Posted on 06/22/2009 6:44:57 AM PDT by MyTwoCopperCoins
The Chinese Communist Party’s principal organs, the People’s Daily and Global Times have issued minatory statements on the current state of Sino-Indian relations. According to the latter, a domestic opinion poll, confined presumably to the Han public, has revealed that 90 per cent of the population perceive India as the foremost threat to China’s security. Being a colonial empire it is rewarding to make a distinction between Herrenvolk rulers and their ethnic minority subjects. Even the brazen Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s celebrated propaganda chief, would have fought shy of including the Tibetans, Mongolians and Uighurs in this regimented anti-Indian endeavour.
The People’s Daily has asked India “whether or not it can afford the consequences of a potential confrontation with China”. The Indian barbarians could as easily pose a question no less insouciant to the Middle Kingdom.
The People’s Daily mandarin, apropos India’s putative view of itself as China’s competitor, has reminded its southern neighbour in a tone redolent of the Son of Heaven addressing a kow-towing tributary, that “India can’t actually compete with China in a number of areas (the export of bogus drugs and life threatening medicines, presumably), like international influence, overall national power and economic scale. India apparently has not realised this.” God be praised, it hasn’t, and god willing it never will. And why should India? To China’s demand that the Asian Development Bank refuse India a loan for the economic development of Arunachal Pradesh, to which Beijing has laid claim, the bank authorities faced with the possibility of an Indian withdrawal from the organisation, and asserting their probity and good sense, together with Japan’s and America’s, have dismissed the Chinese call. Round one to India.
The People’s Daily has snarled menacingly: “China won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India.” And India, for its part, will continue buttressing its military strength in these contested regions regardless.
This is almost a parody of the British envoy Lord Macartney’s first encounter with the Chinese Imperial Court in Beijing in 1793. His request to establish diplomatic and commercial relations between Britain and China was curtly dismissed and his presents returned with a letter for his sovereign George III — addressed as “O Barbarian king” and enjoined to “Tremble and obey!” The reputation of China as a superpower of the time, with its glittering court and imposing ritual of statecraft held Europe in thrall. But Macartney was able to distinguish illusion from reality. His journal remains an enduring monument to his shrewd and perceptive eye; he likened China to a ship: “She may perhaps not sink overnight; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom... The volume of the empire is now grown too ponderous and disproportionate to be easily grasped by a single hand, be it ever so capacious and strong.”
The old Confucian mindset, it would appear, has neither kept pace with the country’s material advances, nor with seminal global developments. Here is Sardar KM Panikkar, free India’s second Ambassador to China (and prone to adulation of the country and its leaders), describing his early encounter with Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT regime: “It did not take me long to discover that the Kuomintang attitude towards India, while genuinely friendly, was inclined to be patronising. It was the attitude of an elder brother... well established in the world, prepared to give his advice to a younger brother struggling to make his way. Independent India was welcome, but of course it was understood that China as the Great Power in the East after the War expected India to know her place.” As for America, it “was no more than the great barbarian for whose dollars and equipment she (Chiang’s China) had immediate need, but for whose culture she had no great admiration”. The KMT regime had clearly inherited the mantle of the Son of Heaven. (KM Panikkar In Two Chinas: Memoirs of a Diplomat).
Chinese Communism is Han nationalism cultured with a virulent strain of an exotic virus. Mao Tse-tung was fond of dismissing the US as “a paper tiger” — but it had “nuclear teeth,” Nikita Khrushchev reminded the great helmsman somewhat unkindly.
For all its muscle-flexing and vitriol, China’s Government, it would appear, is fearful of the Farlung Gong, the Dalai Lama and the ghosts of the Tiananmen Square massacre, about which it will not tolerate the slightest public reference. Its inner demons are a greater threat to the country’s stability and well-being than anything India would wish to do.
The Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai decade of the 1950s bristled with false hope and deceit. Even as Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai were gladhanding at Bandung in the summer of 1955, the Chinese premier was paying a nocturnal visit to his Pakistani counterpart Mohammed Ali to assure him that Islamabad’s membership of the US-sponsored Cold War pacts was no bar to closer Sino-Pakistani ties; that Sino-Indian ties, while cordial for the moment, was approaching a dark tunnel of mistrust and rivalry.
Sino-Pakistani ties over the past decades have been predicated on anti-Indian hostility involving nuclear weapons proliferation, terrorism and much else besides. China may yet rue the day it decided to give its partner a nuclear bomb and its attendant secrets.
A recent appeal by a senior Chinese naval official to a US Admiral for a division of authority over the Pacific and Indian Oceans was surely reminiscent of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 under which the Pope assigned the Pacific region to Spain and the stretch of water and land around India to Portugal. Alas, we live in the 21st century.
Political and cultural overstretch may well hobble China’s soaring ambitions. Purloining American nuclear weapons designs from Los Alamos, establishing intelligence contacts with distant insurgencies in Columbia such as FARC and ETA in Spain, working on a new type of explosive that would escape the most sophisticated detection machine, as revealed to CIA interrogators by a Chinese defector, Colonel Xu Junping of the People’s Liberation Army, in 2001; the penetration of the African continent for economic loot and strategic gain promises no lasting gain. It merely expands China’s arc of vulnerability.
Hence Catherine Philp’s alarmist, undercooked offering in The Times, London, on the ‘great game in the Indian Ocean’ would be appropriate for children with learning difficulties. Its waters are a trifle too deep for such shallow exploration.
Meanwhile, India’s deck of cards is formidable.
MyTwoCopperCoins,
Here’s a good question,
Does the Chi-com military play chicken or horse crap or what ever ya care to call it with the Indian military as they seem to have been doing with the U.S.?
Awesome article. I like how the Congress government in India is starting to deal with the Chicom regime. Without the handicap of the Left dumb***ks for allies, the Congress is an excellent government to have.
They play chicken with India, too, but the problem with India is that much of its frontier bordering China is either uninhabited, or uninhabitable. So, territory is routinely transgessed by both parties involved.
Well, I’ve noticed a major streak of arrogance among Chinese, regarding their “rightful” position as the master of all of Asia, and beyond. They have a deep belief in this “Manifest Destiny”.
Time for the world to put them in their place. This is turning out just like the Germans before the WW-I.
Both nations may be subject to forces beyond their control. This may force both into bloody conflict with each other, and not in a modern war, but in a primitive war.
What may force this is both their cultures, and demography. That is, the circumstances that have given both tens of millions of “excess” males. For this reason, it should be called a “demographic war”.
Because of each nations preference for male children, there may soon be 30-50 million adult males with no prospect for either employment or marriage, because of a lack of adult females. And these are on top of already overburdened populations.
As the Mormon leader Brigham Young once observed, such men are “a menace to society”. But in such numbers, they become an incredible force for destruction. They will either turn against their own societies, causing horrific civil war, or they will turn against each other, in bloody war.
Howsoever the situation evolves, both nations will be pushed into war with the sole purpose of killing off these “excess” men.
Cold logic would have them fight each other in wasteland, and in such a way that their mutual slaughter be indecisive. The scheme is made difficult with the efficiency of modern armies, so they would have to be held in reserve, and the conflict limited to small arms, artillery, and a hostile environment.
In effect, a return to the trench warfare of World War I, but in desolate high mountains on their shared border. Each soldier given a uniform and a rifle, and fed a pound of rice a day.
It is horrific, almost unthinkable. But possibly unavoidable, as the alternatives are far worse.
Long ago I worked the command center in Seoul Korea and watched daily as the North flew nearly supersonic at the border and would veer off at the last second.
The d.m.z. was never transgressed or ya got shot down and then all hell would break out.
Thanks for the info.
The Chinese maps show the border on the South side of the mountain peaks. The Indian maps show the border on the North side. The issue will be water rights. If you control the glacies and snowmelt runoff, you have agriculture. With their huge populations, they may decide to fight over water.
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