Growing Sino-India ties

India and China need access to each other’s huge markets, though in a competitive global trade and investment environment. India is a bit apprehensive about a free trade regime with China fearing that cheap Chinese products will harm its own industry
Recent visit of the Chinese President Hu Jintao to India symbolises a new relationship that the two countries have been quietly building up over the past ten years. The hallmark of this relationship is economic pragmatism, which invisible forces of globalisation and rapid growth of economies of the two countries have shaped.
Moving away from traditional rivalry and confrontation has created fairly large diplomatic and political space to rethink and restructure their bilateral relations. As the two neighbouring giants set their eyes on becoming global economic and technological centres, they cannot allow old feuds to stand in the way of their economic integration. The growth in their bilateral trade, still smaller compared to their major partners in global economy, has, nonetheless, soared during the past decade from US$1.4 billion in 1996 to US$18.7 billion last year. They have pledged to double bilateral trade by 2010.
China and India started out as partners with the common vision of a role for the developing countries during the early years of the cold war. But that phase didn’t last very long. Following a brief but bitter border clash in 1962, relations between China and India remained frosty for more than three decades. There was a strong sense of hurt on both sides — India felt humiliated as a result of the defeat and China angered by India’s aggressive posture in the disputed areas. The clash put an end to the growing partnership between the two largest countries on issues that concerned the post-colonial societies and states. The logic of security, competing strategic interests and traditional policies of balancing and counter-balancing rapidly replaced the initial warmth of post-independence years.
India raised the spectre of Chinese expansionism and portrayed itself as the victim of that policy. New Delhi’s cries for international help found sympathy both in Washington and Moscow. Both capitals were eager to win over India for reasons of its size and importance among the developing countries of the world. Over the years, India moved much closer to Moscow than to the US, as the former became its largest supplier of weapons and defence technology.
In a changing regional and international climate, Pakistan reviewed its traditional policy of dependence on the United States and decided to open up to China, which was equally eager to settle the border demarcation issue and broaden the scope of bilateral relations. In subsequent years, two parallel rivalries produced two parallel informal alliances between Moscow and New Delhi on the one hand, and Beijing and Pakistan on the other. The security issues and geopolitical considerations largely shaped the international politics of the region from two wars between India and Pakistan to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and its retreat from there in 1989.
Much of that is history now. The transformation of the world system during the past decade has changed the priorities of China, India and many other important world powers, giving new direction to their foreign and security policies.
During the past decade, China and India have worked persistently to evolve a new framework to reshape their bilateral relations. There are three important elements of this framework that continue to move both the countries on the path of new partnership: First relates to the understanding that the border dispute will not hold the two countries back from improving bilateral relations. Both have realised that border demarcation is a complex issue that will take more time and negotiations on its technical aspects and that development on other tracks should not be made contingent upon resolution of the border problems.
In other words, they have decided to freeze the border issue, though not left it totally out of the negotiation process. They have formed a Joint Working Group to resolve technical problems of border demarcation and evolve a set of principles according to which the difference would be resolved. Meantime, they have taken steps under the 1993 and 1996 agreements to build confidence and stabilise the situation along the disputed border, without prejudice to the position of either side. Practically, they have accepted the Line of Actual Control as the common border for the interim period. The important thing is that they do not wish to make the border dispute a point of discord or confrontation.
The second important element of the new framework is that their relations with a third country will not interfere with the expansion of their bilateral ties. It is an accepted principle of international relations, but remains a vague and tricky issue because strategic cooperation — military ties, sale of weapons etc — affects the security consideration of other countries, particularly in the immediate neighbourhood. India, for instance, is concerned about China’s friendship with Pakistan. Similarly, China may be apprehensive about New Delhi’s growing partnership with Washington, which seems to be assuming strategic overtones.
It is too early to tell how and to what extent China and India will succeed in isolating the third-party factor from bilateral relations. India is very keen to neutralise China from its confrontation with Pakistan. It believes that technologies and materials from China have greatly assisted Pakistan in developing its nuclear and missile capability. What pressure and influence can India bring on China to downgrade its traditionally close relationship with Pakistan? At the moment, India has no levers to change the basic structure of partnership between China and Pakistan, which is now multi-dimensional and does not rest on common hostility toward India. The dynamics of this partnership today are quite different and would continue to flourish with new focus on cooperation in economic, scientific and technological fields.
Finally, trade and commercial interests have assumed greater salience than the political issues. This is not a specific trait of China’s relations with India but a worldwide phenomenon. Material well-being and concerns of development dominate national outlooks more than the emotive issues of nationalism that defined policies of many countries immediately after the Second World War. With economic liberalisation and lessening of state control over the economies, India and China need access to each other’s huge markets, though in a competitive global trade and investment environment. India is a bit apprehensive about a free trade regime with China fearing that cheap Chinese products will harm its own industry.
The emerging partnership between China and India cannot and should not be interpreted according to the old formulations of geopolitics and dominance of security issues. They remain important, and some of these like the border problem need to be resolved. But they are not likely to push the two towards a confrontation.
The author is a professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He can be reached at rasul@lums.edu.pk