Xi, Modi and the Chumar hijack

Xi, Modi and the Chumar hijack

 

By Ashok Malik in the Deccan Chronicle

 

President Xi Jinping’s visit has ended Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy honeymoon. The Chinese incursion in Chumar, in the Ladakh region, is serious. It has not ended and may not be ending in a hurry. It is qualitatively very different from the Chinese Army incursion in the Depsang area, also in Ladakh, in May 2013, just before Prime Minister Li Keqiang’s visit.

In the Depsang episode, 40 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army set up camp in an area that was part of Chinese claimed territory but far ahead of the normal peacetime position of Chinese forces. This time, the Chinese have sent 1,500 troops. In Depsang, the soldiers were logistically ill-served and ran out of food in a few days. This time the Chinese soldiers are being supported by helicopters dropping down food and supplies. They may be planning a long stay in the area.

In May 2013, the new Chinese leadership had just taken over. President Xi and Premier Li were relatively inexperienced and just settling in. There was a perception that the incursions in Ladakh, on the eve of Premier Li’s first foreign visit, were an attempt by generals in the PLA to put the new leadership in its place and wrest autonomy. This time no such excuse can be offered. President Xi has established himself as the most powerful new leader in China since the modernisation programme began in 1978. He heads the military commissions of both, the Communist Party of China and of the Chinese government. As such, he is in complete control.

His line, allegedly offered even in meetings with the Indian Prime Minister, that he didn’t know the details of what was going on in Chumar and who had authorised it are difficult to buy as China is a rigidly controlled totalitarian state. In the case of Depsang, Chinese incursions took place just before the premier’s visit. After initial hesitation by the then foreign minister and influential sections then serving in the Prime Minister’s Office, New Delhi played hardball. A tough message was sent and the threat of cancelling Premier Li’s visit held out. The Chinese back-tracked.
This time, the incursions did not precede the Chinese President’s visit but coincided with it. To send an equally strong message, India would have had to ask the Chinese President to go home, which was obviously out of question. Prime Minister Modi had to make do with repeatedly raising the border issue. The visit was hijacked by Chumar.

This is not the way the Indian Prime Minister would have wanted it. In his planning for the Chinese President’s trip, Mr Modi had been innovative in moving the first half of the programme out of the national capital. Rather than Lutyens’ New Delhi — a grand setting no doubt, but not repre-sentative of contem-porary India — he had taken his guest to the spanking new riverfront in Ahmedabad. He offered market access and investment opportunities in an Indian economy Chinese infra-structure companies and manufacturers are ambitious about.

Perhaps Mr Modi and his team felt they had the space and time for a deliberately ambiguous relationship with the Chinese, while building ties with Japan and the United States and, more important, repairing the domestic economy. That flexibility was probably projected to last a few months or even a year. Chumar has brought forward the deadline rudely and sharply.

The Chinese have sent a few messages with Chumar and the visit. They have attempted to bully the new Indian Prime Minister and warned him not to overreach himself. In proposing India join the Maritime Silk Route initiative — a Beijing brainchild that rests on Chinese infrastructure and trade and power-projection capacities — China is also indicating, as it has earlier, that India has no option but to accept Chinese leadership. The enthusiasm with which the Maritime Silk Route idea was received in the Maldives and Sri Lanka, which President Xi visited before landing in Gujarat, suggested an attempt to isolate India in its Indian Ocean near-neighbourhood.

India and China share a contested border, with differing territorial claims. India and China also share a contested Line of Actual Control, with both countries offering different markers. Mr Modi has urged a clarification of the LAC. One fails to see why the Chinese would be in a hurry. The confusion suits them. Indian patrolling capacities, border infrastructure and strategic dithering have meant the Indian LAC has moved from the Indian claim line, closer and closer to what is undisputed Indian territory. As such, with every incursion, the Chinese push the LAC closer in the direction of India and gain more territory. The un-demarcated LAC suits them.

This is the legacy that troubles Mr Modi. To be fair, it is not a legacy limited to the previous 10 years and the United Progressive Alliance government. It goes back much earlier. The upshot is the Chinese will keep chipping away — leaving the LAC undefined — for a final bargain with an India in a position of weakness. Symbolically, India made one point this time. It allowed controlled Tibetan protests, virtually up to the gates of Hyderabad House, where Mr Xi and Mr Modi were meeting. In recent years — whether during Mr Li’s visit in 2013, the Brics summit in 2012 or the Olympic torch relay in 2008 — the UPA government had used extraordinarily harsh measures and imposed a virtual curfew in central Delhi to keep Tibetans out of sight. This time the Modi government sent a political signal by allowing a degree of protest.

