The objective should be very clear. As of now it seems, defending territory. Must change to 'Great power status'You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Many people in India or the world are baffled by the Chinese behaviour or how to negotiate out of tricky situation wherein you want to avoid conflict (not worth the time), as there are other more important things, not because you are afraid. One must understand Chinese history & cultural moorings to nullify the aggression Chinese state shows.
China, in Mandarin is 'Zhongguo'. It means 'Central country/kingdom'. Ie, centre of the earth.
If Chinese are centre of the earth, then Emperor of China, who is the 'foremost man' in China, is the 'foremost man' in the world. Thus, to the Chinese, any treaty formed, without paying homage to their emperor, was considered 'unequal/null and void'. This is why, even when the Romans traded with China and formed contacts, they had to 'officially pay tribute' to the Emperor of China- even though Roman Imperium could've crushed China if they were closer.
Same applies throughout history- when the Cholas, Sassanids, Khmer- all of them- wanted trade relations with China, they had to pay 'symbolic submission/tribute' to their emperor. This is also the basis of Chinese claim in Tibet or East Turkestan.
In Chinese culture, all interactions follow this model : it is a hierarchy. Politeness is offered only to those above you in the ladder. And this is why China emphasizes so much on 'saving face', because central kingdom cannot be wrong, ever.
"The name China was given by Indians. Sanskrit cina which is cognate of zina. That is the root of historic insecurity. Later one of the Han Empresses suggested Sinifying the statues of Indo-Bactarian Buddha and popularized Buddhism.This was to heal the country and society from the mass casualties of the end of Han era."
I got these facts from the Asian Museum of Art in San Francisco.
Mao had great insecurity complex due to this.
The archetype I will describe now is the character of Master/Teacher. The ideal teacher for Indians is Dronacharya, because although he had favorites, he taught everyone equally and everyone was equal as disciples. Not so in Chinese stories where There are grades/hierarchies in disciples. There are IN-name disciples, who are typically naam ke vaaste disciples who do odd jobs. There are personal disciples, who are taught personally by the master and lord over the others and there is a Heritage-Disciple, who inherits everything from the master. He is typically the little emperor who terrorizes everyone, but his master does not stop him from bullying others, because bullying is thought top be a privelege of the strong. If you are weak, you deserve the bullying. People will even say you are responsible for your suffering because you somehow provoked the strong by your mere existence.
The Master does not interfere in bullying inbetween his disciples because he thinks its interfering with their natural growth. That stopping the bullying of a weak person by a strong disciple for the sake of the weak is not worth the risk of adversely affecting the growth of the strong, talented disciple. Parallels to this can be seen in the enormous suffering inflicted by CHinese over many little kids while training them to win olympics. Because the suffering of weak mediocre kids is thought to be okay if it brings forth a strong, talented kid who can win olympics' medals.
Another big trauma has been the cultural revolution & it altered the gentle behaviour of common chinese. In late 2015, when a singer stepped onto a neon-lit stage in Shanghai to perform a song about the tribulations of his family of six during the Cultural Revolution, the outpouring of public emotion surprised many people. One web commenter, quoting a line from the song, reflected: “ ‘After the Cultural Revolution, there were five of us left.’ That is not just the story of his family, but that of many others.”
The psychic damage of the Cultural Revolution has been the subject of only a few small-scale studies. An interview project carried out by Chinese researchers in collaboration with German psychotherapists in the early 2000s showed that people with Cultural Revolution-related trauma exhibited symptoms typical of post-traumatic stress disorder: Many reported intense anxiety, depression and frequent flashbacks of traumatic experiences; some showed emotional numbness and avoidance behaviors.
Cultural Revolution trauma differs from that related to other horrific events, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, studies have noted, in part because in China, people were persecuted not for “unalterable” characteristics such as ethnicity and race, but for having the wrong frame of mind. Constant scrutiny of one’s own thinking and actions for signs of political deviance became a necessity for survival that sometimes carried unbearable weight. Thus this horrible inferiority complex needs to be masked with outward aggression & thus need for respect for their thinking.
