It’s not just the border. India has a deeper problem with China, and it looks like it’s part of the same problem that other countries have with China: the country has become much more aggressive.
Indian policymakers and commentators routinely assume that if New Delhi could only resolve the dispute over the line of the Himalayan border, other issues would fall into place. In fact, there’s not much reason to believe that. Just look further afield to the Western Pacific or Ukraine.
For the past several years, New Delhi has said there can be no progress in other aspects of the relationship as long as China refuses to concede on the border problem. This was initially an effort at pushing the border problem to the centre, presumably in the hope that China would not want to risk the entire relationship over it. But China has not budged and does indeed seem willing to risk the relationship instead.
There has been some recent speculation that India and China are on their way to resolving their standoff at the border, where military confrontations have sometimes become violent. India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said last month that 75 percent of the disengagement problems had been resolved. The holding of a round of Sino-Indian border talks in August and a meeting between Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi also added to hope. But Jaishankar has since clarified that his reference was only to disengagement, not to issues of militarisation of the border or the larger state of relations.
Anyway, there may be a larger problem with India’s strategy. The assumption behind it appears to be that the border dispute is the key issue in the relationship. But confrontations at the border may be consequences of deeper problems rather than a cause of them.
India-China relations have become increasingly challenging over the past two decades, even before a severe border clash that raised tensions in 2020. China objected vociferously to the US-India nuclear deal. It gave way, but a few years later refused to allow India to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which governs transfers of civilian nuclear technology and material. Around the same time, China repeatedly stymied Indian efforts to designate Pakistan-based terrorists under the UN terror list. Similarly, China has refused to back India’s efforts to promote UN Security Council reforms as well as India’s quest for a seat on the Security Council.
A meeting of foreign ministers of the BRICS group failed to issue a joint statement (for the first time since its founding) because of the Security Council issue. It is not difficult to assume, given China’s long-standing efforts to undermine UN Security Council reforms, that it had a hand in the latest failure.
India’s assumption appears to have been that each of these was a discrete policy disagreement rather than an indicator of a more fundamental issue—and that may be its big mistake.
China’s behaviour with many of its neighbours has similarly changed. These changes have included increasingly aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea and East China Sea, particularly against Taiwan. As well attempting to fish in troubled waters in both the Middle East and in the Ukraine war by extending diplomatic support to Iran to undermine American influence and appearing to provide material support to Russia.
Each of these instances of China’s behaviour may seem explicable when viewed in isolation. China and its supporters would argue that its behaviour in the South China Sea is a response to aggressive actions by Vietnam and the Philippines, for example.
But we are seeing too many instances. There’s a pattern, and India should recognise it.
If China’s behaviour has fundamentally changed, and its behaviour towards India is only one aspect of that change, then what New Delhi faces is a much more serious problem than just the border. Indeed, it’s clearly not even a Sino-Indian problem, but a China problem.
Part of this might reflect some historical patterns about the way rising powers behave, but one aspect of it may be more narrowly cultural: a reflection of China’s sense of itself and its place in history. Either way, such a shift in China’s position and worldview is not likely to be dealt with through negotiations narrowly focused on an apparently simple border dispute.
This is not to suggest that the border dispute is trivial. In 2020, for the first time in decades, blood was spilled in a clash between Indian and Chinese troops. Tens of thousands of Indian and Chinese soldiers are eyeball to eyeball, with all the attendant risks of inadvertent escalation.
This is a matter of concern even without all the other layers of complications between the two countries. Nevertheless, those layers of complications do matter and suggest that more fundamental issues are at stake than just the border dispute. If China is now fundamentally difficult to deal with, resolving that problem will be harder than Indian policy seems to assume. And even if it were resolved, other disputes may not be.
