China's Territorial Disputes (31 page)

Still, even if the territorial dispute were resolved, India and China would still retain a competitive relationship in the Asia-Pacific region, being as they are, two Asiatic giants aspiring to great power status. As far as China is concerned, the occasional sympathies expressed for exiled Tibetans’ calls for their country’s autonomy, if not outright independence from China, by the Indian public and sometimes even Indian politicians, are interpreted as flagrant foreign interference in Chinese domestic affairs. China is also concerned that Southeast Asian countries may enter into some form of security arrangement with India to check the burgeoning Chinese influence in the South China Sea and the contested Spratly Islands. China is now an energy importer, and its demand for oil from the Persian Gulf will only increase. As such, some Chinese analysts are concerned that India will in future “threaten China’s sea lanes of communica-tion.”
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India is in turn greatly irked by Chinese transfer of nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan, and it considers reports of Beijing’s involvement in developing Myanmar’s naval base at Hianggyi Island and a radar station at Cocos Island as a direct challenge to New Delhi’s strategic pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean.
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Adding to China’s traditional warm ties with India’s arch-enemy Pakistan, its growing interest and involvement in Myanmar only serves to reinforce India’s view of China as an interloper in the South Asian region out to contain India’s influence. Although China no longer supports the Pakistani position of “self-determination” for the people of Kashmir, urging instead that the Kashmir dispute be settled by both India and Pakistan, it has still to accept the integration or annexation since 1974 of Sikkim into India.

Although the value of bilateral trade has been increasing steadily and even impressively for the past ten years, the present size of bilateral trade between India and China remains practically insignificant in terms of percentage of their total trade volume. In 1988, China’s exports to India totaled a mere US$149 million.
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In 1990, the value of Sino-Indian trade was US$33.8 million, just 0.038 percent of the value of China’s foreign trade; in 1991, bilateral trade was only 0.07 percent of the value of India’s foreign trade.
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In 1993, the value of bilateral trade totaled US$675.73 million, with China exporting goods to India worth US$259.16 million and importing US$416.57 million from India. In

1997, bilateral trade was US$1.83 billion.
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Although Sino-Indian trade has reached the figure of US$5 billion in 2003,
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it is still a little more than 10 percent of the trade value between China and the eleven countries of Southeast

Asia.
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Direct flight and telephone links between the major cities of both countries were inaugurated at the end of Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 visit. Direct border trade between India and China through Tibet was resumed after Chinese prime minister Li Peng’s visit to India in 1991. Although both sides were eager to enlarge and diversify their bilateral trade, signified by the December 1991 Memorandum on the Resumption of Border Trade, and the July 1992 Protocol on Entry and Exit Procedures for Border Trade, scope for so doing has been slow, limited by the similar and competitive nature of their economies. There is much similarity in exportable commodities such as carpets, garments, textiles, handicrafts, hand tools, industrial components and light engineering goods, with an acute lack of complementarity and thus inevitable competition. Except for a few small joint ventures in consumer electronics and an ironworks producing

50,000 tons of steel per year,
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industrial cooperation is virtually non-existent. China has not shown much interest in India’s engineering items, agricultural machinery or transport equipment, preferring instead to manufacture them itself or import them from the West, much to the disappointment of the Indians. India had also hoped that China’s burgeoning output of steel would mean an increase in demand for its rich and plentiful deposits of high-grade iron ore, but this did not occur. India was also looking to import petroleum and rare metals from China, but considering that China is today importing oil and even resource minerals from abroad, India’s desire does not seem realistic. Telecommunication links, shipping lines, and banking channels and clearing house facilities between the two countries are rudimentary. Furthermore, an economic race for scarce foreign resources, capital, investment and markets is pitching both economically liberalizing China and India headlong into the global marketplace, more as competitors than as comrades. Both have directed their trade promotion efforts to industrialized countries rather than to each other. China’s trade is now concentrated with Japan and the United States, in whose markets it has outsold every product marketed by India except for hand-knitted carpets,
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and perhaps computer software. If the degree of economic ties between two countries is a reliable indicator of the warmth of their political relationship, competition for markets and investments may ultimately dampen enthusiasm for further improvements in relations. It certainly does not help.

The first JWG meeting took place in July 1989, and two further meetings took place during the next two years. However, it was Chinese premier Li Peng’s high-profile visit to India in December 1991, the first by a Chinese premier in thirty-one years, that provided that impetus needed to concretize the talks on the border. Also, by then, the geo-strategic community of interest which held India and the Soviet Union in a common anti-China posture no longer existed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Chinese relations with Pakistan still irritate Indian sentimentalities now and then, and the reverse is true for the Chinese regarding Indian concerns for religious freedom and human rights in Tibet, Sino-American relations no longer constitute a threat to Indian security. At the fourth JWG meeting held in February 1992, it was agreed that military personnel from both sides would meet twice a year at Bumla Pass in the eastern sector and Spanggur Gap at the western sector, and that telephone links or “hotlines” would be established between area commanders on the two sides.
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Since 1992, as part of the confidence-building process, defense ministers and members of the general staff of both sides have been paying yearly visits to each other’s countries and military bases. At the sixth meeting of the JWG held in June 1993, both sides decided to further enhance transparency by including information about the location of military positions and giving prior notice of military exercises along the lines of actual control to the other side.
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Then Indian prime minister Narasimha Rao visited Beijing in September 1993. During the course of the visit, both governments agreed “pending a final resolution of the boundary question, the two sides would strictly respect and abide by the lines of actual control and undertake no military exercises of specialized sizes in special areas recognized by both sides.”
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Initiating the first agreement on Confidence-Building Measures (CBM) between two Asian countries without outside participation, prime ministers Rao and Li Peng signed the eight-articled “Agreement on Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control” on 7 September 1993.
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Article I highlights the undertaking by both sides to “strictly respect and observe the Line of Actual Control” and never “use or threaten to use force.” Most importantly, Article III behooves each side not to “undertake specified military exercises in mutually identified zones” and to “give the other notification of military exercises along the border.” Article VIII brings forth the CBM process by setting up an expert body consisting of diplomats and military officers of both countries to formulate and implement measures to settle the boundary question.

