RECORDED history shows that India and China have loomed large in each other’s consciousness from well before the first millennium and beyond. As Amartya Sen points out in his essay ‘China and India’ (The Argumentative Indian, 2005): ‘If China was enriching the material world of India two thousand years ago, India was busy, it appears, exporting Buddhism to China.’ This two-way interaction it would seem was a perfect mutual fit of hard and soft ‘power’ in those early times.

Sen also draws a relevant parallel to the contemporary situation in a subsection of the above essay titled, ‘Insularity and Openness’. He recalls that around the 8th century CE there was vociferous resistance in China to the spread of Indian – particularly Buddhist – influence in both the royal court and the people. Led by some Daoists and neo-Confucianists, this resistance was infused with a strong sense of intellectual nationalism, a sense of superiority of Chinese ways and a concern about maintenance of family and social order. The perceived loss of the central position of China in the order of things in the world was also a worry.

The Chinese Buddhist response, also joined in by some Daoists, contributed to opening up and highlighting some issues of universalist ethics underlying Buddhism. In a celebrated piece, Mouzi, a Daoist, advanced a vigorous defence of Buddhism and of the compatibility of the Buddhist outlook with Chinese ethics. Further, he raised serious doubts whether the Chinese could claim to be uniquely central in the world by articulating a strong claim for Buddhist universalism. The contribution of Buddhism to China was to underscore that there were sources of wisdom outside China which encouraged Chinese intellectuals to go abroad, particularly to India, in search of truth and enlightenment.

Sen adds that in the reverse direction the celebrated pilgrims from China moderated Indian chauvinism and its sense of civilizational exclusiveness. This comes out starkly in the heated dialogue between Xuan Zhang and his peers at Nalanda when the Indian hosts tried hard to dissuade him from returning to China by referring to China’s backwardness. Xuan Zhang left but with no bitterness, pleading that Buddhist doctrines being of universal relevance must be shared. Amartya Sen comes to the conclusion that ‘the broadening effects of Buddhist connections on the self-centredness of both Chinese and Indian intellectuals are among the significant secular consequences of those [ancient] linkages.’

 

It was the spirit of the inclusive and universalist ethics shared in pre-imperialist times between the two civilizational states that Nehru invoked when India became independent and China was ‘liberated’ in 1949, but the entry of Chinese forces into Tibet in 1950 cast a shadow. However, acknowledgement of the factual, not fictional, status of Tibet, military prudence, a sense of realpolitik to avoid involvement by major western powers, and the inexorable logic of geography, left little option, as he saw it, except to place primary reliance on a policy of friendship with China for ensuring peace on the borders.

Nehru was committed to building a relationship which would underpin his broader vision of the role of China and India in post-colonial Asia. The resolution of the pending issues relating to Indian-inherited legacies in Tibet resulted in an agreement which incorporated the Panchsheel (five principles): mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence.

Given the international situation of the early fifties, one would agree with Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea: ‘1954 [Panchsheel] introduced into the rigid ideologically divided world of that era, different and challenging perceptions of the structure of international relations and its dynamics, as well as of the norms, standards and modalities of state behaviour.’ (From her essay in Surjit Man Singh ed. Indian and Chinese Foreign Policies in Comparative Perspective, 1998, New Delhi). For a few years India offered a positive fit for Chinese policies to befriend Asians and Africans in the rapidly post-colonizing world. However, it seems that the spirit of Panchsheel which permeated international issues involving China where India played some part (viz., the Korean War, situation in Indo-China and in the United Nations) was not as evident in bilateral issues which flared up.

The disturbances in Tibet and disputed views on where the long India-China boundary lies brought to the fore the intense nationalism which Mao Zedong symbolized. Its manifestation was a wholesale rejection of the order surrounding China brought into existence during imperial times. After the Dalai Lama came to India in 1959, it took a number of years for the Chinese to understand that India’s policy to grant him asylum for humanitarian reasons alone was not reflective of any political agenda vis-à-vis Tibet, recognized by India as a part of China.

 

The tale from 1959 in India-China relations surrounding the boundary dispute was one of misperceptions and lost opportunities leading to bitterness, armed conflict and a frozen state of hostility which lasted for nearly two decades. The book coauthored by me with Ambassador V.C. Khanna entitled, India and China: The Way Ahead (second edition 2004) covers this sorry tale. Here attention is drawn to just one aspect, namely the domestic circumstances in China from 1959 when Mao Zedong assumed de facto paramount authority.

