China Is The Elephant In The Room For Most Asian Powers

Following is my article carried by a Singapore think tank.

China Is The Elephant In The Room For Most Asian Powers

Rajeev Sharma
Strategic Analyst, New Delhi
11 April 2011

Winds of change are sweeping across Asia. China is the elephant in the room for most Asian powers – such a major presence that it can be missed only at the risk of the occupants themselves. Speaking volumes of the “China factor”, Japan and India embarked on a bilateral strategic dialogue in April 2011, and India-Japan-United States will also be starting their trilateral dialogue later this year. Other Asian powers too are busily working on their own strategic fortifications – with Vietnam-US negotiations on a civilian nuclear energy agreement as a major template of the changing geopolitical equations. The biggest driving force behind the fast-changing politico-strategic matrix in Asia is China. The new-found swagger in Chinese diplomacy, coupled with its aggressive military posturing and break-neck speed of pushing transnational, even trans-continental infrastructural links, has made virtually every important Asian power suspicious of China. A diplomatic and strategic realignment has already begun in Asia as powers like India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam have stepped up their diplomatic outreach to one another to prepare an effective shield against China’s threatening rise.

At Japan’s initiative and insistence, the Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao held discussions with key Japanese interlocutors in Tokyo on April 7-8. Constructive and useful discussions were held with Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Kenichiro Sasae and Deputy Foreign Minister Koro Bessho in Tokyo on April 8 on bilateral, regional and global issues. Rao also called on Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto. The two sides agreed that the new Ministerial-level Economic Dialogue, announced by the Prime Ministers at their Annual Summit in Tokyo in October 2010, will be led by the Foreign Ministers of the two countries. The first meeting of the Dialogue will take place later this year. It was also agreed to establish an India-Japan-United States trilateral dialogue on regional and global issues of shared interest. These consultations, agreed to earlier by the U.S., will be conducted by the Foreign Ministries of the three countries. The MEA noted that Rao’s wide-ranging consultations in Tokyo have provided a momentum to the “India-Japan Strategic and Global Partnership”.

On India’s growing proximity to Japan and US, being a counter-weight to China’s growing clout in international affairs, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Vishnu Prakash said that this is not a zero sum game. India’s relations with any country are also not directed against any other country. As in the case of India-Japan and India-US ties are not being aimed against China, India’s relations with the RIC (Russia, India and China) are also not directed against the US. Reiterating these sentiments, the Joint Secretary at MEA’s East Asia Division Gautam Bambawale said that India, Japan and the US realised they had much in common especially in the East Asian region and they hence felt need for such a dialogue. The latter trilateral forum will not be a strategic dialogue of India-US- Japan.

The India-US bilateral strategic dialogue has received a setback of sorts as India got suspicious of the Americans over-enthusiasm in pushing the envelope for the multi-billion dollar MMRCA deal that India is to finalise soon. A file pertaining to the MMRCA deal was found abandoned at a public place recently and initial investigations showed that the file had been taken by a corrupt defence ministry official to Vivek Lal, a top official of Boeing, who photocopied it and forgot to take along the original file. A livid India cancelled the second Indo-US strategic dialogue that was to take place in New Delhi in early April 2011. India officially cited that it rescheduled the dialogue because of assembly elections in four states and one union territory and ongoing developments in West Asia and North Africa and that the two sides will hold it at the earliest available opportunity. Fresh dates for the event are yet to be notified.

Notwithstanding the recent diplomatic overtures, India has not discovered the China factor yesterday or even last year. China rankled the Indian strategists for well over a decade. The first major proof of India’s China fixation came during the NDA regime when two things happened. First, the then defence minister George Fernandes blurted out that it was China, not Pakistan, not anyone else, who was India’s enemy number one. Second, in the wake of India’s Pokhran II nuclear tests in 1998, the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wrote a secret letter to US President Bill Clinton, which was deliberately leaked by the Clinton administration, saying that India had conducted these nuclear tests with an eye on China. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself shared unusually candid remarks on China in early September 2010 when he shared his view that China wanted to keep India bogged down in South Asia by playing on Indo-Pak tensions. Significantly, PM Singh’s remarks on China came close on the heels of reports of some eleven thousand Chinese troops in Gilgit-Baltistan area of Jammu and Kashmir which India considers as its own territory. India’s Northern Army Commander Lt Gen K.T. Parnaik also recently stated at a April 11 seminar that China's presence in PoK was increasing steadily and the Chinese footprints were "too close for comfort" for India.

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