Stagecraft and Statecraft: Asian Security

China-India-Japan Power Struggle in Asia

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:00:33 GMT

Dragon, Tiger and Samurai

Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade

by Bill Emmott

Allen Lane

Price: Rs. 795

Book review by Brahma Chellaney

Pioneer, June 22, 2008

A fundamental reordering of power in Asia is challenging the equations between the continent’s three major powers that hold the key to Asian stability. As they maneuver for strategic advantage, China, India and Japan are transforming relations between themselves in a way that portends closer strategic engagement between New Delhi and Tokyo to help parry Beijing’s moves to dominate Asia. The present actions of the three players offer a peep into the future power relations in Asia.

A year-and-a-half after this reviewer published Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, a HarperCollins publication that was a runaway bestseller, Bill Emmott has done a book on the same Sino-Indian-Japanese theme. Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, is a specialist on Japan, having served as a correspondent there and published six books on that country. Not surprisingly, the sections on Japan in his latest book are the most interesting. Emmott doesn’t display the same depth of understanding when analyzing India and China.

He is, however, right about the emergence of the new Asia that is today the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. “Today’s Asia has been shaped by economics, and it is an Asia of increasing prosperity, of interdependence and of global financial influence,” he writes. “This is the first time since the Mongol empire established by Genghis Khan in the 13^th century that Asia has become truly connected together across 6,000 kilometers that separate Japan in the east from India in the west, or even as far as Iran”.

Asia does not end at Iran’s western borders but extends all the way to Turkey, 97 per cent of which is in the Asian hemisphere. The largest and most populous continent by far, Asia also includes 72 per cent of the Russian Federation. It encompasses very different and distinct areas — from the sub-arctic, mineral-rich Siberian plains to the subtropical Indonesian archipelago; and from oil-rich desert lands to fertile river valleys.

Asia is a highly diverse continent. It has countries with the highest and lowest population densities in the world — Singapore and Mongolia, respectively. It has some of the wealthiest states in the world, like Japan and Singapore, and also some of the poorest, such as North Korea, Burma and Afghanistan. It has tiny Brunei, Bhutan and the Maldives and demographic titans like China, India and Indonesia.

Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline in history that had been partly precipitated by European colonial interventions over two centuries. Asia’s share of the world’s economy totalled 60 per cent in 1820, at the advent of the industrial revolution, according to an Asian Development Bank study. It then went into sharp decline over the next 125 years.

Today, it already accounts for 40 per cent of global production — a figure that could, according to some projections, rise to 60 per cent by 2050, when three of the world’s four largest economies (China, India, the U.S. and Japan) would be Asian.

This suggests that Asia is merely seeking to regain the preeminence it had for most of 2,000 years before the industrial revolution allowed the West to vault ahead. As British historian Angus Madison has brought out, China and India were the world’s largest economies for centuries up to 1820. According to Kishore Mahbubani’s new book, The New Asian Hemisphere, “The past two centuries of Western domination of world history are the exception, not the rule, during 2,000 years of global history”.

It is against this background that one should view the power struggle between China and Japan, and China and India. Modern Japan, as Emmott notes, is the product of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, which set in motion its rapid rise. Japan first defeated China in 1895 and then Russia in 1905, “the first time an Asian country had defeated one of the Western imperialist powers”, in Emmott’s words. Japan was also Asia’s first economic success story.

Such is the international hype about China’s rise that it is often forgotten that Japan remains the world’s second largest economic powerhouse, with an economy that is still larger than China’s, with only a tenth of the population. Tokyo may not share Beijing’s obsession with measures of national power, but Japan’s military, except in the nuclear sphere, is the most sophisticated in Asia.

A strong Japan, a strong China and a strong India need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time. China’s emergence as a global player, however, is dividing, not uniting, Asia.

More anecdotal than forward-looking, Emmott, unfortunately, shies away from the power issues. In fact, the question the book carries in its subtitle, How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, is left largely unanswered.

When Emmott does dare to make a prediction, such as the Dalai Lama’s death prompting China to “use brutal methods to suppress an uprising by Buddhist monks in Tibet”, recent events prove him wrong. It did not need the Dalai Lama’s demise for a Tibetan uprising to break out or for China to employ naked repression against monk-led protestors. The Dalai Lama indeed has emerged as China’s enemy No. 1, reflected in the epithets Beijing has hurled at him in recent weeks, including “a wolf with a human face and heart of a beast” and “a serial liar”.

Emmott has little to say about how China is driving Japan and India closer. Tokyo, as if to make up for decades of neglect, is beginning to enthusiastically discover India as an investment destination and a potential strategic partner. Reversing a long-standing pattern, it now provides more development loans to India than to China.

Every action has a reaction. China’s officially scripted anti-Japanese mob protests of 2005 — a testament to the manner nationalism has begun to shape an increasingly assertive Chinese foreign policy — set in motion a Japanese reaction that will take long to concretize. But its signs so far suggest that Japan will not allow China to call the shots in East Asia. China, for its part, is fiercely opposing its two Asian peers, Japan and India, from joining it in the United Nations Security Council as permanent members. In the emerging Asia, the two major non-Western democracies, Japan and India, are set to become close partners.

In that light, a key challenge for Tokyo and New Delhi is to manage their increasingly intricate relationship with an ascendant China determined to emerge as Asia’s dominant power. Yet it makes sense for Japan and India to play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship with Beijing and put the accent on cooperation. An emphasis on cooperation also suits China because it is in accord with its larger strategy to advertise its “peaceful rise”.

Emmott believes, in his optimistic scenario, “China, India and Japan, encouraged by the Americans and Europeans, would work together to build pan-Asian institutions within which to manage their disputes and differences”. But his nine recommendations — half of them addressed to what he calls “the poor old United States of America, the world’s chief bearer of burdens and payer of prices” — provide little clue to how this scenario will be realized.

Sikkim in India-China Relations

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:59:37 GMT

Defending against martial arts

After Arunachal Pradesh, China is testing Indian defences in Sikkim

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, June 6, 2008

After Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim has become a symbol of China’s hardening stance on territorial disputes with India. The only portion of the 4,057-kilometre Himalayan frontier with India that Beijing accepts as settled is the small 206-kilometre Sikkim-Tibet border, defined by the 1890 Anglo-Sikkim Convention. Yet, that has not prevented China from seeking to drag Sikkim into its boundary disputes with India. Consider the following developments:

One, Chinese forces last November destroyed some makeshift Indian army bunkers near Doka La, at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction. Two, China now has laid claim to the “Finger Area”, a 2.1-square-kilometre tract that protrudes like a finger over the Sora Funnel valley, at Sikkim’s northernmost tip. Three, it has coupled a threat to destroy the Finger Area’s stone demarcations with a surge in cross-border forays. And four, it has objected to India’s move to beef up defences in the vulnerable Siliguri Corridor — the chicken neck that connects mainland India with the northeast.

Leverage, not soundness or legitimacy, has always defined China’s claims. Take the 1914 McMahon Line, which set the border between the then-independent Tibet and the northeastern stretch of the British Indian Empire extending into Burma. Beijing has accepted the McMahon Line with Burma but not with India, finding it more profitable to rail against that colonial-era line. While playing the Tibet card against India by laying claim to Arunachal on the basis of its putative historical ties to Tibet, China has employed its non-recognition of the McMahon Line to deter New Delhi from utilizing the Tibet card against it.

