China and India relationship

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supercat

Major
...continued from above:
India’s illusion on its own position
Although India has risen as a global player recently, its relative power as compared with China has, in fact, sharply plunged. For example, India’s economy is a midget compared with China, whose gross domestic product is roughly US$14 trillion, whereas India’s is less than $2.7 trillion. China’s GDP is about five times a high and its defense spending nearly 3.7 times India’s.

It should be noted that China inflicted severe casualties on India in the 1962 Sino-India war at a time when India and China were comparable in economic terms. For instance, the GDP per capita of India and China was $82.19 and $89.52 respectively in 1960.

The fact that China is far ahead of India in several areas is something that Indian strategists find hard to swallow. India was considered ahead of China in aircraft carriers in the past, but China now has twice as many in-service carriers as India. However, Indian strategists claim that India and China are comparable.

Modi drastically altered several norms of Indian strategy and foreign policy after he entered his second inning in power in 2019. One of them was the scrapping of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir by revoking Article 370 of the Indian constitution. However, India didn’t carefully consider the geopolitical backlash of its move, and particularly did not take China into account.

Delusion on the US

Indian strategists view the US as their crucial partner and friend. At the same time, China was considered its competitor until 2014. After Jayshankar became foreign secretary in January 2015, India dramatically changed its view of China, with the Indian media portraying China as India’s main adversary.

The playbook of Indian strategists for engagement with the US has been “partnership of the two greatest fellow democracies for the 21st century” since 2016. But India is moving ahead to a dangerous destiny: It is a leading frontline state against China in Asian geopolitics.

Indian strategists seem to believe that they could benefit from the partnership with the US. However, they have not been achieving what they intended to accomplish. Conversely, they are unable to evade India’s unnecessary involvement in the American-led efforts to contain China in its back yard and the Indian Ocean rim. Indian strategists have failed to resist US pressure.

Despite Indian strategists’ hubris that India is a global superpower, it has a history of inability to set priorities and make decisions on the issues of foreign policy and security. India has repeatedly failed to enjoy “strategic autonomy.”

India lost its strategic autonomy in 1962 because of its miscalculated alliance with the USSR. The Sino-India war of 1962 was the upshot of India’s strategic blunder to rely on Moscow’s backing aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split in 1960. India again has been repeating the same mistake by overrating the US-India alliance twice in 2017 at Doklam and now at Ladakh.

Indian strategists overlooked American strategists’ aims to maintain a vanguard position in South and Central Asia and the Indo-Pacific region by keeping China and India apart. The US never allows Asia’s two superpowers, China and India, to reach rapprochement.

Hallucinations on China

Indian strategists are suffering from hallucinations when it comes to China. China is far ahead of India in terms of economic, political, technological, military, and strategic capabilities. Indian strategists, on China’s rise, used to say, “Shanghai is China’s drawing-room, and everybody keeps the drawing-room attractive. The rest of China and India are the same.” However, they don’t admit that India is far behind China everywhere.

For instance, Chinese and Indian militaries faced off at the Doklam tri-junction of Bhutan, China, and India in the summer of 2017. The standoff happened after the India-US Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) was signed in 2016. The deal gives the US and India access to each other’s military facilities for logistic support on a reimbursable basis. After overrating the scope of LEMOA, Modi was about to declare war on China. It was India’s most significant loss on the diplomatic front.

Now China wants to repeat the history of Doklam in Ladakh. Chinese strategists want the Sino-Indian border problem to linger, so China can keep India off balance and prevent it from focusing its attention on the West.

India is in a position that no friend to back its place in the neighborhood and South Asia. India is unable to balance China in the region because China helps the country in simple terms. China demands respect for China’s leadership and interest and commitment to the one-China policy. In return, China provides maximum political, economic, and technological benefits to its partners.

Indian strategists find it hard to digest that India cannot compete with China on any front, and China won’t allow any global power to play a game against it.

Before 2014, Indian foreign and strategic affairs were already being overseen by people not up to the task. But since Modi came to power, affairs have fallen into the hands of even less competent people. They are suffering from illusion, delusion, and hallucinations in shaping strategy. India will undergo another significant strategic loss in Ladakh if it repeats its past errors to deal with China.
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Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
China is oving several thousand of airborne paratrooper to Ladakh as a warning. with their superb infrastructure I have no doubt that they can rush reinforcement in a flash should the situation demand it. Maybe China should remind India the lesson 1962 should they forgot it

Several thousand soldiers with a Chinese PLA Air Force airborne brigade took just a few hours to maneuver from Central China’s Hubei Province to northwestern, high-altitude region amid China-India border tensions.
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Here is the video
PLA conducts maneuvers in high-altitude NW China amid border tensions with India

By Liu Xuanzun Source:Global Times Published: 2020/6/7 17:42:03

48d5841e-0bc1-4dbf-a08c-0e472e5cf59e.jpeg

A convoy of military trucks carrying armored vehicles is en route to a designated field during a long-distance maneuver on May 14, 2020. They are attached to an armored detachment of a brigade under the PLA 76th Group Army. Photo:China Military
The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has organized a large-scale maneuver operation featuring thousands of paratroopers plus armored vehicles to the country's high-altitude northwestern region over a long distance from Central China's Hubei Province amid border tensions between China and India.

