China's Territorial Disputes (30 page)

To move the stalled talks forward, Beijing agreed at the fourth round in October 1983 to deal with the issue on a sector-by-sector approach. A sector-by-sector approach would allow India to resist Chinese pressure to make concessions in the west in exchange for a formal recognition of the unstated McMahon Line in the east. India in turn agreed to China’s suggestion that normalization should proceed in other spheres irrespective of the border settlement, which would prove to be important for mutual understanding and confidence building, in light of the subsequent lack of success in coming to a final agreement on the border. Both sides also agreed to work toward defining principles, such as the use of a watershed or the highest crest of a mountain range, which could be applied in working out a comprehensive boundary settlement. In the end, it was again Indian domestic politics that led to the abandonment of the proposal, which was perhaps the closest both countries ever came to resolving the border dispute. Indira Gandhi did not want to risk her coming re-election by being attacked by her opponents for settling the dispute on China’s terms. This is definite proof of the argument that it is harder to resolve a dispute with a democratic country made up of diverse political interests than with a non-democratic country such as a one-party state. Unfortunately, the subsequent assassination of Mrs Gandhi left the border issue very much where it was.

The overwhelming mandate with which Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress Party was returned to power in late 1984 allowed him to pursue serious negotiations with China on the border issue. When the new Rajiv Gandhi administration was formed early in 1985, it was decided to give high priority to developing a new thrust in good neighborliness. The formulation of foreign policy was increasingly shifted from the Ministry of External Affairs to Rajiv Gandhi’s foreign secretary Romesh Bhandari and a circle of advisors, who advocated a bold, non-bureaucratic approach to achieve breakthroughs in Indian diplomacy. Ministers such as Natwar Singh, who led the Indian team to the fifth round of talks, and N. K. Narayanan, the former ambassador to China, were taken into confidence by Rajiv in drafting his China policy.
³⁸
The result was that the pro-Soviet Gopalaswamy Parthasarathy and the hitherto powerful policy planning committee that he headed became progressively shut out of the foreign policy decision-making process.
³⁹

By the sixth round of talks in November 1985, China initially agreed to India’s standing proposal to discuss the eastern sector in detail. However, the Chinese then unexpectedly proceeded to argue that the border issue should be settled on an overall basis, thereby once again implying a desire to trade off Chinese claims in the eastern sector for Indian claims in the western sector. China’s sudden re-emphasis on the eastern sector might have been part of her bargaining strategy to compel the Indians to close on the negotiations by conceding China’s claims to Aksai Chin. China probably believed that Rajiv’s strong parliamentary mandate would enable him to make concessions that previous leaders had eschewed or found politically impossible to do. This might have been a shrewd negotiating gambit, at least according to our theoretical framework. However, the Indians believed that the Chinese were hinting at a return of the Tawang Tract in the eastern sector, which had been taken by India from Tibet in 1951, before China would agree to recognize the McMahon Line. This mutual misperception would prevent the breakthrough both sides had expected at this round of talks, and for the next two rounds, both sides merely restated old claims and positions.

As if to complicate the already difficult negotiations, India accused China of sending military patrols south of the McMahon Line into the Sumdorong Chu Valley in the Tawang District of NEFA, site of a ferocious battle between Chinese and Indian forces during the 1962 war. China countered by claiming that Indian troops had instead penetrated north of the line of actual control into Chinese territory. In view of the increasing tension and suspicion between the two countries, the seventh round of border talks, held in July 1986, not surprisingly ended in complete failure. Adding insult to injury for the Chinese, the Indian parliament granted statehood to NEFA in December 1986 as the state of Arunachal Pradesh, and from October 1986 to March 1987, India conducted a large-scale military exercise along the Sino-Indian border involving more than ten army divisions and the air force. In response, China mobilized its army and weapons in Tibet, with the result that some 400,000 troops from both sides were deployed across the mountainous border by the spring of 1987. This so unnerved the Indian government that it dispatched its defense minister to Beijing in April and its foreign minister to the same destination two months later to conduct high-level talks on reducing tension. This set the stage for the last round of official talks between the two sides on the border in New Delhi in November 1987; not surprisingly, given the bad aftertaste of the recent Sumdorong Chu incident, although neither side was in a fighting mood, nothing was achieved.

