China's Territorial Disputes (32 page)

So saying, a stable peace between India and China would have to rest not only on a satisfactory resolution of the border dispute, which would necessarily involve some territorial concessions on the part of both sides. A durable framework of Sino-Indian friendship would need to be underpinned as much by a legal settlement as by a clear recognition of their relative power status and acceptance of each other’s geo-political stakes in its respective region of the world. China should recognize India’s dominant position in South Asia without diminishing its existing commitments to Pakistan and other countries in the subcontinent, and India should act likewise for China in East and Southeast Asia while maintaining its relations with countries in those regions. The Indians may be well advised to cut a deal with the Chinese fast, for Aksai Chin is less strategically important to China today than it was in the 1960s, due to the construction of other roads and airfields linking Tibet with other parts of China, but as China becomes more powerful militarily and economically, it may be increasingly unwilling to settle territorial disputes at the negotiating table. Beijing may want to keep alive some claims with which it can bargain with New Delhi for more concessions on territory or other matters in the future, and China’s refusal thus far to recognize India’s incorporation of Sikkim may just turn out to be such a bargaining ploy; or China may use the claims to justify strengthening its ties and securing its influence with countries in South Asia, such as Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Findings and conclusions

The two-level games framework predicts that when the costs of an agreement are heterogeneous rather than homogeneous, that is, when they are relatively concentrated on certain segments of a population while the benefits are diffused throughout the country, then those sectors and regions whose interests are most negatively affected by the agreement will organize and agitate to thwart the negotiating process, or failing that, derail its ratification.

As for the quieted but as yet unsettled Sino-Indian boundary dispute, both the costs and benefits of a border agreement, or for that matter the absence of one, are small and diffuse for the governments and peoples of China and India. The major benefits of an agreement for both countries are largely strategic, through an improvement in the security climate, which would enable both sides to withdraw troops and arsenals from the border area and reduce the chances of accidental cross-firings. However, the cost of supporting the military would not be significantly reduced. The Chinese would still need to maintain a sizeable military presence in Tibet to guard against the threat of Tibetan separatism, and India would simply be re-deploying most of his troops along the Himalayan frontier to the border with Pakistan and Kashmir. The principal costs of such an agreement, if they can be considered as such, would accrue to the BJP and nationalist Indian politicians, who would be deprived of the chance to make political capital out of taking a militant and expansionary stance on the Sino-Indian border. Hence material costs or benefits have not been, and will not likely be, a significant impediment or incentive to a border agreement.

Do democratic governments actually make it much easier than non-democratic governments for latent boundary, territorial, or other disputes between states to surface into very real conflicts? This is not an unreasonable view, assuming that political forces in a competitive electoral system have to respond effectively to public opinion that has the potential to be created, manipulated, and galvanized by well organized and well funded groups with their own nationalistic agenda. This seems to have been the problem with the domestic political scene in India. From the time of the release of the first White Paper on India-China relations in September 1959, the Indian press, leaders of India’s parliamentary opposition and even members of Nehru’s own Congress Party were vocal and adamant that boundary negotiations with China should be discontinued until the Chinese vacated all of what they regarded as Indian territory. By agitating and arousing the Indian public to new heights of nationalist fervor, Indian politicians and journalists succeeded in asphyxiating Nehru’s hopes for negotiation and pushing the country toward contemplating war to repel the Chinese “incursion.” All the while, the Chinese mass media were toeing the official line in calling for negotiations at the highest level up till two weeks before the start of hostilities, not least because, as a non-democratic country, they could prevent individuals and groups adversely affected by the agreement from organizing to protect their interests. For sure, opposition to Mao’s impending India war could be heard in the highest corridors of power. In early October 1962, at the tenth plenum of the eighth Central Committee of the CCP, Wang Jiaxiang, director of the Central Committee’s International Liaison Department which dealt with foreign Communist and socialist parties, suggested a foreign policy slogan of “three reconciliations and one reduction,” namely reconciliation with the US, USSR and India, and reducing aid to Third World countries, in view of China’s dire economic straits after the onset of famine following the failure of the Great Leap Forward campaign.
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Wang promptly lost all favor with Mao and was removed from power soon after.

While political elites in China or other Communist or authoritarian countries had managed to keep discussion of foreign policy tightly controlled among themselves while mobilizing carefully controlled public opinion for the purpose of asserting some form of nationalism, there was always the danger elsewhere that public opinion would run ahead of elite opinion, and direct nationalist opinion not only against a foreign target, but also against the state itself. Governments need not only be subjected to public attacks for being “soft” on foreign territorial encroachment; indeed, territorial issues themselves can be used as proxies by public-opinion makers or political opponents to humiliate the government over its failures to address other ills. Many of the non-Communist opposition leaders in the Indian parliament who had called upon Nehru to adhere firmly to India’s policy not to negotiate the boundary with China, were also emphatically seeking to reorientate India’s foreign policy and security posture away from non-alignment and socialism and toward closer cooperation with the United States, Britain and the Western alliance. In this they failed. By adopting an uncompromising stance on the border issues, they had also hoped to remove Krishna Menon from his post as defense minister because of what they perceived to be his all-too-moderate attitude toward equipping and mobilizing an army for a war with China. In this they succeeded.

