China's Territorial Disputes (27 page)

From 1938 onwards, the Survey of India maps began to show the McMahon Line in the eastern sector as a broken line, indicating that it was a delimited (on paper) but not demarcated (on ground) boundary. In the western sector, the border between Kashmir and Tibet on the desolate and windswept plateau of Aksai Chin was recorded as undefined, although shaded with the same colour on maps of the colonial government as the rest of British India. Several versions of the proposed boundary here had been put forward on maps and in correspondence by British officials, cartographers and explorers at various times in the last century, all lying across the Aksai Chin plateau between the Karakoram and Kunlun Mountains (see Figure 5.2). The British authorities in India actually proffered a boundary line to the Qing government in 1899, but the Chinese rejected the offer because it would have led to the partition of Aksai Chin between British India and Chinese Tibet.
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Whatever the case, by 1954 all Indian government maps showed the McMahon Line and elsewhere on India’s northern boundary as a thick, continuous line, with the Kashmiri border running along the Karakoram, making Aksai Chin a part of India. The Chinese never accepted the McMahon Line
qua
McMahon Line as indicating the border between India and China. China based its stance on the fact that it did not ratify the Simla Convention of 1913-1914. In the mid-1950s, unbeknownst to India, China would construct a road across Aksai Chin to consolidate its claim to this remote and uninhabited part of its borderlands.

Jawaharlal Nehru, as independent India’s first prime minister and minister of external affairs, was first questioned in November 1950 in the Lok Sabha, India’s

Figure 5.1
The eastern China-India frontier

lower house of parliament, on whether India had a well defined boundary with Tibet. His reply was that “Our maps show that the McMahon Line is our boundary ... That fact remains and we stand by that boundary, and we will not allow anybody to come across that boundary.”
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Upon further consultations with defense minister Krishna Menon and K. M. Pannikkar, Indian ambassador to China, Nehru decided that India would refuse to subject the border question to serious negotiation even if the Chinese did raise it,
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in the hope that China would have no recourse but to accept the
fait accompli.
Preoccupied with consolidating their rule and socializing the economy, the Chinese Communist leadership did not pursue the boundary question until Premier Zhou Enlai raised that issue on his first visit to New Delhi in 1956.

It would be wrong to assume that, by holding firm on his position on the border, Nehru did not have good feelings for the Chinese. On the contrary, Nehru’s foreign policy of non-alignment between the two superpower blocs, anti-colonialism, and emphasis on Asian solidarity made him sympathize with the Chinese revolution and led him actively to seek and maintain friendly ties with Mao’s China. He often spoke of China as a “great power.” In the Panchsheel Agreement of 1954 reached between China and India, so named because it gave special mentioned to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, the Indian government recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and surrendered all its extra-territorial rights in Tibet inherited from the British.
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After the failure of the revolt in Tibet in March 1959, Nehru would be severely and repetitively censured in the Indian parliament, by opposition and independent parliamentarians, for failure to secure a commitment from the Chinese to respect Tibetan autonomy or the McMahon Line as the legal Sino-Indian frontier. Many Indians had felt cheated by the Panchsheel Agreement. They had given away to the Chinese what they had considered to be the buffer state of Tibet, by agreeing to its absorption into China, with not even the recognition of a valid border in return.

According to Nehru’s subsequent account, Zhou Enlai informed him at their summit in 1956 that China was prepared to accept the McMahon Line.
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As Zhou was to repudiate this position in a later correspondence with Nehru, it seems clear that his offer was forthcoming only in the context of comprehensive boundary negotiations between the governments. While Nehru believed he had been given an undertaking that China would accept the McMahon Line as the boundary without negotiations, Zhou realized that a revolutionary Chinese government and people would never accept the McMahon Line
as it was,
a boundary imposed on his country through an act of imperialism. However, Zhou’s statement seemed to imply that, although China would not simply confirm the McMahon Line, it would be prepared to accept the McMahon
alignment,
if a new boundary treaty could be negotiated between equals, thus erasing the stigma of the old “unequal treaties.” Chinese pride demanded no less. Nehru does not seem to have appreciated the political discourse or have understood the diplomatic nuances of the PRC government, with disastrous consequences for himself and his country.

Trade between China and India had been governed by the state of their political relations since the PRC was established in 1949. As is true of trade between developing countries even today, items of trade between the two neighbors in the 1950s were few and the monetary value low due to a lack of complementarity. They both essentially depended for export on raw materials, agricultural products and simple machinery, in addition to silk (China) and carpets (India). Even with the signing of the eight-year Sino-Indian agreement on trade and travel between China and India on 29 April 1954 (not renewed because of the 1962 border war) in which both governments opened up three towns on each side of the border for trade, the only significant items of exchange in the mid-1950s was 9 million pounds of Indian tobacco for 90 metric tons of Chinese silk.
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The volume of bilateral trade, meager to begin with and largely restricted to the border towns between India and Tibet, plummeted from 1960 onwards with the deterioration of Sino-Indian political relations. Bilateral trade was virtually discontinued for fifteen years after the war of 1962, and border trade was resumed only in December 1991.

