View: New Delhi’s China strategy must apply Chinese dictum “build your strength, bide your time”

In a few weeks, when Dalai Lama is scheduled to visit Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, China will be tempted to make a Mongolia out of India. It shouldn’t. 2017 is not turning out to be anything like how China imagined at all, just when President Xi Jinping is getting ready to become a leader without a successor.

Foreign secretary S Jaishankar stated 2017 would be a year when Indian foreign policy would “invest” more in China. The newly minted strategic dialogue in Beijing though showed the distance that still needs to be travelled, despite the gloss put on it by India. China is nowhere close to addressing India’s concerns. But India and China are nothing if not mature, pragmatic powers, so they decided to do stuff together in Afghanistan. Not wildly exciting, and they continue to have divergent political tools.

China is pushing “reconciliation” with Taliban, India is not. India is clear-eyed about Taliban hosting LeT, JeM, etc against us. China is realising that Uyghur ETIM militants have significantly expanded their presence and activities in Afghanistan, supported by the Afghan Taliban, a wholly owned subsidiary of Pakistan’s ISI.
“Brotherly nation” Pakistan was supposed to have put a lid on them, but quite the opposite appears to be happening as ETIM spreads in districts like Zabul and Badakhshan. Meanwhile, China is picking up unnecessary brickbats for shielding Pakistan’s terror asset, Masood Azhar, in the UN.

It’s an important consideration as Beijing contemplates CPEC connecting Xinjiang to Balochistan. Pakistan politicians and business classes have started murmuring about its “costs and benefits”. A Pak Senate body questioned the funding of CPEC – according to officials, China is believed to give only about 4% in grants, the rest would come through commercial loans from Chinese banks.

One only has to look at Sri Lanka to see how that story plays out. CPEC, like Hambantota in Lanka, is revealing itself as a strategic rather than economic project, raising a whole new set of questions for Pakistan, particularly when thousands of acres and a long debt repayment schedule is concerned.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that China has taken every opportunity to ask India to join. The latest was the National People’s Congress this week, which held out the promise of how CPEC would be good for India. It would, of course, except for the small matter of sovereignty. As Jaishankar said, “The issue is not about connectivity per se.”

The surprises of 2017 are not all joy for China. Donald Trump, for instance, is a nightmare they did not see coming. After demanding and getting a one-China admission by Trump, an insult in itself, the Chinese appear to be taking pre-emptive measures on two fronts.

Beijing is amending its Maritime Traffic Safety Law to empower China to “designate specific areas and temporarily bar foreign ships from passing through those areas”. It will require foreign submarines to pass through “China’s waters” on the surface while flying their national flags to identify themselves. In other words, China is preparing to declare international waters on the 9-dash-line, and perhaps East China Sea as its ‘territory’.

Xi is rebuilding the Chinese military to become a younger, meaner fighting machine, which makes the Chinese outrage at THAAD deployment in South Korea understandable – it emasculates China’s formidable PLA Rocket Force, which targets US bases in the region.

On the other hand, China clearly doesn’t want to give the likes of Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross an opening – this week, Chinese telecom major ZTE quietly paid up the largest ever fine of $1.19 billion to the US for sanctions-flouting sales to North Korea and Iran. “This penalty is an example of the extraordinary powers the Department of Commerce will use to vigorously protect the interests of the US,” intoned Ross. China showed the smallest increase in its defence budget this year, also a sign that it doesn’t want to attract the hawks in Washington. Meanwhile, it’s fighting a losing battle to keep the yuan up.

Simultaneously, China granted approval to 38 Trump trademarks, a full-sweep approval that is unprecedented. Basically, it would cover Trump businesses including spa/massage services, golf clubs, hotels, insurance, finance and real estate companies, restaurants, bars, bodyguards, social escorts and concierge services – all these businesses in President Trump’s name would be legit in China. The coolest pre-emptive strike.

The only superpower with the likes of Pakistan and North Korea as its real allies, China is playing its hide-and-seek battle with the US with typical sophistication. Xi will be in Washington soon, but remember who his first envoy to Trump was – Jack Ma. Xi is positioning himself as the new ‘globaliser’, using a Silk Road summit in May to fuel OBOR. But Chinese overreach, a little like Pakistan’s, is evident in its recent punitive action on South Korean companies for giving land to the US THAAD.

New Delhi’s playbook should include a mix of two strategies – a version of “peace through strength” and a Chinese dictum “build your strength, bide your time”. America is crucial in India’s China strategy, which will probably feature “bigly” in a Modi-Trump conversation.

Dalai Lama told an American comedy anchor this week that common sense is missing from the brains of Chinese officials. “The Chinese hard-liners, in their brain, that part is missing,” in his words. Let that advice apply to India too. It’s time for PM Modi to be less of a missionary, more of the businessman while balancing China and building India.

*Views expressed above are the author's own.