbourhood by China – in Burma, in Sri Lanka, In Pakistan.
At the same time, like an irritating little brother, China basically ignores India or treats it with ill-concealed contempt, both at a diplomatic level, but also on the street where attitudes to India are openly dismissive – a dirty, smelly, chaotic Third World kind of place in the view of many Chinese.
(As an aside, it will be interesting to see if the Chinese media and blogosphere can even be bothered to scorn India’s feeble efforts at organizing the Commonwealth Games, a badly handled second-tier event that – when compared to China’s stunningly accomplished Olympics of 2008 – tells you all you need to know about the gap between the two nations.)
In any event, the current state, or rather non-state of the relationship must be a source of serious concern.
If the US-China relationship is often described like a bad marriage, then the China-India relationship is like that of two very different brothers, who need to get on but at deep, deep level (far deeper than the territorial disputes that the Economists dwells upon far too heavily) are perhaps just incompatible.
The negative personal chemistry – Chinese insularity and Indian insecurity – is no platform for resolve the crunches that surely lie ahead – over water (Chinese dams on the Brahmaputra), over oil and natural resources (both nations have limited supplies and compete the world over to secure others) and in the Asian arms race that is now firmly underway.
, Guess What?? We are Getting Our Relations Friendly, Not the way Soviet and USA went, We both are well within Our Limits....
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