ACROSS THE HIMALAYAN GAP |
Sreedhar
|
A
general impression going around amongst the Indian strategic community is
that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is becoming superpower in the
next 20 years. It may even offer a challenge to the US by that time. It is
further argued that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is going to be a
formidable force in the years to come because of the ongoing modernisation
plans. Some even argue that now is the correct time to resolve the
Sino-Indian border question and establish cordial relations as quickly as
possible with China. Whatever may be reasons for this Indian mindset,
whether it was the 1962 debacle or the 1964 Chinese nuclear explosion, these
arguments need a closer examination. The Wars the PLA Fought
Korean War of 1950-51
Before
we examine Sino-Indian relations, the first question that needs to be asked
is whether the PLA is really militarily so superior as compared to the
Indian armed forces or not? A close scrutiny of the PLA’s performance
during the past 47 years indicates that at every given opportunity, the PLA
flexed its muscle and its performance can best be described as a mixed
kitty. During the late Chairman Mao’s years, the PLA went into action five
times - three times to fight a war with neighbours, once to fight the US
“imperialism” and once to occupy the Paracel Islands in the South China
Sea. The first was in 1950-Y when the PL4 clashed with the US forces in the
Korean Peninsula. Whatever may be the claims made by the Chinese, the PLA
was defeated and suffered heavy casualties. Many would argue that the
technological superiority of the US armed forces played a decisive role in
the defeat of the PLA. Sino-Idian War of 1962
A
decade later, after the failure of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward
Programme, in October 1962, China decided to resolve the Sino-Indian border
issue by the use of force. In October 1962, the PLA moved in swiftly,
defeated the Indian Army and declared unilateral ceasefire after taking
possession of approximately 30,000 sq km of Indian territory. Though no
official history of the war from the Indian side has been published as yet,
the Chinese official version is that they repulsed the Indian attack on
Chinese territory. Various versions of the people associated with that war
from the Indian side, however, indicate that the Chinese succeeded largely
due to the failure of the politico-military leadership of India to assess
correctly the PLA’s capabilities. Way back in 1974 itself, people like K.
Subrahmanyam, who were associated with China during that crucial period in
India’s Ministry of Defence, argued that had the Indian Air Force been
pressed into action, the course of the Sino-Indian war of 1962 would have
been different. In fact, at the time of the war itself elder statesman of
India, C. Rajagopalachari, advocated the deployment of the Air Force by
India to destroy the supply lines of the Chinese Army. Nathu La of 1967
Three
years later, in 1965, two significant events took place on the Sine-Indian
border. The first was the warning issued to India about Chinese sheep not
being allowed to graze on their side of the border by India. This happened
in September 1965 when the Indo-Pak war was simmering on India’s western
border. At
the same time, in September-December 1965, the PLA sent probing missions on
the entire Sikkim-Tibet border. According to one account, there were seven
border intrusions on the Sikkim-Tibet border between September 7 and
December 12, 1965, involving the PLA. In all these border incursions, the
Indian side responded “firmly” without provoking the other. Though
details of casualties of these PLA border incursions are not reported, there
were reports indicating that the PLA suffered “heavy” casualties against
“moderate” loss by India. Two
years later, in September 1967, in spite of their setbacks in 1965, the PLA
launched a direct attack on the lndian armed forces at Nathu La, on the
Sikkim-Tibet border. The six-day “border skirmishes” from September 7-6
to 13, 1967, had all the elements of a high drama, including exchange of
heavy artillery fire, and the PLA soldiers tried to cross the border in
large numbers. The
attack was repulsed at all points, According to an account of this incident,
from the details of the fighting available, it appeared the Chinese had
received a severe mauling in the artillery duels across the barbed wire
fence. Indian gunners scored several direct hits on Chinese bunkers,
