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| AsiaViews, Edition: 18/V/Mayl/2008 |
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| Sino-Indian Competition and the Burma Imbroglio |
When the subject of Burma – or Myanmar as it is officially called – and its unyielding political stance is raised, attention inevitably turns to its giant neighbors China and India. The often-asked question is why the two leading countries in Asia have been unable – or perhaps unwilling – to influence the Yangon regime to ease its authoritarian grip and allow more openness and democratization in the country, in tune with the rest of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries. To expound on the security and economic interests of both China and India with regards to Burma is Professor Brahma Chellaney of India. Dr. Chellaney is currently a professor at the Strategic Studies Center at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. He is also a member of the Policy Advisory Group, which is headed by the Foreign Minister of India.
We also present the views of Minxin Pei, Senior Associate and Director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment as a counter point.
The following are excerpts taken from a panel discussion organized by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA in its Asian Voices Seminar series last January.
Brahma Chellaney
The relationship between China and India which together make up 40 percent of the global working age population and 14 percent of the world's GDP, in my view, needs to be viewed in the larger context of the evolving qualitative reordering of power in Asia and the implications that reordering holds for Asian and international security.
As we all know, major shifts in economic and political power are happening in the world, and these shifts are occurring not because of battlefield victories or military alignments but due to a factor that is unique to the modern world - rapid economic growth. These shifts are most conspicuous in Asia, which is bouncing back from a relatively short period of decline in its history as the Asian Development Bank said, "Asia accounted for 60 percent of the global GDP in 1820 at the advent of the industrial revolution.” By 1945 - that is in 125 years - Asia’s share of global GDP had plummeted just to 20 percent.
Now, Asia is bouncing back, and through its economic dynamism, is all set to shape the future of globalization. That this reordering of power in Asia has been accompanied by sharpening geopolitics should not come as a surprise. In fact, a new great game seems to be on the way - reshaping major equations and challenging strategic stability in Asia. In fact, the main challenge in Asia now is to ensure strategic stability.
Recent events are a reminder of the high stakes geopolitical competition sweeping Asia. These developments ranged from the formation of exploratory alliances like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Quadrilateral Initiative to some of the major war games that we have seen in recent months. The most recent are Chinese exercises in the East and South China seas, the five-nation war games in the Bay of Bengal, and the Russia-China exercises in the Chelyabinsk region.
What is striking is that this new flurry of alliance formation in Asia is being led by Asia's rising powers, not by the United States which has policed Asia since the end of World War II. In this larger context, Asian cooperation and security will be very much influenced by the equations between and among China, India and Japan - Asia's three largest powers who constitute a unique strategic triangle.
Never before in history has there been a strong Japan, a strong China and a strong India at the same time; in fact, since the emergence of Japan as a world power during the Meiji emperor’s reign there has never been a non-Western power that has emerged with such capability to reorder, to change the international order as China has today.
So, stable political relationships between China and India, and China and Japan hold the key to Asian security. Although we all talk about China and India as neighbors, the fact is that these two countries are new neighbors. They maybe 5,000 year-old civilizations, but they have been neighbors for barely 57 years since the disappearance of Tibet as the neutral buffer between them. They had no historical experience in dealing with each other politically until the fall of Tibet.
Since then, they have been on a learning curve trying to build equilibrium in their relationship. That relationship today is more stable and more cooperative than it was in the past. Both China and India have built a mutual stake in maintaining the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their economic modernization and security depend. But just as China is haunted by three T’s in its domestic sphere - Tiananmen, Taiwan and Tibet - its relationship with India is also defined by three T’s - territorial disputes, Tibet and trade. Of these, the first two are stuck, and the third issue, trade, is booming with China enjoying a ballooning trade surplus in its favor.
But as we know from the Sino-Japanese relationship in recent years, flourishing economic ties - as Dr. Pei has also mentioned in his writings - flourishing economic ties by themselves do not assure moderation and restrained in the absence of progress in bridging political differences. In fact, in today’s market-driven world, trade is not constrained by political differences unless political barriers have been erected. So, if the Sino-Indian trade were to overtake U.S.-India trade, a likely scenario within the next two years, political differences will still divide China and India.
One political issue emblematic of the underlying Sino-Indian strategic dissonance is Burma. There are several important and interesting parallels between Burma and Tibet. India has had close historical ties with Tibet and with Burma, which was part of the British Indian Empire until 1937. The majority people of Burma, the Burmans, are of Tibetan ethnic stock, and the Burman script, like the Tibetan script, was taken from Sanskrit.
