Chinese Influence In Southern Asia
Monday 13 July 2009 at 12:12 There is a useful analysis of Chinese influence across Southern Asia in the Financial Times today. For all its ideological blindness on occasion, the Financial Times still remains a sound source for background to international affairs. This led us to our own assessment of the situation in the Indian Ocean.
The matter for concern here is not just China but the response of India to China. India sits outside the SCO, half-allied to the West, placing pressure on Pakistan through the US, supporting the faltering war on terror and developing its own programme to ensure that it is a naval power in the Indian Ocean.
China Competes
Most geo-political discussion has resolved itself around the Chinese-American relationship which is often co-operative on economic matters but barbed and tense on military issues and on Chinese competition with the West for natural resources and third world influence.
More attention should perhaps be given to the potential for stresses and strains between India and China (much as the Financial Times suggests) as the Chinese invest substantial funds in recreating the American and British imperial model of controlling oceanic nodal points of strategic interest.
It is not China that is being contained by the West but India that is being contained by China. Investment in Tibet increases the ability of Chinese troops to threaten North India where the Tibetan government-in-exile is given refuge. Nepal is now no longer simply an Indian protectorate.
In Nepal, Chinese influence may eventually increase with Maoist influence. This weekend also saw 23 policemen killed in a Maoist insurgency in central India that has gone on for over forty years. This is not China’s doing but India will be wary of where this may lead in any change of political conditions in China.
The Chinese also compete with the US for influence in Pakistan and may find fertile ground for increasing that influence if Pakistani resentment of Indian influence on US counter-terrorism policy grows.
China’s influence is also growing in Sri Lanka and it competes with India, albeit less successfully, in Bangla Desh. Burma is effectively a protectorate against Western influence and there are clearly attempts to build a presence in most of the important island groups in the region.
The expansion of the Chinese and Indian navies must thus be seen in the context of the arrival of the Chinese in the Indian Ocean, ostensibly to protect vital trade routes from the Gulf but also as a rather obvious assertion of Chinese attempts to assert a geo-political challenge to the US.
It is as if the Chinese, unwilling to challenge the US across the vital barrier of the Pacific, have displaced themselves into what they may have seen as a natural vacuum after the withdrawal of Soviet fleets from the Southern hemisphere, one vital to the supply of basic resources from Africa and the Gulf.
India – Too Big To Beat
Of course, whether the Indians would recognize the Indian Ocean as a vacuum is another matter. Yet these tensions should not be exaggerated. India in itself is far too big to beat.
The more overtly pro-Western and smaller nations on China’s periphery (Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Australia) are probably much more edgy than India about the struggle between the US and China for regional hegemony.
The Europeans no longer have much to say in this zone and the Russians do not care anymore, so the liberal democratic states of the region must look to Washington for protection.
In the current climate, perhaps in the long run, China and India probably have more in common in their dealings with the West than not. However, the geo-political strategies of both become more relevant to each other if either should, for whatever reason, implode or weaken internally.
Chinese issues are quite focused – the Western provinces, Tibet and the working class in the pressure cooker of its industrial zone. India has some serious internal problems - various class insurgencies, Islamism in the north and communalism, especially where modernisation is creating resentment.
In general, India has integrated its internationally-orientated economy with the West, working through its diaspora, trading on its English language skills and high level of middle class education and reinvesting internally for its domestic market through a broadly economic liberal system.
China, meanwhile, trades globally on price and reinvests the surplus in acquiring cheap natural resources. Both are dependent on the international trading system to some extent - China more so.
What we are seeing is an adjustment rather than a confrontation. The Chinese are, at least for the moment, protecting essential economic interests rather than carrying out an ideological crusade. There is no reason for this not to be collaborative if both sides respect the interests of the other.
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China, Financial Times, India, Indian Ocean, Maoist Insurgency, Nepal, Pakistan, Tibet in Geo-Strategies