including a command post from where the Chinese operations were being
directed. The Chinese were also known to have suffered at least twice as
many casualties as the Indians in this encounter between Indian and Chinese
armed forces. The
important point to be remembered in this context is that the late Chairman
Mao launched his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in 1965 and it
reached its peak in 1967 to weed out all ‘anti-socialist elements” from
the Chinese polity. Though many Sinologists would not like to describe the
GPCR in any other manner, for an outsider like me, it was essentially a
power struggle between Chairman Mao and his adversaries. However,
for the purposes of this essay, three significant things emerged from the
Nathu La episode on the Sikkim-Tibet border. First, the Indian armed forces
demonstrated beyond doubt that the PLA is not as strong and motivated as it
was made out to be. In fact, there were rumours, around September 10, 1967,
that the PLA was planning to bring in the Air Force to escalate the
conflict. Sensing that the Indians were getting ready for such an
eventuality, the Chinese official news agency, Xinhua, denied having any
such plans. Second,
the Indian politico-military leadership quickly realised this myth about the
PLA. This was clearly reflected in the unconditional ceasefire proposed by
India in a note delivered to the Chinese on September 12, 1967, all along
the Sikkim-Tibet border from 05.30 hrs on September 13. Though officially,
the Chinese rejected this unilateral ceasefire offer by India, except for an
occasional salvo by the PLA on September 13, 1967, there was a lull all
along the border. Many observers felt India scored a psychological victory
over the Chinese for the latter’s unilateral ceasefire in 1962. Lastly,
the Indian political leadership also realised that the PLA’s behavioural
pattern on the border had something to do with the domestic turmoil then
going on in China. Ussuri Clashes of 1969
By
March 1969, the GPCR entered its final phase and at that time the PLA
decided that it could decide the border with the former Soviet Union by the
use of force. On March 2-3, 1969, there were “border skirmishes” in the
area of the Nizhnemikhallovka border post on the Ussuri River. The intruding
PLA men were confronted by the Soviet Red Army and their attack was
repulsed. Again,
on March 15, 1969, the PLA launched a fresh attack with an infantry regiment
strength (estimated to be 2,000 men) with support units at Damansky Island
on the Ussuri River. According to the details of the war available,
initially the Chinese succeeded in penetrating the island under cover of
artillery and mortar fire from their side of the river. But a massive
retaliation by the Red Army made the PLA beat a hasty retreat. Like
they had to bring in the Air Force to meet the Indian armed forces’
challenge, this time too, the PLA is reported to have “activated” their
North China Sea fleet, but nothing happened; it turned out to be an empty
threat. Again
there were border skirmishes in August 1969 in the Xinjiang sector of the
Sino-Soviet border between the PLA and the Red Army. It
is a part of history now that the PLA could not take on the Red Army and the
Chinese were forced to come to the conference table to resolve the issue
through peaceful negotiations. Capturing
of paracle Island
in 1974 After the end of the GPCR in 1969.70, it is still a debatable question, whether Chairman Mao eliminated all his adversaries or not, but radical changes came into the structure and hierarchy of the PLA. Apparently the aging Chairman Mao, in a swift move, ordered the PLA to go and capture the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. With the ongoing conflict in Indo-China al that time, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Vietnam. who also claimed part of these islands, did not offer any resistance to the PLA’s occupation of the islands. Virtually
without firing a shot, the PLA had a total success in this operation. An
assessment of these five PLA actions indicates that it had a total success
in two operations and suffered defeat on three other occasions. The PLA
success story is also due to the timing of the campaign like in the Paracel
Islands. Whenever the PLA confronted an adversary without any element of
surprise, or an adversary who challenged them, its performance was poor.
This was obvious from the Korean war, and the Nathu La and Ussrui incidents.