The breakdown of boundary negotiations and the prelude to war: March 1959-November 1962

In the Karakoram borderlands between India, Xinjiang and Tibet lies the disputed high plateau of the Aksai Chin. This windy, bleak and arid place has no permanent inhabitants, and is hardly on anyone’s itinerary except for the occasional transient nomad. In September 1958, on receiving news that the Chinese had completed a highway linking Xinjiang and Tibet through Aksai Chin, an Indian reconnaissance unit was sent to the area, only to be detained by Chinese frontier guards, and deported. This led to the beginning of the trading of notes by both sides alleging violations and counter-violations of the border that was to become a characteristic feature of the Sino-Indian border dispute. On 14 December 1958, in his letter to Zhou Enlai, Nehru denied that there was any boundary dispute between China and India.
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In his reply of 23 January 1959, Zhou pointed out that the Sino-Indian boundary has never been delimited by any treaty or agreement between the central governments of both countries, and that the McMahon Line was the product of British aggression against China. However, Zhou called for negotiations, because “we do not hold that every portion of this boundary line is drawn on sufficient grounds.” Before that, Zhou proposed that each side should not go beyond the border areas under its jurisdic-tion.
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In his reply, Nehru again denied the existence of a boundary dispute, considering it to be fixed by geography, tradition and treaty, but counterproposed that both sides should withdraw behind each other’s claim lines.
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This in effect amounted to a demand for the Chinese to evacuate the entire Aksai Chin area while India withdraw the few frontier guard posts it had lately established, and it was rejected by the Chinese.

After the Tibetan rebellion in March 1959 and the granting of political asylum to the Dalai Lama in India, there was open advocacy for independence for Tibet in the Indian press, and calls by members of parliament to review ties with China, and demonstrations to that effect in major Indian cities.
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Needless to say, the Chinese had no appreciation of the tradition of a free press and open parliamentary debate in India. Deputies to the National People’s Congress, meeting in Beijing in April 1959, then condemned the Indian government for fomenting the Tibetan rebellion and interfering in the internal affairs of China by allowing the Dalai Lama to establish a government-in-exile in India.
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To assert its sovereignty over the territory it claimed, Nehru’s government started in 1959 to establish as many military posts along the frontier as possible, contrary to the advice of his army chief of staff, who was cognizant of the poor state of training, weaponry and logistics of the Indian Army.
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The pursuance of this provocative but as yet unannounced “forward policy” led to the first major armed clashes between Chinese and Indian troops at Longjiu in the eastern sector in August 1959, and the Kongka Pass near Aksai Chin in October 1959. All this led then Chinese foreign minister Chen Yi to warn the Indians that, in attempting to impose the McMahon Line on China, they had “not given the slightest consideration of the sense of national pride and self-respect of the Chinese people.”
¹⁴
Chinese forbearance was apparently beginning to wear thin.

News and public opinion regarding Indian casualties at Longjiu and the Kongka Pass were made use of by members of parliament to press the government to disclose all diplomatic correspondence between China and India over the boundary tussle since April 1954. The release of the first White Paper on India-China Relations in September 1959, the first of many, began the public phase of the Sino-Indian dispute, which would end with Nehru being denied all room for maneuver by his domestic critics and parliamentary opponents. Nehru had hitherto tried to keep matters under control by referring to Chinese incursions as “petty intrusions” and taking the position during parliamentary questioning that “minor border incidents and border differences should be settled by negotiations”. The non-Communist parliamentary opposition coupled disillusionment and bitterness over China’s behavior with sharp criticism of the government for withholding information from parliament. They also called on the government to force the withdrawal of Chinese troops from what they considered to be occupied areas before negotiations could begin. Acknowledging that under the Indian constitution, parliament was supreme and government could not muffle public criticism or the free press, Nehru accepted the “sharp but legitimate” criticism of his failure to disclose the Aksai Chin road, the capture of the Indian patrol there, and his own prior correspondence with Zhou Enlai. It became apparent, as events unfolded, that the British-trained, legalistic-minded lawyer that was Nehru was not prepared to surmount or circumvent the institutional constraints provided by the rules and procedures of the Indian parliament to offer or accept compromises at boundary negotiations over the objections of the parliamentary opposition or the hesitations of members of his own party. It is one thing to make use of a fractious legislature as a tool of international bargaining by leveraging the opponent with the threat of non-ratification, but quite another to have one’s negotiating position or flexibility dictated or limited by its moods and temperaments, which was what happened here.