China's unchecked buildup is dangerous

We can hope that the increasingly harsh tone that had crept into Sino-Indian relations has been checked by the sequence of meetings that Prime Minister Singh and External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna have had with their counterparts in Thailand and Bangalore respectively. Though neither India, nor China can afford a conflict, one side appears as though it is looking for one, and the other side is once again not ready.
Unless they have been changed recently, the political directive that the government has given to the armed forces is to maintain a posture of “dissuasive defence” vis-à-vis the Chinese in Tibet. This contrasts with the directive of maintaining a posture of “disuassive deterrence” in relation to Pakistan. The latter means that the Indian forces plan and equip themselves for possible operations in Pakistani territory. But the import of the former is clear: India has no plans for offensive operations in Tibet in the event of hostilities. Its plans would call for allowing Chinese forces into Indian territory and destroying them in battle there.
A huge component of this strategy devised in the 1970s was firepower. Unfortunately, that is precisely the area where the Indian forces are lacking. China on the other hand, has built up a formidable force of missiles, rocket and tube launched artillery and mobile units, all on display in the recent 60th anniversary parade. On the other hand, India’s missile programme is distinctly limping and laggard, its deployed rocket artillery is confined to multi-barrel rocket launchers and its mountain divisions are in dire need of an overall upgrade. India has no self-propelled artillery and its towed artillery, even the modern Bofors F77B guns, are some two decades old.


The air force part of the equation once favoured India, but this has changed. First, the IAF combat capability has declined because acquisitions have not kept pace with the obsolescence of its fleet. Second, the Chinese air force’s modernisation has advanced with great speed and depth, despite the informal embargo that has been imposed on it by the western countries.
But despite our weaknesses, 2009 is not the same thing as 1962. At that time the poorly equipped and badly led Indian armies literally lacked the knowledge of what was on the other side of the mountain. Intelligence was non-existent. Today, India has a sophisticated system of aerial and ground surveillance of the Tibetan plateau and ought to have enough fore-warning of a Chinese military adventure.

Rise
Even at the time, the outgunned and outmaneuvered Indian forces collapsed only in the Tawang sector. At Walong in the east, they were forced to withdraw, but not routed. In the west in places like Chushul, they fought heroically, laying down their lives to the man. Though the military balance is tilting against us, it is just about adequate for the defensive battle that we would fight in the event things get out of hand.
The rise of China is an inevitable reality; the 2008-2009 crisis may have accelerated its growth. But there are also alternative interpretations of the figures of the Chinese economic performance which are not very flattering. But there is little room for doubt over the fact of China’s impressive military build-up. It is, in fact, quite open and purposeful — to ensure the defence of the sovereignty and integrity of China. This means the ability to prevail in the event of a conflict over Taiwan and keep a lid on the separatists of Xinjiang and Tibet. But, as The Economist has pointed out, the build-up has now gained a momentum of its own and Chinese capacities are beyond what are required for Taiwan or the internal security of its western regions. A large and capable military capacity could enhance the risk for countries like India which have disputes with Beijing.

Shift
It is through borders with these two regions that India comes into the picture. The recent tensions between India and China can be seen as a function of the latter’s insecurities regarding its minorities who people its geographically vast and resource-rich regions. But there could be other causes as well.


There has been a clear shift in the Chinese position towards India since mid-2005 when the Indo-US nuclear deal was announced in Washington DC. Just months before Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited New Delhi and had signed a far-reaching Agreement on Political Parameters and Guiding Principles to resolve the border issue. It had virtually spelt out the contours of a border settlement on the basis of a mutual exchange of claims — the Chinese would keep Aksai Chin and India would retain Arunachal Pradesh.
In June 2007 at the sidelines of a meeting in Berlin with Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi appeared to resile from Article VII of the agreement which had said that “In reaching a border settlement the two sides shall safeguard populations in border areas.” Mr Yang now told Mr Mukherjee that the “mere presence” of populated areas would not affect China's claims on the Sino-Indian border.
It is from this period that the more strident Chinese line on Tawang, on the visit of Dalai Lama and the like seems to have emerged, though it has been amplified by the Tibetan uprising of last year which took place not only in the truncated region of what is Tibet today, but the large areas that the Chinese have hived away and renamed into other provinces.
Early on, Beijing recognised the Indo-US nuclear deal for what it was: A far-reaching agreement through which the nuclear pill that had been stuck in the throats of India and the US would be washed down and would enable the two to have normal, even strategic relations. Almost transparently, the US was wooing India and the aim seemed to be to balance the rising power of China.

