Dear Samuel Huntington, move on! The real clash of civilisations is between India and China

On 9 December 2022, as China sneaked in under the cover of darkness, very unmilitary-like but in a trademark communist style, to grab Indian territories and hold on to them, it brought out the marked transformation in the DNA of the Middle Kingdom. The country, which about two millennia ago, under King Fu Chien, sent an army to the neighbouring Kucha kingdom to fetch renowned scholar Kumarajiva, refusing which the war ensued and the Kucha king was killed in the battlefield, is now using the forces for land grabs. Modern China may be the inheritor of civilisational China, but post-communist takeover it no longer has the ancient mind of its own, much unlike its only other civilisational rival, India. And, as R Jagannathan writes in his highly perceptive Swarajya article early this week, China fears India because “civilisationally, we are the only rival”.

Zhang Weiwei, in his book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilisational State, writes, “A civilisational state has exceedingly strong historical and cultural traditions. It does not easily imitate or follow other models, be they Western or otherwise. It has its own intrinsic logic of evolution and development. It is bound to encounter all kinds of challenges in the future, but its rise is seemingly unstoppable and irreversible. The civilisational state has a strong capability to draw on the strengths of other nations while maintaining its own identity. As an endogenous civilisation capable of generating its own standards and values, it makes unique contributions to the world civilisations. A civilisational state can exist and evolve independently of the endorsement or acknowledgment from others. Its political and economic models are different from others in many aspects.” If Zhang has China in mind while writing these lines, they apply equally, if not more, to India — the latter’s stand on the ongoing Ukraine war is a case in point.

To add to this, one can say, historically too, India has been the only challenger to China, besting the Middle Kingdom economically, culturally and spiritually for most centuries — till the Western predators rose on the Asian horizon in the 16th century to ruin the two civilisational states. Historically, however, the Western dominance has been a marginal episode in the long history of empires. For, except for those two-and-a-half centuries between 1757 and 1991 (while India was economically liberated in 1991, in China’s case economic liberation took place in 1978), India and China together contributed for more than 2,000 years at least half of the total global economy.

At the beginning of the Common Era (CA), if economic historian Angus Madison is to be believed, India was the largest contributor to the global economy with 32.9 per cent of the total share, followed by China with 26.9 per cent. In 1000 CA, India’s share was 28.9 per cent, followed by China’s 22.7 percent. By 1500 CA, India’s share was marginally down at 24.5 per cent, while China took the top position at 25 per cent. Even in 1700 CA, India was the leading nation at 24.4 per cent, followed by China at 22.3 per cent.

So, our own Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, an economist by profession but a self-anointed historian, may ignore these numbers boosting India’s economic credentials when he writes quite imprudently in his 2006 book, The Argumentative Indian: “If China was enriching the material world two thousand years ago, India was busy, it appears, exporting Buddhism to China.”

Sen the economist may have missed those numbers, deliberately or otherwise, but Chinese often do their homework well. They know history, and they know very well that communists are an aberration in the civilisational history of China. Maybe this is one of the reasons why they often get unnerved at the slightest of unrest. It is this affinity with history that makes them wary of India too — the only country that has historically and civilisationally challenged China. Of course, China is in the lead, but momentum is already with India. Can the Chinese mutedly allow the gap to be bridged? Will they be able to do anything when India becomes a $10 trillion economy by 2030?

China has every reason to be anxious with — and alarmed by — India’s rise. What may also be playing on Xi Jinping’s mind is the fear of the Chinese economy plateauing — not an unusual phenomenon given the long economic growth in China. With the slowdown in the Chinese economy, critics have already started wondering if China can ever overtake the American economy; earlier, the cutoff date was 2030, plus or minus a few years. Even worse is the nightmare of the Indian economy surpassing China’s!

For communists who have sold the idea of making China the world’s No.1 country, it’s a dangerous proposition. And if ever India can be made to submit, and its growth story cut short, it would be now or never. It’s a gamble Xi is playing, but then stakes are high too. This explains why the PLA troops have been stationed along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh for the past two-and-a-half years, testing India’s perseverance and self-belief. It also explains why they sneaked in under the cover of darkness to do a Galwan in Tawang last week, but Indians were ready this time to give a befitting reply.

Kanti Bajpai makes an interesting point in 2021 book, India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends, where he says that “power differences” between the two nations is currently making the LAC unstable. “India as the weaker power is unwilling to make concessions. It doesn’t want to further embolden China. China as the stronger power is also willing to make concessions. It doesn’t see why it should do so given its strength.” Shyam Saran, an old China hand and former Foreign Secretary, adds to this in his interview in October 2020: “Today they (the Chinese) feel, ‘Why should we give anything?… We are so powerful, the other side has to accept what we are trying to say.’”

This sense of urgency to stem the rise of India makes the LAC volatile and dangerous. A full-fledged war seems unlikely at this point, but Xi may be tempted to go for a ‘quickie’. He has been looking for soft spots. Unfortunately, he and his men have so far met with a strong, assertive Indian reply. They might have stolen in the dead of night a few kilometres of Indian territories or some strategic heights in Ladakh in 2020, but since then Indians have upped their game — a trailer of which was showcased last week in Arunachal Pradesh where 300 PLA troops were made to run for their lives.

Civilisationally, India and China had a guru-shishya relationship, a phenomenon which even Mao had conceded in one of his statements. The two nations, historically, bolstered each other’s culture and economy, the direction of which largely flowed from India to China. The colonisation of India and China cut off this thriving civilisational relationship, and when the two nations again came into their own, China found itself hijacked by communists, whose understanding about traditions, cultures, and religions have always been a suspect. They believe they can tamper with China’s innate civilisational ethos, but their wariness of India’s civilisational depth and historical reawakening is understandable.

Civilisational India’s success in the modern world would be an existential threat to communists who have hijacked China’s eternal soul. It will always be an impetus that can bring open China’s old, now-suppressed civilisational mores. They also are anxious that the rise of civilisational India will call the bluff on the artificial construct of today’s China, which has geographically inflated itself three times by forcefully annexing its neighbours’ territories.

Till 1500 years ago, the territories of Khotan, Kashgar, Yarkand, etc, to the west of Xinjiang, were culturally, religiously and civilisationally part of India, and not China. So was the Xinjiang region, which according to Subhash Kak’s 2018 article, ‘The Rama Story and Sanskrit in Ancient Xinjiang’, was “Indic in culture and it was a thriving part of the Sanskritic world”. As for Tibet, its Sinicisation is too recent a phenomenon and is still being strongly challenged.

Samuel Huntington, while espousing the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ theory, believed that people’s cultural and religious identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. He, however, saw the war being largely fought between the West and the rest, especially the Western-Islamic conflict. But as India and China rise, the real clash of civilisations may take place between these two last surviving civilisations. Historically too, the battle seems imminent. Provided China gets back its original civilisational moorings. Till then, move on Samuel Huntington! It’s time to get ready for the real clash of civilisations — between India and China.

The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.

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