As India and China mark the sixtieth anniversary of their “Panchsheel” or “five principles of peaceful coexistence” agreement on Saturday, a senior Chinese leader has pointed to the United States-led invasion of Iraq and the recent chaos in the war-torn country as underlining the need for renewing the six decades-old idea.
Speaking a day ahead of the anniversary, which will be marked here by Vice-President Hamid Ansari and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Dai Bingguo, the top Chinese diplomat over the past decade, said in an apparent reference to the U.S. that “hegemonism was staging a comeback” and referred to the war in Iraq as “a lesson” for emerging countries.
Mr. Dai, who retired as State Councillor last year and was the Special Representative on the border talks with India for a decade starting in 2003, also sought to assure China’s neighbours who are concerned about an increasingly assertive posture from Beijing in the region that his government would not “stray from its commitment” to following the “Panchsheel” mode of diplomacy.
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The “five principles,” which refer to mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, cooperation for mutual benefit and peaceful co-existence, were first invoked in a 1954 treaty on trade between India and Tibet and championed by Nehru and former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.
Mr. Dai, however, argued that Panchsheel was “not a piece of relic in a museum, but a full principle to guide international relations in the 21st century.” “Hegemonism is staging a comeback in the form of new interventionism by Western countries,” Mr. Dai said in an address here to mark the anniversary. The new government under Mr. Xi, he said, was focusing on domestic development which “needs a sound international environment and neighbourhood.”
“We will never seek to be as superpower, we will never bully other countries, invade or exploit other countries. We mean what we say.”
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China invited Mr. Ansari and Myanmar’s President Thein Sein to Beijing to mark the anniversary with much fanfare, a move seen by some analysts here as attempting to signal to the region, amid disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, that China’s rise would be peaceful. That message is expected to be stressed by Mr. Xi on Saturday.
The former Chinese Ambassador to India, Zhou Gang, said the “Panchsheel” also had a role to play in India-China relations today, regardless of its mixed legacy. Following the 1962 war, he said, the “Panchsheel” had “helped us overcome the consequence of the brief conflict with India and normalise relations”. So also after the nuclear test of 1998 which had strained ties between the two countries. “Today,” he said, “we’ve become a model for relations between two major neighbouring countries”.