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Engaging China as a friendly neighbour

India’s foreign policy since the early 1990s has begun careering in esoteric directions. Its external relations gave primacy to acquiring military technology, sustaining our neo-liberal economic policies and realising greater middle class consumerism. More and more, the nation got alienated from its foreign policy.

We must seek explanations on how the strategic alliance with the United States, which New Delhi made the quintessence of its foreign policy for almost a decade, helped to discourage farmers in Vidharbha from taking their own lives in sheer despair, reduce the profound alienation of the people of Jammu & Kashmir or bring the neglected northeast into the national mainstream. Would “Malabar exercises” or the Indo-U.S. defence agreement or the envisaged “inter-operability” of the armed forces of the two countries make the South Asian security environment any less complicated? Would they help to ease India’s troubled relations with its neighbours? Do they tackle energy security or the looming food security crisis or the appalling illiteracy and malnutrition stalking the outer rings of our shining metros?

Even smaller countries realise how important it is to relate foreign policy to their domestic policies. Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC last week, Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, said: “I’ve said elsewhere this simple point, that there is now no longer a clinical divide between the national and the international, the foreign and the domestic, the internal, the external, as the great divide collapses. So much of what we do internationally is an extension of what we do nationally. And to be effective in what we now do domestically, we have to be in parallel terms active externally.”

Any serious world power would readily agree. What we know as “Putinism” of today’s Russia is, arguably, the finest example. Again, the 60th anniversary summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Bucharest on April 2-4 revealed how major European powers like Germany, France and Italy refused to be hustled into a new eastward expansion, which Washington robustly sought. For the major European countries, the prime consideration is not to antagonise Russia, which is a resurgent economic partner, especially in energy security. And energy security is in their first circle of foreign policy. If we are to draw a comparison, for Germany or Italy, the priority of cooperation with Russia is no less than the high importance New Delhi would attach to its relations with Iran if its foreign policy were to make sense.

Another obvious example is Washington’s policy toward Beijing, which aims at optimally harnessing China’s phenomenal rise to its advantage. Amid the cacophony by our corporate media and our strategic analysts rooting for Tibet’s “freedom,” they haven’t probably noticed that a key figure in the U.S. administration slipped into Beijing last Monday — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. This was his sixth visit to China since June 2006 when he got appointed to the powerful Cabinet post. (Mr. Paulson has been to India once during this period.)

Very clearly, no matter the Lhasa riots or the theatrics over Beijing Olympics, Washington realises the need for consulting Beijing when there is so much at stake in the U.S. economy by way of the fallout of the sub-prime crisis and the fate of the dollar. China is a major trading partner and investment power which already holds nearly $500 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds, second only to Japan’s holdings. China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange or Safe, the body that manages the bulk of China’s $1.65 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, has just bought a $2.8-billion stake in the French energy giant, Total, the world’s fourth largest oil company and France’s biggest company by value. Safe, which operates under China’s central bank, usually invests most of its funds in low-yielding securities such as the U.S. Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities but the falling dollar has prompted it to diversify its portfolio.

Evidently, Mr. Paulson had a lot on his mind when he arrived in Beijing. The point is, to quote Mr. Rudd, a former career diplomat and distinguished Sinologist, “There is no simple one-line answer to the question of how we should seek to engage China. It’s a huge country with complex global, domestic and historical currents that influence its current policy decisions. But one key is to encourage China’s active participation in efforts to maintain, develop, and become integrally engaged in global and regional institutions, structures and norms.”

Indian opinion-makers must have a clearer perspective on the implications of what is happening in China. They have a mental block in appreciating that Chinese leaders recognise that their country’s problems are of gigantic dimensions, and unless they have a peaceful and stable external environment, they cannot progress against the staggering challenges facing them domestically.

China’s per capita income still hovers around $1600; it has an ageing population; it faces acute regional imbalances in growth and big inequalities between urban and rural areas; it must urgently tackle grave environmental problems, water scarcity, and potential food “insecurity.” And, of course, the massive urbanisation and its discontents in China are of a kind previously unknown to man.

Equally, China recognises that it faces problems of transition in terms of its openness, mobility, legal system, political institutions and democratisation. Hence the priority it places on a stable global order. There is already a nascent thinking on the part of the U.S, Japan and China to extend their Six-Party Talks mechanism (over North Korea) into a broader security mechanism that could eventually include other countries as well. As Morton Abramowitz, author of Chasing the Sun – Rethinking East Asia Policy wrote recently: “The last part of the 20th century was dominated by dualities like the Cold War. The 21st century is shaping up with multiple power centres, calling for multilateral policy approaches. China, Japan, U.S — and throw India and Russia into the mix; Asia quickly becomes ground-zero for great power relations for decades to come.”

India cannot be caught in a time warp. It needs to adopt new thinking and reckon with new realities. First, China is a rising world power. Second, its rise is irreversible. Third, the international community is coming to terms with its rise. Fourth, China’s integration with the world economy is so far advanced that no one in his senses will talk about a “Tibet card,” or, least of all, China’s fragmentation. Fifth, the U.S. cannot afford to pursue a “containment” policy toward China. Sixth, China is willing to be a stakeholder in the international system.

But it is not as if China is an outlier that is waiting to be integrated into the international system either. China’s rise is beginning to change the system itself. Clearly, what follows is our imperative need to engage it as a friendly neighbour. It is a matter of time before China appears in the South and West Asian region as a dynamic change-driver — a role it has already begun playing in the Asia-Pacific and Southeast Asian regions.

We must, therefore, think positively how our seemingly intractable border problem can be resolved, rather than fancy that we would force China to solve it on our terms by playing a fictional “Tibet card.” Given the complexity of the issues involved, a resolution of the border problem cannot happen overnight. But a process is under way and we can afford to give it time to mature. The Sino-Russian border dispute was finally resolved three years ago — pronouncedly in favour of Russia, even though it had become a pale shadow of the Soviet Union — after decades of negotiations. It provides some useful lessons. The tempo of the Sino-Russian border negotiations qualitatively picked up once the overall climate of bilateral relations started improving since the mid-1990s.

An honest stocktaking on why the climate of India-China relations has suffered since 2005 can do us only good. The plain truth is, the slide began following the aberrations in our strategic posturing in the Asia-Pacific region. It was a catastrophic folly on the part of New Delhi to take to the notion of a “quadripartite alliance” involving the U.S., Japan, and Australia. The hare-brained idea was doomed to collapse. And the damage was done as it took the nature of an amorphous anti-Chinese move despite its overt projection as an “alliance of values”.

Fortunately, with the extraordinary professional talent ensconced in our foreign policy establishment today — both in South Block and in our mission in Beijing — we have the capacity to put that macabre “neocon” phase in our mindset to rest, and move on, provided, of course, our chatty think-tankers and the devil’s advocates in our corporate media allow that to happen.

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