Before Sikkim merged with the Indian Union in 1975, Beijing had publicly accepted the 19th-century border line between Sikkim and Tibet. That is how Beijing got saddled with contradictory positions: rejection of the McMahon Line with India as a colonial imposition but acceptance of the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of older colonial vintage, even though the convention had been imposed on the Manchu Qing dynasty when it was unravelling. But given its revisionist craving against a status-quoist India, China is not the one to allow any contradiction to tame its primordial territorial urge.

India’s lamb-like approach has only been grist to the Chinese leverage-building mill. From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty on Tibet to Vajpayee’s blithe recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet — and thereby allowed the aggressor state to shift the spotlight from its annexation of Tibet and Aksai Chin to its claim on Arunachal and assertiveness on Sikkim. Not surprisingly, India has failed to persuade China to agree even to a mutually defined line of control.

Take Sikkim. It is New Delhi that turned Sikkim into a bilateral issue, arming Beijing with leverage. Although Beijing had declined to accept Sikkim’s change of status from an Indian protectorate to an Indian state, no PM until Vajpayee attempted to raise that issue with China. The Sino-Indian disputes involve large chunks of territory, while Sikkim is not only a tiny state, but also Beijing has neither laid claim to it nor disputed its boundary. So China’s insistence on ploughing a lonely furrow on Sikkim was of little consequence.

If Beijing’s depiction of Sikkim as independent was germane to any issue, it was to its own oft-thrown bait of a “package settlement” with India. Sikkim, and the trans-Karakoram tract in occupied Kashmir that Pakistan ceded to China in 1963, do not fall in any of the three Chinese-identified sectors with India — eastern, middle and western. It was to probe whether the “package settlement” idea was a diversionary ruse or a plausible proposal that Indian negotiators, from the time the ongoing border talks began way back in 1981, quietly sought clarity on China’s Sikkim stance. The steadfast Chinese refusal to enter into a discussion either on the specifics of a possible package or on the gaps, as on Sikkim, showed that the ostensible offer was little more than rhetorical bait.

India’s China policy, however, was steered into uncharted waters in June 2003, when Vajpayee visited Beijing, two months after he had reversed course on Pakistan. Desperate in the twilight of his political career to fashion a legacy as a peacemaker, Vajpayee kowtowed in Beijing. He shifted India’s long-standing position on Tibet from it being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory” of China. He linked his Tibet concession with supposed Chinese flexibility on Sikkim. Having turned Sikkim from a non-issue into a bilateral issue, he claimed credit for beginning “the process by which Sikkim will cease to be an issue in India-China relations”.

Five years later, China is seeking to ensure Sikkim will not cease to be a bilateral issue. After all, it has got what it wanted, including the Vajpayee-initiated reopening of the ancient Tibet-Sikkim trade route. It even got Vajpayee to accept a new border-talks framework focused on the illusive “package settlement”, allowing it to renege on its commitment to present maps showing its version of the frontline. That the border talks today have run aground is no accident: the new mechanism was intended to take India round and round the mulberry bush.

India’s diplomatic naïveté can be astonishing. During Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2005 visit, one of his officials handed a new Chinese map showing Sikkim in the same colour as India. Promptly, then Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran displayed that map before the media to triumphantly claim that Beijing had “recognized” Sikkim as part of India. He was followed by Manmohan Singh, who told the Lok Sabha on April 20, 2005: “During my meeting with Premier Wen, he stated that China regarded Sikkim as an ‘inalienable part of India’, and that Sikkim was no longer an issue in India-China relations”.

But has Beijing itself made any such statement to date unequivocally recognizing Sikkim as part of India? The answer is no. The clever practitioner of diplomacy that it is, Beijing has broken the Sikkim issue into umpteen parts, doling out two morsels to get New Delhi to open trade through the strategic Nathula Pass — a one and only reference to the “Sikkim state of the Republic of India”, found in a trade-related paragraph in a 2005 joint statement; and its cessation of cartographic aggression without any formal statement recognizing Sikkim’s present status, thus leaving open the option to resume the cartographic mischief at a later date if circumstances warrant. Also, the trade-related reference to the Sikkim state of India is as empty as the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement’s reference to specific mountain passes and posts, which Nehru misconstrued as Chinese recognition of the Indo-Tibetan frontier despite Beijing saying it had signed a border-trade accord and not a border accord.

Contrast this wily approach with the callow way India has forfeited its bargaining chips. The more India has stripped itself of leverage, the more emboldened and hardline China has become. The government conceded in the Lok Sabha on April 22 that Chinese forces have stepped up “regular cross-border activities” in the past “three years”. More than three dozen Chinese forays into Sikkim alone have been reported so far this year.

Today, as China aggressively probes Indian defences in Sikkim and keeps New Delhi under psychological pressure, India ought to realize its own contribution to encouraging such assertiveness. The newly opened army memorial near Nathula to the 267 martyrs who laid down their lives defending Sikkim against attacking Chinese forces in 1958, 1962 and 1967 is also a cenotaph to India’s reluctance to learn from the past.

Map courtesy The Economist, May 1999

Preventing Burma From Becoming A Failed State

Sun, 11 May 2008 04:45:10 GMT

Stabilize A Faltering Burma

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 10, 2008

Cyclone-wracked Burma stands out as one of the world’s critically weak states that could become a transnational security problem without international stabilization efforts. Yet the tide of Western criticism its junta is facing over the cyclone-related relief operations and constitutional referendum rules out an early lifting of the sanctions against Burma. The referendum and national elections in 2010 are part of the junta’s purported seven-step “roadmap to democracy,” whose implementation within a timeframe, paradoxically, had been demanded by United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.

Burma is a significant state in size, strategic importance and natural resources. It forms the strategic nucleus between India, China and Southeast Asia. Burma is where Asia’s main regions converge — South, Southeast and East Asia. But Burma is also a corrupt, dysfunctional state, although its state machinery, run by a predatory military elite monopolizing power, appears strong enough to wage political repression at home.

Both the annual Failed States Index (FSI) by the Washington-based group, The Fund for Peace, and the Brookings Institution’s new Index of State Weakness in the Developing World list Burma among their top 20 failing states. The Berlin-based Transparency International ranks Burma as the world’s most corrupt state, along with Somalia.

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, it has been increasingly recognized that threats to international peace and security now emanate more and more from the world’s weakest states. Tellingly, two of the world’s critically weak states, North Korea and Pakistan, are members of the nuclear club. It has become routine for the major players to reiterate their commitment to pull critically sick nations back from the precipice of state failure.

It is that argument — to stabilize a failing state — that the Bush administration has used to pour some $11 billion in aid since 9/11 into terror-exporting Pakistan, ranked No. 33 in the Brookings’ Index of State Weakness in the Developing World. The White House now is considering throwing its weight behind Senator Joseph Biden’s call for a $2.5 billion package of additional non-military aid to Pakistan.

Can a different logic or argument be applied to Burma? Or should the stabilization of a failing state only begin when that country actually starts posing — like Pakistan — a threat to international security?

International responses to separate cases of failing states need not be cut from the same cloth because every nation’s situation tends to be different from the others. Still, the undeniable fact is that Burma represents a case of grave state corrosion, with international sanctions having had the effect, however unintended, to lower the living standards of ordinary Burmese.

Another question relates to the extent to which sanctions should be employed. Should punitive actions preclude engagement? Without the Bush administration engaging Pyongyang, to give just one example, would it have been possible to achieve the progress, however tentative it might seem at this stage, on the North Korean nuclear programme? It is nobody’s case that Burma is worse than North Korea.

Foreign trade, investment and tourism exert a liberalizing influence on a regime. External investment helps build private enterprises, boosts employment and wages, and aids civil-society development. But the US-led sanctions against Burma have sought to throttle investment and tourism flows and choke its exports, including textiles, precious gemstones and high-quality tropical hardwoods.

