Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (14 page)

In November 2006 Chinese state television aired a twelve-part series called
The Rise of Great Powers
. The series outlined the histories of different countries that became ‘great powers’ and was based on research by a team of Chinese historians. This was seen as a change in China, where any hint of superpower aspirations were kept tightly locked away. Just two years before, President Hu Jintao had used the term ‘peaceful rise’ but even this was seen by some as too provocative. The series began with an account of Portugal in the fifteenth century and ended with the present-day United States. With a dramatic soundtrack in the back ground, the deep-voiced narrator warned of the mistakes made by Germany and Japan, whilst also drawing attention to those strategies worthy of emulation, such as the development of Britain’s navy to secure its overseas trade. Queen Isabella was praised for her risk-taking as well as Abraham Lincoln for his efforts to ‘preserve national unity’. The research team were said to have briefed the Communist Party Politburo on their findings.

China’s economic strength was shaping global markets. Closer to home, there was a security dimension as well. China was traditionally a continental power and in the nineteenth century its Qing dynasty navy had been entirely outclassed by British warships during the Opium Wars, forcing Beijing to cede Hong Kong and open up the country to Western commerce. China had not had a blue-water fleet since 1433 when a giant armada under Admiral Zheng He had sailed through the Straits of Malacca and around the Indian Ocean. Around the same time, however, the Oirat Mongols under Esen Tayisi were crushing Chinese defences along the Great Wall. Attention had to be turned inland. There was no looking back. In 1497–9 Vasco da Gama navigated around the Cape of Good Hope, beginning what would be 500 years of Western domination of Asian waters, first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, French, British and finally the Americans. Twenty-first-century China was keen to take to the seas. Since the end of the Cold War, US naval forces directed by its Pacific Command in Hawaii have controlled the sea lanes from the Sea of Japan to the Persian Gulf. Would growing Chinese power upset the applecart? The Americans for one were increasingly worried.

Just before I was in Beijing there had been a curious standoff between an American navy ship, the USS
Impeccable
, and five Chinese-flagged vessels not far from China’s southeast coast. The Americans were increasing their surveillance of Chinese submarines (the
Impeccable
was a submarine-hunter), and this in turn had angered the Chinese. The five ships had steered dangerously close, waving Chinese flags and demanding that the American ship leave the area. When the Americans resorted to fire hoses to try to force their pursuers back, the Chinese crew on deck stripped to their underwear (presumably the better to withstand the sprays of water directed against them) and continued their chase. The Pentagon claimed harassment. The Chinese were unapologetic. In the
China Daily
, Vice-Admiral Jin Mao was quoted as saying that the
Impeccable
was a spy ship, up to no good. ‘It’s like a man with a criminal record wandering just outside the gate of a family home,’ he said. The Chinese website Danwei went further, saying the
Impeccable
was like ‘something in which a James Bond villain would plan world domination’.

India, too, was concerned about the prospects of China as a military superpower. Relations have not been good for decades and the 1,200-mile-long Himalayan border is still not demarcated. China claims India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh as ‘South Tibet’ and part of China, and has long bristled at New Delhi’s hosting of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. China has armed forces of over two million men, India over one million; both have a nuclear arsenal.

Whilst the Americans were more concerned about Chinese objectives in the western Pacific, India’s focus was naturally on the Indian Ocean. While I was in China, I read on the internet an article in the
Guardian
by Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research. He said:

China wants to be the pre-eminent power in Asia and whether Asia ends up multipolar or unipolar will be determined by what happens in the Indian Ocean. Currently there is a power vacuum there and the Chinese want to fill it.

