by David M. Malone and Rohan Mukherjee
Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 1, February–March 2010, pp. 137–1158
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Not much has changed in the rhetoric of Sino-Indian relations since Mao Zedong, speaking in 1951 in honour of the first anniversary of India’s constitution, declared that ‘excellent friendship’ had existed between the two countries ‘for thousands of years’. Yet few of the lofty proclamations made by Indian and Chinese leaders over the years truly reflect the reality of relations between the neighbours. It is surprising that two states with such a rich and sometimes fractious history, including a border conflict in 1962, should have what appears to be a largely reactive relationship. But neither has developed a grand strategy with regard to the other. An unshakeable and largely unprofitable preoccupation with the past on the Indian side, and an equally intense preoccupation with domestic consolidation on the Chinese side, have left the relationship under-tended. It might best be seen as one of geostrategic competition qualified by growing commercial cooperation. And there is some asymmetry: China is a more fraught subject in Indian national debates than India is for China. China does not appear to feel threatened in any serious way by India, while India at times displays tremendous insecurity in the face of Chinese economic success and military expansion.
To outsiders, India and China show some striking similarities. Both are ancient civilisations reincarnated as modern republics in the mid twentieth century, and are now rising powers. Both have nuclear weapons, burgeoning economies, expanding military budgets and large reservoirs of manpower, and seem to be vying for influence in the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, Africa, Central Asia and East Asia. Yet little attention is paid to the relationship between them. Most scholarship has focused on Beijing’s relations with the United States, Japan and East Asia or New Delhi’s relations with Pakistan, South Asia and the United States. Whereas Sino-US ties are often cast as a one-to-one contest for global pre-eminence, moreover, the Sino-Indian relationship is more often seen in terms of the countries’ interactions with extraneous actors such as the United States, Pakistan and other South Asian nations. It is also defined by contrasting polities and models of development, with the parties silently competing not just for capital, resources and markets, but also for legitimacy in the arena of great and emerging global powers.
From enthusiasm to uncertainty
The modern Sino-Indian relationship has been marked by four distinct phases. Purported friendship and ideological congruence around anti-imperialist foreign-policy objectives from 1950 deteriorated into a bitter yet brief border conflict in 1962, followed by a Sino-Indian ‘Cold War’. Bilateral normalisation efforts after 1976 led to attempts to address differences through dialogue. This was by no means easy, given Indian sensitivities, frequently expressed in the media and in parliament. In 1998, India pointed to China as the justification for its second round of nuclear tests (the first had occurred in 1974). Although this might have been expected to create significant tensions between the two nations, economic relations have since intensified. Nonetheless, the period from 1998 onward remains one of uncertainty and…
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David M. Malone, a former Canadian Ambassador to the UN and High Commissioner to India, is president of Canada’s International Development Research Centre. He is completing a survey of Indian foreign policy called Does the Elephant Dance? (forthcoming in 2011 from Oxford University Press). The views expressed here are his own and not those of his employer. Rohan Mukherjee is a senior research specialist at Princeton University. He has also worked with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and the National Knowledge Commission, Government of India.
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