The entire process was completed in just a few hours, demonstrating China's capability of quickly reinforcing border defenses when necessary, experts said on Sunday.

Using civilian airlines, logistical transportation channels and railways, several thousand paratroopers under a PLA Air Force airborne brigade recently maneuvered from Hubei to an undisclosed location in the plateaus of northwestern China thousands of kilometers away, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Saturday.

Hubei is the province hit hardest by the COVID-19 outbreak in China earlier this year, but it has now fully recovered and troops there are ready to conduct exercises and prepare for combat, CCTV said.

Several hundred pieces of military equipment including armored vehicles and huge batches of supplies were also involved in the operation, which ended successfully in just a few hours.

"This maneuver mission saw significant breakthroughs not only in the scale of mobilized troops but also means of transportation. [Using civilian transportation] substantially expanded our means of transporting forces and increased efficiency in maneuvering an entire organization of troops," Major Colonel Mao Lei, head of the training department at the airborne brigade, said on CCTV.

A PLA veteran with experience in maneuvering from inland to high-altitude regions of China for missions told the Global Times on condition of anonymity on Sunday that the scale and short time it took to finish the mobilization showed the PLA has the capability to project its power anywhere in China very quickly and send reinforcements to remote locations with harsh environments, including high elevation.

This applies not only to paratroopers, who tend to be highly mobile, but also ground forces and warplanes, the veteran said, noting that they can form a multidimensional force in an integrated combat system.


Groups of tanks and armored vehicles attached to the 76th Group Army under the PLA Western Theater Command also conducted a long-distance maneuver on May 14, according to Chinese military media outlet China Military.

The mobilization operation came at a time when China and India face a new wave of tensions due to high altitude border issues, as reports say both sides have reinforced their border defenses.

Senior military officers from both sides, namely China's Southern Xinjiang Military District chief and India's 14 Corps commander, on Saturday held a first round of talks, which ended with a "positive trajectory," Indian media outlet The Times of India reported on Sunday.

China's Foreign Ministry has stressed at the recent regular press briefings that the situation on the China-India border is stable and controllable, and diplomatic and military channels of communication between the two sides are unimpeded.
 

foxmulder

Junior Member
Confrontation at Pangong lake Doesn't look like the Chinese are giving ground they stay put


This is video *again* proves everything is happening in Chinese side of LAC albeit within 30-50 meters. If it were any other country there would be fighting/war like in 10 seconds. Can you imagine India doing this to USA or Russia or Pakistan or Turkey ? :D China has infinite patience.
 

weig2000

Captain
From the venerable Indian diplomat Mr. M. K. BHADRAKUMAR.

Posted on
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In a trove of declassified CIA documents some years ago, there was a list of Soviet jokes from the 1980s offering the glimpse of a secret American weapon to debunk and demoralise the US’ Cold War enemy. One of these CIA jokes relates to the stagnation of the Soviet era under Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982).

Russians call it Период застоя or Stagnation Period. The joke goes like this: A train bearing Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev stops suddenly when the tracks run out. Each leader offers a unique solution. Lenin gathers workers and peasants from miles around and exhorts them to build more track. Stalin shoots the train crew. Khrushchev rehabilitates the dead crew and orders the tracks behind the train ripped up and relaid in front. Brezhnev smiles and simply pulls down the curtains and pretends the train is moving.

The metaphor is an apt description of the present stagnation period in India’s foreign policy. Perhaps, there is a co-relation between a rock-solid government (like Brezhnev or Modi’s) and stagnation. Perhaps, Modi is so very much inundated with domestic crises — Kashmir, CAA, economy, coronavirus — that his attention span got severely limited. Maybe, social distancing reduces the scope for “hug diplomacy”.

At any rate, with the advent of a cerebral External Affairs Minister after a five-year hiatus, the locus of Indian diplomacy shifted from the PMO to the foreign-policy bureaucracy. There are pluses and minuses when bureaucracy drives diplomacy. The plus is that institutional memory revives; the great minus is that bureaucrats are largely staid and listless and tend to acquire the Sisyphean syndrome — marking time in seemingly profound but ultimately futile efforts — while politicians generally tend to be result-oriented.