The military has been in power in Burma for 46 long years. But the Western penal approach toward Burma began shaping up only in the 1990s. In fact, it was not until this decade that Burma became a major target of US sanctions, reflected in the congressional passage of the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act and the enforcement of several subsequent punitive executive orders dating up to May 1, 2008.

Some U.S. measures put in place against the junta before 2003 included a ban on new investment and an American veto on any proposed loan or assistance by international financial institutions. That ban on new U.S. investments was imposed in 1997 — the same year ASEAN admitted Burma as a member. The Clinton administration could take that decision in 1997 because at that time the US had minimal trade with Burma and a total investment of only $225 million.

Indeed, until the advent of the Bush administration, Burma was not among the key targets of sanctions, with the broadest U.S. sanctions being directed at countries identified as supporting terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Sudan. But Bush, prodded by his wife, has made Burma key US target.

Laura Bush’s Burma activism — manifest from the unprecedented manner the first lady came to the White House briefing room this week and addressed a news conference on the cyclonic disaster in another country — is tied to the Christian fundamentalist beliefs that have long coloured her and her husband’s thinking. Her ire against a predominantly Buddhist Burma and its military, which sees itself as the upholder of the country’s unity and cultural identity, reputedly has sprung from information from some of the Christian churches that have a sizable number of ethnic-minority adherents in that country and from a meeting with a Karen rape victim.

Laura Bush’s first-ever visit to the White House briefing room was not to announce an aid package for Burma but to hurl insults at its rulers and accuse them of callousness in going ahead with the referendum. Actually, the junta has delayed the vote until May 24 in the cyclone-battered areas, where a third of the population lives. As one American newspaper columnist wrote, when a country has been “laid low by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond with a show of compassion. Not kick ’em when they’re down.”

While the European Union has also slapped sanctions on Burma, especially after the brutal way the September 2007 monk-led protests were suppressed, the blunt fact is that no nation thus far has emulated the extent to which United States has gone in imposing penal actions. In fact, U.S. sanctions against Burma have followed a now-familiar pattern in American policy — first imposing an array of unilateral sanctions against a pariah regime, then discovering that the sanctions aren’t working and, therefore, turning to allies and partners to join in the penal campaign, and finally threatening sanctions against firms from third countries if those nations refuse to toe the U.S. line.

Interestingly, the history of Western sanctions against Burma underscores the manner the penal approach got shaped not by a cause — bringing an end to the military rule — but by the political travails of an iconic personality, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma’s founding father, Aung San, the Japanese-trained commander of the Burmese Independence Army.

Suu Kyi has had close ties with India since her student days. Because her mother, Khin Kyi, became Burma’s ambassador to India in 1960, Suu Kyi studied at a high school and college in New Delhi. Then, in the mid-1980s, Suu Kyi and her British husband, Michael Aris, a scholar in Tibetan and Himalayan studies, were fellows at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies at Simla.

Burma’s present problems can be traced back to the politically cataclysmic events of 1962, when the military under General Ne Win ousted an elected government and thereafter sought to introduce autarky by cutting off the country from the rest of the world. Yet the West, not unhappy that the military had ousted a founding leader of the non-alignment movement, Prime Minister U Nu, imposed no sanctions on Burma.

More than a quarter-century later, even a bloodbath that left several thousand student-led demonstrators dead or injured in Rangoon did not invite Western sanctions. For the democratic opposition, August 8, 1998 — the day of the bloodbath — symbolized the launch of the Burmese democracy movement. Its 20th anniversary thus will be commemorated on the same day the Beijing Olympics kick off with an opening ceremony that some world leaders are threatening to boycott over China’s brutal repression in Tibet.

When the bloodbath happened, the then UK-based Suu Kyi was in Rangoon to take care of her stroke-stricken mother. Within days, she was addressing her first public meeting. Having been accidentally thrown into the vortex of national politics, Suu Kyi then went on to inspire and mould the Western punitive approach toward Burma.

The junta’s detention of her from July 1989 onward and its refusal to honour the people’s verdict in the May 1990 national elections brought Suu Kyi to the centre of world attention. She received several international awards in quick succession — the Rafto Human Rights Prize in October 1990; the European Parliament’s Sakharov Human Rights Prize in July 1991; and the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1991.

A major trigger in galvanizing international opinion was clearly the junta’s brazen refusal to cede power despite the May 1990 national elections, which gave the detained Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party 59 percent of the votes but 82 percent of the seats in Parliament. By keeping her in detention for nearly 13 of the past 19 years, the junta has itself contributed to building Suu Kyi as an international symbol of the Burmese struggle for political freedoms.

The personality-shaped nature of the sanctions approach can also be explained by the fact that before Suu Kyi, there was no unifying figure to challenge the military’s domination in all spheres of the state and to lead a national movement for the restoration of democracy. The Nobel Prize greatly increased her international profile and domestic clout. Western aid cut-offs and other penal actions thus began only in the period after the junta refused to honour the results of the 1990 elections.

How a personality can help shape the sanctions approach was further underlined by the way Suu Kyi’s personal rapport with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright helped spur President Bill Clinton to reluctantly impose a ban in 1997 on new American investments to develop Burma’s resources. That ban was slapped even though international pressure, and the Clinton administration’s own intervention, had made the junta to release Suu Kyi in July 1995 after six years in house detention.

Even Laura Bush cited Suu Kyi this week to justify her Burma activism, announcing that President Bush would soon sign legislation conferring Congress’s highest civilian honour on her, just months after he had personally presented the same prize — the Congressional Gold Medal — to the Dalai Lama.

Not only has the sanctions approach been personality-driven, but also a personality hue has been put on the internal struggle in Burma. That struggle has been portrayed, simplistically, as a battle between Suu Kyi and the junta’s reclusive chairman, General Than Shwe, a fight between good and evil, and a tussle between the forces of freedom and repression. While such a portrayal is useful to draw international attention to a remote country that is peripheral to the interests of all except its neighbours, it helps obscure the complex and multifaceted realities on the ground.

Despite Suu Kyi’s central role in shining an international spotlight for 19 years on the military’s repressive rule, the grim reality is that years of tightening sanctions against Burma haven’t helped loosen the military’s grip on polity and society. If anything, the sanctions have only worsened the plight of ordinary Burmese.

Far from the people gaining political freedoms, an again-detained Suu Kyi’s personal freedom has remained an outstanding issue. While ordinary Burmese have been its main losers, the sanctions-centred approach has proven a strategic boon for China, creating much-desired space for it to expand its interests in and leverage over Burma.

In the period since the West began implementing boycotts, trade bans, aid cut-offs and other sanctions, it has seen its influence in Burma erode. Even as it has become fashionable to talk about better-targeted sanctions, the sanctions instrument, in reality, has become blunter. Sanctions were intended to help the citizens of Burma, yet today it is the ordinary people who bear the brunt of the sanctions.

Because Burma is poor, vulnerable and isolated, it only reinforces its attraction as a sanctions target. Still, Burma has proven an exceedingly difficult case on what the outside world can do, underscoring the limits of securing results through punitive pressures alone.

Building democracy in Burma is vital not only to end repression and empower the masses, but also to facilitate ethnic conciliation and integration in a much divided society that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence. There is need for greater unity and coordination among the major democracies on adopting a pragmatic Burma strategy. A good idea would to build a concert of democracies working together on Burma, serving as a bridge between the U.S., European and Asian positions and fashioning greater coordination in policy actions.

