Lies being told by Communist China;
It has no expansionist designs.
Now the truth;
China's Bhutan land grab aims at bigger target;
China honed its "salami slicing"
strategy in the Himalayan borderlands with India in the 1950s, when it grabbed
the Switzerland-sized Aksai Chin plateau by surreptitiously building a
strategic highway through that unguarded region.
Aksai Chin, part of the original princely
state of Jammu and Kashmir, has since provided China with the only passageway
between its rebellious regions of Tibet and Xinjiang. Now, the attempt by the
People's Liberation Army to replicate its seizure of Aksai Chin by building a
military road through the Doklam plateau of tiny Bhutan has triggered one of
the most serious troop standoffs in years between China and India, which is a
guarantor of Bhutanese security.
The standoff involving hundreds of PLA and
Indian troops, near where the borders of Tibet, Bhutan and India's Sikkim state
meet, has successfully halted the Chinese construction of the highway in
Doklam, which Beijing claims as a "traditional pasture for Tibetans."
This is similar to Beijing's claims in the South and East China seas, which are
based on "traditional fishing grounds for Chinese." The Indian
intervention has triggered a furious reaction from China, which is warning
India almost daily to back down or face reprisals, including a possible war.
India has mobilized up to 10,000 troops for any contingency.
The Chinese defense ministry has warned India
to learn the "historical lessons" from the major military reversals
it suffered in 1962 when China carried out a surprise trans-Himalayan invasion
just when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in the Cuban missile
crisis. Beijing has also stepped up diplomatic pressure on New Delhi, with the
Chinese foreign ministry insisting that the "precondition for any
meaningful dialogue" would be for Indian troops to "unconditionally"
pull back from Doklam.
Beijing's full-throttle campaign against
India amounts to psychological warfare, from mounting daily threats to staging
military drills in Tibet. For example, a recent "full combat
readiness" exercise with tanks was aimed at delivering a clear warning to
New Delhi, according to Chinese state media. However, the more China threatens
India and the more it refuses to seek a compromise, the more it paints itself
in a corner.
Beijing has no good options in emerging as a
winner from this confrontation. Given the geography, military logistics, weapon
deployments and the entrenched Indian positions, the PLA will find it hard to
give India a bloody nose and seize Doklam. If it were to attack, it could
suffer a setback. Just as Beijing's intense propaganda war against India over
the Dalai Lama's April tour to the Chinese-claimed northeastern Indian state of
Arunachal Pradesh achieved nothing, China risks losing face over the current
troop standoff.
The central issue that China has sought to
disguise is its intrusion into tiny Bhutan, which has less than 800,000 people.
To cause a distraction, Beijing, in keeping with ancient military theorist Sun
Tzu's concept of strategic deception, has tried to shift the focus to India
through a public relations blitzkrieg that presents China as the victim and
India as the aggressor. Just as it has touted historical claims to much of the
South China Sea, which have been dismissed by an international arbitral
tribunal as groundless, Beijing contends that Doklam (or "Donglang" as
China calls it) has belonged to it "since ancient times."
Beijing's dire warning
Besides launching a flurry of official
denunciations of India, China has employed the state media in the psychological
warfare campaign. "We firmly believe that the face-off in the Donglang
area will end up with the Indian troops in retreat. The Indian military can
choose to return to its territory with dignity or be kicked out of the area by
Chinese soldiers," China's nationalist tabloid Global Times said on July
5. "This time we must teach New Delhi a bitter lesson."
An article on the PLA's English-language
website, China Military Online, has warned that "if a solution isn't
reached through diplomatic or military communication or the issue isn't handled
properly, another armed conflict ... is not completely out of the
question."
Beijing employs stealth aggression in
territorial expansion
Despite the Indian army's prompt actions to
protect Bhutan's territorial interests, the standoff has exposed some of
India's institutional weaknesses. In combating disinformation in war or peace,
time is of the essence. Yet it took New Delhi more than four days to issue its
first statement in response to China's verbal attacks against India's move to
protect Bhutan, its longstanding strategic ally. The result was that after
Beijing revealed the days-old troop standoff just hours before the June 26
meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald
Trump at the White House, the Indian media was awash with Chinese propaganda,
reporting only Beijing's line on the standoff.
