Why Doklam stand-off could be bad for Xi Jinping and China

By Pinaki Bhattacharya

Chinese President Xi Jinping may have bitten off more than he can chew this time with the latest conflagration over the Doklam border stand-off with India. For Xi and China, it comes at a more unpropitious moment than in the past.

Xi is on the verge of mobilising the Communist Party of China (CPC) towards the 18th Party Congress, where he would be hoping to pack the central committee (CC) and the politburo (PB) with his own men. Even more important is to have the already pliant National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s parliament, genuflecting to him as the ‘strong man’.


It is the NPC that, at the direction of the CC, would have to amend the 1982 constitution by which Deng Xiaoping had the proviso added about the ‘Two Fives’: two five-year terms for the president and the premier of the country. This, of course, is all speculative, as Xi has not announced whether he wants to remain in power beyond 2022.

One will, however, know in the next four months. For, at the Party Congress, the transition of power to two senior members of the Sixth Generation of leaders will begin. At this delicate time, the ‘ICBM crisis’ with North Korea – Xi failing to stop Pyongyang from testing an intercontinental ballistic missile, no less on July 4, the US’s Independence Day — or a border transgression episode with India would be unsettling for Xi.

China, along with Russia, is seeking to develop a parallel world order that can truly make this century ‘Asia’s’. This attempt could get hobbled if it was at loggerheads with India. India rebuffed the Chinese by not attending the Belt Road Initiative (BRI), a grouping that could potentially change how geopolitics is conducted.

PM Narendra Modi wanted to register India’s protest against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor passing through Pakistan-administered Kashmir, on which New Delhi wishes to wield a veto -- at least till Pakistan agrees to make the Line of Control an international boundary.

On the issue of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the Chinese position has shifted from a possible formula for a solution to one of intractability. The middle sector of the LAC – the one that abuts Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh – for instance, is a settled fact. To make it official and to show that there has been some progress on the conversion of the LoAC to an international boundary through the Joint Working Group (JWG) mechanism got stalled because Beijing’s representative refused to exchange maps, demarcating the line.

Had Beijing showed flexibility, it could have improved trust between the two countries enormously. One can even safely say that Bhutan is the only other country, besides India, that has an unsettled boundary dispute with China. Since Bhutan is a ‘protectorate’ of India, New Delhi could not have ignored the Doklam issue.

But one should keep in mind that till date, the Chinese have boundary disputes with 21 countries, some of which have been settled. The Indian conception of dealing with China has been, for long, based on what Deng had told Rajiv Gandhi in 1988: while the boundary question can take its own time to get settled, the two countries should try to move forward on other issues of mutual interest.

This, in turn, could create the right atmospherics for the core issue to be handled in a situation of mutual empathy. There have been times in the early-1990s when India had sought to bring some urgency in the JWG process. The Chinese invariably were ‘inscrutable’. This time, the Chinese seem to want to take the bull by its horns. As Strategic Dialogues, the 2016 memoir of Dai Bingguo, former special representative on the boundary issue for 15 rounds of talks till his retirement in 2013, mentions, China wants the boundary ‘to be settled as quickly as possible’. With one eye on the 18th Party Congress.