Outcomes
India is unlikely to act precipitously on the border. This is as much a matter of choice as its current weakness. It sees its best option as a need to settle on an “as is, where is” formula. On the other hand, the signals coming out of Beijing are not very good. Its military build-up has gone into overdrive, even as its attitudes towards India have hardened. This is bad news, as much for China, as for India.
A unsettled border only provides opportunity for conflict, notwithstanding the interim agreements to maintain “peace and tranquility” there. China may be thinking that by outpacing New Delhi in building its national power it can get better terms in the future, or hawks in Beijing are contemplating administering New Delhi another lesson.
But things may not work their way. A combination of factors, or a single event could change things: The Chinese economy could stall, India could be provoked into building up its deterrence capacity, Taiwan may act up or the US could elect a hawkish president.
You don’t need Sun Tzu to tell you that it is easier to start a fight, than to predict its outcome.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 29, 2009

Pakistan is pulling its punches on the Taliban

Everything seems to be tentative about the Pakistan Army’s Rah e Nijat (Path to Salvation) operation. It was launched after several months of dithering and carried out after the Army cut deals with two powerful Taliban warlords. Even now, it is not clear as to whether the Army launched the operation to salvage its wounded pride after the recent Taliban attack on the General Headquarters at Rawalpindi, or it is acting under American pressure. Or, that it has now finally come to believe that Pakistan’s deliverance lies in abandoning the sponsorship of terrorist groups.
At the start of the operation, the Pakistan Army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani has tried to wean away the Mehsud tribe from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan by appealing to their patriotism. He can be forgiven for his caution. You don’t make war with your people lightly, especially if they happen to be Mehsuds who have in the past several years compelled the Pakistan Army to sue for peace thrice, and in the past century given great grief to a succession of armies.
Reasonable people will agree that the operation is truly Pakistan’s path to salvation. For years now the writ of the state has ceased to run in large parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Craven peace deals with various Taliban factions have ensured that while Pakistan’s garrisons in towns like Razmak, Wana and Miramshah remained untouched, the surrounding country-side fell under the control of the Taliban.


No war goes according to plan. Most likely this war, too, will end up with unanticipated twists and turns. But the goal that the world community seeks is the destruction of the Taliban as a whole. That is where there are worries about the Pakistani action. Last year a similar operation was launched against Baitullah Mehsud and then called off suddenly without any explanation.

Goals
This time, too, there are questions about the Pakistani goals. They have, for example, made peace with two major Taliban factions led by Maulvi Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur and ignored the Haqqani network which has been operating out of North Waziristan for close to a decade now. As is well known, the Pakistani authorities retain close links with the Haqqanis — Jalaluddin and his son Sirajuddin — who were involved in the Kabul bombing of the Indian embassy last year.
If the deals are tactical — aimed at keeping these powerful warlords out of the battle temporarily — they are understandable. But if they are aimed at destroying the anti-Pakistani Taliban, even while preserving the others as part of the Pakistan Army’s “strategic” depth, then we have reasons for concern.
The US cannot be too happy about these deals because it knows that nearly fifty percent of the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders it has killed through drone strikes were in the areas controlled by Maulvi Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur. As for the Haqqanis, they lead the most effective Taliban forces operating against the US in Afghanistan.
The Pakistan Army has to beware that it does not become the Taliban’s “strategic depth”. The Taliban of today are not those of 2001. The war they have fought for the last decade has, if anything, deepened their fanaticism and hatred of the US and the West. They no longer require the services of the ISI to lead them into battle as they once did. Not only are they a much more seasoned fighting force, one that is deeply intertwined with the Al Qaeda, they have also expanded their sway across large parts of Pakistan which was not the case earlier.