Burma and Tibet, today, epitomize, in my view, the India-China historical tensions. Having lost Tibet as the buffer, India values Burma as a hedge against China’s rise. It is significant, that the resistance to repressive rule in both Burma and in Tibet is led by iconic Nobel laureates, one living exile in India and the other with close ties to India but under house arrest in Rangoon for long. It is also interesting that the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel Peace Prize in quick succession for the same reason - for leading a non-violent struggle in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi.
Yet, another parallel is that more than half a century after forcibly absorbing Tibet, China has failed to crush the Tibetan resistance. That non-violent struggle today ranks as one of the longest and most powerful resistance movements in modern history with no links to violence or to terror, this movement, in fact, stands out as a model. Similarly, despite keeping Aung San Suu Kyi in detention for the nearly 13 of the past 19 years, the junta in Burma has failed to suppress the democracy movement as last September’s monk-led mass protest showed. Today, the Sino-Indian competition over Burma is rooted in two factors - geopolitics and energy.
For China, Burma is an entry way to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Burma, in fact, overlooks vital sea lanes of communication to the Strait of Malacca. China is busy completing the Irrawaddy Strategic Corridor involving road, railway, river and energy transport links between the Burmese ports and Yunan.
For India, the Irrawaddy Strategic Corridor means strategic pressure on the eastern flank given the fact that China is already building strategic corridors in two other parts around India. One is another north-east strategic corridor, the Trans-Karakoram Corridor linking Xinjiang with Pakistan’s Chinese-built Gwadar port, which is located at the entrance of Strait of Hormuz through which 40 percent of the world’s oil supply passes. And the second corridor is an east-west corridor in Tibet across India’s northern frontiers.
For India, China’s growing strategic clout in Burma holds important military implications because such transportation and strategic links give China the levee to strategically meddle in India’s west of northeast including the state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims to be Chinese territory.
Operating through the plains of Burma and in India’s northeast is much easier than having to operate across the mighty Himalayas. In the 1962 war, the Indian army in Arunachal Pradesh found itself outflanked by the invading People’s Liberation Army, spurring speculation that some units of the PLA, rather than entering by climbing the mighty Himalayas, came from Yunan through the plains of Burma. It is no wonder that during the World War II, both the Allied and the Axis powers classified Burma as the “back door to India.”
The potential for Chinese strategic interference has to be viewed against the background that the tribal insurgencies in India’s northeast were all instigated by Maoist China, which trained and armed these rebels partly by exploiting the Burma route. Today, India has 850 kilometer long porous border with Burma, with insurgents operating on both sides with the help of shared ethnicity.
Energy is another factor. In Asia, we have not only the world’s fastest growing economies, the fastest rising military expenditures, the most dangerous hotspots, but also the fiercest energy competition anywhere. The intra-Asian competition over energy is driven by the fact that some parts of Asia are energy-rich and the other parts, where economic growth is concentrated, are energy deficient.
Like elsewhere, energy-rich states in Asia tend to be governed by autocrats - that is the harsh reality. Against this background, you have a country like Burma sitting on vast gas reserves, which are coveted by its neighbors, but Burma because it is sanctions-hit, it is an isolated state, it has not reaped the energy dividends like some other autocratically ruled energy rich states in the world.
Foreign investment in Burma’s gas exploration and production has not been too significant, plus sanctions have prevented Burma from accessing liquefaction technology to become a major LNG exporter. So the only choice Burma is left with is to sell natural gas by pipeline, and to whom can it sell natural gas by pipeline? To its immediate neighbors as it is doing to Thailand and is going to do to China once the new pipeline is complete, and as India wants but has failed so far to secure any contract to buy Burmese gas.
Until September - last September’s pro-democracy uprising, Burma, like China, had been free of any major pro-democracy demonstrations for nearly two decades. The last major pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma were in 1988; in China, in 1989. Then came fuel price increases both in Burma first, then in China. We had fuel price increases in Burma followed by fuel price increases in China eight weeks later. In Burma, we had mass protest with the monks coming out on the streets. In China, we had some sporadic incidence of violence, one person killed in Hinan, but no pro-democracy protests in China.
The reason why we had this contrast is that China has transformed itself radically in the last 20 years since Tiananmen Square, while Burma remains impoverished, isolated and battered by sanctions. The post-Tiananmen trade sanctions against China did not last long on the argument that they were hurting the ordinary Chinese and that engagement was a better way to promote political change. The same principle, however, was never applied to Burma.
