Beijing praise for new Indian envoy intrigues China watchers

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 22

China watchers are intrigued by the exceptionally warm welcome being accorded by the official commentariat in Beijing to India’s Ambassador-designate for China Pradeep Kumar Rawat.

The Global Times led the charge by describing Rawat as the person behind Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to India in 2014 which was a “huge success”. It then went on to mention his effort as the head of the China desk in MEA in quarterbacking PM Narendra Modi’s visit to China in 2015 and the 2017 China-India border standoff.

The praise for Rawat is then interspersed with some hard real politic on the border dispute where it sets out the Chinese and Indian positions and concludes by asking New Delhi to renegotiate the border issues.

There is also a not-so-subtle effort to see daylight between Rawat and the Modi administration, point out the China watchers. “Rawat needs to be pioneering, and should not set preconditions. The Modi administration has been demanding to restore the status quo of April 2020 in eastern Ladakh,” points out the paper.

On the previous Indian ambassador to China Vikram Misri, the paper says he had “a closer relationship with Modi, and then hopes that Rawat may not have such close ties with Modi” though he belongs to the “so-called circle of China hands in India”, wrote commentator Liu Zongyi.

In another article, Yang Sheng and Yu Xi also praise Rawat for his “rich experience in diplomatic negotiations” but like Liu, they say that “to know China well doesn’t necessarily mean be friendly to China because Indian diplomats’ behavior is driven by India’s internal politics”.

Rawat, they reveal, has a Chinese name, “Luo Guodong”, and many Chinese experts on Indian studies are familiar with him. However, some former Indian ambassadors to China also showed positive signs before coming to China, but eventually played “very limited roles in saving China-India ties from getting worse,” points out Lin Minwang of the Institute of International Studies of Fudan University.