Denial
The recent attacks in Lahore and at the GHQ indicate that there is very little wriggle room left for the Pakistan Army and establishment. The recent spate of terrorist attacks in the Pakistan Punjab have showed that the Taliban have the capacity to attack at will across urban centres of Pakistan’s heartland. It also indicated that the outfit had developed links with the so-called Punjabi Taliban — the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Muhammad and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. These organisations have in their own way eaten away at the vitals of the state.
Despite a spate of terrorist attacks, some whose authorship the Pakistani Taliban has openly acknowledged, there are people ready to point fingers at India or the US. Last week in the wake of the Taliban attack on three police targets in Lahore, the city’s police commissioner Khushro Pervez declared, “The enemy has engaged us in the North West Frontier Province and other areas… There is a lot of evidence showing the involvement of a neighbouring country.” Interior Minister Rehman Malik, too, hinted at the Indian connection. Important sections of Pakistan remain in denial about their predicament.
Savage terrorist attacks have hurt Pakistan grievously. The country is stunned and confused. The reason for this is that its leaders, political and military, are not willing to change the discourse of jihad that they encouraged for the past two decades, leave alone dismantle the jihadi armies that have a free run of the country.
Meanwhile there are also military questions about the ability of the Pakistan Army to prevail in Waziristan. Pakistan has a competent and capable army, but one devoid of any counter-insurgency experience. This was evident in its actions against the Baloch separatists in 2006 and, recently in Swat where it used air and artillery strikes liberally.
In Waziristan, too, Pakistan is relying on aerial bombardment to overwhelm the Mehsuds. This will only result in great destruction and a hardening of attitudes, without any diminution of Taliban military capabilities. This has been the experience of air power since the Great Blitz of London in 1940 and most recently in Gaza.

Victory
Perhaps the most accurate instruments of aerial bombardment are the American Predator and Reaper drones being used in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Yet a New America Foundation analysis released in Washington this week suggests that of the 1000 or so people killed in drone strikes since 2006, as many as 320 or one-third, have been innocent civilians. You can make your own back-of-the-envelope calculation about the number of civilians being killed by the less accurate aerial bombardment currently under way in Waziristan.
Islamabad is using air and artillery fire-power to minimise the use of boots on the ground. But insurgencies can never be defeated this way. Mountains and insurgencies gobble up human resources in large quantities — camps and supply lines need to be guarded, convoys, administrative offices and centres protected. Search and destroy operations require ridgelines and passes to be held and so on. As of now the Pakistani strategy seems to be to capture Hakimullah Mehsud’s hometown Kotkai, probably flatten his home and declare victory.
If that is so, then it is going to be a much longer war than what the Pakistan GHQ has anticipated.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 22, 2009

Expending Capital

PM should keep Pakistan on the backburner and focus on key domestic issues instead

On Monday, the Lahore High Court decided that the police had no case against Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, the founder of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. In the process, they tossed the ball back into New Delhi’s court. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has to now decide whether he wants to persist with the peace process with Islamabad, or wait till there is some clearer indication that Pakistan has decided that it will no longer be a state sponsor of terrorism.
Insiders say that in a month or two, freed from the burden of public opinion, the PM intends to re-initiate the peace process and the composite dialogue with Pakistan. He has a clear window of about a year before the Bihar assembly polls in 2010 and he hopes to make full use of it.
Perseverance in the cause of peace is praiseworthy, even heroic and statesmanlike. It is the kind of stuff that garners Nobel Peace prizes. On the other hand, persistence in the face of sure failure is foolhardy, and possibly vainglorious.
In the case of Pakistan, persistence may be a virtue, but so would prudence.
The PM’s approach to Pakistan is betraying a stubborn persistence with a policy that is proving to be unworkable. Over the past several months, or actually the year since Pervez Musharraf was forced out of office, it has been clear that the Pakistan problem is not easily amenable to solution.

