India needs to check China’s ‘imperialism’

The received wisdom regarding Sino-Indian relations over Taiwan is one of cautious fear. The new political class in New Delhi has been warned in no uncertain terms against flashing a “Taiwan card” against China or veering away from India’s long-standing commitment to a “One-China” policy as a bargaining chip against Beijing. China recently lodged a diplomatic protest against India for hosting a Taiwanese parliamentary delegation with Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang in Bejing asking New Delhi to deal “prudently” with Taiwan-related issues to maintain sound Sino-India ties.

Off and on, we get to hear tropes about the pitfalls of India playing the Balochistan card, against Pakistan playing the Kashmir card, or India flashing a Taiwan card against China’s deeply adversarial stand on a range of issues. Recently, China warned India against allowing the Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh in the coming weeks, holding on to its contention that the Tibetan spiritual leader is a “separatist”, followed by the country’s former chief negotiator on the border issue and one of the foremost and highest-ranking figures of Chinese foreign policy in the Hu Jintao administration, Dai Bingguo, arguing there should be some give and take to settle the dragging boundary dispute. Geng Shuang issued a veiled warning that the Dalai Lama’s visit will cause “serious damage” to China-India ties and even threatened by reminding us that China is “strongly opposed” to Dalai Lama visiting “disputed” areas.

China considers the “One-China” policy as the political “bedrock” for the development of US-China relations and warns that if it is compromised, the sound and steady growth of its bilateral relationship as well as bilateral cooperation in major fields with the US would be off the rocker. US President Donald Trump is already betraying signs to drag its feet over his threat that he might use the “One-China” policy as a bargaining chip to pressurise Beijing to change its behaviour. “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a ‘one China policy’ unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade,” Mr Trump said in a December interview with Fox News on Sunday. But the strident rhetoric melted into thin air after President Trump spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping in a late-night phone call in February. The morning after, effects of Chinese diplomacy was evident the way Trump swore by America’s long-standing “One-China” policy.

What explains Chinese behaviour? Ever since the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war to the Chinese communists and fled to the island of Taiwan, Beijing is insistent — as expressed by a PRC writer, that only when “the Taiwan problem is resolved will the complete unification of the ancestral land be realised”. China is not hesitant to reunite with its “rebel province”, even by force, if necessary. This putative reunification is held to be an integral part of Chinese irredentism, erupting off and on into the surface, as evidenced last year by Beijing’s sabre-ratting over the South China Sea, that it considers to be Chinese sovereign territory.

This vision of imperial China envisages a Chinese empire comprising China Proper, Outer China and the tributary territories. The Qing dynasty (1644-1912) became one of the most enduring dynasties to rule the essential territory that comprises today’s China proper that is the cultural heart of China and the core of Han Chinese settlement. Outer China is comprised of buffer territories ruled directly from China Proper but inhabited almost entirely by non-Chinese peoples that historically included all or parts of Xinjiang, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet and, at times, northern Korea and northern Vietnam.

The real danger lies in Chinese perception that borders of contemporary China must be seen as “a continuity and succession from historic borders” of the country, the obsessive level of which is such that it now passes for a de-facto public policy. Its historic arc of territory included all of Korea, Central Asia, Ukraine, Iraq, Iran, Burma and Vietnam as part of the Outer China during the Yuan dynasty (1206-1367). A vast sweep of land encompassing Russian Far East, Sakhalin Island, the western half of the Sea of Japan, the Korean peninsula, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the South China Sea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, the Andaman Sea and Island, Nepal, Bhutan, Kirghizstan, the eastern half of Kazakhstan, Russia’s Altay and Sayan Mountains, and Mongolia was once part the Qing dynasty during its heyday.

Even if we are warned against ruffling Chinese feathers too much, China’s irredentism might have deeper ramifications for Asia and the Pacific in view of its resolve to reclaim some of its lost territories, especially Taiwan, Diaoyutai and the South China Sea, that might seriously hobble the security of America’s allies and friends, including Japan, the Philippines and Thailand, with whom the US has bilateral security treaties besides a congressional act on Taiwan.

The ideological core of China’s “One-China” policy harks back to an imperial China, and is rooted somewhat akin to the desire for a pan-Islamic caliphate. The basic point that must be made is that while China is deeply territorial over its core areas of strategic interest and issues of sovereignty, it is deeply disdainful about India staking the same claims. Both China and Pakistan had given a short shrift to India’s protests — it is yet unclear whether Indian foreign secretary S. Jaishankar’s visit to Beijing recently for the China-India Strategic Dialogue yielded any results — for instance, over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor passing through sovereign Indian territory; for instance, the Gilgit-Baltistan region, bordering disputed PoK, to be Pakistan’s fifth province. While to declare that CPEC is a sham because it is blatantly violative of India’s territorial integrity would be the most daring diplomatic policy move by India to make in 2017, India must learn to come to terms with the irredentist nationalism of China with both diplomatic moves and military prowess as China is no short of a hegemon.

The writer is a social commentator based in Kolkata