Without a structured and more-progressive international approach, Burma will stay on the present deplorable path, with the military continuing to call the shots. As American analyst Stanley A. Weiss wrote after recently visiting Rangoon, sanctions against Burma “may feel right, but they have helped produce the wrong results. Encouraging Western investment, trade and tourism may feel wrong, but maybe — just maybe — could produce better results. That might be politically incorrect, but at least it wouldn’t be politically futile.”

In an era of a supposed global village, why deny the citizens of Burma the right to enjoy the benefits of globalization and free trade? A more dysfunctional Burma is not in the interest of anyone.

Chinese Stunt Atop the World's Highest Peak

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:04:06 GMT

China’s Tall Claim

Taking Olympic torch up Everest is a poor publicity stunt

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, May 2, 2008

As a triumphal symbol of its rule over Tibet, China is taking the Olympic torch through the “Roof of the World” to Mt Everest, which straddles the Tibetan-Nepalese border. That publicity stunt will only infuse more politics into the Games, already besmirched by the manner China’s pressure helped turn the just-concluded international torch relay into a stage-managed, security exercise everywhere to pander to its sense of self-esteem at the cost of the Olympic spirit of openness.

Taking the torch to the tallest mountain is Beijing’s way of reinforcing its tall claim on Tibet. The blunt fact is that the only occasions in history when Tibet was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from 1644 to 1912. What Beijing today asserts are regions “integral” to its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier foreign dynastic rule in China. Yet revisionist history under communist rule has helped indoctrinate Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires as Han. When a dynasty was indeed ethnically Han, such as Ming (founded between the Yang and Qing empires), Tibet had scant connection to Chinese rulers.

Today, to prevent any demonstrators sneaking in from the Nepalese side and spoiling its triumphalism atop the 8,848-metre Everest, China has pressured a politically adrift Nepal to police entry routes to the peak and deploy troops up to the 6,500-metre Camp II. Having eliminated the outer buffer with India by annexing Tibet, China is now set to expand its leverage over the inner buffer, Nepal, where the Maoists will lead the next government following elections marred by large-scale intimidation.

Beijing’s plan to take the torch to Tibet is nothing but provocative. After all, the Chinese crackdown in Tibet continues, Tibetan monasteries remain sealed off, hundreds of monks and nuns are in jail, and the vast plateau is still closed to foreigners.

In fact, China specially constructed a 108-kilometre blacktop road to Everest to take the torch to the summit, unmindful of the environmental impact of such activities in pristine areas. China’s large hydro projects in Tibet — the source of all of Asia’s major rivers except the Ganges — and its reckless exploitation of the plateau’s vast mineral resources already threaten the region’s fragile ecosystem, with Chinese officials admitting average temperatures are rising faster in Tibet than in rest of China.

Yet such is the Olympics’ politicization that Beijing has extended the torch relay in Tibet into June. After ascending Everest in the coming days, the torch is to travel to Lhasa on June 19.

The torch’s three-month route within China, as compared to just a five-week run through the rest of the world, shows that for the Chinese Communist Party, the Olympics are an occasion not only to showcase national achievements under its rule, but also to help win popular legitimacy for its political monopoly. To some extent, the Olympics have always been political, with politics more about national power and pride. But until this year, politics had not cast such a big shadow since the Soviet-bloc nations boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in reprisal to the US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games.

As if the relay becoming the most divisive in history is not enough, China is stoking more controversy through the torch’s Everest climb and Tibet run. Yet, while continuing brutal repression in Tibet, it has made the Olympics’ success such a prestige issue that it has offered to meet the Dalai Lama’s “private representative”.

Blending hardline actions with ostensible concessions has been Chinese strategy for long. Even as it was readying to invade India in 1962, China was suggesting conciliation. Today, while stepping up cross-border incursions and encouraging India-bashing by its official organs, with a recent China Institute of International Strategic Studies commentary saying an “arrogant India” wants to be taught another 1962-style lesson, Beijing offers more meaningless talks with New Delhi.

Clearly, China has appropriated the Olympic torch for its own political agenda. It never tires from lecturing to the world not to interfere in its internal affairs. Still, during the international relay, it kept interfering in the affairs of other states, wanting to be kept in the loop on the local security arrangements and insisting that pro-Tibet demonstrations not be allowed. It even helped script some counter-demonstrations by young Chinese along the international route.

Now a pressured Nepal has been forced to restrict expeditions to Everest in the busiest mountaineering season and station soldiers with authority to open fire as “a last resort”. All this is to ensure that not a single protester or Tibetan flag greets the torch on Everest.

All autocrats tend to do things that ultimately boomerang. Who would have thought two months ago that Tibet would come to the centre of world attention? A relay carrying the theme, “Journey of Harmony”, has helped bring host China under international scrutiny. The autocracy’s troubles indeed may only be beginning. This year could prove a watershed. Just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the Beijing Games could end up as a spur to radical change in China.

Those who see Tibet as a lost cause forget that history has a way of wreaking vengeance on artificially created empires.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

© Times of India, 2008.

Red Star Over Nepal

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:48:13 GMT

Revolution By Intimidation

Brahma Chellaney

Guest column, India Today, April 28, 2008

The Maoist victory in Nepal elections represents another setback for India in a troubled neighbourhood and calls into question the sustainability of its open-border policy.

Having helped sow the wind in Nepal, India now will reap the Maoist whirlwind. New Delhi first ceded strategic space in Nepal to outside powers and the United Nations and then, in an intimidation-plagued environment, encouraged a process that has sprung a nasty surprise.

Yet, no sooner had the Maoists triumphed in the elections than New Delhi’s after-the-fact rationalizations began.

Nepal is not just another neighbour but a symbiotically linked state with close cultural affinity and open borders with India that permit passport-free passage. The Indo-Nepal equation is deeper than between any two European Union members. Indeed, ever since the1950 Chinese annexation of Tibet eliminated the outer buffer, Nepal has served as an inner buffer between India and China.

The Maoist victory presents India with new potential challenges. It is likely to embolden other revolutionaries in the red corridor from Pashupati to Tirupati that the way to secure power is to wage unbridled violence until the established order gives in to a political and constitutional restructuring.

Equally significant is that India now will have to openly vie with China for influence in a state that had been its security preserve for more than half a century. Maoist leader Prachanda’s pledge of “equidistance between India and China” despite Nepal’s 1950 security treaty with New Delhi underscores Beijing’s gain. At a time when China is still battling a Tibetan uprising, the Nepal events arm it with additional leverage to dissuade New Delhi from playing the Tibet card.

It is karmic justice that the monarchy, which for long sought to play the China card against India, now faces extinction from the very forces — the Maoists — it initially helped rear to counter the India-friendly Nepali Congress.

The poll outcome raises the spectre that radicalization could extend from the polity to the military, as the victors seek to integrate their former fighters into the security forces. The Maoists’ stint in office, however, could help gradually defang them by making them indistinguishable from other politicians.

The new situation signals three likely developments. First, Nepal’s rocky and troubled path to democracy since 1990 is unlikely to end, with the polls marking only the newest chapter in a blemished experiment. Second, India’s relationship with Nepal is set to become more complicated, with little progress likely on addressing Indian security concerns or harnessing hydropower reserves for mutual benefit. And third, the Maoists’ hard part comes now on the twin issues of governance and Constitution framing.

Those who sought to bring about a revolution by chipping away at state institutions are being called upon to reverse state atrophy. It won’t be easy for them to embrace what the situation demands — consensus building. If anything, they are likely to make India a convenient scapegoat for their failures in office.

