One China versus many Chinas: Time to bust the myth to deal effectively with the Dragon

Communist China is an artificial construct. It’s a state with predominant colonial features. In fact, China has gone a step ahead than the archetypal colonial state of the yore: unlike the one the 19th century, China doesn’t necessarily need a faraway territory to be ravaged and looted upon. It exploits its own peripheral territories to satiate the ever-increasing appetite for resources.

This is because China still looks at itself as a Han state. It may have conquered the surrounding areas such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, but its national outlook remains Han-oriented. Anything that is not Han is looked at with suspicion. This exposes the fault lines in Chinese society and nation state. For, Han China is just about a third of the total landmass that constitutes People’s Republic of China. The remaining two-thirds, comprising Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, are discriminated upon like a modern-day colony.

While Tibet and Xinjiang get some sort of global attention, the fate of Inner Mongolia, no less tragic, hardly escapes the national boundary. Occupying about 12 per cent of the country’s landmass, Inner Mongolia, in the north, is rich in natural resources such as coal, gas, and rare earth metals. Given the abundance of minerals, the region has become a victim of excessive mining to fuel China’s economic growth. Accounting for as much as a quarter of domestic coal production in the country, Inner Mongolia, once known for its pristine beauty, has now been reduced to scarred landscapes, with people forced to live amidst dangerous air pollution levels.

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If inner Mongolia has been devastated for mining coal reserves, Xinjiang, located in the western part, produces more than 10 per cent of China’s crude oil and natural gas. But more than that, the region is China’s gateway to Central Asia. Constituting one-sixth of China’s landmass, Xinjiang’s territorial vastness can be gauged from the fact that it is three times the size of France. Before Islam gained its footholds in the region at the 10th century AD, Xinjiang was the hub of the Indic civilisation, with the region buzzing with Sanskrit shlokas and mantras. The Islamic characteristic of Xinjiang makes it a suspect in Beijing’s eyes. As per a 2018 estimate based on “official sources”, more than one million people, which comes to around 10 per cent of the adult Uyghur population, are arbitrarily imprisoned. The numbers would have risen significantly since then. And those who are not jailed find themselves subjected to intense surveillance, scrutiny, forced labour and involuntary sterilisation.

As for the atrocities committed on them, the lesser said the better it is. While Uyghur men, seen in any way to be “dangerous”, either get killed or sent to jail, their women become prey to the lust of the Chinese soldiers supposed to be guarding the region. Such is the state of affairs that a Uyghur is deemed an “extremist” if the Quran is found in his possession!

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If Inner Mongolia is scarred for coal, and Xinjiang for oil and natural gas, Tibet is targeted for water. Geostrategic expert and author Brahma Chellaney in his book, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, puts the importance of Tibet in perspective when he writes, “Water indeed has emerged as a key issue that could determine whether Asia is headed toward greater cooperation or deleterious competition. No country would influence this direction more than China, which controls the Tibetan plateau, the source of most major rivers of Asia.”

So, how does Han-dominated China deal with non-Han regions? By unleashing a demographic war against Mongols, Uyghurs and Tibetans. Communist China has been aggressively pursuing the policy of encouraging the Hans to settle in non-Han regions. This explains why Mongols are now just 20 per cent of the total population in Inner Mongolia — and their number is shrinking by the day. The Uyghurs constituted 75 per cent in 1982 but today the Han and Uyghur population might be evenly divided at around 40 per cent each in the Xinjiang region. As for Tibetans in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), the Han population share increased from 6 per cent in 2000 to 10 per cent in 2010, to 12 per cent a decade later in 2020.

Author David Tobin explains the Chinese mindset vis-à-vis non-Hans in his book, Securing China’s Northwest Frontier: Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang. He writes, “Official texts and popular usage still refer to Xinjiang today as the frontier, alongside the northern and south-western regions of Inner Mongolia and Tibet. In the Chinese imagination these are regions historically occupied by barbarians and they became repackaged as Chinese ethnic minorities in transition from empire to nation-state. Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians who inhabited the territories acquired and settled during the mid-eighteenth century Manchu imperial expansion were only officially re-categorised from external barbarians to internal ethnic minorities in the 1950s. The conceptual opposition between Han-populated ‘inner China’ and ethnic ‘frontier’ constitute China in official and unofficial narratives of national history and nation-building today.”

This Han versus non-Han divide is so obvious because China, as we see it today, is a recent construct, artificially put into a shape through violence, conquest and subjugation. In fact, less than a hundred years ago, in the mid-1930s, when Sir Eric Teichman, a British diplomat, undertook a journey of some 38 days, covering 2,550 miles by motor truck from Inner Mongolia through the Gobi desert, to finally reach the Xinjiang border, he wrote how “the traveller finds himself in a new country, China and Mongolia are left behind”.

About 90 years ago, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and China were all different nationalities, cultures, and even civilisations. In this backdrop, one wonders what gives the mandarins the confidence and courage to question India’s claim over Kashmir — a region that has always been an integral part of the Indic civilisation. Maybe it’s because the Chinese are made to believe their own lie about China, thanks to their unique imperialistic nature, about which historian RC Majumdar wrote almost six decades ago.

“Thanks to the systematic recording of historical facts by the Chinese themselves, an almost unique achievement in oriental countries… we are in a position to follow the imperial and aggressive policy of China from the third century BC to the present day, a period of more than 2,200 years… It is characteristic of China that if a region once acknowledged her nominal suzerainty even for a short period, she would regard it as a part of her empire forever and would automatically revive her claim over it even after a thousand years whenever there was a chance of enforcing it,” Majumdar wrote in an article in 1965.

To add to it is the Chinese tendency to exploit the weakness of the opponent. Arun Shourie gives a fascinating perspective about this Chinese mindset in his book, Self-Deception: India’s China Policies: “Make no mistake: China watches… the feeble, confused, contradictory ways in which our governments, and even more our society reacts each time it advances a claim. And it pursues its policy: Claim; repeat the claim; go on repeating the claim; grab; hold; let time pass. And they will reconcile themselves to the new situation. Has the policy not succeeded in regard to Tibet?”

Aren’t the Chinese currently trying to do the same in eastern Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh?

Today, China is desperate to woo India and convince it to normalise relations, especially in the economic arena. It has tested India’s mettle on the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh in the last few years and now with Donald Trump all set to take over the US presidency, it is uneasy about the impending trade war with America — more so as it comes at a time when Beijing is facing a serious economic crisis.

India must realise that this is the time for tough negotiations with China. In this relationship, there is no space for any conciliatory, bhai-bhai approach. The Chinese are innately programmed to see goodwill gestures as a sign of weakness. In communist China, after all, the path to peace often comes out of the barrel of a gun. So, next time Beijing rakes up the Kashmir issue or claims Arunachal Pradesh to be a part of China, Delhi would do well to show a mirror to China… err many Chinas.

(This is the fourth and the last part of the ‘China: Myth Vs Reality’ series. Read the previous part  here . Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.