In fact, in the Nathu La and Ussuri incidents, the PLA did not offer even
stiff resistance. From all accounts, it made a hasty retreat the instant the
adversary offered stiff resistance or acted “decisively”. All
these five actions of the PLA also clearly indicate three things: (a) the
late Chairman Mao, wanted to consolidate his country’s boundaries as
quickly as possible, and in that exercise, advantage China should be the
guiding principle; (b) also, he pressed the PLA into action, whenever his
plans to accelerate the peace of economic developments failed; and (c) in
all these wars/engagements, the PL4 was not as professional as it was made
out to be. Sino-Vietnam
War of 1979 In the post-Mao period, after the initial years’ power struggle was over and Deng Xiaoping managed to place himself firmly in the saddle, he too looked to the PLA to resolve the outstanding claims of China on its borders. The first was, of course, the now famous February 1979 war with Vietnam. Deng wanted “to teach a lesson” to the Vietnamese. In that Sine-Vietnam war, the PLA was badly mauled and forced to retreat. The battlehardened Vietnamese with better strategy and motivation were able to take on the PLA and inflict heavy casualties. According to one strategic commentator, The only thing the Chinese are not interested to discuss is the Sino-Vietnam war of 1979.” Deng
realised that there was need to improve the technological superiority of the
PLA. Consequently, the military modernisation segment of the Four
Modernisations Programme (the other three being agriculture, industry, and
science and technology) was acelerated. Accordingly, we notice greater
allocations for defence in the Chinese budget since then. Sumdorong
Cho Valley incident of 1985 Six
and half years later, Deng decided to flex China’s muscles again with
India. In mid-1986, it came to the notice of India that the PLA had built a
helipad at Wandung in Sumdorong Chu Valley in Arunachal Pradesh. India
reacted swiftly and the PLA had an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the
India Army in Sumdorong Chu Valley of Arunchal Pradesh in August 1986. After
a week of tense moments both sides mutually agreed to withdraw their forces
inside their respective territories and create a no man’s land. The
Chinese posture at that time clearly indicated that Beijing quickly realised
that 1962 cannot be repeated. Afterwards, we saw some writings in the
PLA’s official organ, Liberation Army
Daily, about the professionalism
the Indian armed forces. Sine-Vietnam
Clashes in the South China Sea Called
the Truong Sa Archipelago by Vietnam, and the Nansha Islands by China, the
Spratlys consist of about 150 reefs, sandbanks and islands in the South
China Sea, 350 km from Vietnam’s coast and 1,000 km tram China. They
straddle busy shipping lanes and are, therefore, strategically important. In
addition, the preliminary geological surveys have shown that this area has
vast deposits of crude oil and natural gas. Both
China and Vietnam claimed the Spratlys for centuries, but up to 1987 had
been content with a war of words. However, from early 1967 onwards, the
Chinese started putting markers on some of these islands, making it clear
that they had asserted their sovereignty over them. Simultaneously, the PLA
also started strengthening its presence and started conducting naval
exercises in and around the Spratlys. This
brought a sharp reaction from Vietnam and in the subsequent protest notes
exchanged, both sides accused each other of provocation, and claimed that
the other side would bear the responsibility and consequences of its
actions. On
March 14,1988, the PLA’s Navy clashed with the Vietnamese Navy for the
first time. Though it was a very short confrontation, both sides suffered
considerable casualties. But the tension continued up to the end of the
month. In late March 1988, the war-weary Vietnam proposed bilateral talks
with China to resolve the issue. As usual, the Chinese rejected the offer
initially, but later agreed to the Vietnamese proposal. However,
fresh tensions erupted in May 1992, when the Chinese authorities leased an
oil concession to an American Firm, Creston Energy, for oil exploration in
and around the Spratlys, and Vietnam took strong objection to it. From
1993 onwards, both China and Vietnam realised that they could not resolve
the issue militarily and started negotiations. Invincible PLA ?
Like
Mao, Deng also tried to use the PLA to settle the border issues by use of
force but had no success. With the Deng era coming to an end, what his
successors would do can only be a matter of speculation. They may or may not
continue this policy of using force to settle the “Middle Kingdwn’s”
boundades. But
the lessons others can draw from the PLA’s past engagements is that the
PLA’s conventional armed forces are not an invincible force as they are
being made out to be by a section of the Indian strategic community. As far
as China’s nuclear capabilities are concerned, the Chinese have given a
solemn undertaking to the international community that they will not be the
first to use nuclear weapons. And the doyen of India’s nuclear programme,
Dr. Raja Ramanna, in October 1996, observed that the country has acquired
the nuclear weapon manufacturing capability. In other words, we have the
needed nuclear deterrent capability. The
other aspect of the PLA is its equipment. Right from the liberation of
mainland China in October 1949, the Chinese strongly believed in
self-reliance. At the height of the Sine-Soviet friendship, in the early
1950s, a considerable amount of Soviet technology was transferred to China.
