Opinion | Why China Is So Desperate To Put India In Its Place

For decades, China regarded India as a geopolitical upstart, to be taught the occasional military and diplomatic lesson to keep it in its proper place.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will run into Prime Minister Narendra Modi twice between August 22 (BRICS) and September 9 (G20). The meetings between the two leaders will be brisk, business-like, shorn of diplomatic niceties as the confrontation at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) festers.

When Xi arrives in New Delhi on September 9, 2023, for the G20 heads of government summit, he will be aware of a new reality. India is a rising power. China’s own rise has stalled.

The stall isn’t temporary. China’s three golden decades when GDP growth often crossed 10 per cent a year are over. But a terminally slowing economy isn’t Xi’s only worry. Beijing is confronted by an increasingly hostile United States-led West.

At next month’s G20 summit in New Delhi, six of the world’s seven largest economies will be ranged against Xi — the US, Japan, Germany, India, Britain and France.

Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t be there to offer support to Xi. Others like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin-Salman and South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa will hedge their bets.

Xi’s effort to stamp China’s diplomatic imprint on Middle East politics has met with mixed success. Beijing brokered a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia and nudged the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to re-admit Syria. Xi hosted Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Beijing to revive moves for a two-state solution to the Palestine problem.

But China is far from imposing its writ on the Middle East. Washington may be distracted by the Russia-Ukraine war and febrile domestic politics, but it still has military bases across the region. China has so far been able to establish only one significant military base globally, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa.

China’s relationship with Europe has meanwhile deteriorated. Italy, Beijing’s beachhead to Western Europe, is set to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s support of Russia in the Ukraine war could end Beijing’s ambitious attempt to build a new Silk Route across Eurasia.

Despite mounting problems at home and abroad, China is still the world’s second largest economy and a technological powerhouse. It leads the world in automation, quantum computing, machine learning and electric vehicles (EVs). Tesla’s gigafactory in Shanghai produces more passenger EVs than the US firm’s anchor plant in Austin, Texas.

But in the industry that today matters more than any other — chip-making — China is being shut out. The three global leaders in the complex chip manufacturing and design ecosystem are the US, the Netherlands and Taiwan.

Washington’s Chips and Science Act, passed into law in August 2022, has effectively barred advanced chip technology transfer to China. This means China will remain one, possibly two generations behind the West in the world’s most critical cutting-edge industry.

The Xi Factor

Xi knows that China is growing older. Its public debt is over 282 per cent of GDP — twice America’s 130 per cent. When Xi took over as president in 2012, China had just ended a five-year period of spectacular growth. In 2006, China’s GDP was $2.75 trillion. In 2011, China’s GDP had nearly tripled within five rampaging years to $7.55 trillion.

India was meanwhile in the throes of political paralysis in 2011 under the Congress-led UPA government. The Congress enjoyed cordial relations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The two parties signed an MoU in 2008, its contents still undisclosed.

Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) reported on August 7, 2008: “India’s ruling Congress and the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Thursday signed a pact to put in place a mechanism that would help regular high-level exchanges between them, soon after party chief Sonia Gandhi arrived in Beijing with her family for the Olympics inaugural ceremony. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) also provides the two parties the opportunity to consult each other on important bilateral, regional and international developments.”

“The MoU was signed by the Chinese vice-president and standing committee member of the CPC’s politburo, Xi Jinping, and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi in the presence of his mother and party president Sonia Gandhi, sources told IANS. ‘It is strictly on a party-to-party basis,’ a source said.”

“Before the signing of the MoU, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi held a meeting with Xi and other senior leaders of the Communist Party of China and held discussions on issues of mutual interest, the sources said. Xi, one of the most prominent leaders of China, is widely believed to be a strong contender for the president’s post in 2012.”

“The fact that China, though aware of the recent developments in India, decided to go ahead and sign this document shows it is trying to build a relationship with the Congress, and the Nehru-Gandhi family in particular, that goes beyond the UPA government.”

When the Narendra Modi-led NDA came to power in May 2014, a little more than a year after Xi took office, the Chinese president tried to assess him first-hand at their informal Ahmedabad summit in September 2014. Xi’s glamorous singer-wife Peng Liyuan joined the two leaders at the Sabarmati riverfront.

Two more informal summit followed in Wuhan (2018) and Mahabalipuram (2019). They allowed both men to take a measure of the other. Neither came away satisfied. Xi recognised that Modi was cut from different cloth from Congress leaders he had met.

Modi had meanwhile formed a close strategic partnership with the US-led West. India, Xi decided, needed to be taught a lesson. Chinese incursions in eastern Ladakh began in April 2020, early into Modi’s second term as prime minister.

Leading superpower?

China’s oft-stated ambition is to be the world’s leading superpower by 2049, the centenary of the CCP’s founding. But to achieve that objective, Xi knows China must first be an unrivalled regional power across Asia. The only country that has the size and scale, militarily and economically, to thwart China’s absolute supremacy in the parabolic arc from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, cutting through East Asia, South Asia and West Asia, is India.

Since Modi had not accepted India’s subsidiary status to China through diplomacy in the Ahmedabad, Wuhan and Mahabalipuram summits, Xi concluded that New Delhi must be put in its place through other means.

Galwan Valley followed. India’s strong subsequent military build-up across the entire LAC came as a shock to Beijing’s mandarins, used to India’s supplicantry silence over Tibet and Taiwan.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), India’s GDP by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in 2022-23 was $13,033 against China’s $33,014. The gap is now 2.5x and narrowing with every passing year as India’s GDP grows at twice the average annual rate of China’s GDP.

If China cannot exert supremacy over India militarily and economically, how can it exert it over the US-led West? Instead of the G2 architecture of global power between the US and China that Xi believed was inevitable, India, the interloper, could convert that into a G3 with two angles of the triangle, the US and India, aligned against China.

It will therefore be a thoughtful and subdued Xi we will likely see in New Delhi on September 9-10 at the G20 heads of government summit, arriving late and leaving early.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.