Vijay Gokhale’s paper on China’s India policy: Invaluable treatise fills critical gap in decoding Chinese motivations

China is India’s most comprehensive and serious challenge. As India rises in the same geography, this relationship will be consequential in setting the trajectory and determining the pace. It must therefore be worrying for India that the arc of the relationship is looking as trickier as ever. Since the turn of the previous decade, China is defying all past agreements in managing the border. Beijing is disregarding the mechanisms put painstakingly in pace over years to introduce a dynamic disequilibrium in ties. The India-China border has become ‘live’, and may continue to remain so. The stress is worsening despite drawing huge attention and resources from India. The larger relationship is marked increasingly by a total lack of trust. The prognosis, according to analysts, is equally bad with optimism in short supply. New Delhi is articulating its concerns clearly and frequently over the border crisis and the larger decay in ties. The effort is to set bilateral concerns at the front and centre of the new modus vivendi that eventually will have to be arrived at. India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar, at various times in recent past, has said that bilateral ties are passing through an “extremely difficult phase” and that it poses an “intense challenge for India”. He has accused China of trying to “unilaterally change the LAC” and has framed the crisis in words that China has used in the past — that Asian century isn’t possible unless “wisdom dawns on the Chinese side”. Despite India’s articulation of concerns and efforts to address the structural root causes causing the disequilibrium, it is evident that China wants to lock the power asymmetry in terms favourable to it while it still can. On 9 December last year, at the Yangtse region in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, one of the most serious skirmishes took place between Indian and Chinese troops since the Galwan tragedy in 2020. The face-off left 20 Indian and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers gravely injured. Satellite data accessed by Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) reveals “that rapid infrastructure development along the border in this region means the PLA can now access key locations on the Yangtse Plateau more easily than it could have just one year ago.” The 9 December skirmish was not an isolated incident. It conforms to a pattern of China’s recent provocative behaviour coinciding with improved infrastructure on its side of the LAC. The motto seems to be gaining operational advantage on the strategically significant plateau over which India still enjoys dominance. According to ASPI analysts, the latest intrusion and previous clashes “likely served to further normalise the presence of Chinese troops immediately adjacent to the LAC” which possibly is Beijing’s larger goal. As India gets drawn into an “escalation trap” in its most consequential bilateral relationship, it is worth understanding the Chinese motivation behind its actions, why it is employing coercive methods to extract strategic concessions from India, why it wants to keep the relationship suspended in a state of animated disequilibrium and why it fears no major geopolitical backlash or kinetic action from India. To decipher these actions from Beijing’s perspective, it is worth understanding China’s India policy, and the latest paper from former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale for Carnegie India — A Historical Evaluation of China’s India Policy: Lessons for India-China Relations — seeks to precisely do that. The paper, released last month, uses Chinese sources to analyze China’s India policy, “the drivers of that policy and the options available to Indian policymakers to engage with, adapt to, and mold it.” Gokhale uses three kinds of primary sources in formulating his analysis — officially published speeches by Chinese leaders, primary written material that includes memoirs of Chinese diplomats to gain insight into policymaking by key officers of China’s foreign policy establishment and scholarly writings published by Chinese think tanks. Gokhale, a former diplomat, avid China watcher and author of three bestselling, critically-acclaimed books on China — Tiananmen Square (May, 2021), The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India (July 2021) and After Tiananmen (September 2022) — acknowledges the risk of interpreting policymaking from documents in a closed society where “firsthand information from policymakers is carefully controlled, and only sanitized versions are released from time to time”. However, in his endeavour to present policymakers and researchers with a clear-eyed insight into China’s security dilemmas (both traditional and non-traditional) and quest for status that has historically influenced and continues to shape Chinese policymaking, and in his stated objective of analyzing “what the structural drivers of China’s India policy have been and what is their relevance in the present context,” Gokhale’s paper is sparkingly successful. The author categorises China’s India policy in three phases. He marks the first phase between 1949 and 1962 when “China viewed the United States as its primary adversary and its core objective was to keep India neutral and away from the US camp on matters of concern to Beijing.” During this phase, argues Gokhale, Mao Zedong’s China also adopted a secondary policy of exploiting “India’s standing and influence in the developing world should be utilized to build ‘Asian solidarity’ as a bulwark to stop further US inroads into Asia.” Worth noting that Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister, recently invoked the ‘Asian solidarity’ theme to remind China of the gap between its words and actions. Gokhale marks the second phase between 1962 and 1989, when due to the twin shifts of Sino-Soviet split and India’s deepening ties with the Soviet Union, China’s policy “remained to detach India from a great power that this time was the Soviet Union. Its policy was also to engage Pakistan in order to keep India in check.” The transition from Mao to Deng Xiaoping’s era also saw a pattern emerge, says Gokhale, of “China appearing as more amenable to addressing Indian concerns when it thought it faced an existential threat that India could magnify.” Deng proposed a “package deal to settle the border question” and appeared ready to make “tactical concessions”, writes Gokhale. He traces the motivation for a shift in China’s approach to the geopolitical flux. Deng, writes Gokhale, “had three objectives when he became supreme leader in 1978: to end China’s diplomatic isolation after the Cultural Revolution, to manage the ‘anti-hegemony’ struggle, and to generally improve ties with neighbors in order to create a stable environment for economic reforms.” Deng’s China had identified the USSR as the “biggest threat to national security”, and feared strategic encirclement in a period coinciding with Soviet forces in Mongolia, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and support for Vietnam against Cambodia. Deng stated that the “quickened pace of global strategic deployment by Soviet hegemonists presents a serious threat to world peace and our own national security.” It was around this time, writes Gokhale, that Deng “felt it necessary to neutralize this threat by uniting