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.
This story is from the August 2020 edition of Geopolitics.
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This story is from the August 2020 edition of Geopolitics.
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