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Super Power?: The Amazing Race between China’s Hare
and India’s Tortoise A recent issue of the London-based Economist (August 21-27) carried on its front page the inscription "Contest of the Century: China and India" and highlighted what it calls "A Himalayan Rivalry". Beijing, the weekly heavily underlines, has now become Pakistan’s "biggest supplier of military hardware" while US think-tanker’s "axis of democracies" seeks to balance Islamabad itself. Among others what constitutes a major "impediment" to India’s relations with Beijing with its determined bid to keep New Delhi, as the Prime Minister put it, in "a state of low-level equilibrium", was Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s hugely popular "government in exile", which, Beijing has no doubt, was responsible for the Tibetan uprising of March 2008, billed as the biggest in decades. As to New Delhi, its principal preoccupation, widely shared, is China’s mounting influence.
It should be obvious even to the purblind that Beijing’s principal goal is resource mobilisation. And here, Russia’s sparsely populated Far East with its large reserves of natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold is not far from Beijing’s heart. Not surprisingly, Moscow has been wary of large numbers of Chinese settlers moving into adjoining Manchuria with timber and mining companies in their wake. While their "creeping" demographic control over the area—parts of which China had held briefly during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912)—was steadily increasing. China’s influence is also spreading into Southeast Asia where it is said to be meeting "the least" resistance. As a matter of fact, it has been suggested that the "natural" capital of all the countries of Indo-China centring on the Mekong would be Kunming, in China’s Yunnan province. This apart, Beijing views Central Asia, Mongolia, the Russian Far East and Southeast Asia as its legitimate zones of influence. The situation on the Korean peninsula is somewhat different for political borders here "may well" shift. Beijing’s clear objective is the "gradual economic takeover" of the Tumen river region, where China, Russia and North Korea meet and which has good port facilities, across from Japan, on the Pacific Ocean. The 21st-century China, it appears, will project hard power abroad primarily through its navy. The very fact of China’s mounting economic and military clout will exacerbate US-China relations, where the hegemon of the Western hemisphere will try to prevent China from becoming the hegemon of the Eastern hemisphere. Raghav Bahl, a top drawer journalist who in less than five years had succeeded in putting together a pantheon of the world’s leading media brands and competing American groups— CNBC, CNN, MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Forbes—under a single owner was often asked as to how did he pull that off? "My answer," he tells us, was "a shrug!" His colleagues’ excitement about India though was invariably, he confesses, subdued, tinged with an "edge of skepticism, if not outright disbelief". There was, the author concludes, only one risk for India—the lack of confidence that its own leaders have on its abilities and destiny. Every other disability stems from this "endemic, ingrained complex" that our policy makers suffer from. They peg India "lower than an Indian can stretch to, force it to punch below its weight", never quite believing that we have what it takes to be at the top, not just near the top. We are witnesses to an amazing race between China’s hare and India’s tortoise—one that China need not automatically win nor India believe it’d lose. Bahl’s core question
is not about who will win, instead it is about who will lose
the economic race. An overbearing, intolerant, Soviet-inspired China
will lose. At the same time, the ills plaguing India spring from its
apologetic, unambitious state. India needs new leadership, bolder
governance and modern policies, especially in agriculture, health,
education and infrastructure. Who will do the forceful, no-nonsense
Teddy Roosevelt (1901-9) for India? His final wager! "Advantage
China" on velocity and momentum and "odds on India’ as the
institutional favourite. But the ultimate outcome is still anybody’s
guess—it’s fifty-fifty.
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A
prestigious US journal (Foreign Affairs, May-June 2010) has
front-paged China’s Grand Map, a well-researched,
thought-provoking piece posing the issue in stark terms: "How far
will Beijing reach on land and at sea?" Worrisome, as tethnic
tensions in Xinjiang and Tibet are complicating Beijing’s
relationships with adjacent states. India, too, constitutes a
"blunt geographic wedge" in China’s zone of influence in
Asia. To a degree, China and India are destined by geography to be
rivals: neighbours with immense populations, rich and proud cultures
and competing claims over territory.