Domestic win-sets for entering into international agreements are theorized to be bigger the more open a country is to trade. Economic benefits accruing to the conclusion of a boundary agreement between China and India are not significant either. It is true that the value of bilateral trade increased fifty-fold between 1990 and 1997 from a paltry US$33.8 million to US$1.83 billion. However, the value of bilateral trade in 1990 was less than 0.1 percent of the value of either country’s foreign trade, and still remained below 1 percent in 1997, the last year before relations took a downturn with the victory of the BJP and India used China as justification for its nuclear tests. In addition to the insignificance of trade volume between China and India, competition for exports to third markets are intense, as has been mentioned, and both countries have been trying to attract overseas investment from the same countries and multinationals in the industrialized world. Although bilateral relations have improved sufficiently such that the Indian prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was able to pay a visit to China in June 2003, and trade volume had reached almost US$5 billion by then,
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commerce is still not a major consideration motivating both parties to pursue a final territorial agreement in this dispute, though there is always hope that this will one day be the case.

“De-linking” issues in order to solve those that are most amenable to solution first is a well established concept in bargaining theory. Similarly, “shelving sovereignty for joint development” is an oft-floated proposal in the East Asian diplomatic lexicon to de-link territorial from economic issues. Such a “de-territorialization” of issues would serve to increase the chances of countries engaging in joint economic development in a disputed area while leaving the sovereignty of the area undetermined for the time being. The plan is that, hopefully, by working together for joint economic gains, governments and citizens of the disputant countries would accumulate “goodwill” which would widen the prospective win-set for discussing the final disposition of the ownership question of the disputed area.

Following the first Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) between China and India in September 1993, the boundary dispute between the two neighbors was “de-linked” from their security postures, for while a body of technical experts was set up to take charge of determining the boundary, another joint working group was established to promote arms control and maintain peace along the demilitarized boundary. “De-linking” the eastern and western sectors of the Sino-Indian boundary for the purpose of negotiations, which was the Indian strategy, obviously did not work, but neither did the Chinese preference for “issue aggregation” for the purpose of achieving a comprehensive settlement of the border question as a package deal, which would have involved trading off NEFA to India in exchange for the recognition of Aksai Chin as Chinese territory. Why then did “de-linking” the CBM negotiations from the border talks not achieve productive results? The most probable answer I believe is that, while the security and welfare of both parties were definitely better off with an arms reduction treaty and respect for the existing line of actual control, the Chinese could gain nothing more than what they had already obtained through military action in the 1962 border war and the Indians were in no position to change the status quo short of restarting a major war. An agreement will be signed only if it produces a better result than each party could in the absence of the agreement, and this is clearly not the case here.

Our theoretical framework also predicts that the size of the win-sets correlate inversely with the number of votes needed in a country’s highest legislature to ratify an international agreement. In the case of the Sino-Indian boundary negotiations, it became clear very early on that Nehru was not prepared to surmount the institutional constraints provided by the rules and procedures of parliament by cutting off debate or negotiating with the Chinese in secret instead of publicly airing his negotiating position. By deferring to the prerogatives of parliament to debate all matters of foreign policy, especially one as sensitive as the boundary negotiations, we have seen that, although Nehru always kept his party’s overwhelming majority in parliament, he lost all room to maneuver and could not prevent rivals from making political capital by creating and working up nationalistic and anti-agreement sentiments. Nehru might even have mistakenly believed that Mao’s huge win-set in China’s political constituency was a sure bet that the Chinese could eventually be forced to yield on the border question, since on this matter his own hands were already tied. Border negotiations became bogged down by the end of the 1980s because the Chinese side was reportedly split between influential “Level II” moderates in favor of relinquishing the “southern slopes” in the eastern sector, at least for the time being, and prominent hard-liners who were against yielding on any stretch of China’s claim.
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By taking into account the influence of formal and informal institutional constraints on win-set size, two-level games framework has shown itself to be culturally sensitive.

We do not know of any instance in which negotiators to the disputes we are looking at actually argued to their negotiating counterparts that pressure from domestic constituents prevented them from making concessions that they would otherwise have made if they were sure their agreement could be ratified at home. However, in this case, the minority Indian governments under prime ministers Rao and Gujral in the 1990s were able to garner Chinese support for the CBM agreements. On the other hand, Mrs Gandhi and her son Rajiv could make no progress on the border despite their solid parliamentary majorities, and the latter almost led India to its second war with China. This finding offers indirect support for the proposition that the weaker a government is in terms of its control over votes in the national legislature or Level II constituents required for ratification of agreements, the stronger the position of its Level I negotiators.

The success or failure of any negotiating behavior obviously depends heavily on the strategies adopted by the negotiators themselves. We have seen that the presence or absence of leadership in negotiation affects both the duration and direction of the negotiating process, and is instrumental in determining the ultimate success or failure of the negotiation. While the presence of leadership does not equate to a speedy resolution of a dispute, witness Mao’s decision to go to war, the absence of leadership during the negotiation process results in drift and the loss of initiative. This argument is amply illustrated by Nehru’s weak and uncertain role as chief interlocutor with China in the lead-up to the Sino-Indian War. The absence of effective leadership in official negotiations means that the initiative in setting the agenda or blocking an agreement will pass from Level I negotiators to Level II opposition forces both within the governmental institutions and outside in the societal realm.

Assuming that leaders are ready to promote rather than retard agreement on a disputatious issue, they should also seek to keep the details of sensitive sovereignty negotiations or talks on territorial compromises as secret as possible until some form of agreement is reached, so that those who might be opposed to the tentative agreement would not be able to join forces. This seems to have been the case with the Sino-Indian JWG sessions on the CBMs and the affirmation of the line of actual control in the 1990s, as opposed to the public airing of official disagreements preceding the 1962 war, which led to the hardening of official positions on the border issue and the rallying of domestic forces against a boundary settlement, especially on the Indian side. The appointment of a “special representative” by each side to work with the other to achieve a political settlement of the boundary issue, arrived at during Vajpayee’s 2003 visit to China, may also be considered as an inconspicuous means to insulate often difficult boundary negotiations from efforts to enhance bilateral commercial and diplomatic ties.