SINGAPORE : India and China were moving in the "direction" of sustaining peace and stability in their neighbourhood and not just on their frontiers, a top official of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) said.

Major General Zhu Chenghu, Commandant of the College of Defence Studies in the PLA's National Defence University, told The Hindu after delivering a lecture here that the "Chinese and the Indians share a lot of common ground."

On India-China relationship, seen from the military angle, he said: "We have a long history. Both China and India are very ancient people. These two nations made very important contributions to the civilisation of the human kind. They are facing the tasks of developing ourselves.

``Both India and China have a desire to improve their relations and maintain stability across the border. China and India can contribute to maintaining peace and stability and promoting prosperity in the region — not only on the periphery of these two countries.

``And, we are working in that direction, and I believe these two nations can make further contributions to the human society in the future."

On China's nuclear arsenal, he said, "Actually, this is very incremental. I don't think we spend too much energy on that." The theme of his speech was "the modernisation of PLA."

He said Beijing's "nuclear arsenal is not big enough to make the Chinese leaders MAD."

He was punning on the term "MAD" (Mutual Assured Destruction) that the U.S. and the erstwhile Soviet Union adopted in multiplying and modernising their stockpiles of nuclear weapons during the Cold War period.

He said any war among the nuclear powers in the post-Cold War era would only be a "zero-zero" scenario and "no zero-sum" event.

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