The junta, or the military, has been ruling Burma for 46 years now. The Communist Party has governed China for 59 years now. Neither model is sustainable. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union. For the time being, however, the Chinese political system through its remarkable economic success story is advertising that autocracy is a better or a more rapid route to prosperity and stability than the tumult of liberal democracy.
It is not an accident that there is a strong streak of authoritarianism in Asia. If you look around Burma’s neighborhood, you see that. It was the fast track to authoritarianism that was associated with prosperity, with the strong one-party systems in Singapore and Malaysia in the lead. So in a way, one can argue that the Chinese political system has emerged as a challenge to liberal democracy - maybe, the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of fascism.
In analyzing the future Sino-Indian trends, I wish to look at this relationship by identifying certain challenges that are common to the larger Asian continent. Challenge one in Asian is to overcome the harmful historical legacies that weigh down all major interstate relationships. Be it the China-India relationship, the China-Japan relationship, the Korea-Japan relationship, all these are weighed down by history. The shadow of the 1962 War bedevils the India-China relationship. Not only does it weigh heavily on the Indian psyche, but also, the wounds of that war have been kept alive by China’s assertive claims to additional Indian territories - claims that underline the fact that China is not willing to accept the territorial status quo for a settlement with India.
India-China ties test Asian security. But given the fact that China and India are pointing across the mighty Himalayas in very different, two political directions, they need not threaten each other as long as they abstain from hostile actions against each other.
A cooperative Asian security environment, in my view, in Asia is very much linked to how the India-China relationship evolves. How that relationship evolves in turn will depend how the Tibet issue is managed or settled. Having ceased to be the political buffer between India and China, Tibet can still be the political bridge between these two giants if China were to begin a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet and grant the region genuine autonomy that it promised in 1951.
Challenge two in Asia is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single state as Europe has done, so that political homogeneity in terms of shared goals can be established. The shadow of hegemony looms so large in Asia as the effort to fashion an East Asian community has shown that, let alone an Asian community even a rules-based Asian order will not emerge unless this challenge is addressed. In fact, this challenge is the main driver of the new great game that we are witnessing.
Challenge three, in the absence of a common Asian identity, is to build common norms and values so that institutionalized cooperation and collaboration could be promoted in Asia. Without common norms values, it cannot have any community. Think of the European Union without common norms or values, even NAFTA is built on certain common norms. But given the divergent political systems in Asia, building common norms is a daunting challenge made worse by the mix of history, cultural diversity and unsolved territorial and political problems. Yet, this challenge ought to be addressed because Asia stands out as being the only continent where regional integration has not taken hold.
In the absence of efforts to build common norms, the risk is that political values will become the main geopolitical dividing line in Asia. Pitting a China-led coalition that values centralized domestic control and whose favorite institution is the SCO against a constellation of democracies loosely tied together by a web of strategic partnerships. In fact, the Sino-Indian rivalry plays to this political divide.
Challenge four is to address the threats from within. All the emerging powers in Asia - particularly China and India - the main threats that they face come from within. India and China’s future will be determined very much by how they address these challenges, which include rising disparities in society, high incidence of corruption, poor governance, environmental degradation and growing discontent among ethnic groups located in outlying regions. Unfortunately, they become too focused on GDP growth rates as if development really means GDP growth, but development is more broad based. The concept includes far more things than GDP growth or even acquisition of military muscle.
Challenge five, which is a challenge you rarely hear about, yet, you scratch the surface, this challenge is so visible. And this challenge is to build river basin arrangements in Asia; particularly, between India and China because all the major rivers of Asia originate in the Tibetan Plateau except one, the Ganges. Only the Ganges of all the great rivers of Asia originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas.
But the other rivers - the Mekong, the Salween, the Karnali, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Sutlej, the Yangtze, the Yellow -- name any major river of Asia - they all originate from Tibetan Plateau. And these rivers that originate from Chinese-held territory are a lifeline to 47 percent of the world’s population. Wars of the future will be fought not so much over oil but over water. No region better illustrates this danger than Asia, which according to a 2006 U.N. report, has less fresh water per capita than any continent other than Antarctica.
I think Asia’s sharpening energy geopolitics driven in part by high GDP growth rates and in part by mercantilist efforts to lock up supplies has obscured the fact that water shortage is already becoming an obstacle to Asia’s continued rapid economic expansion. If water geopolitics were to spur interstate tensions, the Asian renaissance would definitely stall.