One can say that the Chinese arms industry was built on this in the
subsequent years. The Soviet technology stopped coming from the mid-1950s
onwards. With the embargo and containment policy of the West up to 1971, the
Chinese arms industry, it is generally agreed upon by China watchers,
remained, more or less, stagnant. In
other words, for about 16-17 years, China had no access to any rapidly
changing conventional arms technology in the international arms market. In
addition, how much the social engineering experiments of the late Chairman
Mao affected the overall technological standards in the PLA and outside is a
debatable question. Some Western scholars have observed that the PLA was
insulated against the social upheavals created by the late Chairman Mao.
Still, at least two generations of young people were affected by Chairman
Mao’s experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. This must have automatically
resulted in a low level of technological base in the Chinese society. It
certainly affected the civil sector, We can see this by the low quality of
Chinese consumer products. And, therefore, its impact on the arms industry
cannot be ruled out. Whatever
may be the actual position, there has been a scramble for weapon related
technology since 1971, from the international market by China - how much
they are able to absorb is an open ended question and can be debated. The
performance of the equipment the Chinese are selling in the international
market leaves much to be desired. For instance, some of the biggest
recipients of Chinese arms like Pakistan, North Korea and Iran have bought
this equipment as a last choice, when it was denied to them from others or
they were cash starved. In fact, the Pakistani arms acquisition pattern over
the years indicates that their first preference is arms from the West and
the last choice is China. This is in spite of an indepth relationship with
China, and the fact that Chinese equipment is cheap and available on easy
credit. In
this part of the world, the Chinese equipment saw action in war in recent
years only in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1990s. The Iranians used the Silkworm
missiles from China quite successfully to confront Iraq, but in the later
stages of the war only, when Iraqi ammunition was almost depleted. Therefore,
one need not be unduly alarmed at the technological level of the PLA’s
weapon systems. Myth of Economic Miracle
The
other myth that is perpetuated by a group of China watchers is that Beijing
is likely to become an economic superpower in the next two decades, that is,
by about 2015 or so. And to support their argument, the World Bank report on
China and the Economist (London)
are liberally quoted. One is tempted to compare this Chinese miracle with
the 1970s’ assessments of the West about China’s crude oil reserves,
There used to be screaming headlines in the mid-1970s in the Western Press
saying that China’s crude oil reserves are bigger than Saudi Arabia’s,
We, at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis, were the first to
question these assessments, and the late Mr. Mirchandani, then General
Manager of the United News of India promptly carried it on his wire
services, Within a few months, that bubble burst. The
Chinese economy witnessed some spectacular development (but not development
in the broad sense of the term, that is economic, cultural, social, etc,
which India is attempting) of 10-t 1 per cent growth in recent years. This
has been achieved largely due to heavy doses of foreign investment. Here one
should not forget the fact that the foreign investor will continue to make
investments only if his profits are assured. One more factor needs to be
borne in mind here, international capital has no nationality and concepts
like nationalism and patriotism have no relevance to it. The overseas
Chinese who made the bulk of investments in China may not continue to do so.
Already reports are appearing in the international media that investors in
China are not happy with their returns and are looking for greener pastures.