Containment
As it is, the twists and turns in the PM’s policy have been bewildering. In Russia, inadvertently or otherwise, he snubbed the president of Pakistan on the issue of terrorism. Then, three months later, he veered to the other side and agreed to the impugned Sharm-el-Sheikh statement.
The peace process has a two decade old history. Despite the thousand-year war fulmination of V.P. Singh, the onset of the rebellion in the Kashmir Valley in 1990 persuaded India to push for peace with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Despite Islamabad’s continous support to terrorism and separatism, New Delhi sought to promote peace through a slew of confidence building measures among which was the composite dialogue, first proposed by J.N. (Mani) Dixit in 1994.
The dialogue envisaged a step-by-step approach to solving small problems first, building confidence, and then resolving the big ones — the Pakistani support to terrorists in India and Jammu & Kashmir. However, what the process has revealed is that the big problems have held the resolution of the small ones hostage. In fact, the composite dialogue has become a meaningless talking shop. As for the peace process, it remains a triumph of hope over experience.
After a quarter century of trying to make peace with Pakistan through dialogue, even while the latter has thrown armies of terrorists and saboteurs against us, the time has come for a change. Not only are there limits to what we can achieve with our neighbour, but those limits have been reached.
The situation demands a policy of flexible containment. This requires India to build an unambiguous deterrent capability vis-à-vis Islamabad, and also set our own house in order.
It is not that there are none in the Pakistani establishment who want to make peace with India. Unfortunately, they are weak and divided. Their ambiguous response to the Mumbai carnage and their handling of its aftermath are the best indicator of their weakness and confusion.

Kashmir
The political window that is going to open up after the Maharashtra elections is not exclusively for peace with Pakistan. It may be more fruitful for the Prime Minister to pursue a variety of outstanding issues — economic reform, the Maoist challenge, China, peace in Jammu & Kashmir, removal of institutionalised discrimination of the Muslim community in the country.
The last two issues — the internal negotiation with separatists in Kashmir and the Sachar committee recommendations — are begging for attention. Success there could yield enormous dividends, not in the least in the country’s Pakistan policy. After the victory of the Congress-National Conference in the state assembly elections last year was confirmed by their sweep in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, there have been expectations that the Union government would quickly resume the dialogue with the separatists suspended since 2007.
It would also move on the issue of autonomy of the state in relation to the Union government. The separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and the new chief minister Omar Abdullah have both called for a resumption of the dialogue.
At the time the centre-state and centre-separatist dialogue failed to move ahead because it was said that the government in New Delhi was too “weak” to make a deal with the moderate separatists. Since then the government in Delhi has become “strong” but the dialogues remain elusive.
In the meantime, the ground situation has become distinctly brittle. While violence has declined to its lowest levels, separatists have found it convenient to use incidents of alleged rape, molestation and police high-handedness to stoke street protest against the authorities. This year infiltration from Pakistan has again gone up sharply. These militants have not yet displayed their hand, but it is a matter of time before their presence impacts on the ground situation. Therefore, it is imperative that the government take up the issue and move ahead on it. To wait for the Pakistan end of the peace process to deliver before settling with domestic separatists would be futile.
The second issue, too, is one that is of great importance. There may be a post-Mumbai lull in terrorist actions in India. But this is at best temporary. Attacks are likely to resume as soon as the Indian Mujahideen networks disrupted last year are replaced.
The struggle against violent Indian Muslim extremists is a challenge of an enormous magnitude. The government should not mislead itself by the fact that the mainstream Muslims remain firmly committed to the path of democracy. After all, it just takes a couple of hundred radicals to create a security night-mare. But these extremists are sheltered and nurtured by a larger pool of unhappy people. It is the government’s task to take up the gauntlet of the Sachar Committee recommendations and move ahead.

Sachar
No doubt the BJP will seek to capitalise on any move to address the issue of institutionalised discrimination against the Muslim community in the country. That is what makes the challenge of addressing the issue so difficult. But the outcome could pay the Congress party substantial political dividend, and the country’s security would get a payoff by reducing the vulnerability of its minorities to blandishments of radical ideologies and Pakistani agent provocateurs.
The almost continuous cycle of state and national elections are distorting the country’s governance processes. There have been many voices pointing to the need for simultaneous elections to the state assemblies and the Lok Sabha. But the problem is unlikely to be resolved given the nature of parliamentary democracy. So, politics and governance will remain hostage to the election processes whenever and wherever they occur.
Just how important the cycle is apparent from the manner in which the Prime Minister shifted his post-Sharm el Sheikh Pakistan stance with an eye on the Maharashtra elections. Now he has one clear year in which to act. But he would be better advised to focus on issues that are ripe for resolution rather than chase the will o’ the wisp.
The economist-turned-politician has to understand that politics is eminently the art of the possible.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 14, 2009

