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25 September 2014

Chinese President’s ‘Sweet & Sour’ Visit to India 2014 Analysed

By Dr Subhash Kapila
Paper No. 5792 Dated 23-Sept-2014

Chinese President XI Jinping’s visit to India in mid-September 2014 ended analytically on a ‘Sweet & Sour’ Chinese flavour. It would be a learning curve for Indian Prime Minister that dealing with China as Prime Minister is vastly different from the effusive perceptions gained on visits to China as Gujarat Chief Minister.

As Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi has perforce to take firm stands on issues which stand impinged by China’s needless military provocations on our Northern Borders and necessarily give a back-seat to any economic carrots that were offered to India by China to wean India away from its evolving close relationship with Japan. Regrettably, China did not measure up to that extent also, as the economic deals with China during the Chinese President’s visit to India did not materialise as the pre-visit high-voltage Chinese publicity campaign indicated by the Chinese Consul General in Mumbai.

It would also be a learning curve for the Chinese President and the Chinese establishment that India no longer was a captive of the ‘China Appeasement’ policies of the last ten years resorted to by the previous government. China should expect the ‘New India’ to value good and peaceful relations with China as an important plank of its foreign policy which should as it be between two powerful neighbours. But beyond that China would have to make serious and substantive efforts to forge a trustworthy relationship with India with imperatives of boundary settlement and honouring in letter and spirit the innumerable ‘peace and tranquillity border agreements’. 

China’s differentials of power with India both in the conventional and non-conventional domains may be glaring enough to tempt China to adopt condescending postures accompanied by provocative brinkmanship on the India-China Occupied Tibet Borders bristling with Chinese troops. Notwithstanding the preceding is the strategic reality also that India is not the India of 1962 under Nehru. China would be well advised to transform its policy attitudes towards India to one of “Equitable Equations” because, as pointed out in a number of my preceding SAAG Papers on China is the painful reality for China to accept that unlike India it is China that is strategically cornered on all its flanks, today.

With this contextual backdrop let us now proceed to analyse the just concluded visit of the Chinese President to India. Essentially, this analysis needs to be done from the perspectives of strategic and economic gains accruing to India on what in the run-up to the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to India was marked by intense euphoria in India. My preceding SAAG Papers kept cautioning that India should not expect any ‘strategic game-changers’ from the Chinese President’s visit and that likely economic upturns in China –India relationship were no substitute for obliterating the decades of “strategic distrust”.

Strategically, the Chinese President did not offer or provide any “sweet flavours” during his first-ever visit to India as President. On the contrary China soured the Chinese President’s visit to India by the additives of glaring Chinese troops confrontations and transgressions into Indian Territory both preceding, during and after the Chinese President’s visit to India. Prime Minister Modi is reported to have drawn the notice of the Chinese President to Chinese brinkmanship on the borders on all three days of the visit but to no avail. It seemed as if China was orchestrating the Chinese troops violations of Indian Territory as part of a pre-determined script to send subtle political messages to the Indian leadership.

Analytically, it flies against all logic that Chinese troops confrontations and intrusions into India territory would not have been in the knowledge of the Chinese President and moreso when he wears all the top four hats of the Chinese military behemoth and all this under his personal control. So what does this presage? It clearly indicates that China despite all pious rhetoric has no inclination to resolve the border disputes with India and is intent on perpetuating it as a bargainable strategic pressure point against India.

Prime Minister Modi seems to have been convinced by the third and final day of the Chinese President’s visit that China was not accommodative on the border disputes issue and not inclined to dilute the military confrontations on the borders and was finally constrained to publicly articulate that when there is a toothache, it affects the whole body and thereby clearly and firmly indicating to China that forward movement in China-India relations was not possible if China persists in prolonging the ‘Chinese Toothache’ generated by it.

China thereby missed a golden opportunity in the strategic domain to carry out course corrections in its disruptive strategies against India and put China-India relations on a new footing in keeping with China’s current strategic environment.

In the economic domain, one could say that there was both an element of ‘sweet feavours’ and equally if not more of ‘sour flavours’. The sweet flavours were provided by China’s eagerness to establish technology parks in Gujarat and Maharashtra besides involvement in railways modernisation and infrastructure. China was keen to enter the Indian civil nuclear power generation industry and negotiations are said to follow.

However, the “sour flavours” were added by China markedly in terms of executing FDI targets pertaining to India. Against a very heavily hyped campaign that the Chinese President would announce a figure of $100 billion investments in India, the figure ended up by the final day of a mere $20 billion. It is reported that this climb-down by the Chinese President occurred after some much-needed plain-speaking by the Indian Prime Minister on strategic issues especially the lack of restraint by Chinese troops on the borders and a reluctance of China to mellow down its aggressive postures in the military stand-off on the Himalayan borders.

In the economic domain too the Chinese President during his visit to India failed in generating China-India economic trust to off-set the prevailing strategic distrust in China –India relations. The ‘sour taste’ left by the Chinese President was that China would resort to heavy economic investments in India provided India was pliable in the strategic domain. This should be an eye- opener for India’s China apologists that good economic relations could pave the way for generation of strategic trust.

In such high level visits of foreign dignitaries the visuals of the visiting leaders’ body-language also count. Perceptionaly, it seemed that the warmth and exuberance exhibited by Prime Minister Modi as the host was not evenly matched by the Chinese President. To say that the Chinese President is habitually reserved would not be correct when visuals of his meetings with President Obama some time back are scrutinised. Reflective of China’s reluctance of not according equitable equations in its dealings with India so was the body-language of the Chinese President during the Indian visit. It was diplomatically and protocol-wise correct and nothing more.

In the overall analysis, it can be stated that the recently concluded visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India in September 2014 has in its wake not provided any substantive signals of optimism that China-India relations would in the foreseeable future enter the phase where “Strategic Distrust” presently dominates, would incrementally be replaced by some semblance of trust-building initiatives in the strategic domain and provide optimism that China and India despite their contentious equations in the moulding of Asian security could still hope for a new dawn.

- See more at: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/node/1619#sthash.m2UDUyTE.dpuf

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