Despite its proverbial aversion to hard decisions, India today is left with no soft options. An open-border policy is sustainable only if India moves its security perimeter to the Nepalese frontier with Tibet. The onus must be placed on the Maoists to show through actions that the government they lead deserves sustained Indian assistance, or else these revolutionaries will take Indian aid and also damn India.

New Delhi ought not to shy away from employing the immense leverage it holds: Nepal’s topography, with mountainous terrain sliding southward into plains, shapes its economic dependence on India. The ethnic Madhesis who populate the Terai, Nepal’s food bowl, are India’s natural constituency, and that card is begging to be exercised.

The author is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research.

Tibet and Burma: A Study in Contrast

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:49:18 GMT

Contrasting responses to crackdowns in Tibet and Burma

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, April 9, 2008

There are striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located, endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive rule, resisting hard power with soft power and facing an influx of Han settlers. Yet the international response to the brutal crackdown on monk-led protests in Tibet and Burma has been a study in contrast.

When the Burmese crackdown on peaceful protesters in Yangon last September left at least 31 people dead — according to a U.N. special rapporteur's report — it ignited international indignation and a new round of U.S.-led sanctions. More than six months later, the tepid international response to an ongoing harsh crackdown in Tibet by the Burmese junta's closest ally, China, raises the question whether that country has accumulated such power as to escape even censure over actions that are far more repressive and extensive than what Burma witnessed.

Despite growing international appeals to Beijing to respect Tibetans' human rights and cultural identity, and to begin dialogue with the Dalai Lama, there has been no call for any penal action, however mild, against China. Even the leverage provided by the 2008 Beijing Olympics is not being seized upon to help end the repression in the Tibetan region.

When the Burmese generals cracked down on monks and their prodemocracy supporters, the outside world watched vivid images of brutality, thanks to citizen reporters using the Internet. But China employs tens of thousands of cyberpolice to censor Web sites, patrol cybercafes, monitor text and video messages from cellular phones, and hunt down Internet activists. As a result, the outside world has yet to see a single haunting image of the Chinese use of brute force against Tibetans. The only images released by Beijing are those that seek to show Tibetans in bad light, as engaged in arson and other attacks.

The continuing arbitrary arrests of Tibetans through house-to-house searches are a cause of serious concern, given the high incidence of mock trials followed by quick executions in China. That country still executes more people every year than all other nations combined, despite its adoption of new rules requiring a review of death sentences.

The important parallels between Tibet and Burma begin with the fact that Burma's majority citizens — the ethnic Burmans — are of Tibetan stock. It was China's 1950 invasion of Tibet that opened a new Han entrance to Burma.

But now the Han demographic invasion of the Tibetan plateau is spilling over into Burma, with Chinese presence conspicuous in Mandalay city and the areas to the northeast.

Today, the resistance against repressive rule in both Tibet and Burma is led by iconic Nobel laureates, one living in exile and the other under house detention. In fact, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel peace prize in quick succession for the same reason: For leading a non-violent struggle.

Each is a symbol of soft power, building such moral authority as to command wide international respect and influence.

Yet another parallel is that heavy repression has failed to break the resistance to autocratic rule in both Tibet and Burma. If anything, growing authoritarianism has begun to backfire, as the popular monk-led revolts in Tibet and Burma have highlighted.

Vantage location and rich natural resources underscore the importance of Tibet and Burma. The Tibetan plateau makes up one-fourth of China's landmass. Annexation has given China control over Tibet's immense water resources and mineral wealth, including boron, chromite, copper, iron ore, lead, lithium, uranium and zinc. Most of Asia's major rivers originate in the Tibetan plateau, with their waters a lifeline to 47 percent of the global population living in South and Southeast Asia and China. Through its control over Asia's main source of freshwater and its building of huge dams upstream, China holds out a latent threat to fashion water into a political weapon.

Energy-rich Burma is a land bridge between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. China, however, has succeeded in strategically penetrating Burma, which it values as an entryway to the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Beijing is now busy completing the Irrawaddy Corridor through Burma involving road, river, rail, port and energy-transport links.

The key difference between Tibet and Burma is that the repression in the former is by an occupying power. Months after the 1949 communist takeover in Beijing, China's People's Liberation Army entered what was effectively a sovereign nation in full control of its own affairs.

At the root of the present Tibet crisis is China's failure to grant the autonomy it promised when it imposed on Tibetans a "17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet" in 1951. Instead of agreeing to autonomy, Beijing has actually done the opposite: It has pursued Machiavellian policies by breaking up Tibet as it existed before the invasion, and by seeking to reduce Tibetans to a minority in their own homeland through the state-supported relocation of millions of Han Chinese.

It has gerrymandered Tibet by making Amdo (the present Dalai Lama's birthplace) Qinghai province and merging eastern Kham into the Han provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. More recently, Chongqing province was carved out of Sichuan.

The traditional Tibetan region is a distinct cultural and economic entity. But with large, heavily Tibetan areas having been severed from Tibet, what is left is just the 1965 creation — the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the central plateau comprising U-Tsang and western Kham, or roughly half of the Tibetan plateau. Yet China has changed even the demographic composition of TAR, where there were hardly any Han settlers before the Chinese annexation.

TAR, home to barely 40 percent of the 6.5 million Tibetans in China, was the last "autonomous region" created by the Chinese communists, the others being Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang (1955), Guangxi Zhuang (1958) and Ningxia (1958). In addition, China has 30 "autonomous prefectures," 120 "autonomous counties" and 1,256 "autonomous townships."

All of the so-called autonomous areas are in minority homelands, which historically were ruled from Beijing only when China itself had been conquered by foreigners — first by the Mongols, and then the Manchu. Today, these areas are autonomous only in name, with that tag designed to package a fiction to the ethnic minorities. Apart from not enforcing its one-child norm in these sparsely populated but vast regions (which make up three-fifths of China's landmass), Beijing grants them no meaningful autonomy. In Tibet, what the ravages of the Cultural Revolution left incomplete, forced "political education" since has sought to accomplish.

China grants local autonomy just to two areas, both Han — Hong Kong and Macau. In the talks it has held with the Dalai Lama's envoys since 2002, Beijing has flatly refused to consider the idea of making Tibet a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong and Macau. It has also rebuffed the idea of restoring Tibet, under continued Chinese rule, to the shape and size it existed in 1950.

Instead it has sought to malign the Dalai Lama for seeking "Greater Tibet" and pressed a maximalist historical position. Not content with the Dalai Lama's 1987 concession in publicly forsaking Tibetan independence, Beijing insists that he also affirm that Tibet was always part of China. But as the Dalai Lama said in a recent interview, "Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history."

Contrary to China's claim that its present national political structure is unalterable to accommodate Tibetan aspirations, the fact is that its constitutional arrangements have continued to change, as underscored by the creation of 47 new supposedly "autonomous" municipalities or counties in minority homelands just between 1984 and 1994, according to the work of Harvard scholar Lobsang Sangay.

Until the latest uprising, Beijing believed its weapon of repression was working well and thus saw no need to bring Tibetans together under one administrative unit, as they demand, or to grant Tibet a status equivalent to Hong Kong and Macau. President Hu Jintao, who regards Tibet as his core political base from the time he was the party boss there, has ruled out any compromise that would allow the Dalai Lama to return home from his long exile in India.

Following the uprising, Hu's line on Tibet is likely to further harden, unless effective international pressure is brought to bear.

The contrasting international response to the repression in Tibet and Burma brings out an inconvenient truth: The principle that engagement is better than punitive action to help change state behavior is applied only to powerful autocratic countries, while sanctions are a favored tool to try and tame the weak. Sanctions against China are also precluded by the fact that the West has a huge commercial stake in that country. But Burma, where its interests are trifling, is a soft target.