Millionaire legislators are skewing our democracy

Democracy, as Abraham Lincoln famously declared in his Gettysburg Address, is supposed to be “of the people, by the people and for the people.” In India its definition is being rewritten. It remains by the people, but whether it is still of the people, or even for the people is a moot point.
The trend was first noticed in Karnataka where the mine barons of Bellary began to gather attention, though in all fairness, the sugar lords of Maharashtra have been influential in politics for a long time. Last week, in these columns, Bharat Bhushan has detailed the way things are going in Andhra Pradesh. Now we are hearing about Haryana where an NGO says that the average worth of a Congress candidate is Rs 5 crore and that of an Indian National Lok Dal and Haryana Jan Congress candidate around Rs 3 crore each.
Ever since it became mandatory for candidates to declare their wealth the realisation has dawned that our representatives are not quite like us; to paraphrase Hemingway’s comment to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “they’re richer.”

Plutocrats
India is regressing from a democracy to a plutocracy featuring the disproportionate presence of the wealthy in our governance systems and the capture of political machines by their families.
This is the end of the grand experiment launched by our founding fathers when they decreed in 1950 that every Indian would henceforth be entitled to a vote. Considering that most people were illiterate and poor, this was a stupendous act of political faith. This was a time when countries like the US, Switzerland and Australia did not have universal adult franchise.
There was a heady atmosphere in the country about its future. And, the founding fathers were certain that India would take a unique developmental track, one imbued by the values of the freedom struggle and its leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhimrao Ambedkar.
We have a very good idea of how well it worked. When the first prime minister of the country, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, died in 1964, his will was made a public document. He gave away his sole fixed asset —the Anand Bhavan in Allahabad to the nation. The only thing his daughter inherited were the royalties from his books.
The wills of our leaders are no longer public documents. Given their affluence, which in many cases follows a spell in public office, there is every reason for them to keep such a document secret.
The Association of Democratic Reforms and the National Election Watch have calculated that some 15.5 per cent of the candidates in this year’s Lok Sabha elections were worth more than Rs 1 crore. Not surprisingly the largest number were in the Congress followed by the BJP, but even the humble Bahujan Samaj Party had a substantial number of them, as did the avowedly socialist Samajwadi party.
Some 61 per cent of the candidates had not submitted their PAN cards, so we must also take into account an additional percentage of undeclared millionaires who keep their properties in a benami (nameless) fashion.

Criminals
According to the NGO, as many as 300 crorepatis were eventually elected to the Lok Sabha, a 94.8 per cent increase over the previous house. The Congress may not have a majority of its own in the house, but the millionaires do.
There is nothing wrong in rich people participating in politics. Indeed, there are many who argue that a greater participation by the middle and upper-middle class professionals would work wonders for the Indian political ambience. Well off people are often not just creators of wealth, but good managers and stewards of it, and they would definitely be assets for any government or legislature.
The problem arises when the rich who enter politics use their background and managerial talent to enrich themselves, and to skew the institutions of the state for their own benefit. Instead of acting like the representatives of the people, the richer individuals seek and get favoured treatment from institutions like the government and the judiciary.
This explains the coincidence of the phenomenon of criminals entering politics. Where politicians once used criminals to win elections, now mafia dons have themselves become netas. There has been a steep rise of criminals in our Parliament and state assemblies. The study cited above noted that 16 per cent or 909 of 5573 candidates had criminal records, of which 402 were charged with heinous crimes.
Criminal-legislators manage to get “better” justice because they are able to subvert the police and administration with impunity. The record shows that even if they are convicted of heinous crimes, they are able to persuade the politicians to let them off the hook by misusing the power of commutation and pardon.
Actually in India the plutocracy is degenerating into something even worse — a kleptocracy. Most democracies suffer from the vice of greed and corruption. But the great virtue of democracy — indeed its greatest — is that it has a self-correcting mechanism. But in India those mechanisms are not working. The police and administration have teamed up with the politicians and constitute the plutocracy.
Bad money has succeeded in driving away the good. Representatives of the subalterns like Ms Mayawati and, before her, Lalu and Mulayam Singh Yadav decided to enrich themselves in the name of social justice. As a result all face “disproportionate assets” charges, while the lives of those that they claim to lead remain unchanged.
The existence of a plutocracy offers an explanation for the persistence of illiteracy and poverty in the country sixty years after independence. Tens of thousands of crores have been spent on public health centres, irrigation systems and schools, yet, 40 per cent of Indians remain illiterate, 80 per cent rely on private healthcare systems, the highest in terms of proportion in the world, and the bulk of our agriculture continues to be rain-fed.
This is not because of the incompetence of government managers or their venality, but structural issues. In other words, the plutocratic system requires people to remain illiterate and poor.

