The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (10 page)

Chinese note to India, 1965
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China and the South Asian countries have a great deal of common ground and converging interests just as all neighbours do. However, as neighbours, it is difficult not to have some differences or disputes from time to time. We stand for seeking common ground on major issues while reserving differences on minor ones. We should look at the differences or disputes from a long perspective, seeking a just and reasonable settlement through consultations and negotiations while bearing in mind the larger picture. If certain issues cannot be resolved for the time being, they may be shelved temporarily so that they will not affect the normal state-to-state relations
.

Jiang Zemin, “Carrying Forward Generations of Friendly
and Good-Neighbourly Relations and Endeavouring Towards a
Better Tomorrow for All”, 1996
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No country can choose its neighbours, and a distant relative may not be as helpful as a near neighbour. China and India should not seek cooperation from afar with a ready partner at hand
.

Li Keqiang, “Seize the new opportunities in India-China Cooperation”, 2013
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In December 1996, Jiang Zemin was due to make a state visit to Pakistan. It was a rare event in Sino-Pakistani relations. Although Chinese heads of state had made the trip before, neither of the men who wielded ultimate power in China, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, had ever taken the six-hour flight across the Karakoram mountain range. With Deng, now in the last few months of his life, having fully handed over the reins to Jiang, this would be an unusual opportunity for Pakistan to play host to a Chinese president who could actually call the shots. It would be another decade before they would have the chance again. Jiang had even spent several months living in Pakistan, in 1976, as an engineering consultant at the Heavy Machinery Complex and Heavy Forge and Foundry in Taxila.
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Yet the Pakistanis were viewing the visit with trepidation. Jiang’s arrival in Islamabad looked set to be completely overshadowed by the first leg of the journey: he would be flying in from New Delhi, where he would make the first ever visit to India by a Chinese head of state. This would draw further public attention to a development that was making Pakistan increasingly uncomfortable. Chinese policy in South Asia was steadily taking on what Beijing described as a more “balanced” quality.
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The Sino-Indian relationship had been undergoing a gradual process of normalization, and entered a new phase after Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s breakthrough visit to Beijing in 1988.
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The Soviet Union’s collapse accelerated the transition in Chinese foreign policy away from Cold War rivalries towards a focus on economic goals, whether through outright trade diplomacy, or through the stabilization of China’s regional security environment in order to concentrate on economic development. India no longer occupied the status in Beijing’s eyes of Soviet quasi-ally, and, in addition to its prospects as a trade partner, might even become an asset in China’s growing struggle with the United States. In the year preceding Jiang’s visit, the Taiwan Strait crisis had seen the staging of the greatest display of US military might in East Asia since the Vietnam War, as Washington deployed two carrier battle groups in response to China’s intimidatory missile tests in the vicinity of Taiwan.
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With US-China relations already fundamentally altered by the Tiananmen Square massacre, this was the closest the two sides had come to confrontation since the early 1960s. For China, concepts such as “anti-hegemonism” and “multipolarity” were the order of the day, and major developing world powers such as India were potential supporters.
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An old friend like Pakistan wouldn’t be forgotten, but the relative value of the relationship seemed to be diminishing.

The Pakistanis watched Jiang’s visit to India closely. There was already one worrying sign for them. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman declared on Indian soil that “it is not in the interests of China to sell advanced weapons to its immediate neighbours”.
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This was a promise that Islamabad could probably afford to discount, though: Beijing had regularly made and broken them before, and would indeed do so again. But China had saved the real blow for a speech that Jiang would deliver in Pakistan itself, at the national assembly. The language sounded bland but the message was well understood by the parliamentarians in attendance. The Chinese president failed to mention Kashmir explicitly—a point of sensitivity for the Pakistanis in its own right—but his references to “seeking a just and reasonable settlement through consultations and negotiations” and “shelving” disputes were clear and pointed.
¹⁰
It undercut Pakistan’s position that Kashmir should be resolved through international mediation, not bilateral negotiations, at precisely the time when Islamabad was on a renewed push to internationalize the dispute.
¹¹
Worse, it seemed to reflect a willingness on China’s part to shift its stance on an issue of deep significance to Pakistan for the sake of better relations with India. The passage of the speech was received in “pindrop silence” according to the US ambassador, Thomas Simons.
¹²
It is still cited today by Pakistanis as a warning sign for what might happen if the attractions of warmer ties with the old enemy grow too great for Beijing to resist.
¹³

Nearly twelve years later, on 5 September 2008, US officials were desperately trying to get an answer out of Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao. The centre of the action was Vienna, where the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was meeting to reach a decision about whether an exemption should be granted to India. The NSG had been founded after India’s nuclear test in 1974, in which material and technology supplied by the United States and Canada under bilateral agreements committing India to their peaceful use had instead been diverted to its bomb programme. As a result, the United States and six other governments concluded that the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) alone would be insufficient to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, and established a informal “nuclear cartel” to coordinate and control exports of nuclear material, equipment and technology.
¹⁴
India’s undeclared nuclear activities outside the NPT
left it barred from most international nuclear commerce for decades. But now the United States was leading the effort to persuade the members of the NSG to grant India a waiver and allow it to engage in the civil nuclear trade. It was the final hurdle to clear in a process that had started when the Bush administration sought a symbolic centrepiece in its plans for a fundamental transformation of the US-India relationship. Instead of being a source of contention and division between the world’s largest democracy and its most powerful, as it had been only a few years before, the civil-nuclear agreement would make the United States the principal country responsible for bringing India into the international nuclear order—on India’s terms.
¹⁵
New Delhi would not place all its nuclear facilities under safeguards, would not be a member of the NPT, and would not sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
¹⁶

