India and China

[Guest guest]

India and China

January 9, 2001

By Lieutenant Colonel Thakur Kuldip S Ludra (Retd.)

 

 

Napoleon is purported to have assessed China as a sleeping giant,

which should be left sleeping, or the world would rue the day she

woke up. China did wake up and very soon made her presence felt, when

she took on the Americans and the Western World, with all their

military might in Korea. She followed it up 10 years later when she

gave the Indian Army a smart drubbing along the Indo-Tibet Border,

both in Ladakh as well as in the North Eastern Frontier Agency now

known as Arunachal Pradesh.

 

India and China, together, cover nearly one third of Asia and their

combined population constitutes more than one third of the world

population. While Russia still has pretensions of a World Power,

primarily on account of her holdings of Nuclear weapons, both China

and India are emerging and trying to find their place under the sun.

Of course as the present readings go China has not only stolen a

march over India but is miles ahead in terms of military power,

economic strength and her standing in the world pecking order.

 

Both India and China are countries with ancient civilisations which

have, more or less developed the existing natural resources, not

possibly to their optimum but to a very fair degree. To achieve their

ambitions both have had to resort to centrifugal economic policies

and develop sources of raw material, as well as markets for their

produce, outside the geographical limits of their countries. Here

also China has stolen a march over India.

 

China is the third largest country in the world. Yet it finds itself

difficult to feed her own population which is well over one billion

mark. The Western region comprising nearly two thirds of the total

area is either a huge mass of towering mountains or a desert, where

camel caravans travel for days without meeting a soul. With the

greatest of stretching, not more than 20% of China is arable. The

rest is too dry, too steep or plain exhausted. Mineral resources have

also been exploited for centuries. However, the mountains of Central

China do offer a scope for availability of fresh mineral resources

and China is fairly well endowed with mineral wealth.

 

China is located North of the 21st Parallel, with India Nepal, Burma

Laos and Vietnam bordering her in The South. She extends to the

North, well above the 50th Parallel, with Mongolia, North Korea and

Russia as her Northern neighbours. On the East she rests on the

Pacific Ocean, while in the West she extends to the 75th degree of

Longitude, with Russia and some of the Central Asian states as her

Western neighbours.

 

In her population she has a certain degree of ethnic cohesion in that

all he population is Mongolian in origin. In the eastern region she

has predominantly the Han people. These are the people who reside in

what has euphemistically called the Middle Kingdom. This is the

region bordered on the North by the Great Wall, on the South by the

Kuenlen Mountain Range and in the East by the Sea. Outside the Middle

Kingdom is the Manchurian Autonomous Region in the North-east now

absorbed by the Han Chinese, and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous

Region, in between Central China and Russian Siberia. Sinkiang or

Xingjiang Autonomous Region in the West and the Tibetan Autonomous

Region in between Kuenlan Mountains and the Himalayas are the other

peripheral regions. All the Autonomous regions had been inhabited by

people who were ethnically different from the Han and that is where

the fault lines run in China.

 

In terms religion barring Xinjiang, Kangsu and Chinghai where there

is a large proportion who are Muslims who are also ethnically

different from the Hui Chinese Muslims, the people are by and large

either Buddhists or follow Confucian thought. Tibet, although

primarily Buddhists has its own kind of Buddhism which is different

from Buddhism practised in rest of China. While the Muslims of the

Western region who are ethnically either Uighurs or Khyrghiz are so

culturally different that they consider the Chinese rule almost

colonial and resent the Hans presence. They have never accepted the

Chinese halter and still do not accept what they consider as

subjugation from the Chinese East. This is what is making them such

easy recruits by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, in their

Fundamentalist drive.

 

Tibet is another region which has never accepted Chinese subjugation

and are at present in a continuous state of revolt. Though in the

last fifty years Chinese have been successful in transplanting a

large number of Hans Chinese into these two regions. For India, Tibet

is of particular importance. Till 1950 Tibet, protected by mountain

ranges from all direction had led an autonomous existence, while

paying lip service to Chinese suzerainty. That also, when the Middle

Kingdom was in a position to impose her will. At other times Tibet

drifted in its own independent orbit.

 

China's strongest point is her cultural homogeneity which she has

imposed with ruthless fervour. Unlike India where there are as many

scripts as there are languages and even dialects, in China, barring

Tibet and The West, there is only one script. In addition,

practically all the literate people read and write Mandarin. A vast

majority, nearly 90% of the Chinese live in the Eastern region. This

is being sought to be rectified by large scale transplantation of The

Hans into Xingjiang as well as the Tibet Autonomous Regions. This

while generating ethnic conflicts, may eventually lead to a more

culturally homogeneous people. In India on the other hand the effort

has been to encourage propagation and development on ethnic,

cultural, linguistic and communal lines. To quote Jawahar Lal Nehru,

India's first prime Minister, "Let the Indians develop and progress

in their cultural and linguistic ethos". This, while removing

coercion tended to encourage fissiperous tendencies, particularly

when political leadership, for its petty personal gains, incited the

masses on the imaginary threats to their religion, language or

culture.

 

Politically, China has a Communist pattern of government. However,

unlike the other erstwhile Communist regimes it has been pragmatic to

have shelved the Communist ideology where its economics and economy

was concerned. Thus while with the of collapse communist thought, as

a result of Soviet Russia's collapse she considers herself as the

sole champion of Communist ideology, it has been watered down so much

with the market concepts that it would be difficult to even think of

it as a communist economy. Yet where political regime is concerned

she has still the communist pattern of dictatorship. Witness Tianmen

Square where the agitating students were massacred by the government

troops.

 

When the Chinese Communists took over the regime in China in 1949,

they were treated as her protE9gE9 by Soviet Russia. However, soon

there were strains in their relationship. Initially China resented

the patronising attitude by Russia who were wanting to treat China,

more as a colony rather than a friend. The Russia on the other hand

were wanting to access Chinese raw material for her industry and

treat China as a market for her produce and finished product.

Simultaneously Russia did not relish the idea that she would be

expected to feed the teeming Chinese millions. The relations had

deteriorated to the degree that the two even clashed over their

boundaries.

 

With the collapse, both geo-political as well as economic, of Soviet

Russia, the situation has altered some what with Russia now actually

wooing China, while the later is playing coy, even while taking full

advantage of Russia's precarious economic situation. She is driving a

hard bargain even as she is purchasing weapons systems selectively to

augment her own technology. However, it must be understood that

whatever the platitudes that are being mouthed, Russia and China are

clashing economies. The sole assets that Russia has at the moment are

oil and her capability to supply cheap, robust and simple armaments.

She has a fairly big captive market for her armaments. Today, China

is also entering the world markets with the same type of armaments.

In fact the armaments that China is supplying are a modification, an

offshoot, possibly an improvement of the Russian equipment. Thus the

collision and clash.