Learning from China - India Has the Advantage of Being Young

By: Hardeep Click author's name for more of his/her articles

OUR strategists, retired diplomats, ex-service officers and media persons have been engaged in an intense debate on how to deal with a rising China which appears to be playing the game of nations to our disadvantage. China has had a decade and half lead in initiating economic reforms. It has consistently maintained a faster growth rate than India.
China has expanded its international trade at a pace not conceivable by India. Its military modernization and infrastructure development are very much in advance of India. Its economic decision-making is not hampered by party politics. It is our neighbor and it has an unresolved dispute with us in respect of Arunachal Pradesh. It has ambitions of being one of G-2 with the United States in global financial system.
Though China disavows ambitions of being a hegemonic power, it shows all signs of moving towards that goal. This is evident from its nuclear proliferation to Pakistan and supporting Pakistan’s role as a counter-vailer to India, opposing the waiver of Nuclear Suppliers Group for India and permanent seat for India in the Security Council.
China is likely to overtake the US in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the next couple of decades. In Asia there is only one nation which is comparable to China in terms of population, skilled labour force and potential in terms of GDP in the longer run and that is India. It is, therefore, natural in spite of all public declarations to the contrary that China should view India as a likely future rival and attempt to slow down India catching up with it. This should be a natural expectation in realpolitik.
There is no point in complaining about it and bewailing that China is playing the game of nations to our disadvantage. It is up to us to catch up with China in a realistic way.
We should bear in mind that some 50 years ago China was bracketed with India. China had its successful revolution two years after Indian independence. China had two man-made disasters, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution which resulted in 30 million deaths.
China from its revolutionary birth till 1990 for 40 years faced continuous security threats from superpowers. In spite of all that travail, China has become the second powerful nation in the world and its manufacturing hub and one of the significant leaders of international financial system. How did they do it and are there lessons in it for India?
The Chinese knew how to manipulate the international system to their advantage. Even as they were fighting their revolutionary war to capture power they made overtures to the US arguing they were not Soviet-type Communists.
However, the Americans in their short-sightedness rejected their signals and firmly aligned themselves with the Kuomintang. Mao set out to woo a not- too-friendly Stalin. He agreed to Stalin’s harsh terms and obtained the Soviet military and economic aid.
China had to fight the Korean war and incur hundreds of thousands of casualties. The Soviet aid was used to industrialize China rapidly and develop its military forces and the military industry. The US used to transgress China’s territorial waters and its airspace regularly. The Chinese used to issue 457th, 571st and so on serious warnings to the US but observed restraint.
Their relationship with the Soviet Union deteriorated due to ideological differences with the Soviets cutting off their technology transfer on the nuclear weapons program midway and withdrawing their technicians and stopping all their industrial aid programmers. The conflict worsened to the extent of erupting into armed conflict on the Ussuri River in 1989. There were signals of Soviet nuclear threat.
The great ideologue Mao, who conducted an annual ‘Hate America’ campaign, who talked of fundamental antagonistic contradiction between capitalism and socialism and whose pilot son had been shot down in the Korean war, had no hesitation in allying himself with the US to obtain extended deterrent security vis-à-vis the Soviet nuclear threat.
China provided bases for the US in Xinjiang to monitor Soviet nuclear tests when the Iranian Ayatollahs closed down the US monitoring bases in Iran in 1979. Then come Deng Xiao Peng’s economic reforms and opening up of China to US multinationals. The US companies used Chinese soil, Chinese labour and Chinese raw materials to make cheap goods to be exported to the US and the rest of the industrial world. The profits went to the multinationals. The Chinese export surpluses were not used for the benefit of the Chinese population but were invested in the US to enhance the credit availability to the US population to make them buy more consumer goods. Simultaneously, the Chinese reserves grew making China a major holder of US treasury bonds, giving it a leverage over the US.
By collaborating with the retail stores chains of developed countries and providing them access in China, the Chinese products are being marketed all over the world. And China has been transformed from an isolated ideological fundamentalist to a major member of the international community holding spectacular Olympic Games in three decades. No one will question today the independence of Chinese foreign and strategic policies.
All this has been achieved not by China ploughing a lonely furrow and insisting on self-reliance. From the beginning, China realized that it has to absorb investments and technology from the international system wherever they were available. Then come the added realization that market access was needed and that in turn called for international collaboration. Instead of adopting a jingoistic attitude towards the challenge posed by China, there should be calm unsentimental strategic planning on how to deal with this problem.
India has a number of advantages. It is an English-speaking, democratic country. Its rise as a power does not cause concern to the international community unlike the case of China. The entire global arms market is open to India while China has at present no access to the US and European markets. India’s entrepreneurial system is better tuned to the international one.
Major Powers have a stake in not allowing China from becoming an undeterred hegemony in Asia. In the longer term, India has the advantage of a younger age profile even as China will be ageing. Therefore, the debate on the Chinese challenge should be conducted on constructive lines instead of the present display of unbecoming chauvinism.
Most of our people have forgotten that India did invoke the countervailing Soviet factor when faced with the Pakistan-China-US line-up in 1971. It is the stake of major powers in India as a potential balancer in Asia that resulted in technology denial regime against us being ended.
For Jawaharlal Nehru, nonalignment was a strategy in a bipolar world and not an ideology. Now that the Cold War has ended and the world has globalized, India is in a position to exploit the international system to its advantage without ideological hang-ups.