Asia’s water woes are likely to be aggravated by climate change. Intrastate - within nations - intrastate water disputes are rife from South Asia to Southeast Asia to China. Name any part of Asia, intrastate disputes are common. Of greater concern should be this potential for interstate conflict over water. And no country will determine the direction of Asian geopolitics more than China, simply because it controls the river head of Asia’s waters. Yet, it is pursuing major interbasin and interriver water transfer projects in the Tibetan Plateau. Plus, it has dammed the Mekong with two dams upstream; six upstream on the Brahmaputra, one upstream on the Sutlej and this has created a lot of unease in the lower Riparian states.
It is also pursuing this project called the “Great South-North Water Transfer Project,” which has the blessing of Hu Jintao who actually was trained as a hydrologist and who made his name, guess where? In Tibet as a martial law administrator. So you combine water and Tibet and you have Hu Jintao as the president of China and then keep at the back of your mind the officially blessed book that was published the year before last with the title quite revealing -- Tibet’s Waters Will Save China.
So against this background - and I do not have too much time - against this background, the protection of Asia’s shed water resources demands interstate cooperation. Interbasin arrangements that already exist for the Indus, the Nile, the Niger and the Senegal rivers offer a model on how to avert water conflict in Asia because these arrangements have worked well. They offer the technical and the institutional means to manage water disputes.
My last challenge and I think it is a very important one in terms of the title of this seminar underlined by the way a resource-rich Burma stays in abject poverty under a brutal military regime. And these challenges how to fashion a forward-looking international approach to promote democracy so that outside actors far from treading themselves off actively engage to influence developments within. Only 16 out of the 39 states in Asia are free, according to the Freedom House, and in recent years, we have seen democracy in retreat underlined most prominently by the way Russia is sliding back from democracy. And instead of democracy spreading, we have Islamic revivalism spreading.
So this challenge is an important one, but I admit this is a challenge easier to define than to address. Difficult as it may be, this is a challenge that needs to be taken head on because of the different standards that we are applying and of the fact that often sanctions by themselves as Burma’s case illustrates, sanctions by themselves are not helping to promote political freedom. It has been more than two decades since the free world began implementing boycotts, trade bans, aid cutoffs, and began exerting diplomatic pressure on Burma, and what do we find today? That the free world has even less leverage over Burma than it had earlier.
So it is very clear that sanctions by themselves, as a sole instrument, are not going to deliver the promised objective, but engagement by itself cannot be the answer. The notion that democracy is going to follow capitalist development has been belied by China. So we need a more calibrated, a more nuanced approach which ensures that outside factors are able to play a role in influencing developments within. Also, it is important to ensure that promotion of freedom does not become a diplomatic instrument to target not the powerful big autocracies but the weak, unpopular, isolated states. The fact is that the more you push and punish the weak renegade states, the more likely the big autocracies are going to gain.
Beijing, in recent years, has signed tens of billions of dollars worth of energy and arms contracts with pariah regimes from Burma and Iran to Sudan and Venezuela. Because of its U.N. veto, it is able to provide political protection to regimes that international community seeks to isolate.
Building democracy in Burma is vital not only to end repression and to empower the masses, but also to facilitate ethnic conciliation and integration in a very ethnically divided society that cannot be held together indefinitely through brute military power. This called for refining the sanctions tool, achieving better targeted sanctions and ongoing process. Yet even as we are trying to achieve better targeted sanctions, the sanction instrument has become more blunt.
One thing we need to bear in mind is that the seeds of democracy will not take root in an isolated, sanctions-battered economy - in a stunted economy with little civil society in existence and support. Burma is a case of a country that has been at war with itself since day one, since it became free, independent in 1948. The reason why the military is so strong, there are more than 400,000 troops in the Burmese military making the Burmese army one of the largest standing armies in the world. The reason why it became so big and powerful is because it has been fighting internal wars from day one. Today, it is the only functioning institution left in Burma - this is a sad story.
So given on one side, a stunted economy, lack of an entrepreneurial class, underdeveloped civil society, a military as the only functional institution, how do we bring about political change in a country like Burma? This is no easy task. After all, what we are seeking to achieve in Burma is not the removal of the junta with another autocratic regime with a civilian mask. What we are seeking in Burma is the empowerment of the masses through genuine democracy.