Domestic politics was marked by humiliation of prominent Chinese leaders who he felt opposed him or questioned his policies. Stretching into the decade and a half of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao in the mid-sixties, the Sino-Soviet ideological and inter-state dispute came to the forefront. Khrushchev’s policies in the post Stalinist era convinced Mao that Soviet Union was headed towards revisionism which could infect China too. In international relations, Khrushchev’s attempted reconciliation with the US was seen as an example of Soviet Union sacrificing China’s interests by reneging on nuclear cooperation. Khrushchev’s reversal of earlier Soviet policies vis-à-vis India and the special role he attached to improvement of communications, economic and military relations with it came for special criticism in 1963-64.

 

An article in People’s Daily, ‘A Mirror for the Revisionists’, severely indicted the Communist Party of India. This article made improving Indo-Soviet relations, in Mao’s view, the symbol of all that was going wrong with Khrushchev-led Soviet Union. In Mao’s worldview, India became doubly aligned with the US and Soviet Union, when China’s relations with both were at a nadir. MacFarquhar, a reputed teacher and scholar of Harvard University, argues that this was consistent with China’s anti-Soviet policies and prefigured its anti-Soviet policies of 1963-64 ‘thus making it as a weapon in the ideological struggle with Moscow rather than its military struggle with India’ (MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 3, p. 310). The above developments have been recalled only to emphasize the many baneful influences, external and internal, on India-China relations for some two decades since 1959. These happily ceased to matter in the post-Mao Zedong era.

A decade of internal chaos and turmoil, when China followed autarchic economic policies at home and was isolated abroad, had devastated the Chinese economy and vastly reduced the cultural, intellectual and living standards of the Chinese people. Under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, the Chinese set themselves the task of transforming the domestic situation. This needed a drastic transformation of the way Mao Zedong looked at the world. Domestically, the new road for economic growth was through reform and ‘opening up’. Externally, the compulsion for the existence of a peaceful international environment to promote its domestic priority of economic and social development, made China work hard. A peaceful international environment to develop China while using its development to promote friendly and peaceful relations with neighbours and others became the twin mutually reinforcing objectives.

 

The above broad shift in China’s strategy coincided with detente between the US and the former Soviet Union from the eighties. By the late eighties China’s relations with the latter were normalized following major initiatives taken by Gorbachev. The end of the Cold War provided a more benign global environment for China’s growth. It withstood the impact of the disintegration of the former Soviet Union by hastening the pace of reforms which broadly benefited the population. Problems with the United States were contained in the interest of access to American markets and flows of investments into China and elsewhere.

The 16 character directive that Deng put out in 1992 to guide relations between China and the USA and tide over difficulties in their relationship may be recalled here: ‘increase trust, reduce trouble, promote cooperation, avoid confrontation’ (zengjia xinren, jianshao mafan, fazhan hezuo, bugao duikang). As domestic growth gathered momentum from the mid-nineties, China began to gear itself to meet the membership requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Eventually it used its admission to this body to force through domestic reforms needed to build up the institutional basis for closer integration with the world economy and to better leverage the process of globalization. India too benefited from the vast change in China’s domestic policies and the international situation.

 

In 1988, the former prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, visited China. The visit by India’s head of government to China came after a gap of 34 years since his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit in 1955. This undesirable hiatus in the millennial old India-China relationship was a reflection of much that had gone sour in bilateral relations from the late fifties of the last century.

During his 1988 visit, Rajiv Gandhi met with Deng Xiaoping. At that meeting Deng said, ‘In recent years there has been comment about the next century being the Asia-Pacific century. I do not agree with this viewpoint. The combined population of the two countries is 1.80 billion. If India and China fail to develop, it cannot be called an Asian century.’

Within two decades of that statement, its prophetic importance is being realized by the Indians, Chinese and the world at large even as India and China have significantly deepened their constructive engagement straddling many diverse fields. There is a broadening of mutual understanding at the highest political levels over where India and China are placed vis-à-vis each other and with respect to the rapidly changing contemporary global and regional situations in Asia which impact on both countries. The implementation of confidence building measures (CBMs) in the military field to ensure peace and tranquility along the long border, albeit disputed, and an intensification of exchanges at different levels between the armed forces are other welcome developments. A remarkable growth in the two-way trade between India and China has resulted in China and Hong Kong becoming a top ranking economic partner of India.

There is a palpable and growing interest on the part of Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs to partner in mutually profitable joint ventures and investments in manufacturing and other service areas. Well-known Indian companies have invested in China in fields as diverse as information technology, telecommunications, energy, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, packaging, automotives, tourism and hospitality. Improved communication through direct flights between the two countries has led to an increasing number of exchanges in cultural tourism. The growing spending power of vast sections in each country is an impetus for deep mutual exploration of the myriad ‘soft’ sectors such as information technology enabled services, human resource development, entertainment, food, fashion, and similar areas. Exchanges between academic scholars and civil society organizations either on a bilateral basis or under the aegis of international bodies are burgeoning.