A recent
Time
magazine cover story was entitled ‘Burma: The New Great Game’. The original Great Game was the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century competition between tsarist Russia and imperial Britain for supremacy over Central Asia. Analysts argued that a similar ‘tournament of shadows’, as the Great Game was also called, was beginning to be waged around the Indian Ocean. India and China certainly seemed to be vying for influence. In Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and of course Burma, all the countries along India’s periphery, China was busy cultivating commercial ties and building infrastructure. The flag could easily follow trade as it had for past ‘Great Powers’. Some said it was just a matter of time before China displaced America as the main naval power in the western Pacific and established itself, militarily as well as economically, around the Indian Ocean as well.

I asked a Chinese scholar of the region what he thought of this line of reasoning. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, dismissive.

This is not Europe in 1914. We don’t need to replicate the Western experience of rivalry and war. China is still a poor country, India is a poor country. All these countries near us, Nepal, Bangladesh, are poor. We all need development. We should think of cooperation, not competition.

Others were more blunt. ‘The Americans just want to keep China down,’ said a Chinese friend. He had studied in London and was now working for a big multinational company. He was tall and at fifty still boyish-looking in his jeans and lime-green Ralph Lauren sweater. We were have dinner at the Middle 8th, a fashionable restaurant in Sanlitun. Sanlitun is a neighbourhood to the west of the centre of Beijing that had been the hub of the local nightclub scene since the 1990s (and the haunt of mini-skirted working girls from Mongolia and Russia until they had been cleared out for the Olympics). There were many bars along the tree-lined street, including Paddy O’Shea’s, the Q Bar and the Apothecary, as well as restaurants and cafés, some with tables and white plastic chairs set on the pavement outside. The Middle 8th specialized in food from Yunnan, with a menu that included several mushroom dishes. It was noisy and brightly lit and the crowd inside, a mix of Chinese and Westerners, were mostly young and expensively dressed.

Over a dish of ‘fried boletus edulis with shrimp’, my friend argued that the Americans had prejudged them, already vilifying them as the future enemy and making plans accordingly, cementing ties with Tokyo and other Pacific nations, drawing closer to New Delhi, and selling sophisticated arms to Taiwan. The US was maintaining fleets and bases around the world, invading countries, and had a defence budget equal to all other countries put together. He didn’t understand how Americans could possibly see China as the more dangerous power.

Others I met in Beijing echoed this view. In 2009, the US military spent $738 billion on defence and homeland security. Estimates for China’s annual military budget vary considerably, ranging from $69.5 billion to $150 billion. There was annoyance at the thought that China could be a threat to anyone and protests that China was only seeking a ‘peaceful rise’. I mentioned Deng Xiaoping’s advice to the Communist Party, well remembered in China, to ‘hide our capabilities, bide our time’. In many countries there was anxiety about what would happen, if not now, then in a decade or so when capabilities would no longer need to be hidden. They said there would be no new imperialism. A better life for the Chinese people was all that was desired. If it meant growing ties with markets and governments around the world, that was China’s own business. The rest of the world would just have to adjust.

Whatever the truth of China’s ambitions overseas, it is also clear that in the late 2000s China’s leadership was still extremely worried about the sustainability of its recent gains. The world recession of 2008 did not knock the Chinese economy in the same way as in the West and indeed seemed to underline the feeling that the future could be rosier in China than elsewhere. But there were big problems lurking under the surface, from rampant official corruption to China’s basic dependence on exports to a now anaemic American market. There were two other major worries as well.

The first was the huge and growing divide between the haves and have-nots and between a prosperous east coast and a still poor rural interior. A provincial breakdown of China’s current GDP per capita shows this divide clearly. At the very top of the table of provinces, municipalities, and Special Economic Zones, way above the rest, is Hong Kong with $44,000 per capita, compared with a national average of $6,000. A per capita income of $44,000 places Hong Kong roughly on par with many industrialized countries, including the United States. Then there are the big eastern and coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where the per capita GDP is less than half of Hong Kong’s, but still very high by international standards at about $18,000 a year, placing them at about the same level as Poland or Hungary. Per capita income in Guangdong, also on the east coast, is about the same as Brazil’s at $10,000 a year.