Give China a crushing military defeat along the border and, ideally, create suffocating chaos for the chinese economy by cutting off its trade routes in the IOR.
Because China is a rational trading power with non-military culture, a short war is possible especially if we overwhelm them in the theaters of our choice and give them no incentive to pursue further hostilies by limiting territorial gains to what we lost in 1962 and bit more in defensible positions. It won't go long term or total war if we don't get victory disease and attempt to detach Tibet as a whole. They'll settle down to making money again once we magnanimously release our chokehold on the IOR and trade flows again
if Indians do not fight then they will not see India overtaking Cheen in our life time. China adds far more every year to its economy than we do to ours even with a higher growth rate. The GDP gap is widening and will widen for decades. The arms gap will widen, they have built four 12K ton Type 055s in parallel and that is on top of a flood of Type 054 frigates and Type 052D destroyers. Where are our P15Bs? And that's only the surface fleet. We are worst off on the submarine front and when their Type 002 and 003 carriers come out, we'll be behind in naval air as well. This will change the calculus of our stranglehold on their trade routes.
The PRC is already the top dog in Asia (after the US.) As I written above, without war we won't be able to overtake Cheen in our lifetime. War provides India with an opportunity but Cheen with a risk.
OBOR happens unabated WITHOUT war, with war it goes on hold.
Defeating India would not change their conflucts with Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam or Korea. It didn't in 1962 and it won't today. And in fact would spur them to arm themselves more furiously.
G2 is dependent on the US. Why would it grant Cheen the privilege after a war with another democracy? The US public won't let it happen.
There is nothing that war can help Cheen with which is why I don't think they'll fight. They want to intimidate and grab a defensible position on the cheap.
But it is not in Indian interest to allow them to just back off when we currently own overwhelming advantages along the border and in the IOR.
Advantages that will disappear over time as OBOR and CPEC kick in and their naval programs mature and their printing press buys their bases around the IOR.
Mao was an imperialist with overtly exceptionalist proclivities... his China would define its role on the world stage in terms of the CCP's unique worldview and nothing else. It could define the rules by which it played, simply through its sheer size and willingness to defy the worldviews of either the Western or the Soviet camps. In sharp contrast to the exceptionalism of Mao (a form of revisionist Nationalism, though cloaked in red garb) Deng Xiaoping set China on the path to becoming a thriving economy through leveraging what was then the globalist order in its embryonic form.
The pendulum swung back and forth afterwards as different successors came to the fore. Jiang Zemin, the key architect of the policy of building up nuclear rogue states like NoKo and Pakistan as proxies via proliferation, was more Maovadi. Others like Hu Jintao were more Dengvadi. Yet none of these leaders had as much direct control of all three axes of the Chinese setup (the Party, the State Council, and the Military) to the extent that Mao used to. Until Xi Jinping.
To my mind Xi is like Napoleon III consolidating power as head of the Second French Empire after the interlude of the Orleans restoration. A man of strong political capability domestically, but more ambition than vision internationally.
Of course Napoleon III's grand ambitions ran headlong into a brick wall when he encountered a rival that would never again allow France to achieve pre-eminence on the European continent: the rising Germany of Otto von Bismarck. The Franco Prussian war furnished a bloody nose that is still in some sense bleeding, and marked the overall decline of France into the second rank of global power until this day.
India must take this opportunity to fight now!!!
You fools! Don't you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don't you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life." : HO Chi Min
Geopolitics encapsulated in the vulgarity of a general. Priceless
PS : As usual lot of this is summary of writing, views of many ppl i admire Dr Shiv, Ramana, Rohit, Sridhar.. along with some of mine
PS : As usual lot of this is summary of writing, views of many ppl i admire Dr Shiv, Ramana, Rohit, Sridhar.. along with some of mine