Getting to Vienna had been a long and gruelling task. Domestic opposition in both India and the United States needed to be overcome, an India-IAEA agreement needed to be reached, and an array of countries needed to be persuaded that this was a means of strengthening the non-proliferation order rather than undermining it—or at least to swallow their reservations. NSG meetings are generally low-key affairs, attended by mid-level officials who are able to convene without attracting even a hint of press attention. Not this one. The final push to gain the unanimous agreement required for the waiver involved a diplomatic marathon at the highest levels of the governments involved in what was by now a 45-nation body. From the president down, every top US official was deployed to cajole and persuade the hold-outs. Opponents to the exemption were gradually peeled off, with the Japanese, the Norwegians, the Dutch, and the New Zealanders all folding. In the closing stages, it appeared that there were two countries blocking the deal—Ireland and Austria.
¹⁷
Ireland’s consent was finally secured in a phone-call between George W. Bush and Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
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Austria was in the middle of an election campaign and its government feared that the India exemption could be exploited by the opposition Green Party. The Austrian Foreign Minister, Ursula Plassnik, was at a European Council meeting in Brussels, and proving to be elusive. Condoleezza Rice had to break from her landmark visit to Libya to place a call to the German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who managed to track Plassnik down. She finally instructed her negotiator to agree.
¹⁹
It seemed there was now a green light.

Yet at a late stage in the negotiations, the behaviour of the Chinese delegates took an unexpected turn. China had been among the countries to express their reservations about the deal, but had given assurances in Vienna and through separate bilateral communications with the Indians and the Americans that it “won’t be an obstacle”.
²⁰
Beijing had provided discreet support to the principal opponents of the deal, who were starting to cast around for additional ballast in their attempts to resist US pressure, but China largely hid behind them, quietly supporting their amendments but otherwise keeping its head down. Signs that something was afoot were first evident when the Chinese negotiators started putting forward proposals of their own.
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These included language that could have opened the door for Pakistan to seek a similar waiver, which attracted near-complete opposition from the other NSG members and curiosity about whether Beijing was genuinely testing the water or just finding ways to bring about procedural delays.
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At this stage, Chinese officials still had cover from the European opponents of the deal, but it became increasingly evident that Beijing had been counting on the Europeans to hold out and that its negotiators were not actually authorized to give their nod to the exemption. The result was a minor panic. Chinese officials proposed an adjournment, to no avail. Then, at midnight, China’s two senior negotiators, including Cheng Jingye, the head of the Chinese delegation, walked out.
²³
With the diplomacy in Vienna in danger of unravelling, the focus switched back to the channel between Washington and Beijing. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao had been avoiding calls from the Indian prime minister,
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but were now on the spot. They blinked. Rice reached Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, to urge China not to block the deal.
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With a few hours to go until the meeting was scheduled to break up, the junior official that the Chinese had left in the room conveyed China’s evidently very reluctant assent. To rub salt into India’s wound, Chinese diplomats—including Yang, on the eve of a visit to New Delhi—attempted in the immediate aftermath to pretend to their Indian counterparts that they had been supportive all along.
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China had been hoping and expecting that the US-India civil nuclear deal would fall at one of the many hurdles in its way—the US Congress, the Indian parliament, the non-proliferation hard-liners—but all of them had been cleared. It paved the way for what many in Beijing saw as a potential “anti-China” containment effort and a soft alliance being hatched between Washington and New Delhi, a refreshed version of the
Indo-Soviet relationship: friends, if not actually allies.
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Observers in Beijing were hardly reassured by the alternative explanation furnished by US and Indian advocates of the deal.
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In this account, “containment” or even “counterbalancing” was a crudely reductive way of thinking about what was going on—India had no interest in being dragged into a US containment effort, and the United States had no interest in mounting one anyway.
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But instead, they portrayed an even grander scheme that would disrupt China’s rise to pre-eminent status in the coming century: a baton-passing across the Anglosphere from the United States to India, as from the UK to the United States over the early decades of the 20th century. India was not merely the short-term ally, it was the like-minded successor, which the United States would “help become a major world power in the twenty-first century.”
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China had tended to be dismissive of India’s prospects for surpassing its own rise, seeing the country as ten years behind it economically and showing little sign of catching up. But India was on an economic roll now, and with access to US arms and technology, the picture looked altogether different.
³¹
China no longer felt confident that it had the luxury to be disdainful: what Shyam Saran, the former Indian Foreign Secretary, described as the “Chinese predilection to dismiss India’s role in international affairs as that of a pretender too big for its boots, while China’s super power status is, of course, regarded as manifest destiny”.
³²

But China had a tried and tested solution to hand. If the United States was going to smooth the path for India’s ascent, Pakistan would be the means for China to hold it down.

Nominally, India is the principal point of continuity in the China-Pakistan relationship, yet in some ways it is anything but. The Sino-Indian and Indo-Pakistani rivalries today are vastly removed from those that laid the foundations for the Sino-Pakistani relationship in the 1960s. While their border dispute certainly hasn’t gone away, India and China are now two globally capable powers that clear $74 billion in trade,
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and collaborate closely on climate talks
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and WTO negotiations,
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even as their corporate giants square up over ports and pipelines around South Asia and the Middle East. And the India-Pakistan rivalry now takes place between one state with a $225 billion economy and the means to pursue a strategy of asymmetric conflict under a nuclear umbrella, and another with an economy closer to $2 trillion and an
acute sense that even a limited war could be devastating to its position as a centre of global commerce.