Remedies
Is there any remedy? Or are we doomed to wallow in this slush forever? There are some obvious ways and means to make politics cleaner — keeping out those charged with heinous crimes legally, or introducing a transparent process of election funding. Structural changes like introducing a proportional representation system, too, could help in ending the zero-sum political outcomes.
But any change requires the agency of good men. It is not that the system is without them. Our Prime Minister, for example is known to be incorruptible. But, he also tends to be pusillanimous and compromising on issues like structural reform of the bureaucracy, one of the bigger causes of the problem.
Our real problem is the silence of good men, or to be precise, their passivity.
This was published in Mail Today October 8, 2009

China's missile power

Some of the readers on this blog have seen my negative references to the pace of the Indian missile programme. I have had harsh words to say about the Prithvi and the Agni. Just why I feel the way I do is because of how we continue to delude ourselves, while our adversaries gain strength. Here is a link to a picture gallery of the missiles displayed in the recent parade marking the anniversary of the 60th year of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
This gives you an indication of what a well-rounded missile power is like and what it looks like when it means business. There are intercontinental, medium range nuclear armed missiles, a number of conventional ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, SAMs, shore to ship missiles and multi-barrel rockets.
These missiles are not just for display, they are deployed, ready-to-use systems. I have had on occasion commented on the fact that we usually parade a model of Agni on Republic Day, but the commentator will never actually call it a model, of course. The conventional missiles are all solid-propellant based and compact in contrast to our Prithvi.



Here is a pix of the DF-11 A paraded, this is the M-11 that PRC gave to Pakistan in the early 1990s to counter the Prithvi.

Change is the only constant

China is likely to surprise the world in the coming sixty years as well

In Asian cultures, including that of India, the 60th birthday or the shastipoorti, is a unique one. It marks the end of one term of life and the stepping ahead into another, better one. On Thursday, the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 60th birthday. This is an occasion to sum up the first tumultuous and eventful sixty years of the country’s life, and to figure out what the coming decades will be like.
The last sixty years have been epochal and dramatic. There was an important symbolism in Mao Zedong and his comrades deciding on the afternoon of October 1, 1949, to proclaim the new People’s Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tienanmen) leading into imperial Forbidden City in Beijing. They wanted to tell the Chinese people and the world that the Communist Party of China had, after resisting the Japanese onslaught, triumphed in the long civil war. It was now determined to put the “One Hundred Years of Humiliation” — the century of foreign invasions — behind and usher in a new China.

Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese revolution

That path was to prove uncommonly difficult and bloody. The Great Leap Forward (1958-61), the first grand social and economic plan which was supposed to launch the parallel economic and agricultural development of China was a disaster of enormous magnitude. A combination of flood, drought and chaos engendered by Mao’s forced collectivisation policy led to a famine where between 30 and 40 million people died.