But move inland and the numbers change dramatically. First come the provinces like Shaanxi, closer to the centre of China, with per capita income at about the national average, comparable to Egypt or Guatemala. Then there are the very poor ones. All are clustered in the west and southwest. Yunnan is third from the bottom, with about $3,400 a year in per capita GDP (at the bottom of the list is Guizhou, next door), about the same as Vietnam and the Philippines.

And so we have a gigantic east to west slide in income levels, from US levels of prosperity to levels not much different from the poorer agrarian countries of southeast Asia. For the Chinese government’s strategic thinkers, the need to narrow the gap between rich and poor, east coast and interior, was a top priority, and looking at the map, they concluded a big reason for the south west’s poverty was its distance from the sea and lack of easy access to international trade. Some 90 per cent of international investment had been targeted at coastal cities. It was these cities that were booming. Future development had to mean creating new infrastructure, including airports and motorways that would more efficiently link the poorer provinces to the eastern seaboard.

But there seemed another way to ameliorate this coast–interior divide. And that was to make China a ‘bi-coastal’ nation. China’s ‘Western Development Strategy’ was officially inaugurated in 1999 and related to this was the idea of a connection through Burma to the Indian Ocean. It was an idea that was championed first by academics, and then by policy-makers. Development of the west would require massive investment in infrastructure and over the past decade tens of billions of dollars have already been spent. Easy access to the Indian Ocean would be a significant plus; on this everyone agreed. The problem was making it happen. It meant first and foremost bringing the Burmese military junta on board.

There was a second problem as well: managing the country’s ethnic diversity at a time of fast economic and social change. From afar, China seems like a giant monolithic society. Most will know that Tibet is in the far west of the People’s Republic, and will perhaps have heard or read about the Uighurs in the northwest and the recent violent clashes there between Uighur Muslims and the majority or ‘Han’ Chinese. But few outsiders appreciate the full complexity of China’s ethnic picture or the importance placed by Chinese policy-makers on the integration of China’s disparate ethnic communities. The Han Chinese are basically the people who speak one (or more) of the many Chinese dialects and who see themselves as part of a Chinese tradition, stretching back to the old Han dynasty of ancient times and beyond. But there are many ethnic minorities who speak entirely different languages and identify themselves with other traditions. These ethnic minorities account for 7 per cent of the total population. Which doesn’t sound like much. But that’s still more than a hundred million people, equal to the populations of France and Spain combined. And these minority nationalities are the majority or near majority in over half of China’s territory.

There’s Xinjiang in the far west with its vast reserves of oil and natural gas. And the huge Tibetan plateau, not just what is today the Tibetan ‘Autonomous Region’ but also Qinghai, and the historically Tibetan-speaking areas now annexed to Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Then there’s Yunnan in the southwest and the adjacent minority regions in Guangxi and Guangdong, together home to more than forty million non-Han people, from minorities few in the West have ever heard of, like the Naxi, Yi and Dai.

China’s rulers know that within living memory what is today China was a led by a hotchpotch of warlords and local military commanders, or under the control of independent and non-Chinese rulers. Their answer to the threat of ethnic division has been different at different times, but in recent decades the answer has largely been the same as the answer to everything–sustained economic growth. With more jobs and better jobs, other problems will be manageable and will vanish over time. Burma is next to China’s biggest concentration of ethnic minorities, Yunnan, and Beijing’s Burma policy has been dictated first and foremost by what will help Yunnan’s economy move forward. This too meant dealing with the Burmese military junta.

Chess was invented in India and exported to Europe. In China, however, the principal board game has long been
weiqi
, known in the West by its Japanese name, Go. And in Go, victory comes to the player who can surround the pieces of his opponent. It was a mix of internal challenges that appeared to be leading China back down the Burma Road. But would China, like the Europeans who acquired Africa in a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’, one day emerge in control, on Indian’s eastern flank and on top of the sea lanes of the world?