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World Affairs
Letter from the Guest Editor
C V Ranganathan
The focus of this issue of World Affairs is on China. In the view of the Editorial Board, it is more important than ever for Indians to make greater and more open-minded efforts to understand that country better. With China’s admirable economic growth over the last decade and a half and the shifting contours of geo-politics in regions of vital interest to India and China after the horrible events of September 11, 2001, the timeliness of the several articles in this issue by prominent Chinese, Russian and Indian thinkers is self-evident. They cover a wide canvas.
The issue starts off by an article by the former Chinese Ambassador to India and to other countries in India’s neighbourhood, Cheng Ruisheng, now a senior adviser in a think-tank supported by the Foreign Ministry of China. He observes that relations between India and China have in recent times become more mature in contrast to the emotionalism that characterised them in earlier years. Maturity and pragmatism have marked Indian and Chinese foreign policies since the end of the Cold War and the introduction of economic reforms in both countries. These attributes are needed for them to manage their differences. Ambassador Cheng looks dispapassionately at the boundary dispute and China’s relations with Pakistan, which is a cause for anxiety in India, and suggests ways of coping with these issues. An example of this is his statement ‘in order to reduce the possibility of any set back in the relations between India and China, legitimate interests and concerns of either side need to be taken care of when the other side takes important steps on sensitive questions’. This is a good and expedient formula for the conduct of relations and seems to have been in evidence during the recent visit of Premier Zhu Rongji to India.
Ms Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea, through her numerous writings over the last four decades on China and Sino-Indian questions has sought to focus on difficult problems in their relationship. Co-Chairperson of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi, she traces the development of China’s external interactions in the post-Soviet world. It is a study on how the ongoing domestic need for economic and social growth in poor Maoist China impelled an external policy centred on creating a peaceful neighbourhood environment for China. This strategy took account of the tectonic political implosions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which could affect governance by a mono-party Chinese Communist State. Even as China accommodated the interests of USA on the one hand, she confronted it where its vital interests (e.g. Taiwan) were concerned, on the other. The evolution of multi-faceted Sino-Russian relations, beginning with the solution of the boundary dispute and culminating in the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is the joint response of China, Russia and four Central Asian States to the complex challenges of international terrorism.
Professor Mikhail L Titarenko, Director of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies, under the Russian Academy of Sciences, deals with the stages of the evolution of friendly and mutually supportive Sino-Russian relations. He brings out similarities in the Russian and Indian approaches to improving relations with China and indeed the approaches of all three countries to common problems faced by the international community. There is a detailed account of the density of Sino-Russian relations and the diverse fields they cover. This is a subject on which much more needs to be known amongst Indians, strategic thinkers and political level decision-makers. Titarenko’s article could be read with profit by them.
Another Chinese scholar and publicist, Wu Miaofa deals briefly with Chinese perceptions of how a multipolar world can be brought about. The article clearly brings out China’s discomfort with USA’s predominance in a world where there is ‘one super-power plus several strong powers’. While offering no programmatic commitments which China is prepared to make to change this situation, he refers to regional organisations and major countries in each continent, including India, which should play a more active role in realising a more evenly balanced multipolar world.
How China achieved economic and social growth while promoting "Chinese Style" political growth is the subject of the next article by Xu Jian, another Chinese scholar. While stunning statistics are recorded, there is a balance and sobriety in the article in dealing with the challenges as well as prospects that China faces ahead in the globalising process and after her post-WTO membership. The quiet confidence is expressed in the sentiment ‘by combining the experience of developed countries and China’s national characteristics, China has the ability to overcome these difficulties’. Time will tell whether this optimism is fully justified but the record of China’s flexible adaptation to the domestic and international environment over the last two and a half decades, does give room to justify his optimism.
Looking around the world, the Chinese have every reason to feel very self-confident. China’s economy has the resilience to survive the global slump, led by events in USA and elsewhere. China has never felt more secure, although there is the possibility that its vast investments in nuclear and missile capabilities would be diminished if American plans for the Missile Defence System are put in place. There is also the need felt by the Chinese to reassure the world that a strong China is not a threat either to the neighbourhood or to any one else. How the Chinese sought to express their self-confidence and the fact that the world needs to know more about China, while China needs to involve itself more with the world, is covered in a report on an international conference held in Beijing in September 2001. It had a very high level of participation by important leaders, scholars and businessmen from many countries. This report written by Dr Surjit Mansingh, Professor in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, gives insights into the instrument of conference diplomacy used by the Chinese to win friends and influence influential personalities from around the world. The President of China met the invitees and the Vice-Premier gave a keynote address (included in the document section.)
The article by Ravi Bhoothalingam, who has rich experience of the private sector in India and is now an independent business consultant, is an excellent piece by a frequent tourist to the remote parts of China. Far from the maddening perspectives of strategic thinkers and defence analysts, Ravi Bhoothalingam, has provided a refreshing lay professional’s approach to the building of people-to-people understanding between India and China. (We heard the complaint during Prime Minister Vajpayee’s recent visit to Japan from Japanese intellectuals that Indians and Japanese have an abysmally low level of interaction with each other at the popular and academic levels). How this can be remedied in the case of China through the profitable avenue of developing tourist traffic between India and China, is what Bhoothalingam focuses on. Both China and India would need to initiate enabling measures to catalyse large-scale movement of cultural and holiday tourism. These include civil aviation links and the putting into place logistics and other infrastructure. India needs to do much to energise the agreement on civil aviation signed as long ago as in 1988 if direct air connections are to be put in place between the capitals or between parts of both countries. Indeed post-September 11, such measures assume greater urgency for India and China and tourism is an eminently desirable soft sector to begin with.
There is a lot of debate within academic circles in USA about whether China is a status-quo power or is unreconciled to the present unipolar centred status-quo. The example of China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), covered in a pithy article by T K Bhaumik of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), clearly indicates that China’s admission to WTO will involve enormous and possibly painful changes to the status-quo in China’s domestic politico-economy. But China has shown through the wide-ranging concessions it has made to the developed country interlocutors that it has taken the real world into account, as it has emerged and is prepared to act on this realisation. Its entry into the WTO would have a serious impact on the developing countries and it is up to them to take advantage of the more liberalised conditions within China that its membership entails.
A brief article on possibilities of collaboration between the Chinese and Indian Information Technology (IT) industries through identifying complementaries in the hardware and software fields, respectively is the subject of an article by Gautam Soni, an expert in the field. This is a sentiment which the Chinese Premier Zhou Rongji, apparently gave expression to during his visit to the well-known Bangalore company, Infosys.
Parallels between Taoist metaphysics and the Upanishads is the subject of a serious piece by Indra Nath Choudhuri. In the midst of so many material changes and the consumerism which has overtaken both countries, it is salutary to remind ourselves of some common philosophical roots, which have not lost their relevance for all the scientific revolutions we have seen.
Speeches made by the Chinese Premier Zhou Rongji during his recent January visit to India, as this issue was going to the press, are also included in the Annexure and the one made by the Indian Prime Minister A B Vajpayee, manifest the maturity present at the highest levels of leadership to push forward the Sino-Indian relationship in the changing milieu. Other inclusions in the Annexure are good annotations to some of the articles in the issue.
New Delhi
December 2001