What we need are not just negative conditionalities but positive conditionalities; that is, sanctions that do not prevent Burma’s regional integration but sanctions that are more carefully targeted, and more importantly, Burma’s rulers are given a set of benchmarks - the meeting of each benchmark bringing positive rewards. This is what I mean by positive conditionalities, and these benchmarks should be designed to expand the civil society because it is only a growing civil society that is likely to sound the death knell of any dictatorship.
It is very important for outside actors to play a role within and not shut themselves out and hope that sanctions by themselves are going to deliver the results. For example, without the Bush administration engaging Pyongyang, to give you one example, would it have been possible to achieve the progress however tentative it might seem at this stage on the North Korean Nuclear Program? And it is nobody’s case that Burma is worse than North Korea.
Minxin Pei
I think one of the things that I’m always struck by is the puzzle in regarding Indian-Chinese relations. As you can see, there are structured, deeply embedded sources of conflict, tensions, competition and distrust, but the relationship in the last 10, 15 years has been growing in a quite positive direction. The competition between the two countries has remained quite muted. Both sides have exercised enormous strategic restraint in dealing with each other.
How do we explain this puzzle? I think that puzzle actually is far more interesting for policy analysts. This discussion of mine focuses really on this puzzle rather than on a specification of Burma. I believe that Burma is important, but in the overall scheme of things between China and India, Burma occupies probably a secondary place with far bigger bilateral issues between these two countries.
When you look at Sino-Indian relations, there are four sources of conflict in competition that are very, very obvious and they are serious sources of competition. The first one is it is structural. It is embedded in the geopolitics of Asia. Both countries are regional powers with huge aspirations for bigger influence both within the region and on the global stage. And, of course, that geopolitical rivalry pits the two countries against each other over issues such as Burma, such as Southeast Asia and, of course, Tibet.
Second source of tension is historical. The two countries fought a border war in 1962, which left a bitter taste especially among the Indians and, of course, the onset of territorial disputes among the two countries are among the most difficult in the world and that issue continues to dog the two countries.
The third is that the two countries are influenced by third parties. For India, Chinese relations with Pakistan, which is very strategic, has been a sore spot because China uses Pakistan as a strategic balancer against India. And for China, India is being used or at least Washington is trying to use India as a strategic balancer against China. So there are third parties involved.
And finally, both countries are developing very rapidly economically and that means they are engaged, as Professor Chellaney said, in the competition for resources, for markets, for access to capital and I think also for this international prestige. Everywhere you go, they always raise this issue of India versus China and vice versa.
So these sources of competition are structural or embedded in the nature of geopolitics in the nature of the two economies and in the nature of the two political systems. But why these two countries have been able to go beyond these immediate sources or the structural causes of competition and have tried very hard, and I will say quite successfully, in developing a relationship that is very pragmatic and that is marginally, mutually beneficial. Here I offer four explanations.
I think, first of all, leaders in both countries understand that gains from seizing the strategic opportunities available for them at a moment are far more important than possible gains from strategic competition with each other. Just look at what both countries face at the moment.
Globalization means China and India with enormous cheap labor will benefit hugely from this strategic opportunity. And if they throw away this opportunity for economic development and engage in the zero-sum geopolitical rivalry against each other, it’s a lose-lose proposition, and I think neither country has decided to go down the path.
The second is that the rivalry between India and China is what I call structural. That means they are acute. In other words, none of the issues that are mentioned at the beginning of this discussion are so pressing that the government in either country will have to take immediate action against the other in response as that allows political leaders to take action to delay competition or to restrain competition.
Certainly, is that both countries understand the immediate costs of strategic competition against the other. China, for example, understands that being nasty to India will certainly push India into the arms of the U.S. and that will repeat the mistake the former Soviet Union made regarding to China itself, and for India, its leaders understand that it will be facing a far stronger China. Chinese GDP is anywhere -- whatever you measure is double or triple the size of India, and this taking on a stronger rival at this moment when you are not ready is irresponsible and strategically counterproductive.
And finally, I think, both countries have very different strategic priorities at the moment. China’s priority is the East - Taiwan, Japan; India's priority is the region of South Asia, so they really do not have overlapping strategic priorities that would force them into a game of competition. That is why I think China and India have been quite successful in putting aside their long-term strategic differences and focus on gains from cooperation. That is why I’m personally quite optimistic about the short- to medium-term development in Indian-Chinese relations. For the next 10, 15 years, even 20 years both countries will prioritize their domestic economic development over foreign policy and that can only mean moderate cooperative foreign policy, especially, when it comes to Sino-Indian relations.
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| By Yuli Ismartono |
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