Besides regular summit-level meetings then, there are now two other levels of contact associated with the Sino-Indian negotiation process: a joint working group (JWG) operating to develop a confidence-building regime, and an expert body charged specifically with determining the border. This is a remarkable move by both countries to “de-link” the contentious issue of territorial sovereignty from the desired effect of border security, which, by our theory, should enhance the chances of achieving a satisfactory negotiation outcome by reducing the saliency of territoriality, postponing difficult issues, expanding on common interests, and accumulating the goodwill of people on both sides.

Rao’s meetings with senior leaders of opposition parties before his departure for China suggests that his signature on the agreement on maintaining peace and tranquillity along the line of actual control reflects a new multi-party consensus on China policy, especially with respect to the territorial issue.
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India seems to have accepted the Chinese position that the border issue should be shelved in favor of other confidence-building measures in the interim. In any case, the Chinese hold the upper hand in any negotiation because they already occupy the disputed lands which India desires, and so are understandably in no hurry to make any concessions to solve the dispute. As to the degree of trust built, it seems that there is now “almost total lack of opposition in parliament, in the media and even from former generals to what is seen as acceptance of the
de facto
border with China.”
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The trust-building momentum built up by the Rao visit led to visits to India of such high-level Chinese dignitaries as Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation Wu Yi, foreign minister Qian Qichen, and defense minister Chi Haotian, and return visits of the Indian chief of army staff and vice-president to China, all in 1994. Relations progressed markedly so that, at the JWG meeting in August 1995, both delegations could agree to pull back troops from four border posts, two on each side, which are located within fifty to a hundred yards from each other. In fact, relations between China and India improved to such an extent that another agreement on CBM was signed during Chinese president Jiang Zemin’s visit to New Delhi in November 1996. This twelve-articled treaty, which is practically an arms control agreement, sought to extend and deepen the existing CBM agreement to more specific and sensitive military aspects.
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Article I stands out as a virtual no-war pact, by stating “neither side shall use its military capability against the other side.” Concretizing the on-going talks on troop and weapons reduction along the border, Article VI provides for the withdrawal of “offensive” weapons such as combat tanks, infantry combat vehicles, guns and howitzers of 75mm or larger calibre, mortars of 120mm or larger calibre, surface-to-surface missiles and surface-to-air missiles. Both sides also agreed not to hold military exercises involving more than one division (15,000 soldiers) in close proximity to the line of actual control, and to inform the other on “type, level, duration and areas of exercise” if and when more than a brigade (5,000 soldiers) are involved. In Article V, both sides agreed that no combat aircraft of any type would be allowed to fly within ten kilometers of the line of actual control except by prior permission by the other side.

With the coming to power in India of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in March 1998, relations took a turn for the worse when the new government voiced suspicions of Chinese activities in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. During the visit to India of the PLA chief of staff Fu Quanyou in April

1998, the Indian government uncharacteristically allowed a hunger strike by six Tibetan youths protesting what they referred to as Chinese aggression against Tibet, and as if to signal that a BJP government did not intend to appear weak before China, prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee subsequently met with the Dalai Lama.
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The Chinese believe that India’s BJP government regarded China as the country’s top security threat by justifying its surprise series of five nuclear tests in May 1998 with references to “an overt nuclear weapon state” on its border, a clear reference to China.
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In an interview with the PLA newspaper, former Chinese envoy to India Cheng Ruisheng voiced concern that Indian leaders were attempting to use the unsettled border and the “China threat theory” to foment nationalist sentiments at home to gain political support and to deflect international criticism of its nuclear tests.
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This still appears to be the prevailing opinion among Chinese officialdom. When the sixth meeting on the Diplomatic and Military Expert Group on China-India Border Questions in Beijing in June 1998 made no headway, the Chinese spokesman accused the Indians of “making remarks slandering China and undermining the sound atmosphere for improving relations.”
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A nationalist BJP-led coalition government of regional parties facing a fractious Congress opposition will be no more able than a Congress-led coalition to show flexibility on the border negotiations, and may be even less likely to do so. Significantly, however, there have been no troop movements by either country to disturb the tranquility of the by now
de facto
if not
de jure
Sino-Indian border.

As opposed to the euphoric bonhomie of the 1950s, Sino-Indian relations in the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century are clearly based on pragmatic self-interest. Given the many annual diplomatic, military, cultural, sporting, economic and scientific exchanges between delegations from both countries in the last fifteen years, constituencies may hopefully be emerging that would support an eventual compromise solution to the border question. However, despite best intentions, conflict situations may still occur if the border dispute with China is not settled. The territorial issue, as in all territorial issues, raises primeval reactions touching on the holy cows of any state - a nation’s sovereignty and a people’s dignity. While Aksai Chin is strategically important to China, as the highway cutting through the area is still more or less the only allweather road that allows for quick deployment of troops and material between the adjoining PLA commands in Tibet and Xinjiang, another restive region in China, holding the McMahon Line is critical for the political survival of an Indian leader. Perhaps both China and India could do well to agree on turning the present line of actual control into a formal
de jure
boundary to avoid committing themselves to making unilateral concessions or preparing for a war in the future.