Fire On All Cylinders At China

The blood of twenty Indian martyrs and the broader problem of China’s repetitive ‘salami slicing’ tactics with its neighbours demand a comprehensive longer-term response. China is a different beast. Even as the intense news media focus shifts from the Ladakh encounter and the LAC flareup, India’s foreign and defence communities cannot afford to take their eyes off the ball of China’s overall imperialistic posturing, which is bound to return in some form or the other either at the LAC or in the Indo-Pacific, argues SREERAM CHAULIA

- Sreeram Chaulia

The unprecedented physical brawl on June 15 in the Galwan Valley at the Line of Actual Control (LAC), which cost the lives of twenty Indian soldiers and an unspecified number of Chinese troops, was a caesura moment in bilateral relations. It shattered a 45-year spell of relative ‘peace and tranquility’ with occasional tensions but no hostilities and casualties.

For India, the violent clash came as a painful reminder that the China it is facing today along the 3488-kilometre LAC, and in the vast maritime domain of the Indo-Pacific, has crossed the foreign policy Rubicon set by Deng Xiaoping (paramount leader from 1978 to 1990) and followed by his protégés Jiang Zemin (1993 to 2003) and Hu Jintao (2003-2013).

Their approach of China ‘hiding its strength and biding its time’, avoiding costly geopolitical and military conflicts with neighbors and extra-regional powers, and focusing national energy on economic ‘reform and opening up’, had ensured a degree of strategic stability in Asia and beyond. Even as China’s economy was growing at a rapid clip during what the American scholar Elizabeth Economy terms as the era of the ‘second revolution’ under Deng and his successors, it acted with a degree of restraint and could claim in that period to be a sort of gentle giant.