Throughout the last few weeks, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, the petite, mostly smiling Hua Chunying remained delightfully vague when asked about the border spat. She happily peppered her responses with words and phrases like “peace”, “tranquility at the border”, “relevant mechanisms” and so on.
She was soft but firm in repeating one aspect about the spat: China did not violate the meandering Line of Actual Control (LAC) that not only divides the two nations geographically but is also the diplomatic dividing line between the two nations, which are quietly wary about each other in their own ways.
But the daily briefings by Hua yielded no information; nothing about the sequence of events or the status at the place of the incident. When China said that its troops did not cross the LAC, did that mean that the PLA troops were responding to movements by Indian troops near the LAC? The net answer always veered towards “peace”, “tranquility”….and so on.
A Chinese diplomat who met Indian journalists informally this week was only willing to say that China did not provoke the three-week spat which had the potential to leave a bitter diplomatic aftertaste – if it hasn’t already — in the ambiguous relationship between the two most populous neighbours in the world.
The timing of the spat obviously surprised everyone; it came just before high profile visits between the two countries including the first visit abroad by Premier Li Keqiang to India.
If we were to assume that it was the Chinese soldiers who first walked 19 km into Indian territory to set up camps then does it fit into Chinese foreign policy?
Broadly it does fit the pattern of how China has lately dealt with outstanding claims of sovereignty.
“In the larger picture of Chinese current foreign policy it does fit the pattern of the last few years, in which China has sought to be more assertive on its outstanding border/sovereignty claims – see the various disputes with Japan/Philippines/Vietnam – which could be understood as a response to Barak Obama’s “pivot” to Asia,” Anton Harder, a research scholar on India-China relation at the London School of Economics told HT over email.
“From this perspective I might hazard a guess that with various high-level meetings to occur over the next few months, China wants to strike a more implacable stance to remind India that there is a cost to be paid on Sino-Indian relations from Indian relations with the USA. China is feeling vulnerable at the moment, at a popular level people talk about the USA seeking to contain China with alliances around the periphery, and at a policy level there was a defence white paper issued by china recently warning of US hegemony,” Harder said.
But at the same time, and for exactly the same reasons, it is also peculiar for China to be in a combative mood with India at this time: Beijing is involved in sovereignty issues in the South and East China seas. Besides the Korean Peninsula too seems to be in a volatile situation.
“It is a strange time for China to pick this fight. With potential instability on the Korean Peninsula and sovereignty disputes in the East and South China Seas, it belies strategic logic for Beijing to open a new front of territorial revisionism,” said a recent Foreign Policy article.
To say that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) acted independently, even if in a localised situation, is also speculative; President Xi Jinping besides being the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) is also chairperson of the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC).
But that also raises the question: if the top bosses of the CPC gave the green signal to the PLA to enter Indian territory, why did they do so?
So, the question raises itself again: why? The same question will keep echoing in the cold, desolate mountains till the two countries find a solution to the border dispute, which the diminutive Hua kept saying was a “leftover from history”.
But if we believe that China did not provoke India as its diplomats have been emphasising, it only means Beijing was responding to something India did: Did China respond to India’s improving military and border infrastructure along the LAC in Ladakh?
This question will not be answered by either New Delhi or Beijing any time soon. And, with the border between the two countries mostly peaceful, this incident will soon be cast aside from broad, public memory. Till something like this rears its head from the leftovers of history again.