The Blue Room is a state-of-the-art facility where the media based in Beijing encounters the mandarins of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Questions, and answers, some direct and others not so, fly back and forth. The questions vary from the crisis in the Korean Peninsula to the international implications of an underperforming stock market.
However, in a break from routine, and for over a month, the stand-off between Indian and Chinese troops in the Doklam plateau had echoed powerfully in the Blue Room. The hall became a venue for tough talk, with the Foreign Ministry calling repeatedly for a unilateral withdrawal of Indian troops from the Himalayan heights of Doklam.
Contest of willpower
For the non-partisan, it was not difficult to infer that the back-and-forth in the Blue Room reflected a contest of will between the two neighbouring giants, who were engaged in energetically defining their own competing ‘Lebensraums’. To a seasoned historian, the face-off in the Himalayas may have been marked by an unmistakable sense of déjà vu. On the footsteps of the Russian and British colonial empires, China and India seemed to have embarked on a new Great Game — a fierce competition for geopolitical ascendancy, in their Asian neighbourhood, and the nearby high seas.
In the late nineteenth century, Tibet had become one of the battlegrounds for the Great Game between Czarist Russia and imperial Britain. With its march into Lhasa, via the Chumbi valley, Britain resoundingly won the Game’s Himalayan chapter.
For some Chinese bloggers, the Doklam stand-off was all about Tibet. India, as the successor of ‘British India’, was gradually “surrounding Tibet”, with Sikkim, Bhutan and eventually Nepal as the staging grounds.
A widely circulated positing on WeChat — the Chinese micro-blogging site which has millions of followers — ominously warned: “If China cannot have the firm and effective plan to cope with this stand-off, India will for sure go further. At the same time Bhutan will succumb further to India’s so called protection. India’s next target will be Nepal, so it can surround Tibet.”
The alarmist post underscored that the prolongation of the Doklam crisis could undermine Bhutan’s sovereignty. It also expressed concern that there is “every reason to worry that in view of its police, defence and security forces being long controlled by India, Bhutan will soon become a second Sikkim and emerge as an Indian state.”
Consequently, it warned, Bhutan “will be integrated with Arunachal Pradesh”. “If that happens, the middle and eastern part of the China-India border will be completely connected.”
The absence of a new strategic dialogue between India and China appears to have sharpened the growing misperceptions between the two countries. Without a comprehensive and detailed sharing of world views, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is being simplistically, if not conveniently, interpreted as a hegemonic project covering half the globe.
In Beijing, India’s Indo-Pacific doctrine, which is robustly recasting New Delhi’s ties with the Association of South East Asian Nations and the island territories of the Pacific, is being seen as a carefully constructed barrier to challenge China’s rise.
The end of the Doklam crisis may ease some of the tensions in the Blue Room. However, a sense of closure, where geoeconomic cohabitation will triumph over divisive geopolitics, is yet to be achieved.
Atul Aneja writes for The Hindu and is based in Beijing