 

Today India is increasing its density of interactions with China and with a palpable self-confidence. A robust and steady growth of its economy, and the flexibility shown by its industrialists and business entrepreneurs to adapt to the challenges of globalization and to competition from China in areas where India was traditionally strong, add to India’s self-perception that it can ‘rise’ in the global economic order. The capacity of the Indian political system to absorb and represent multiple, at times opposing views, on the direction of economic and social policies through democratic institutions is a phenomenon that is the pride of Indians and admired universally. The professionalism of India’s armed forces, backed by a minimum nuclear deterrent which India will never be the first to use, ensures respect for India’s territorial integrity and capacity to undertake voluntary international responsibilities in the cause of peace and stability.

 

Deng Xiaoping’s statement to Rajiv Gandhi is also prophetic in the sense that the sequential rise of China first and then India is not a matter for China and India alone. A noteworthy feature of the early years of this century has been a gradual shift from the almost obsessive focus on China to India. Comparisons between India and China highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each have almost assumed industry proportions. The global impact of the growth in recent years of the political economies of both are the much discussed topics at major international gatherings.

The point to emphasize in all this is that there has been a shift in the centre of geopolitical gravity away from the Occident and it is now well-recognized that India and China are drivers of the Asian and international political economies. Other major powers and regional groups in Asia such as Japan and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have recognized this and have strengthened their engagement with both countries.

International developments since the demise of the former Soviet Union have highlighted anew what nature, geography and man’s ingenuity had promoted in ancient and pre-modern historic times, namely, the spread of the intellectual influence and commerce of the two large civilizational states, India and China, over a wide swathe of continental and maritime Asia. In contemporary times it is evident that Indian and Chinese interests intersect over a very wide arc extending from West Asia through Central Asia and South Asia to South East and East Asia. India and China either share immediate borders with countries of this vast region or are near neighbours to them, not separated by big distances. China is an immediate neighbour of India’s northern neighbours and India and China share a long mountainous border. Within this arc from the West of Asia to its East is contained the source of raw materials, particularly energy required by both. It is also the source of problems caused by unstable governments, unresolved conflicts and violent extremism, which impact on regional peace and stability which in turn could affect both countries.

 

During Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to India in April 2005, several agreements were signed with the Government of India which would serve to consolidate the trend towards friendly relations first set in motion during the 1988 visit of Rajiv Gandhi to China. In the Joint Statement, it was decided to establish an ‘India-China strategic cooperative partnership for peace and prosperity’. This phrase is a mutual acknowledgement of the wider significance of India-China relations going beyond the purely bilateral, to encompass regional and global issues of concern to both sides.

The partnership is based on the five principles, mutual respect and sensitivity to each other’s concerns and aspirations and equality. Among the various important agreements signed, two relate to the political parameters and guiding principles for the settlement of the boundary question and a protocol on modalities for the implementation of confidence building measures in the military field along with the Line of Actual Control in the India-China border areas.

The agreement and the protocol sum up the understanding following several rounds of discussions between civilian and military officials over a decade and a half and the operational ground experience of the two armies in keeping the peace following two earlier agreements in 1993 and 1996. The agreement crystallizes in clear and mutually acceptable terms the bottom lines which could govern an eventual settlement, which would be based on political (not purely academic) considerations. It closes a yawning gap in public acknowledgement by both parties of a de facto situation which came into being after 1962, but which was never formally accepted as something approximating to a reality which both countries could live with. As such the agreement should be of immense help in the education and creation of public opinion in India’s plural society and a society in China which has seen bursts of strident nationalism.

 

A good augury is that the border agreement has not been subjected to criticism by the media in India, pointing to the political maturity achieved in the relationship. Viewed in its totality the relationship between India and China has assumed a more wholesome character, where differences are managed imaginatively and where governments act as facilitators for a wide spectrum of activities to be undertaken by diverse sections of the two peoples, within and outside the two governments.

 

If effective multilateralism in the UN awaits various reforms and an amendment of the UN Charter, the multilateral cooperation necessary to make regional organizations effective is something that both India and China have practiced in recent times. Good neighbourly diplomacy followed by both has been extended from their immediate neighbourhoods to a policy for multilateral regional regimes in Asia.

