Author: Rajeev Srinivasan
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: May 28, 2001
This has been an interesting spring;
I am generally in a good mood at this time of the year. I was in rural
Britain for a while; and both that and San Francisco are excellent places
to enjoy springtime. The manicured lawns and meadows and fields and hedgerows
and parks in the UK always amaze me: so bucolically pretty for a rogue
nation whose prosperity rides on having beggared half the world! Seldom
have so few stolen so much from so many!
On arriving in California, I enjoyed
the cherry blossoms in the Golden Gate Park; and the lovely purple wildflower
whose name I do not know was blooming along the highways. I started writing
this column in mid-April; but I am now finishing it on the Memorial Day
weekend, and much has happened in the meantime. All in all, a good spring!
This year I have good reasons to
be pleased. For something I have been shouting myself hoarse about for
a long time, the long-awaited containment, encircling of China with a cordon
sanitaire, seems to be in the works. I do hope this is not a flash in the
pan, but an explicit and strategic approach that will put paid to China's
dreams of a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, also known as the empire
China covets.
I mean, of course, the American
statements about moving forward with their Nuclear Missile Defence and
Theatre Missile Defence systems. They made no bones about the fact that
this is aimed at China, not at poor, bankrupt Russia. US Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage went to India to 'consult'. George W Bush's annoyance
at China has resulted in swift action, in the form of strong support for
Taiwan and sales of weapons systems; China may lose its chance to host
the Olympics, as well as find obstacles in its accession to the World Trade
Organization.
India's explicit, some may say ecstatic,
support of the US government's proposals has caught many observers by surprise.
There was certainly an element of unseemly haste, but it has an extremely
significant aspect to it that the sceptics in India did not catch. That
India is finally saying, ideology be damned, let us look after our own
selfish interests. I hope this is the beginning of a trend. It is in India's
strategic interests to contain China just as China has contained us. George
Fernandes was right, after all, in identifying them as our number one threat.
And India cannot do the containment
alone: it needs to ally with Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, Myanmar,
Korea and of course the United States, to achieve the total encirclement
of China. With India's growing ability to police the Indian Ocean sea-lanes
controlling the flow of oil to Japan and China, the US would like to use
India as an ally in possibly applying a choke-hold on China, should there
be economic warfare with China at some point in the near future.
Of course, China has the same idea:
to have Japan by the short and curlies by controlling shipping in the South
China Sea. Apart from any mineral rights in the Paracels and Spratlys and
Mischief Reef, China's bluster there has been intended to serve notice
that it is the hegemon in the South China Sea and can disrupt Japan's economy
at will.
The potential effect on China has
not gone unnoticed by China's fifth columnists in India. Reader Ashish
sent me an editorial in a famous newspaper that bemoaned the alleged fact
that India had now lost its 'strategic autonomy' and become a puppet of
the US. Why, asked the editorial, didn't India support China in the brouhaha
with the US over the downed spy plane? For good measure, they continued,
why didn't India support the Palestinians against Israel?
The short answer: It is none of
our business. Whether the US and China shoot each other's planes down,
or the Israelis and Palestinians are beastly to each other, we don't give
a rat's ass unless our national interests are affected. We are, you see,
no longer the hectoring, shrill voice of the Non-Aligned Movement: the
Third World can go fly a kite. The diplomatic answer: We desire peace in
the Pacific and West Asia, and we hope they settle their differences amicably.
There were others who worry about
how China would be upset by India's acceptance of the American dogma. Oh,
really, and what will they do? Arm Pakistan? Try to cripple India's nuclear
and missile capabilities by lobbying in multilateral fora like the CTBT?
Turn Myanmar into a listening post? Support insurgents? Guess what, they
have been doing everything they could possibly do to hurt India; they couldn't
possibly do any worse. Yes, I know this is an assumption: but let them
see there is some cost to their adventurism.
India's 'secular' 'progressives'
have been so influenced by Jawaharlal Nehru that they cannot get beyond
his view of China as an invincible conqueror. Wake up and smell the coffee,
boys and girls: 1962 was a debacle only because Nehru and Krishna Menon
screwed up. This is true even though I do not fully buy Neville Maxwell's
words on rediff.com which imply that India was, in a bizarre way, the aggressor.
When the Chinese attacked Vietnam in 1979, the small but determined Vietnamese
army, battle-hardened and self-confident, tore the great People's Liberation
Army to shreds, forcing them to retreat.
I have no illusions about the benignity
of America's intentions towards India. As in the famous dictum, we have
no permanent allies, only permanent interests. Our paramount interest now
is security, followed by economic growth. And I say that advisedly, because
we cannot have prosperity without physical security. I have repeatedly
said this in previous columns, see The End of Nuclear Virginity.
This is where China has been the
biggest thorn in our flesh: it sustains Pakistan, which it has publicly
referred to as "China's Israel" -- that is, a smaller power that it uses
for leverage by arming and supporting it. China has discovered to its delight
that it can easily hobble India by merely supplying Pakistan with a relatively
small amount of money, say $1 billion a year, in the form of small arms,
tanks, nuclear-capable M-11 missiles, semi-knocked-down nuclear bombs,
and the wherewithal and know-how to build some of these things.
Magnified by Pakistani hatred and
leveraged by their burgeoning, unemployed/unemployable and Wah'abi-Deobandi-brainwashed
surplus youth, the Chinese $1 billion turns into $10 billion worth of trouble
for India. A terrific return on investment, indeed. If China were to stop
supplying Pakistan, the holy war in Jammu & Kashmir would end within
weeks, and we all know this.
Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji's recent
visit to Pakistan to commemorate 50 years of China-Pakistan ties emphasized
that this mutually profitable little arrangement will continue for the
foreseeable future -- there were pledges of eternal friendship. There is
no negative consequence to China for abetting Pakistani mischief against
India, and so they will continue to indulge in it. Anything that causes
China to pay a price is therefore welcome. Containment is one such.
Of course, the Chinese may rue their
closeness with Pakistan when Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang secede, enflamed
by fundamentalist Islam imported from the Taleban and Pakistan over the
Karakoram Highway. That would be poetic justice, but for the moment they
are enjoying the pluses and not worrying about the minuses.
I believe the Chinese made a major
miscalculation in provoking the Americans over the downed spy plane. I
have consistently talked about China being a middling power (see my previous
column China Doesn't Matter) which has delusions of grandeur and has mastered
the art of diplomatic theatre: of bluster, bluff and blather without substance.
They have begun to believe their own propaganda about how the American
economy needs them more than they need the Americans.
This is patently hogwash: for, after
all, the balance of trade is $80 billion in China's favour. That is, China
takes away $80 billion from the US each year. So what will happen if America
decides to impose a trade embargo? China will lose $80 billion in sales
and be left with a mountain of their low-end goods (Reader Manny called
it "rubber dogshit from Hong Kong") that nobody else has the demand to
consume -- China will have to dump it at fire-sale prices and lose billions.
And the US can source it from other low-cost countries like Indonesia,
Malaysia, Thailand and India, if not instantly, in a short while.
And what will that do to the US
middle class? It will raise the prices of a lot of things like toys, small
electronic goods, trinkets, low-end clothing, etc. But since when is the
US government worried about the pocketbooks of the consumer? America's
mercantilist system worries only about the interests of big business. And
after all, George W Bush has four years before he has to worry about facing
the voter again.