The current crisis has shown that New Delhi
is ill-prepared to counter China's grandstanding tactics. India's response to
the continuing barrage of hostile Chinese statements against it has been
confined to a single statement issued by its foreign ministry on June 30. This
is partly to do with India's intrinsically defensive strategic mindset,
including a reluctance to employ its natural economic leverage to rein in
Chinese belligerence.
Since China has an almost $60 billion annual
trade surplus with India currently, New Delhi has an opportunity to emulate
Beijing's use of trade as a political instrument in punishing South Korea,
Mongolia, the Philippines, Japan and others. The flood of Chinese goods
entering India is overwhelming. The lopsided trade balance not only rewards
China's strategic hostility but also foots the bill for its strategy of
encircling India. Beijing thus has little incentive to moderate its behavior or
avoid belligerence.
India also appears reluctant to reopen the
Tibet issue, even though China is laying claim to Indian and Bhutanese
territories on the basis of alleged Tibetan (not Han Chinese) historical links
to these areas. Like Doklam, China claims Arunachal Pradesh, a territory almost
three times larger than Taiwan that is famous for its virgin forests and
soaring mountain ranges. To help curb such territorial revisionism, India needs
to question China's claim to Tibet itself.
Tibet, autonomous until China annexed it in
1951, enjoyed close historical transportation, trade and cultural links with
India, exemplified by the fact that the main Tibetan cities are located close
to the Indian border. But with Tibet now locked behind a Chinese "iron
curtain," the formerly integrated economies and cultures of the entire
Himalayan region have broken apart.
Expansion drive
Modern China has come a long way since the
Great Wall denoted the limits of the Han empire's political frontiers, as
during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Territorially, Han power is now at its
zenith. With the exception of Mongolia, China is seeking to expand its
frontiers beyond the conquests made by the Manchu Qing dynasty in the 17th and
18th centuries. By relying on stealth aggression in which no bullets or
missiles need to be fired, China has mastered the art of creeping, covert
warfare, as is apparent in the Himalayas and the South and East China seas.
"Only vast lands can cradle great powers," according to Chinese
geographers Du Debin and Ma Yahua.
Recent events have offered clear evidence on
how China uses history to justify its territorial ambitions. In the same week
that it dusted off an 1890 colonial-era accord on the Tibet-Sikkim border to
use in its propaganda war against India, even though the agreement was
irrelevant to its intrusion into Bhutan, it mocked as worthless the legally binding
1984 pact with Britain that paved the way for Hong Kong's handover in 1997 by
guaranteeing the city's rights and freedoms under China's "one country,
two systems" formula. By turning its back on the 1984 pact, Beijing
indicated that "one country, two systems" was just a ruse to recover
Hong Kong. Yet China will cling to colonial-era accords if they still serve its
interests.
Unless Beijing reopens the door to diplomacy,
the present military stalemate at Doklam could drag on until the arrival of the
harsh winter forces the rival troops to retreat, thus ending the confrontation.
This would restore the status quo ante by frustrating the PLA's road-building
plan. The brief July 7 meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Modi at
the G-20 summit in Hamburg has offered China an opening to save face through a
possible mutual retreat from Doklam.
Whatever happens, the current crisis offers
India important lessons, including how a clever China presents itself as the
victim and feeds disinformation to the Indian media. This should, however, not
have come as a surprise. It is standard Chinese strategy to play the victim in
any conflict or dispute in an example of how China blends toughness, savvy,
single-mindedness and deft propaganda to try to achieve its goals.
Psychological warfare is integral to China's military strategy. Yet India found
itself taken by surprise.
More fundamentally, India must recognize that
while caution is prudent, diffidence tends to embolden the aggressor. It should
continue to err on the side of caution but must shed its reluctance to employ
countervailing leverage against China so that it is not always in a reactive
mode.
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