Shastri Ramachandaran first went to China in 2008 to cover the economic summit between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. His visit and the “long and short spells” he spent in China thereafter was an ‘eye-opener’. During his stay in China, Ramachandaran had opportunities to work with Chinese media organisations — first with China Daily, the official government newspaper published by the State Council Information Office of China, and then with Global Times. This was an “engaging experience, revealing unsuspected potential and unforeseen possibilities,” he writes in Beyond Binaries: The World of India and China. As the title suggests, Ramachandaran is offering a fresh narrative about China and India-China relationships that defies the conventional wisdom about the subject, especially among the Indian commentariat.
The book is a compilation of Ramachandaran’s writings from 2008 to 2022 on China, covering the period that witnessed a marked improvement in bilateral ties from the Manmohan Singh years to the breakdown in relationship after the 2020 Galwan clashes. Rather than the complex history of both countries, Ramachandaran’s focus is on the contemporariness of perhaps the most important bilateral relationship in Asia of the 21st century. His account of China is qualitatively different from the mainstream portrayal of the Asian giant in most Indian and western media outlets. Ramachandaran wants the reader to understand the continuity in the different phases of China’s development unlike some narratives that put China’s economic modernisation in different compartments of history.
People in Shimla pay tribute to the Indian Army soldiers, who were martyred during the standoff at the India-China border along Galwan valley in Ladakh, in 2020. | Photo Credit:
Continuity in change
Visitors pose for a picture in front of a hoarding of Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen, southern China’s Guangdong province. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Deng Xiaoping, who opened up China’s economy unleashing its industrialisation, built on the foundations laid by Mao. “The primitive old China perished. On the political foundation laid by Mao, grew a spanking new China... Maoist China and Dengist China are different dimensions of the same country, Mao’s focus was on political liberation, Deng’s [was on] economic emancipation,” he notes.
Yet, his narrative is not free of critical thinking. While appreciating China for lifting millions out poverty during its reforms years, Ramachandaran also shines a light on the country’s “appalling income disparities, rising unemployment, displacement of rural populations, pervasive corruption, massive environmental degradation, pockets of extreme poverty, social sickness, discontent of the have-nots and restive minorities in the Tibet and Xinjiang regions.” He says the Communist Party of China (CPC) has evolved over the years. “The last thing this revolutionary party wanted and still doesn’t is another revolution. It is a party of the middle class, the professional classes and the salariat. Clearly, the party was no longer the custodian of the interests of the poor, the marginalised, the rural masses and the millions of migrant labourers,” Ramachandaran points out.
Tracing a relationship
Then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (left) with Chinese President Yang Shangkun during his visit to China in 1988. | Photo Credit: PTI
What does China’s “turbo-charged growth” mean for India? India-China ties saw a gradual turnaround in the years that followed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to the country in 1988. Ramachandaran writes in detail about the improvement in bilateral relations during the Manmohan years. During this period, he says that India and China “enjoyed a long spell of warmth, unspoiled by the occasional irritants and hiccups”. But this “great progress in friendship” did not stop the Chinese from making an incursion into Ladakh in April 2013, immediately after Xi Jinping assumed the presidency of China. This took India by surprise and “gave rise to tensions that revived memories of the 1962 conflict”. But India opted to stay the course of engagement with China.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping. | Photo Credit: AP
After Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister in 2014, he was very particular about strengthening bilateral engagement with China. Modi hosted Xi in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, his home state, in 2014, and a year later, he was welcomed by Xi in Xian, the Chinese President’s hometown. But the personal diplomacy and the informal summits between the leaders did not prevent the standoff in Doklam, a strategic area on the India-China-Bhutan trijunction, in 2017. Even after the Doklam standoff, India emphasised that both countries “should not allow differences to become disputes.” The message New Delhi wanted to drive home was that “India-China relations could not be reduced to any one issue such as the [Doklam] standoff or, for that matter, to the boundary issue...,” contends Ramachandaran. But this approach was not successful as clashes broke out between Indian and Chinese soldiers in June 2020 in the Galwan Valley, which left 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers dead.
Reasons for clashes
China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is more or less the Gateway to the Belt and Road Initiative as the region shares international borders with eight countries. | Photo Credit: Radhika Santhanam
Why did the Galwan clashes happen? Ramachandaran cites a number of reasons such as India’s deepening ties with the U.S., its role in the Quad ( a grouping of the U.S., Australia, Japan and India), its refusal to join the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious connectivity and infrastructural project rolled out by Xi, or its ambitions for supremacy in Asia, “or all of these”. For him, the principal reason is this: “More than any or all of these, China’s provocative military attack could well have been to establish deterrence against India.” But Ramachandaran doesn’t explain his most important thesis in the book further. Why did China, a nuclear superpower, want to establish deterrence through aggression on the border? Did it feel threatened by India? Even if this was the case, did China meet its objective, or what were the driving factors behind such a risky gamble? The book doesn’t answer any of these questions.
The border tangle
He refers to India’s lost opportunities in the past to find a solution to the border problem. He also notes that there were expectations in China that Modi “would resolve the boundary issue”. “The military provocation could have been to push Modi in that direction,” he says. But how can China push the Indian Prime Minister to take measures to resolve the boundary issues by carrying out incursions and launching aggression on the border? Also, were there any meaningful attempts from China in recent years — before the clashes took place — to settle the boundary question? The book doesn’t talk of any.
Ramachandaran’s emphasis on India tackling the China challenge in its own ways, without getting stuck in the great game between China and the U.S., should be taken seriously. India should deal with China “exactly as the U.S. does, and not as Washington advises, wants or pushes New Delhi to do.” As he passionately writes, the India-China relationship is more than the boundary question. India and China are “emerging as two tigers on one mountain and becoming the twin drivers of the Asian Century”. But if they want to continue to build a strong relationship, the boundary question cannot be sidestepped — this is the key takeaway from the Galwan clashes. And it’s not just in India’s hands, particularly when China is the aggressor in this case. Finding a lasting resolution to the boundary question is and should be the responsibility of both parties.
Beyond Binaries: The World of India and China; Shastri Ramachandaran, Institute of Objective Studies, New Delhi, ₹450.
stanly.johny@thehindu.co.in
Published - September 13, 2024 04:31 pm IST