The Sisyphean syndrome is much in evidence today in South Block. There is a private joke in circulation currently among Foreign Service officers that while as Foreign Secretary under late Sushma Swaraj, S. Jaishankar used to be de facto EAM, now that he is the EAM, he prefers to be a de facto FS.

That makes Jaishankar’s world view to be the stuff of India’s current foreign policy and diplomacy. He does the thinking and Modi largely steps in to execute it in assigned roles, with elan. Jaishankar’s world view rotates on an axis with two ends — one, ‘if you have a problem with China, come hither for a cup of Darjeeling tea’; two, tack up the Indian horse in the American stable, lock up the stable and throw away the key.

Take, for example, Modi’s “virtual summit” later today with his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison. The latter’s attraction today for Delhi is two-fold: first, he is a friend of US President Donald Trump; second, he has run foul of Beijing.

As a loyal friend of Trump, Morrison began mouthing the phrase “Wuhan virus”, demanding an independent investigation into the origin of Covid-19 pandemic, which he said “has taken more than 200,000 lives across the world” and “shut down the global economy.”

Unsurprisingly, China was displeased and warned it China “has to reciprocate.” Morrison thereupon sensed that he might have put his foot into his mouth on a matter which even the US’ closest allies warily touch. He
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, admitting that Canberra “has nothing” in terms of evidence to point finger at Beijing.

But the damage has been done. China’s recent barley tariffs and beef bans on imports from Australia may or may not have anything to do with all this. In fact,
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that the Chinese actions were prompted by genuine “technical export issues” and Covid-19 is “unlikely to be the sole reason or main motivating factor behind such major trade moves.”

This indeed provided a warm setting for the Modi-Morrison virtual meeting today. Delhi is visualising a convergence with Canberra over its China-baiting. But Modi may find Morrison a chastened man. The latter realises the folly of overlooking that Australia owes its prosperity to its trade with China, which is, in fact, bigger in volume than its trade with its next 4 biggest trading partners — including the US and Japan — combined.

The point is, unlike India, which takes its containment strategy against China almost obsessively, its “Quad” allies (Japan and Australia) adopt a nuanced attitude when it comes to their thriving economic partnership with China. (The same is the case with Taiwan and South Korea.) They don’t share Delhi’s desperate itch to “decouple” from China.

The US foreign policy is at a crossroads today. The transatlantic partnership has lost traction and Washington’s major European allies are carefully distancing themselves from its tough posturing toward China. With Russia figuring in the US national security strategy alongside China as another revisionist power, the US-Russia-China triangle today gets tilted against American hegemony as well.

In such a dismal scenario, Jaishankar’s American counterpart Mike Pompeo is probing the scope to put together a new US-led coalition of the willing against China. Whose brain wave this quixotic idea to tilt at the Chinese windmills could be, we may never get to know, but in the current civil war conditions in America, the US’ soft power is waning.

And the US’ capacity to be a driver of growth for the world economy is diminishing. The US-led globalisation has ended and given way to China-led globalisation. Clearly, the US is hard-pressed to form a coalition with China-baiting as its leitmotif. The recent meeting of the World Health Assembly underscored the limits to US influence.

The European Union aspires to be an independent pole in the world order while Russia is maintaining its strategic autonomy; Russia is forging a quasi-alliance with China and robustly opposes the Trump administration’s attempts to shift the global balance, something which is pivotal to Moscow’s strategic doctrine.

Fundamentally, if Pompeo has a bee in his bonnet regarding the Chinese Communist Party, why should it become India’s concern? In the prevailing world order, India enjoys ample space and freedom to manoeuvre to safeguard its interests and boost its development.

Nonetheless, incredibly enough, India has volunteered to join Pompeo’s “coalition of the willing”. What has India in common with the other countries identifying with
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— Australia, South Korea, Israel and Brazil? How does India gain out of such a grouping, which is to meet shortly for its second meeting within a span of a month? Does it resolve India’s border disputes with China?

Indeed, this is a transformative period for India to think big and to cast its net wide to realise an objective which remains elusive — to transition as a middle income country. Do not squander it away in frivolous pastimes and reality shows. There is nothing to gain out of getting under the Chinese skin.

The US lacks the sort of investible surplus or expertise to partner in “Make in India”. Nor is the US in the business of making other countries “self-reliant”. Trump, in particular, has a mercantilist mindset. Whereas, within the matrix of a cooperative relationship, China can be a driver of growth for India’s economy. Be realistic and pragmatic.

No one will respect us so long as hundreds of millions of Indians keep migrating on foot or bicycle from one region of our vast country to another to eke out their livelihood or live under flyovers in cities like lost souls. Jaishankar’s tunnel vision harms India’s national interests. It is a recipe for stagnation.
 
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