The 2005 Dhaka Summit of SAARC made effective and concrete commitments to the political, economic and social development of the region. There is a visible desire on the part of India and Pakistan to push the SAARC trade and economic agenda forward. China and Japan have been invited to become observers in SAARC. When former President of China, Jiang Zemin visited India and Pakistan in 1996, he not only underscored the visible interest of China in the success of SAARC but also advised that India and Pakistan should rise above their deep differences and attach priority to the development of their vast populations. China has always seen SAARC as having the potential to emerge as an autonomous actor contributing to multipolarity. Successful regional cooperation and more important, avoidance of conflict within the region (between India and Pakistan) would keep US intervention away and consequently in Chinese calculation, limit the growth of its influence in South Asia.

Both India and China view ASEAN as the principal organ which should drive the broader goal of closer Asian economic integration. Good relations between India and China have added the much needed comfort levels for the ASEAN as a group to leverage the economic growth of India and China for the benefit of ASEAN’s security, stability and prosperity. The recently concluded East Asian Summit in November 2005, which includes ASEAN member states plus China, Japan, ROK, India, Australia and New Zealand, is an indication that a wider Asian economic community, a pan Asian community of interests to which the Indian prime minister gave expression, is an objective worth pursuing.

 

Within a few years of this millennium, India is well poised in its relations with all the major powers and groupings – USA, EU, Russia, Japan, China and ASEAN. Each of these compartments of India’s relations serve to reinforce a wide spectrum of India’s interests in ensuring development, peace and stability. Care must be taken to see that no single compartment of each of India’s relations with the major powers and groupings impacts adversely on the other.

In the context of China, the Indian prime minister gave a clear expression to this in the wake of the recent substantive improvements in Indo-US relations: ‘The world has enough space to have India and China develop together. I don’t believe that having a good relationship with the USA means we are opposed to China.’ USA enjoys a density of relations with China covering strategic, political, economic, social and other interests which it will not jeopardize by seeking to overtly contain China with India’s help. Both India and China are acquiring the confidence that each is following independent policies to achieve diverse interests.

The overall situation in North East Asia contains issues which impact on the region’s peace and security. The non-compromising nuclear policy of North Korea is matched by American firmness in not making concessions without adequate guarantees. Japan’s deep economic interdependence with China is not reflected in political warmth between them. Japan’s concern over China’s military modernization is shared by the US whose defence links with Japan have intensified. Whether the status quo in Taiwan will endure depends on the domestic political dynamics of Taiwan and China.

With the spread of institutions for regional cooperation in areas East of India to the Pacific, India has become a dialogue partner covering all subjects. India’s evolving position will be watched with keen attention by the Chinese in the context of overall India-China relations. Through the East Asia Summit process, the interdependence of security concerns between the South East and East Asia is something that all member states will have to pay attention. India’s interests in East Asia are well served by a status-quo in the Taiwan Straits, by a peaceful resolution of North Korea’s resolve to have nuclear weapons and by improved political relations between China and Japan.

 

The logic of geography is unrelenting and proximity is the most difficult and testing among the diplomatic challenges India faces with respect to its neighbourhood. It is obvious that the translation of the relationship with China, described as one of a strategic cooperative partnership, would need to be tested with respect to the commonly shared neighbourhood. It is also self-evident that India’s security interests are best served if all our neighbours evolve as viable states with moderate and stable political and social systems and robust economies. A removal of these present deficits would give all our neighbours the confidence to take advantage of India’s growing strength to reap political and economic benefits.

The most desirable outcome for India would be if the people and governments of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka take domestic responsibility to remove Indian concerns since their policies often cause problems for India. Feudal autocracy, militarism, acquiescence and complicity with fundamentalist terrorists and extremists, lack of responsiveness to legitimate demands of the majority are some of the characteristics which add insecurity to South Asia.

In the nature of things as they have evolved over the last few years, it is logical that India, the USA and China share some common interests in South Asia although no common approaches to secure these interests are visible. Absence of the possibility of military conflict, strict control over the spread of technologies related to non-conventional weapons from areas known for proliferation, preventing re-emergence of fundamentalist or extremist ideologies leading to international terrorism are some of the common interests.

The maturity with which Indian and Chinese leaders achieve a strategic consensus should lead to a situation where the accretion of power by India and China does not lead to a display of power politics in India’s neighbourhood and elsewhere. In the wise words of a veteran Chinese diplomat who knows South Asia well, ‘In order to reduce the possibility of any setback (in India-China relations), legitimate interests and concerns of either side needs to be kept in mind when the other side takes important steps on sensitive questions.’ As far as South Asia and India’s neighbourhood is concerned, the same advice could apply to the US also.