This means that the flow of foreign investments into China is going to slow
down in the years to come. And in the long run, the Chinese economy may have
to settle down for a 5-6 per cent growth rate. Anything beyond that requires
at least a couple of trillion dollars of investments in the next two to
three decades, First, that type of capital is not available in the
international capital market. The $80 billion foreign investment of the past
decade created such regional and social imbalances in China that the Chinese
authorities have been forced to take a fresh look at the process of
liberalisation of the economy. Therefore,
in these circumstances, China becoming an economic superpower, say in the
next 20 years, can at best be described as wishful thinking by members of a
China admirers’ club. And, in fact, a couple of Chinese scholars with whom
I interacted with in 1993 were surprised at these assessments. They said
that like in any planned economy, they too fixed some target; and if they
can achieve even 50 per cent of those targets, they would consider their
planning process successful. This is understandable. In fact, any student of
economics will be able to tell that a developing country with a population
of one billion plus cannot sustain a 10-l 1 per cent growth rate for too
long. Indian Policy Options
It
is in this backdrop that we must examine India’s policy options vis-a-vis
China in the short and medium terms. To discuss long term perspectives at
this stage is not feasible as there are so many imponderables. At
one level, the current phase of Sir-m-Indian relations started some time in
the early 1980s by the late Indian Prime Minsister, Mrs Indira Gandhi,
progressed satisfactorily, except for the 1985 aberration mentioned earlier.
In fact, from 1987 onwards, efforts were on from both sides to ensure that
1995 is not repeated. Both sides took a number of confidence building
measures, including high level political visits, armed forces to armed
forces contacts, dialogue at various levels, etc. The Sine Indian joint
working group has been meeting regularly. Even the bilateral trade which was
at a low level, started picking up. In other words, both India and China
have engaged themselves in a constructive dialogue which proved to be
mutually beneficial. Can
we take this relationship forward? This is the question haunting many policy
analysts. In this context, one needs to look into three broad ‘areas.
Foremost among them is the border question. This issue has two dimensions.
First, some-boundary specialists would argue that at the end of 1994, there
were more than 100 disputed boundaries around the world. This is a vexed
problem of the international community and there are no fixed ground rules
for this. And these experts feel that after the 1958-59 India-China boundary
talks, it became clear that this issue has no academic solution. Second,
India is not in a position to cede any territory to others except for a few
kilometers this way or that. Therefore, to resolve the vexed boundary issue
and establish cordial relations with India, China has to vacate the occupied
territory. In
addition, both Jiang Zemin and Atal Behari Vajpayee are new to the centre of
power in their respective countries. Neither
of them are charismatic personalities like Pandit Jawaharfal Nehru, Mrs.
Indira Gandhi , Chairman Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. They have limited
political clout in their respective countries. Therefore, to expect the
governments of these two leaders to find a solution to the decades-old
India-China boundary question is just not possible. Hence, status quo will
continue and this may remain as one of the unresolved boundary questions,
which will be carried into the 21st century. Second
is the economic cooperation between the two countries. Both China and India
are developing countries, and each side enjoys some advantage over the other
in trade. Incidentally, both are exporters of primary commodities and
semi-manufactured goods. At the moment, in the international market, India
enjoys a marginal advantage over China, because of its being a member of the
World Trade Organisation. Otherwise, both the
economies are competing with each other in the international market.
Therefore, the scope for a larger volume of India-China trade is rather
slim. The existing volume of India-China trade at around $1 billion may at
best grow into $4.5 billion by the turn of the century In percentage terms
of foreign trade of India and China, this is less than one per cent of each
country’s trade. I am not arguing against increasing trade between China
and India. But as I mentioned earlier, the ground realities are different.
Any expectation of faster growth of India-China trade is nothing but wishful
thinking. India-China
joint ventures in third countries is once again a low feasibility
proposition because of the reasons mentioned above. Therefore,
we can assume that in the immediate future, say in the next ten years, both sides
should reconcile to the fact that the existing level of economic cooperation
cannot be improved dramatically, and efforts to improve upon it may result
in some changes, but marginally only. In fact, here one should also note
that China is mixing politics with economics to a certain extent. For
example, China would prefer the US to India in awarding a contract. Lastly,
the option to improve people-to-people level contacts between India and
China. This, undoubtedly, is one area where more interaction can take place
between the two countries. But, the spirit of Hindi-Chini
Bhai Thai of the 1950s cannot stage a comeback for obvious reasons. |
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1998 Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New DelhiAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.
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