So, while an impoverished Burma reels under widening sanctions, a booming China openly mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of countless hundreds of students did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions against Beijing.

No one today is suggesting trade sanctions. But given that Beijing secured the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the promise to improve its human-rights record, the free world has a duty to demand that it end its repression in Tibet or face an international boycott, if not of the Games, at least of the opening ceremony, to which world leaders have been invited. By making the success of this summer's Olympics a prestige issue, China has handed the world valuable leverage that today is begging to be exercised.

This rare opportunity must not be frittered away.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20080409bc.html

Beijing faces moment of truth on its brutal occupation of Tibet

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:03:26 GMT

Prolonged unrest in Tibet could unravel China's monocracy

The scrutiny that will accompany the 2008 Beijing Olympics could be the spur that brings change to China.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, March 27, 2008

The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist China's history. It is a rude jolt to the world's biggest and longest surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven efforts to pacify Tibet through more than half a century of ruthless repression, in which as many as a million Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives.

The open backlash against the Tibetans' economic marginalization, the rising Han influx and the state assault on Tibetan religion and ecology constitutes, in terms of its spread, the largest rebellion in Tibet since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced to flee to India. Even in 1989, when the last major Tibetan uprising was suppressed through brute force, the unrest had not spread beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing calls the Tibet Autonomous Region. Now, the state's intensifying brutal crackdown across the Tibetan plateau — an area more than two-thirds the size of Western Europe — dwarfs other international human-rights problems like Burma and Darfur, Sudan.

Indeed, the current revolt openly challenges China's totalitarian system in a year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to showcase the autocracy's remarkable economic achievements. It is a defining moment for a system that has managed to entrench itself for 59 long years and yet faces gnawing questions about its ability to survive by reconciling China's dual paths of market capitalism and political monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

The latest events have laid bare the strength of the Tibetan grassroots resistance despite decades of oppression, including the demolition of monasteries, the jailing of independent-minded monks and nuns, the state's wanton interference in the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism, and the forced political re-education of Tibetan youth and monks. Tibet's rapid Sinicization today threatens to obliterate the Tibetan culture in ways the previous decades of repression could not. That threat has only sharpened the Tibetan sense of identity and yearning for freedom.

For Chinese President Hu Jintao, who owes his swift rise to the top of the party hierarchy to his martial law crackdown in Tibet in 1989, the chickens have come home to roost. The fresh uprising, coinciding with Hu's re-election as president, epitomizes the counterproductive nature of the Hu-backed policies — from seeking to change the demographic realities on the ground through the "Go West" Han migration campaign, to draconian curbs on Tibetan farmland and monastic life.

The Tibetans' feelings of subjugation and loss have been deepened as they have been pushed to the margins of society, with their distinct culture being reduced to a mere showpiece to draw tourists and boost the local economy, which benefits the Hans.

The natives also have been incensed by atheistic China's growing intrusion into Tibetan Buddhist affairs, as exemplified by Beijing's recent proclamation making itself the sole authority to anoint lamas — traditionally a divine process to select a young boy as a Buddha incarnation. Having captured the institution of the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing is preparing the ground to install its own puppet Dalai Lama after the present aging incumbent passes away. So shortsighted is this approach that the rulers in Beijing don't realize that such a scenario will surely radicalize Tibetan youth and kill prospect of a peaceful settlement of the Tibet issue.

The ongoing crackdown, behind the cover of a Tibet that has been cut off from the outside world, symbolizes what the communist leadership itself admits is a "life and death struggle" over Tibet. The likely further hardening of the leadership's stance on Tibet, as a consequence of the uprising, will only help mask a serious challenge with wider political implications. At a minimum, the crackdown by a regime wedded to the unbridled exercise of state power promises to exacerbate the situation on the ground.

The muted global response thus far to the bloodletting and arbitrary arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China's growing clout, underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military power and unrivaled $1.5 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, largely invested in U.S. dollar-denominated assets. Given that even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions, the lack of any attempt to penalize China for its continuing human-rights violations in Tibet should not come as a surprise.

But Tibet's future will be determined not so much by the international response as by developments within China.

After all, the only occasions in history when Tibet was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from mid-17th century onward. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel at the beginning of the 20th century that Tibet once again became an independent political entity.

What Beijing today asserts are regions "integral" to its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier foreign dynastic rule in China. Yet, revisionist history under communist rule has helped indoctrinate Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires as Han, with the result that educated Chinese have come to feel a false sense of ownership about every territory that was part of those dynasties.

The truth is that Tibet came under direct Han rule for the first time in history following the 1949 communist takeover in China. Just as the politically cataclysmic developments of 1949 led to Tibet's loss of its independent status, it is likely to take another momentous event in Chinese history for Tibet to regain its sovereignty.

That event could be the unraveling of the present xenophobic dictatorship and the synthetic homogeneity it has implanted, not just in institutional structures but also in the national thought process. Today, the Chinese autocrats are able to fan ultranationalism as a substitute for the waning communist ideology because the central tenet of the communists' political philosophy is uniformity, with Hu's slogan of a "harmonious society" designed to underline the theme of conformity with the republic. The Manchu's assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the natives in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts.

With 60 percent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire's outer security perimeter.

Territorially, Han power is at its pinnacle today. Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centered on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the South and East China Seas and on India's Arunachal Pradesh state — nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. Few realize that China occupies one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Tibet, however, is a reminder that attempts at forcible assimilation can backfire. That was also the lesson from Yugoslavia, a model of forced integration of nationalities. But once its central autocratic structure corroded, Yugoslavia progressively but violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening of the central political authority in China for Tibet to reclaim autonomy.

Those who gloomily see the battle for Tibetan independence as irretrievably lost forget that history has a way of wreaking vengeance on artificially created empires. The Central Asian states got independence on a platter, without having to wage a struggle. Who in Central Asia had dreamed of independence in mid-1991? Yet months later, the Soviet empire had unraveled. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania twice lost their independence to an expanding Russian empire, only to regain it each time due to a cataclysmic event — World War I and the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The post-1991 flight of Russians from large parts of Central Asia is a testament that the Sinicization of the Tibetan region is not an unalterable process.

The Tibetan struggle, one of the longest and most powerful resistance movements in modern world history, exposes China's Achilles' heel. The reverberations from the latest bloodshed on the land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture will be felt long after Chinese security forces have snuffed out the last protest.

Hu knows that the Tibetan uprising has the potential to embolden Han citizens in China to demand political freedoms — a campaign that would sound the death knell of single-party rule. The last time he suppressed a Tibetan revolt, his then boss, Deng Xiaoping, had to borrow a leaf from Hu's Tibet book to crush prodemocracy protesters at Tiananmen Square two months later. Hundreds were slain.

This year could prove a watershed in Chinese history. Just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany's collapse, the 2008 Beijing Games — communist China's coming-out party that has already been besmirched by the crackdown in Tibet — may be a spur to radical change in that country.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times

Why Tibet Matters to India

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:52:13 GMT

New Delhi has a major stake in Tibet, with its security tied to the developments there

India’s Muddle Path

By Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, March 19, 2008

When Burma’s junta last September killed at least 31 people during monk-led protests in Rangoon, it triggered international outrage and a new wave of US-led sanctions. Now the junta’s closest associate, the world’s largest autocracy in Beijing, has cracked down on monks, nuns and others in Tibet, with an indeterminate number of people killed. The muted global response thus far raises the question whether China has accumulated such power as to escape international censure over highly repressive actions.