However, two caveats need to be entered here. First, while the sight of Tibetan banners and activists irritates the Chinese, it does not compare with the serious Army incur-sions in Ladakh. Second, the Tibetan community in India itself is divided with segments of its senior leadership keen to come to a settlement with the Chinese. Talk of the Dalai Lama going back to Chinese-governed Lhasa is part of that environment. Should the Dalai Lama actually return to Tibet, it will deprive India of a crucial lever and make Beijing that much more confident in dealing with New Delhi.

It was this backdrop that persuaded Mr Xi he had the measure of Mr Modi. Now it is for the Indian leader to prove him wrong.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com

 

 

 

From the Diplomat

 

China's Military May Have Gone 'Rogue' After All

Xi Jinping isn’t happy with the PLA’s chain of command, suggesting that he may lack complete control.

 

By Ankit Panda for The Diplomat

Generally, when the Chinese military does something particularly bold, such as intercept a U.S. spy plane or barge into India-administered Kashmir, inevitably some analysts explain this behavior by suggesting that the Chinese military has gone “rogue.” In other words, there is a tendency to explain off Chinese aggression by pointing to a failure in the chain of command that results in miscommunication (or in some cases, non-communication) between the leadership in Zhongnanhai and field commanders. After the most recent manifestation of this sort of explanatory bias, following the U.S.-China spy plane intercept incident, Zachary Keck pushed back against this notion of rogue PLA officers. I tend to agree with this view as well–the Chinese military, after all, is subservient to the Chinese Communist Party, and Xi Jinping, as president, presides over the Central Military Commission.

It turns out this may be more of how things are supposed to work in the Chinese military chain of command on paper. In reality, the “rogue” theorists may be right.

New evidence supports the commonly held view that the Chinese military isn’t entirely in line with the party leadership. Recently, President Xi Jinping delivered a speech at the PLA headquarters in Beijing with PLA chiefs of staff present. Notably he delivered this speech following his return from his South Asia tour which featured a particularly interesting visit to India when PLA troops crossed intro India-administered Kashmir as Xi arrived in the country. In his speech, Xi unusually emphasized the importance of the PLA’s “absolute loyalty and firm faith in the Communist Party of China,” according to Xinhua.

Further supporting the idea that there may be some commanders in the PLA who have acted without the consent of the party leadership, Xi emphasized the need for a “smooth chain of command” and called on field commanders to “make sure all decisions from the central leadership are fully implemented.” In a particularly telling paraphrasal, Xinhua notes that Xi suggested that “Military commanders should have a better understanding of international and domestic security situations as well as the latest military development.” According to Xinhua, Fang Fenghui, chief of the PLA general staff, was in attendance, along with other senior Chinese military leaders. A statement following Xi’s speech noted that “All PLA forces should follow the instructions of President Xi Jinping, also chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), and update their operations to meet new goals and missions set by the CMC.”

In light of Xi’s remarks, it seems highly likely that PLA leaders have at times acted without the consent of the Communist Party’s senior leadership and, more critically, against the strategic vision of that same leadership. It is, of course, nearly impossible to ascertain the extent to which the PLA may have drifted from the party leadership without veering dangerously close to baseless speculation. All we know is that Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the chairman of the Central Military Commission, felt it necessary to issue a statement to the People’s Liberation Army that, in effect, says “Please listen to me.”

In light of Xi’s remarks, it may bear reconsidering the verity of, for example, him telling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he honestly did not know the details of the stand-off between Indian and Chinese troops in Kashmir as the two leaders met. The fact that Xi felt it necessary to deliver these remarks and issue a statement to the PLA immediately upon his return from India suggests that the Chinese incursion in Chumar may not have been carefully coordinated after all.

The one oddity in all this is why we’re hearing about this speech at all. If Xi is truly concerned by lapses in China’s chain of command and fears that his leadership over the military is not absolute, why broadcast it via a report in state media? For a state apparatus so concerned with saving face, it’s somewhat curious that Beijing would choose to willingly broadcast these sorts of lapses in leadership to the outside world. Xi, like Hu Jintao before him, has issued statements expressing displeasure with the military before, but the frank language and the fact that the remarks were delivered following the incident in Kashmir between Indian and Chinese troops suggest that this time things might be different. One explanation might be that this speech and the report could be engineered specifically for consumption by the outside world. After all, given recent incidents involving Chinese troops in India, Southeast Asia, and the East China Sea, it may grant the leadership in Beijing some plausible deniability by suggesting that these actions were not sanctioned by the top leadership in Beijing. Of course, by the same token, this same admission makes Xi look weak in a way very much contrary to the image he has cultivated for himself (it is almost cliche to refer to Xi as anything but the 21st century reincarnation of Deng Xiaoping).

Unfortunately for many of China’s neighbors, neither explanation of Chinese military behavior–be it top-down carefully planned strategy or “rogue” field commanders–is particularly comforting. Leaders and strategists in India, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and the United States will be less interested in cracking open the black box that is the Chinese military and more interested in responding effectively to China’s increasingly assertive military behavior.