The Xi-Li Factor – Is India ready for the new China?

One day in the mid-1960s, a boy named Xi Jinping in northern China saw his life turned upside down when his father, an influential communist revolutionary and deputy prime minister, was purged and condemned to manual labour in a faraway factory. The boy’s school was closed down and he was sent to work at a rural location. For a while, it looked like the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao Zedong tried to cleanse the country of ideological dissent, would claim Xi among its millions of victims.

But the boy was made of sterner stuff. He survived against all odds. He had a genius for fast-tracking his life. Even though he hadn’t finished school, he got himself enrolled in college and by sheer hard work, earned his chemical engineering degree. Soon after, he also got a doctorate even though he hadn’t done his masters.

And Once Mao died and Deng Xiaoping overturned Maoism on its head and ushered in free market reforms, Xi took the plunge into politics. A series of double promotions later (his pedigree helped), he rose to become the first secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party and the country’s vice president.

In 2012, he is all set to become China’s President.

Li Kequiang followed a similar route to prominence.Two years younger to Xi, Li too was sent on a rural labour assignment. He joined the Communist Party and received his indoctrination very early in life. He even won an award for ‘Outstanding Individual in the Study of Mao Zedong.’  But unlike Xi, Li didn’t have the family connections to prop him up. He rose through the ranks of the Communist Youth League, the ideological powerhouse of the Communist Party of China, a la Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for the Indian saffron brigade.

He will most likely become the next Premier of China.

In addition, the most powerful decision-making body in China, the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, will see an overhaul next year. Seven new members will join Xi and Li to take charge of policy-making in the world’s most populous and fastest growing country over the next decade.

In the factional politics of communist China, Xi is identified as an elite, a beneficiary of dynasty politics. However, Xi also has a strong public support and a record of being pro-economic reform. Li is a scholar and seen as belonging to the ‘league’ faction. His strengths are his experience in grassroots economics and connection with the people. He may be slightly more conservative than Xi when it comes to economic reforms or decentralization. He is also a protégé of President Hu Jintao.

It is these two gentlemen and a revitalized politburo that India would be dealing with in the next several years. The leadership change comes at a time when India-China relations are rapidly becoming perhaps the second most important bilateral partnership in the world, next only to the US-China relationship.

The so-called fifth generation of leadership marks a watershed in China’s modern history. Xi and Li represent the first crop of leaders born after the 1949 revolution that brought China under Maoism. The lingering bitterness from their personal experiences during the Cultural Revolution has only alienated them further from communism. Mao himself never fully believed in Maoism, Deng Xiaoping abandoned it, Jiang Zemin cemented the free-market, high-growth model of China and Hu Jintao globalised its economy.

Thus, Xi and Li will inherit a substantially capitalist economy, communist only in its name and political institutions.

They also come without any practical memory of the Sino-Indian War of 1962. For five decades, Chinese leaders have derived psychological advantage over their Indian counterparts from the humiliation their country had inflicted on India in Nehru’s war. Indian leaders, too, had been unable to overcome the shame of that loss. Our China policy had all along been clouded by that one defining moment in the shared history of the two countries.

As a result, we have failed to engage China as much as we should have. We seem to think that a strategic ally must agree with us on all matters, cheerfully abandon countries we don’t like and generally behave like a lover. We sulk when our allies fail to live up to our expectations. In reality, the relationship between any two countries is much less sexy. International alliances are all about finding harmony between national interests, emphasizing the commonalities and holding the disputes in abeyance until the environment becomes conducive for a solution.

Over the last five decades, China has done enough to show that it has no aggressive design on India but that we must come to the negotiating table to settle such issues as Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh. In fact, China voluntarily returned the territory it captured in Arunachal Pradesh in the 1962 war and hasn’t tried to claim it back even though it has the military muscle to do so.

In Aksai Chin, the barren expanse that never belonged to India (read a compelling account of how this region came to be claimed by British India here ), China has built a road to connect Tibet with Xinjiang. The reality is that we neither have a strong moral case nor the military might to claim it back. Negotiation is our only chance.

India’s right wing rhetoric describes China as the country’s No.1 enemy. For the young generation that likes to be fed on jingoism, this sounds appealing. Nothing could be farther from truth. But such a stance has a way of justifying itself by inviting similar gestures from the ‘rival’ country.

The rejection of visa to India’s defence officials, issuances of stapled visas to people from Jammu & Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh are all symbolic gestures that merely express China’s frustration over India’s reluctance to come to talks on substantive issues. These positions proved fleeting and China soon was back to being normal. An Indian military delegation is currently in China engaging in joint operations.

These skirmishes are par for the course in any complex relationship. The US and China engage in such bravado almost daily. They also have many more substantial disputes between them than India has with China. But that has not stopped them from working ever more closely and forming a workable strategic partnership.

Xi and Li offer perhaps India’s last chance to undo the bitterness of the 20th Century and form an enduring alliance with tomorrow’s superpower, China. For fifteen centuries, India and China were the world’s most prosperous and friendly nations. It was the European colonial powers that drove a wedge between them.

With the burial of Maoism, China has overcome the past. Will India?