For India, the Chinese crackdown on monk-led pro-independence protests in Tibet — the biggest in almost two decades — is an opportunity to highlight a festering issue that is at the heart of the India-China divide. That divide cannot be bridged unless Beijing begins a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet by coming to terms with the reality that nearly 60 years of oppression have failed to crush the grassroots Tibetan resistance. By laying claim to Indian territories on the basis of alleged Tibetan ecclesiastical or tutelary links to them, Beijing itself underlines the centrality of the Tibet issue.

While China unabashedly plays the Tibet card against India, such as by staking a claim not just to Tawang but to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly thrice the size of Taiwan — New Delhi fights shy to even shine a spotlight on the Tibet issue. Worse, India has unwittingly strengthened China’s Tibet-linked claims to Indian territories, including occupied Aksai Chin, by recognizing Tibet as part of the People’s Republic. Even when the Dalai Lama backs the Indian position on Arunachal, New Delhi is too coy to translate such support into diplomatic advantage.

It is a testament to India’s pusillanimity that, even as Chinese security forces arbitrarily arrest and publicly parade young Tibetans, New Delhi has received fulsome praise from Premier Wen Jiabao, who, while calling the Tibet issue a “very sensitive one in our relations with India”, said, “We appreciate the position and the steps taken by the Indian government in handling Tibetan independence activities masterminded by the Dalai clique”. The orchestrated, Cultural Revolution-style attacks on the Dalai Lama are a reminder that a line of moderation vis-à-vis Beijing is counterproductive. Two decades after he changed the Tibetan struggle for liberation from Chinese rule to a struggle for autonomy within the People’s Republic, the Dalai Lama has little to show for his ‘middle way’, other than having made himself a growing target of Chinese vilification.

It is past time India reclaimed leverage by subtly changing its stance on Tibet. It can do that without provocation. Indian policy has been held hostage for long by a legion of panda-huggers, who bring discredit to our democracy and comfort to our adversary. These Sinophiles believe the only alternative to continued appeasement is confrontation. They cannot grasp the simple fact that between appeasement and confrontation lie a hundred different options. A false choice — pay obeisance to Beijing or brace up for confrontation — has been used to block any legitimate debate on policy options.

Today, several developments are underscoring the need for a more nuanced approach on Tibet that adds elasticity and leverage to Indian diplomacy. These include China’s frenetic build-up of military and transport capabilities on the vast Himalayan plateau; its refusal to clarify the frontline with India; and its latent threat to fashion water as a weapon.

Tibet’s vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems. With global warming likely to aggravate water woes, China’s control over the riverhead of Asia’s waters carries major security implications for lower-riparian states like India. As World Bank Vice-President Ismail Serageldin warned in 1995, “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

Tibet’s forcible absorption not only helped China to expand its landmass by one-third, but also has given it a contiguous border, for the first time in history, with India, Bhutan and Nepal, and an entryway to Pakistan and Burma. By subsequently annexing Aksai Chin, China was able to link Tibet with another vast, restive region, Xinjiang, home to Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups and seat of a short-lived independent East Turkestan Republic up to 1949. Today, China is recklessly extracting Tibet’s immense mineral deposits, unmindful that such activities and its new hydro and railway projects are playing havoc with Tibet’s fragile ecosystem — critical to the climate security of India and other regional states.

Tibet’s security and autonomy are tied to India’s own well-being. If the ‘Roof of the World’ is on fire, India can hardly be safe. Tibet indeed symbolizes that a sustainable regional order has to be built on a balance among the market, culture and nature. Tibet is likely to determine whether we will see a more cooperative or a more competitive Asia — a stable, peaceful Asia that expands its economic and cultural renaissance, or an Asia riven by Great Power rivalries and the continued suppression of conquered nationalities.

Against this background, India needs to do at least three things. First, softly put the focus on the core issue, Tibet, including on China’s denial of autonomy to that region, in breach of the ‘17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet’ imposed on the Tibetans in 1951. New Delhi could sugar-coat this by saying China’s own security would be advanced if it reached out to Tibetans and concluded a deal that helped bring back the Dalai Lama from his long exile in India. The onus must be placed squarely on Beijing to ensure that Tibet, having ceased to be a political buffer, now becomes a political bridge between India and China.

The choice before India is to either stay stuck in a defensive, unviable negotiating position, where it has to fend off Chinese territorial demands, or to take the Chinese bull by the horns and question the very legitimacy of Beijing’s right to make territorial claims ecclesiastically on behalf of Tibetan Buddhism when it still has to make peace with Tibetans.

Second, if Tibet is to be the means by which India coops up the bull in its own China shop, it has to treat the Dalai Lama as its most powerful ally. As long as the Dalai Lama is based at Dharamsala, he will remain India’s biggest strategic asset against China. The Tibetans in Tibet will neither acquiesce to Chinese rule, as their latest defiance shows, nor side with China against India. If after the death of the present incumbent, the institution of the Dalai Lama gets captured by Beijing (the way it has anointed its own Panchen Lama), India will be poorer by several army divisions against China. To foil China’s scheme, India should be ready with a plan.

Third, India has to stop gratuitously referring to Tibet as part of China. From Nehru to Vajpayee, no Indian PM returned from a Beijing visit without referring to Tibet, in some formulation or the other, as part of China. Last January, Manmohan Singh became the first PM to return from Beijing without making any unwarranted reference to Tibet to please his hosts. The ‘T’ word is conspicuously missing from the joint communiqué — a key point the media failed to catch. If this is not to be a one-shot aberration, Indian policy has to reflect this change, however unobtrusively.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=3f44c623-a1cb-43ee-8b50-e421ec3d3bff&&Headline=India%e2%80%99s+muddle+path

Why the Australia-India-Japan-U.S. Quadrilateral Initiative makes sense

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:12:45 GMT

The contours of a new geopolitical line-up in the Asia-Pacific are becoming clearer

Differential equations

The Hindustan Times, February 13, 2008

By Brahma Chellaney

At a time when a qualitative reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players in the Asia-Pacific are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting a China-led axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, would guide their foreign-policy strategy. Yet the new Great Game under way plays up regime character as a key element.

India has already faced such a values-based geopolitical divide in its region, but singly. The Sino-Pakistan nexus against India is unique: Never before in history has one country armed another with nuclear weapons and missiles so as to contain a third nation with which the two share common frontiers. Authoritarian bonds have also been employed in more recent years to try and open a new Chinese flank against India via Burma.

Indeed, the stated aim of the 1962 Chinese invasion — “to teach India a lesson” — was rooted in a geopolitical divide centred on incompatible political values. For Mao Zedong, that war was a means to humiliate and demolish India as an alternative democratic model to totalitarian China. The 32-day aggression, which Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed "Mao's India War", helped boost China’s image at India’s expense.

More than 45 years later, the speed and scale of Asia’s economic rise is bringing new players, including India, into the world’s geopolitical marketplace. The eastward movement of power and influence, once concentrated in the West, has been accompanied by a high-stakes competition for new strategic tie-ups and greater access to resources, making strategic stability a key concern in Asia.

In the absence of a common identity or institutional structures, one challenge Asia faces is to develop shared norms and values, without which no community can be built. Yet, with only 16 of the 39 Asian countries free, according to Freedom House, creating common norms is a daunting task, especially when some states still flout near-universal values.