When Gorbachev was asked during his visit to India in November 1986 about his stance on the Sumdorong Chu incident, he pointedly refused to take sides on the merits of the Sino-Indian territorial dispute, and instead called for better relations between the Soviet Union, China and India.
⁴⁰
Indian officials undoubtedly noticed that the scaling down of the Soviet military in areas close to the Chinese border got under way while the confrontation at Sumdorong Chu was escalating. As Sino-Soviet relations became increasingly cordial from the mid-to-late 1980s, New Delhi felt less certain about the degree of Soviet support for

India in the event of a crisis, hence the Indian leadership’s desire not to fall too far behind Moscow in improving relations with Beijing. India’s defense establishment was also apprehensive that improved Sino-Soviet relations would enable China to re-deploy troops from the Soviet border to Tibet and so complicate India’s security environment. Given the growing recognition at the national level that India had very little chance of retrieving lost territory short of a major war, the need for resolving the border dispute through a political approach rather than relying on a narrow framework of moral-legalistic considerations became self-evident.

The eight rounds of border talks did not lead to a breakthrough, or even much progress, in the border question. However, in a significant shift from Nehru’s policy of no dispute and no negotiation, the Indian side accepted that a border dispute indeed existed, which both sides agreed should be resolved through peaceful means. As if to demonstrate that the Sino-Indian quarrel had always been nationalistic but never ideological, even though it became caught up in the dynamics of the Cold War, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Indian Congress Party established party-to-party ties in May 1988. The CCP had already re-established party ties with the CPI in 1983.

Sino-Indian economic relations have moved parallel to the state of their political relations, as predicted by the “two-level game” framework. Commerce between the two countries had resumed on an ad hoc basis since 1977 after a break of almost fifteen years. In 1977, Sino-Indian trade was US$2.5 million. Despite the conclusion of a comprehensive trade agreement and mutual bestowal of most favored nation status in 1984, bilateral trade remained paltry. India accounted for only 0.5 percent of China’s export value, and 0.4 percent of its import value.
⁴¹
Fluctuations in the total turnover and lack of complementarity in the needs of both countries did not augur well for closer economic cooperation. India’s trade and investment posture throughout the 1970s and 1980s was very inward oriented, or else very much tied to the Soviet bloc and West Asia. Indian scholars have often asserted that China made considerable inroads into India’s traditional export market for engineering goods and industrial machinery in the US, and had overall increased its exports to third countries at India’s expense by offering identical items for sale.
⁴²
Given the low degree of trade dependency between China and India, moreover the high degree of trade competitiveness, the constituency pushing for greater bilateral economic and overall relations within each country will remain small, even insignificant. As such, trading ties will not set, but can only follow, the pattern and pace of political interaction between the two countries.

Confidence building and Sino-Indian relations since 1988: rapprochement or rivalry?

Eight rounds of largely fruitless official talks must have convinced both the Indian and Chinese leaderships that the border problem would never be resolved at the bureaucratic level and that a political initiative was necessary. Rajiv

Gandhi, who had by them taken an active interest in relations with China, then made the bold move to visit Beijing in December 1988, with the risk that there would be little to show for it. Privileging domestic explanations of foreign policy making, we may argue that Rajiv needed a foreign policy success to restore some of his prestige lost due to his failure to quell the Punjab separatist rebellion and the accusation by opposition leaders that he had received bribes from Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors to approve defense contracts. Whatever the case, the Rajiv visit was an expression of qualitative change in India’s border policy, from “boundary settlement or nothing,” to overall development of peace and cooperation in all fields of bilateral relations.

