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From: Brahma Chellaney
The Hindustan Times, June 22, 2006
China is building new regional links and capabilities antithetical to Indian interests
Dragon designs
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
For long, Beijing has called for trade with India through the strategic Chumbi Valley, located at the junction of Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. To that end, it has offered incremental concessions on Sikkim after, in 2003, making India unequivocally recognize as "part of the territory of the People's Republic of China" the area it calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). China's bit-by-bit concessions have not reached the point where it is willing to declare that it fully recognizes Sikkim's status as an integral part of India.
Despite presenting an official map showing Sikkim in the same colour as the rest of India and signing a joint statement that carried a reference to Sikkim being in India, Beijing has been loath to surrender its Sikkim card the way India relinquished its Tibet card. China's admission that Sikkim is presently under Indian control — a self-evident reality — does not mean that it now recognizes Sikkim to be part of India. Indeed, Beijing's acknowledgement of Indian control over Sikkim is plainly limited to the purpose of facilitating trade through Chumbi's Nathu-la Pass, the scene of bloody artillery duels in September 1967 when Indian troops beat back attacking Chinese forces. No Chinese official till date has conceded any change in Beijing's stance on Sikkim.
Yet Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has succeeded in getting what he sought during his 2005 India visit — trade through Chumbi "at an early date". Unlike the inconsequential trade through the opening of the passes at Shipki-la (Himachal Pradesh) and Lipulekh (Uttarachal) between 1992 and 1993, the scheduled reopening of the Nathu-la Pass from July 6 could help pave the way to the gradual revival of the ancient Lhasa-Kalimpong and Lhasa-Kolkata trade routes that were Tibet's economic lifeline. Beijing's interests, however, are more than commercial.
With its new wealth, China has been inventively building trade and transportation links to further its larger interests. Such links around India's periphery are already bringing this country under strategic pressure on three separate flanks. China is fashioning two north-south strategic corridors on either side of India — the Trans-Karakoram Corridor stretching right up to Gwadar, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz; and the Irrawaddy Corridor involving road, river and rail links from Yunnan right up to the Burmese ports. In addition, it is shoring up an east-west strategic corridor in Tibet across India's northern frontiers.
The $6.2-billion China-Tibet railway from Gormu to Lhasa is designed not only to aid the mineral exploitation of the Tibetan plateau but also to strengthen China's hold on Tibet. When ready shortly, it will significantly augment China's offensive military capability against India while making more vulnerable the fragile ecology of Tibet — the starting point of all the great Asian rivers. The railway passes through wildlife habitat, endangering Tibet's famed black-neck cranes, yellow ducks, musk deer and chiru antelopes.
A southward rail spur under construction from Lhasa to Xigatse — seat of the Panchen Lama's Tashilhumpu monastery — will further bolster China's military-transport and reinforcement capabilities against India. At short notice, China will be able to intensify military pressure on India by rapidly mobilizing up to 12 divisions. A string of new Chinese military airfields along the India frontier have also come up, even as China builds up its missile strength on the Tibetan plateau. The new railroad facilitates the easy transport of intermediate-range missiles and allows China to rail-base in Tibet some of its intercontinental ballistic missiles. China indeed has designed its latest ICBM, the DF-31A, as a rail-mobile weapon.
Just as the southbound roads China built in the 1950s were later used for aggression against India, the new Tibetan railway indubitably carries significant strategic ramifications for India. And just as the newer highways into Tibet have helped dramatically increase Han migration, the railway to Lhasa and Xigatse will further accelerate Tibet's Sinicization and the economic marginalization of its native people.
This strategic corridor arms China with multiple benefits: enhanced power-projection force capability; the option to step up direct military pressure against India; superior transport links with states that are part of the Indian security system (Nepal and Bhutan); improved potential to meddle in India's restive northeast; and the ability to dump goods in the Indian market via Chumbi and Nepal. China would like to extend the Tibetan railway to Kathmandu even as it presently expands its road links with Nepal.
Ever since the elimination of Tibet as the outer buffer, India has regarded Nepal and Bhutan as its inner security buffers. Chinese efforts to make strategic inroads into those inner buffers thus challenge Indian security. During 2005-06, Beijing signed contracts to sell Nepal arms worth several million dollars. Emerging transportation capabilities up to the Himalayas will endow China with influence over Nepal and Bhutan, which Mao Zedong had once described as two of the fingers of the Tibetan palm — the others being the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh (which Beijing still shows as Chinese territory), Jammu and Kashmir (one-fifth of which China occupies) and Sikkim.
With the Irrawaddy Corridor stretching up to the Bay of Bengal, Chinese security agencies have positioned personnel at several Burmese coastal points, including the Chinese-built harbours at Kyaukypu and Thilawa. These agencies already operate electronic-intelligence and maritime-reconnaissance facilities on the two Coco Islands — transferred by India in the 1950s to Burma, which then leased them to Beijing in 1994.
Beijing is reinforcing the strategic significance of the naval base-cum-port it is completing at Gwadar, Pakistan, by linking it up with the Karakoram Highway to western China through the Chinese-aided Gwadar-Dalbandin railway, which extends up to Rawalpindi. In addition, the Chinese-supported Makran coastal highway is to link Gwadar with Karachi. Gwadar, already home to a Chinese electronic-listening post, is a critical link in the emerging chain of Chinese forward-operating facilities that stretch from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal and then to the Gulf of Siam.
Protected by cliffs from three sides, Gwadar will not only arm Pakistan with critical strategic depth against a 1971-style Indian attempt to bottle up its navy, but it will also open the way to the arrival of Chinese submarines in India's backyard. Beijing admits that Gwadar's strategic significance is equivalent to the Karakoram Highway, which since opening in 1969 has helped underpin the Sino-Pakistan nexus and served as the route for covert Chinese nuclear and missile transfers. A Karakoram Highway-Gwadar link-up is bound to create a strategic-multiplier effect.
Islamabad and Beijing are currently exploring the building of an energy pipeline from Gwadar to western China as a way to reduce the time and distance for transporting oil to China from the Gulf region. Built in parallel to the road-and-rail link to connect Gwadar to China, a similar second pipeline could potentially carry Iranian gas to western China. With its planned petroleum and naval facilities, Gwadar will be a key base in China's strategy to secure greater Gulf energy resources.
Once the Gwadar project is complete, the Chinese navy, with its access in Burma, will be able to operate on both Indian flanks. In addition, Beijing's broad-based military-cooperation agreement with Dhaka — Bangladesh's first such accord with any country — has four apparent objectives: to bring that country into the Chinese strategic orbit; gain naval and commercial access to Chittagong; connect Bangladesh with Burma; and secure a doorway to India's northeast. Trade through Chumbi anyway will help China to gain influence in the vulnerable northeast.
With China's accumulating power becoming the single biggest instigator of qualitative change in the geopolitical landscape, India faces a mounting strategic challenge. Despite New Delhi's accent on cooperation, Beijing will not shy away from ploughing more and more of its resources into activities and capabilities antithetical to Indian interests and security.
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