more closely with the Third World and countries like the United States. India’s geopolitical position as well as its influence in the Third World, therefore, likely became crucial from the perspective of Chinese threat perception. Beijing’s overtures to India between 1979 and 1984 to improve ties and settle their boundary dispute coincided with the period of maximum threat perception vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.” This window of opportunity, however, quickly subsided. “As Sino-Soviet relations normalized in the second half of the 1980s, India-China relations again turned tense,” points out Gokhale. The third phase of China’s India policy, according to the author, began following the collapse of USSR in 1991. The post-Cold War unipolar moment was marked by China’s paranoia that the US wanted “regime change in other communist states, including China” and Beijing sought “once again to reduce risk to its security by keeping India nonaligned and to reduce India’s threat to its periphery. By the mid-2000s, the normalization of US-China relations and its partnership with Russia meant a favourable balance of power for China, and as a result, the India-China relationship began to experience friction.” In the third phase, especially since the ascension of Xi Jinping as party general secretary and Chinese president in a period when China’s economy has vastly outgrown India’s, “the US-China relationship has deteriorated, and the India-China relationship has experienced a fair amount of friction as a result. Beijing’s India policy has been to resort again to low-level coercion on the border to establish deterrence,” writes Gokhale. In his assessment of China’s India policy across all three phases, including the most recent period of turbulence in Sino-Indian ties, Gokhale finds continuity and a theme that runs consistently throughout the Mao, Deng, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi eras of Chinese Communist Party. Gokhale finds that China’s India policy has always been shaped by exogenous factors — namely China’s view of the larger great power strategic triangle of China, the Soviet Union (later Russia), and the US. He argues that China has never considered India as an independent player but an appendage to the great powers, and therefore Beijing’s India policy has always been formulated in the context of a strategic triangle. “The relationship was not one of equals from Beijing’s perspective. China’s objective was to keep India, which it did not trust, as neutral as possible during the Cold War while it struggled to rise, and then in the post–Cold War period to limit through containment and coercion India’s capacity to harm China’s strategic goal of hegemony.” Since “India becomes relevant to China primarily in the context of great power relationships, and especially US-China relations,” therefore, “India’s alignment with the United States is the problem” and “China tracks India’s relations with the United States very carefully and is concerned at the synergy between them,” writes Gokhale. Looking at the increasing corrosiveness of bilateral ties, it is not a coincidence, he argues, that China’s intensifying coercive tactics at the border correspond roughly with India’s growing strategic ties with the US. It may be asked that if China is worried about increasing US-India synergy, why does it expect that despite its use of militarized coercive tools to shape India’s behaviour, the geopolitical cost for its actions will remain low even in the future? Gokhale says, quoting from an assessment by Chinese analyst Ketian Zhang, that Chinese policymakers do not expect the US to get “directly involved militarily in the India-China dispute because this will be an intolerable burden. There is also the view in China that India is hesitant to play the role of a junior ally and has a long tradition of pursuing an independent foreign policy.” The salience of US-India ties in China’s strategic assessment of India has also been the subject of an essay by analyst Yun Sun of Stimson Center. In an article for War on the Rocks, March 2020, Yun Sun posited that “the US factor has become the most important consideration in China’s policy toward India” and Beijing fears US-India defence cooperation would threaten its security and stability and undermine its strategic influence and power projection in South Asia. “Regionally and globally, the U.S. endorsement of India’s leadership status dilutes and diminishes China’s soft power, and encourages other countries like Japan and Australia to follow suit in seeking closer ties with New Delhi.” Unlike Ketian Zhang, however, Yun Sun says Chinese policy community feels India needs to rely on the US to balance China’s dominance and while strategists are undecided on the nature of the alignment, and there are concerns that India’s strategic autonomy may have been compromised because Washington is making offers “India cannot refuse” and New Delhi may become “enticed, entangled, and potentially enmeshed in institutionalized cooperative frameworks that it later cannot reject despite its aspiration for autonomy,” writes Yun Sun. Interestingly, on two “basic assumptions” that drives China’s India policy — “that India will not intentionally escalate militarily in response to low-level coercion and that India will not form alliances against the coercer”—  Gokhale says that India is now more clear-eyed in both political and strategic circles about the threat posed by China, India’s risk-taking abilities to counter Beijing’s coercive moves have increased (as the Snow Leopard counter-operation at Rezang La/Rechin La was carried out in August 2020 demonstrated)” and “the vestiges of nonaligned thinking that might have restrained India in the past from pursuing deeper relations with the West have evaporated.” Convinced of the power asymmetry, China does not believe that it needs to accommodate India’s interests and it seeks one-sided concessions from India. Gokhale says this policy has been myopic. Right from the 1962 border war, which Mao hoped would “force India into a neutral posture”, China has suffered from a recurring problem in its India policy “by relying on coercion, it produces the opposite result from what it says it wants.” According to the author, “Beijing would be wise to adjust its worldview and accept that there is an important subset of great power relationships in the Indo-Pacific and to treat India as a necessary interlocutor in this regional context.” Among the policy recommendations for India to shape China’s policy, Gokhale advocates resumption of political dialogue, a more consistent whole-of-government approach (the modalities are not made clear), and pursuit of a “higher-level risk management” that “shifts the focus from the ground-tactical level to the politico-strategic level.” If one is bent on nitpicking, it may be pointed out that the paper remains ambiguous on one aspect of China’s policy. If China’s approach towards India has pivoted on strategic pressure from great powers, it is not clear when China has “tended to use coercive tactics to force India toward neutrality” and when it has made conciliatory noises and moves to achieve the same result. That said, Gokhale’s paper brings much-needed clarity on the outlook, perspective and drivers of Beijing’s India policy and fills a critical gap in our understanding. It will remain an invaluable treatise. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.