A bigger Asian challenge is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single power (as Europe has done) so that greater political understanding and trust could be built. This challenge pits two competing visions. On one side is the mythical ‘Middle Kingdom’ whose foreign policy seeks to make real the legend that drives its official history — China’s centrality in the world. Its autocrats believe that in their calculus to make China a “world power second to none”, gaining pre-eminence in Asia is vital. On the other side is the interest of many Asian nations and outside powers in a cooperative order founded on power equilibrium.

Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules ought to matter more than regime form. But regime character often makes playing by the rules difficult. As a new book, China’s Great Leap, edited by Minky Worden, reveals, China won the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the plea that awarding the Games would help improve its human-rights record. Instead, it has let loose new repression. But just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Games could help trigger radical change in China.

Today, Beijing’s best friends are fellow autocracies while those seeking to forestall power disequilibrium happen to be on the other side of the value divide. Political values thus could easily come to define a new geopolitical divide. What may seem implausible globally, given America’s lingering tradition of propping up dictators in the Muslim world, is conceivable in the Asia-Pacific theatre as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. But for the divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values would not matter so much.

It was China that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to help unite it with the Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical alliance. Designed originally to bring the Central Asian nations — the so-called Stans — under the Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is shaping up as a potential ‘NATO of the East’. Yet, when Australia, India, Japan and the US last year started the exploratory ‘Quadrilateral Initiative’, Beijing was quick to cry foul and see the apparition of an ‘Asian NATO’. A Chinese demarche to each Quad member followed.

Through sustained diplomatic pressure, mounted on the back of growing economic clout, Beijing has sought to wilt the Quad. A new opening has come with the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd being elected Australia’s prime minister. With the Australian economic boom being driven by China’s ravenous resource imports, the previous John Howard government wasn’t exactly enthused by the Quadrilateral Initiative, as Beijing had already taken a dim view of Canberra’s US-backed bilateral and trilateral defence tie-ups with Tokyo. But the new Rudd government, as reflected in its foreign minister’s remarks last week, is signalling a wish to turn its back on the Quad.

Australia’s growing wariness is no different than India’s. After having called liberal democracy “the natural order of social and political organization in today’s world”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now says the Quad “never got going”. Even the US has downplayed the initiative, whose real architect, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was driven out of office last fall. Yet, the Quad staged week-long war games in the Bay of Bengal, roping in Singapore.

Rudd, though, is so mesmerized by his Mandarin fluency that he feels an inexorable itch to cosy up to Beijing. In a strange spectacle, Canberra has proclaimed it will sell uranium to Beijing (without fail-safe safeguards against diversion to weapons use) but not to New Delhi, even if the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group were to carve out an exemption for India. The reason proffered for overturning the Howard government’s decision is that “India has not signed the NPT”. That rationale is flawed: While the NPT carries an Article I prohibition on transfer of nuclear military technology outside the club of five recognized nuclear powers, its state-parties are actually enjoined by Article IV to pursue peaceful nuclear cooperation with all countries.

If Rudd has read the NPT, it probably was a Chinese translation, because there is nothing in its official text that forbids civil cooperation under safeguards with a non-signatory. But why blame Canberra for trotting out an indefensible excuse when the Indian foreign minister is smitten by the same myth? Pranab Mukherjee told Parliament in December that the Hyde Act was passed because “the US cannot enter into any civilian nuclear cooperation with any country which is not a signatory to the NPT”. Unknown to the minister, US law does not condition cooperation to NPT membership.

The Quad was never intended to be a formal institution, although John McCain has vowed to institutionalize it as US president. Founded on the historically valid hypothesis of democratic peace, it is supposed to serve as an initial framework to promote security dialogue and interlinked partnerships among an expanding group of Pacific Rim democracies. Such collaboration is already being built. As an idea, the Quad will not only survive the current vicissitudes, but it also foreshadows the likely geopolitical line-up in the years ahead. For India, close strategic cooperation with Quad members plus Russia holds the key to Asian peace and stability.

Need for India to Reclaim Leverage Against China

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:58:13 GMT

Mixed Signals

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, February 6, 2008

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1149345

The periodic summit meetings between India and China are deceptively all sweetness and light. During Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit, there was no forward meeting on any contentious issue, but the accent was on the positive. That should surprise no one. Although the underlying wariness and suspicions remain, the two giants, for different reasons, feel the need to publicly play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship and emphasize cooperation.

Yet, the conciliatory words that come out from the bilateral summitry are a poor substitute to the glaring lack of progress on the issues that divide IndiaChina, like the territorial disputes. If anything, the rhetoric at times is a painful reminder of the empty slogans of the 1950s that helped blind India to China’s furtive territorial encroachments and subsequent surprise invasion in 1962, which Jawaharlal Nehru characterized as Beijing’s return of “evil for good”.

The wounds of that 32-day war have been kept open by Beijing’s assertive claims to Indian areas, even as it holds on to the territorial gains of that conflict. China’s unwillingness to settle the border dispute on the basis of the status quo has drawn further strength from then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 2003 recognition of Tibet as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China”. Emboldened by that recognition, which stripped India of diplomatic leverage, Beijing has become publicly assertive on its claim to Arunachal Pradesh, a state more than twice the size of Taiwan. Now it insists that India cede at least the Tawang valley — a critical corridor between Lhasa and Assam of immense military import because it overlooks the chicken-neck that connects India with its northeast.

In that light, Dr. Singh has done well to visit Arunachal, becoming the first PM in 12 years to tour that isolated but strategically located state. But he would have strengthened his hands had he visited Arunachal, “the land of the rising sun”, before going to Beijing, rather than upon his return. Also, instead of having omitted Tawang from his tour of Arunachal, the PM ought to have made a stop there to send out a needed signal to Beijing.

Employing the doctrine of incremental territorial annexation, Beijing has laid claim to Tawang on the basis of that area’s putative historical ties to Tibet. By 1951, China had fully occupied the Tibetan plateau, yet no Chinese set foot in Tawang until the invading Chinese army in 1962 poured through the NamkhaValley, close to the tri-junction of Tibet, India and Bhutan. In pouring forces into Tawang, China scoffed at India’s contention that, in conformity with the McMahon Line, the border in that region ran along the high Thagla Ridge. Still, after halting its aggression, Beijing withdrew from Tawang, as it did from the rest of Arunachal (then NEFA), while keeping its territorial gains in Ladakh. That was in line with the punitive aim of its aggression, which Premier Zhou Enlai had admitted was “to teach India a lesson”.

Significantly, Dr. Singh is the first Indian PM to return from Beijing without making any unwarranted reference to Tibet to please his hosts. The ‘T’ word is conspicuously missing from the joint communiqué — a key point the media failed to catch. Contrast that with the last joint communiqué issued when President Hu Jintao visited New Delhi: “The Indian side reiterates that it has recognized the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China, and that it does not allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in India. The Chinese side expresses its appreciation for the Indian position”.

The only way India can build counter-leverage against Beijing is to gently shine a spotlight on the Tibet issue and China’s failure to grant promised autonomy to the Tibetans. This can be done by India in a way that is neither provocative nor confrontational. New Delhi ought to make the point that China’s security will be enhanced if it reached out to Tibetans and concluded a deal that helped bring back the Dalai Lama from his long exile in India.

A first step for India to help reclaim leverage and stop being overtly defensive is to cease gratuitously referring to Tibet as part of China. In doing just that, Dr. Singh has shown good judgement. He even sent the foreign secretary to Dharamsala last Sunday to brief the Dalai Lama on his Beijing discussions. That the Dalai Lama remains an invaluable asset for India can be seen from his public repudiation of China’s claim that Arunachal, including Tawang, were traditionally part of Tibet.

The writer is a strategic affairs expert.