Revolution
After a brief period of recovery, came the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 that lasted till Mao’s death in 1976. The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s megalomaniacal effort to establish his hegemony on China, but all it brought was economic and political chaos and considerable bloodshed and hardship to the average Chinese. For ten years, China’s educational system came to a grinding halt as its students rampaged across the land and their professors were sent to remote farms to do hard labour.
But Deng Xiaoping’s return to power in 1978, began the process of China’s transformation. Deng was anti-Mao. Where Mao could not see beyond Marxist doctrine and dogma, Deng insisted that “white or black as long as it catches the mouse, the cat is good.”
He reintroduced capitalism in China and insisted that this was only “market socialism.” As of the end of June 2009, China’s foreign currency reserves stood at $ 2.13 trillion, the largest in the world, its 2008 GDP was $4.33 trillion — more than 20 times greater than it was when Deng’s policy of reform began, and the third highest in the world after the US and Japan. China’s exports totaled $1.43 trillion in 2008, second only to Germany’s.
Deng Xiaoping’s main contribution to China, besides his leadership as a reformer, was to provide his country political stability. A child of the revolution, and its sometime victim, he ensured that in the post-Mao era, the Communist Party would institutionalise a system of peaceful transfer of power from one generation of the collective leadership to another. The economic achievement was built upon the unexpectedly stable and resilient Communist party system.
The unprecedented prosperity has brought the individual Chinese enormous self-confidence and pride, but not political freedom or a liberal ambience. Those who disagree with the official view are treated like criminals. Entire ethnic groups like the Tibetans and the Uighur are suspect because they want to retain their cultural exclusivity. This is what led to the clash at Tienanmen Square in 1989 and to the repeated uprisings in Tibet and Xianjiang.
Things cannot but change. The economic growth of the country is itself creating new classes of people who are outside the formal power structure. The internet age has brought to the Chinese a means of individual expression. Though the net is policed extensively, it is not possible to maintain the kind of social control that the party had in Mao’s heyday. It has to rule by some sort of consent, which is based on the competence of the leaders and the party cadre. The need for political reform is manifest, but China probably awaits a new Deng to inaugurate that period.

Deng Xiaoping, the father of modern China

In many senses, what we are witnessing is not the rise of China, but its resurrection after two centuries of decline brought on by the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the west and its accompanying predatory colonialism. People wonder whether the rise of China is a “threat” or an “opportunity”. Those who think it is a threat worry that its opaque policy-making practices, which have encouraged nuclear proliferation and supported unsavoury regimes around the world, could take the world into an era of uncertainty and strife. On the other hand, there are those who think that the Chinese engine could be the new factor in the world’s economic development.

Rise
Given the economic success of China and its continuing failure to reform its politics, the rise of China confronts the world with both threat and opportunity. This China is no longer guided by Deng Xiaoping’s 24-character strategy. That dictum called for China to “Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capabilities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.”
The last two or three years have seen the shift. On the issue of Tibet last year, the Chinese were not just assertive, but almost hostilely so. The national day parade on Thursday will be the biggest and most impressive display of Chinese military hardware in a long time; military capabilities are no longer hidden. The economic crisis of 2008 has thrust the Chinese closer to a leadership role in the world of finance.

DF-31s parading at the 60th anniversary celebrations on October 1, 2009

China is India’s big neighbour and without doubt our major challenge, and a multi-dimensional one at that. Many people focus mainly on the military challenge arising out of our past humiliation in war and the disputed land boundary. But that is a small part of what confronts us in the future. In that future, China is a development challenge because its success not only offsets our attraction to our neighbours, but actually undermines our position with them. Beijing understands this well and expends considerable effort in keeping us off balance in our own region.

Challenge
The recent revelations that China supplied Pakistan with nuclear weapons designs and material and actually tested a Pakistani-made weapon in 1990 underscore this point; Beijing’s aid to Pakistan has completely transformed our security paradigm. China’s friendship with a country like Pakistan, of course, begs the question about the friends it has in the international system.
In the 1990s, India took its first hesitant steps towards economic reform. In the process, it has scripted a success story of its own, no less distinct than that of China in the economic field. The world does not speak of the rise of India in the same hushed tones as it does of China. But the Indian transformation, too, has similar characteristics, including a sharp growth of the country’s military power. India has emerged as a geopolitical entity in its own right and has begun to exert its own gravitational pull which has to a small degree offset Beijing’s attractions.


Looked at from the vantage point of the present when the world has just emerged from a major economic crisis, the future looks optimistic from the point of view of China. But it still has a long way to go. China’s per capita GDP does not even today place it in the ranks of the top 100 countries of the world. Its political system, of course, remains antiquated and authoritarian.
But China has repeatedly surprised the world in the past sixty years; there is no reason why it cannot do so in the future, though hopefully in a pleasant sort of way.
This article appeared in Mail Today September 30, 2009