Rooftop War

The Chinese and the Indians are at it again. To be moreprecise the Chinese are at it. They are once again pushing at the disputed2,100-mile Sino-Indian border.

This week 20 Indian soldiers died and tensions rose asChinese soldiers attacked with sticks and stones. Tensions appear to havesubsided—for now.

But why is a border high in the sparely-populated Himalayasof any interest to the rest of the world? For a start, we are talking about thetwo most populous countries in the world. They are both nuclear powers. Theyhave the largest and second-largest conventional armies in the world.

There is also the problem that the headwaters of thestrategic Indus River run through the disputed Ladakh Region. The Chinese havebecome notorious for damming fast-moving Himalayan rivers for theirhydroelectric power at the expense of downriver farmers and industrialists.Several Southeast Asian nations will testify to the fact.

Ladakh also borders Tibet and has historic and cultural tieswith the Buddhist country which is a constant thorn in Beijing’s side. Controlof Ladakh would enable the Chinese to tighten their control over Lhasa.Pakistan could also be expected to exploit the situation to renew fighting indisputed Kashmir—now under Indian martial law.

China and India are world economic engines. A Sino-IndianWar—especially during an economically disastrous pandemic—would join Brexit andAmerican race wars in tipping the world into an even deeper economic abyss.

The Himalayan clash is also a worrying trend in Chinesediplomacy. Beijing has been traditionally viewed as taking the long, softly,softly catchee monkey with soft words and loads of dosh approach to foreignaffairs. Since the pandemic that view appears to have shortened.

The Chinese have responded to tariffs and Trump’s conspiracytheories about the “Chinese Virus” with their own even more outrageous andconspiracy theories about American involvement. They have clamped down on HongKong and recently rammed a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea.

Finally, there is the danger of American involvement. TheTrump Administration has been forging a new anti-Chinese alliance with India,Vietnam, Australia and Japan. If the Chinese push too hard, Trump could feelthe need to come to the aid of his new best friend—and fellow right-wingpopulist—Narendra Modi.

But back to the roof of the world. The roots of theSino-Indian border dispute are set firmly in the British Raj. To be precisethey are the result of the difficulty successive British surveyors had inmapping Himalayan peaks and valleys. The result was a botched job. The Indianswere easy about it. They were owned by the British. The Chinese were distractedby the British-led carve-up of their empire to care too much.

It was not until Indian independence in1948 and the ChineseCommunist accession to power the following year that the border issueresurfaced. In 1950 the Chinese invaded and annexed Tibet and brought theChinese border right up to the border of India. It finally boiled over into the1962 Sino-Indian war which was fought on both sides of the long border; in thewest in the Ladakh region and in the East the Indian-controlled protectorate ofSikkim. The Indians were humiliatingly defeated at both ends.

Since then there has been an armed Sino-Indian truce withperiodic outbreaks of goodwill punctuated by the occasional skirmish. TheIndians are painfully aware that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is threetimes the size of the Indian military, so they have concentrated onconsolidating control by building airports and roads to what is called the Lineof Actual Control (LAC)– to avoid the more legalistic terms boundary orborder.

When he assumed office, Indian Prime Minister Narendradeclared that a settlement with China was his top foreign policy priority. Heorganised two summits with Xi Jinping, but no progress was made. China sees nolong term advantage in compromise. It simply does not fit in with its plan tobe the number one power in Asia.

Tom Arms is a regular contributor