Although Rajiv’s visit to China did not lead to any breakthrough in the border negotiations, it led both sides to agree on the establishment of a Joint Working Group (JWG) to deal exclusively with the border question under the supervision and direction of the Indian foreign secretary and the Chinese vice-foreign minister. The JWG was entrusted with the task of achieving an overall boundary settlement within a definite time frame and ensuring that peace and tranquility prevailed at the border in the meantime.
⁴³
For its membership the JWG would draw on the foreign ministries, legal advisors, military officers and surveyors of both sides,
⁴⁴
reflecting the need for a comprehensive approach to deal with the boundary question in all its political, legal, security and technical aspects. The two governments obviously believed that organizing a joint committee of experts that would meet regularly away from the glare of publicity would increase the chances of solving the border question by turning an emotional political issue into a technical one to be tackled by knowledgeable people familiar with one another. Whatever the results of the boundary discussions, at least in terms of building trust and promoting understanding between political and defense personnel on both sides, and reducing general tension and suspicion between the two countries, this negotiating technique has already proved an unqualified success.

Rajiv Gandhi’s visit was also historic because it was only the second time an Indian prime minister had visited China, and the first in thirty-four years since Nehru’s trip in 1954. The visit would come to symbolize the arrival of a more relaxed phase in a Sino-Indian relationship that had moved from a legacy of prejudice and dogma toward a more constructive and businesslike dialogue. It demonstrated that, with the requisite political will on the part of state leaders to give high priority to developing a new thrust in forging good neighbourliness, years of inherited rigidity could be exorcized. By upgrading the political dialogue to the highest level and conducting talks with then Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang and senior leader Deng Xiaoping, Rajiv was able to promote “reverberation” by directing both countries’ media and public attention to the need to reduce tension and create opportunities for security and other forms of cooperation. Most of the national English-language newspapers in India supported Rajiv’s visit, as did the government-controlled Chinese media quite naturally, with protestations mostly confined to a small number of people like the ex-leader of Jan Sangh,

Balaraj Madhok, and V. P. Venkateswaran, former foreign secretary and exambassador to China.
⁴⁵

Rajiv’s ability to convince China’s leaders that he was both able and prepared to negotiate on the border was demonstrated by his successful sponsorship of a resolution passed by the All India Congress Working Committee on 5 November 1988. Urging the government to seek a settlement based on “mutual interest” and “acceptable to the peoples of both countries” through “peaceful negotiations,”
⁴⁶
this resolution basically rescinded the parliamentary resolution of 8 November 1962 binding the government to obtain the return of every inch of India’s “sacred soil.” There was always the danger that opposition parties in the Indian parliament would reintroduce an emotional dimension to a proposed visit by the Indian prime minister to China in the absence of a border settlement favorable to India. After all, it was the accusation by opposition politicians that the Indian government was negotiating behind the back of parliament which prevented Nehru from entering into any meaningful settlement on the border issue, even while he had that chance. However, this time the main opposition parties did not openly oppose Rajiv’s move to reopen border negotiations, partly because a parliamentary consensus on the issue seemed to have been tacitly struck when Janata foreign minister Vajpayee visited China in 1979. This demonstrates the need for multiparty consensus, or at least broad agreement among politicians of all stripes, in pushing through sensitive and tentative foreign policy initiatives.

Both countries have come to realize in recent years that the most serious and immediate threat to their military security and territorial integrity comes from within rather than without. While China had problems with separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang, India had internal security issues to deal with regarding Kashmir, Assam, and elsewhere, as well as seriously deteriorated relations with Pakistan to attend to. Neither government needed border incidents to add to their worries. A durable peace between China and India and stability along their common border would enable both to limit unnecessary increases in military expenditure and devote their energy and resources to economic development and domestic reform. The dramatic improvement in Sino-Indian relations occurred in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square incident while the Beijing regime was feeling isolated and vulnerable, and as the New Delhi leadership was witnessing the rapid disintegration of its erstwhile ally the Soviet Union. When premier Li Peng embarked on his Indian visit in December 1991, both China and India were facing a very altered global strategic environment following the end of the Cold War. To forestall any Western or American-led attempt to impose its values on their countries, both Chinese and Indian premiers came to an understanding against perceived meddling by the United States on issues of human rights, environmental protection, intellectual property rights, economic liberalization, nuclear detonation, missile tests, weapons sales and nuclear technology transfers. While China called for India’s membership in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), India supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO).