CININDIA IS MORE THAN INDIA AND CHINA
By Bhabani Sen Gupta

A spectre is haunting an enormous lot of people all over the
Western world and its allies, friends and defenders in India. Its name
is Communist China. The world order that came to be established after
World War II and has melted down to a large extent is known as the
American World Order. China is one of the strongest pillars of a
new emerging world order that will rest, in this century, on a balanced
foundation of equal give and take among the large global community of
sovereign states spanning all continents. However, the building blocks of
the new global architecture reside at this time in Asia. China is in the fore-
front of the emergent pillars of the new world order. There are other
big pillars too---India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and, of course,
Japan. Why, then, is there so much nervousness about the specture of
Communist China creating a pall of neurosis, even hallucinations, in
the hall of nations, or ,more precisely, the thinking sections of their
articulate elites?
“The media” occupies the grandstand of the thinking sections
in democracies where the press that is now more electronic than print.
Less articulate and less assertive are the academic communities in
democracies , particularly those engaged in the volatile fields of politics
and international relations. “The media” is a conglomerate of newspapers
and magazines, television, and the vast, and still expanding universe
of internet.
In democracies, the media as a collective entity is given the role of
sentinel of the people’s right to demand accountability from the principal
organs of the state—the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Of course,
the demand is not always made, nor met. The Fourth Estate, a precious gift
of the French Revolution, is an organic part of the state, and is symbiotically
linked with the economic and political interests that control the state and run
the government, even as the people’s “ownership” of the state is nicely acknowledged. In democracies, this “ownership” is excercised only through
the vote in elections which must be as free and fair as practicable, even permissible,
in generic circumstances.
In democracies, government, too, own print, television and internet media
and thus compete with the ‘independent’ media. Government maintain networks
of control over “facts” and about information about “facts.”Thus is laid out a huge
space of cooperation and attrition between government and media not owned and run by government. In practice, the private media and the government try to keep
each other on the right side.
Democracies vary from one another in many ways, not the least in the
tension-ridden space of information and facts. Only in the United States, citizents
enjoy the constitutional right to information, and this has created major tensions
between presidents and the media. In India, citizens now enjoy right to information
under legislation enacted by parliament.
However, the media must weigh seriously and with a high sense of responsibility the veracity of ‘news’ reported in its columns or in its airwaves.
The test of veracity is the source of ‘news.’ The media often attribute news
to unspecified sources. Recent reports of Chinese ‘incursions’ along the undemarcated undefined 4000km long border between India and China,
both in the eastern and western sectors lacked veracity because these were
attributed to unidentified sources. When one or two retired military officers
working with private think-tanks receiving handsome government grants
found space in India’s largest circulated English daily, confirming ‘aggressive
Chinese patrolling’ in the eastern as well as western sectors, the editors did
not question of the source of the information obtained by the “strategic
experts.” Denial of these reports by spokespersons of the Chinese government
were dismissed with a superior sleigh of hand. The newspaper evidently allowed
its political prejudices against “Communist China’ to prevail over its ethical
and political responsibilities about maintaining peace and cooperation between
India and China.
The India-China relationship is more that relationship between emerging
Asia’s two largest nations who are also among the planets largest neighbours.
There is admittedly a tectonic shift in power equations in the international
arena in the 21st century. If the 19th century was British, and the 20th American,
the 21st is witnessing a balanced, more equitable distribution of power and
wealth among nations of the world. The post=colonial shift that began in
the wake of World War II, with Britain’s negotiated withdrawal from its
Asian empire and, much more assertively, with the communist revolution
in China is now acquiring firm geopolitical stability and acceptance on a global
basis.
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have drawn lessons from the
internal and international behaviour of the Soviet Union, and continue to
do so. They have cautiously handled foreign policy problems and issues
and generally avoided confrontation.Time magazine, in its issue of September
28, 2009, gave a comprehensive profile of China’s strides of 60 years affirming
unambiguously that China has broadly conducted its external relations within
accepted norms of the United Nations, behaved with considerable responsibility
in handing contentious issues. “Today, the People’s Republic of China is deeply
involved across the globe and is increasingly an upholder of, and contriobuter to,
the existing international order…Today, indeed, the PRC may be the greatest
advocate of the UN among the major powers.”
The Indian Government showed a far greater sense of responsibility
about maintaining cordial relations with China than corporate media
represented by corporate media.The reports of Chinese ‘incursions’ were
firmly denied by the prime minister, the foreign minister and the national
security adviser acting almost in concert. And the intervention worked
immediately. The reports stopped coming in. Those few ‘experts’who relished
finding their names in the hallowed columns of a couple of corporate
dailies vanished.
There are people and interests in India, as in other countries, that
are disturbed, even alarmed, by China’s roll-in. The Obama administration
that got the many millions of Dollars as a loan from China to stem the
most critical crises in global capitalism since the Depression of the 1930s,
have reasons to nurse and strengthen the current tension-free relationship
between the U.S. and China. Mr Obama’s coming visit to Beijing may well
turn out to be a major event in international diplomacy. However, the Obama
presidency does not occupy even the larger than half of the American political
space. Apart from a belligerent Republican Party that has determined to
take on the Obama administration, there are deeply entrenched Amrican
domestic and international interests that are unreconciled to China’s rise-and-
rise. These interests have woven together global arteries of influencing
empathic interests across the planet. These arteries are active in numerous
countries including India.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Japan and Australia receive as much
Attention of makers of China’s foreign policy as does India. Japan’s new
Prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan
(DPJ) has a solid majority in the lower house of parliament with the
support of two small parties, one of which used to wear the name of
Socialist Party, is expected to lighten the very heavy burden of America’s
Alliance hugs, is expected to invest significantly more in coddling China
than did the Liberal Democratic Party in over 50 years of governing
the world’s second largest economic power. The Chinese government
claimed after president Hu Jintai’s much publicized visit to Japan
earlier this year that for the first time Sino-Japanese relations were
given a greater balance and a stronger template. As the Indian government
weighs carefully the changing dynamics of US-China relations, so do
the government in Beijing as well as the leadership of the Chinese Communist
Party the dynamics of India’s relations with the United States.
India-China relations have to be seen in the larger context of global
change in this century. The bilateral focus is too narrow and is smitten
by fogs of short-sighted patriotism and power chauvinism in both countries.
Even the China-U.S.-India focus is not untarnished by chauvinistic slips of
objectivity and farsight.
The territorial imperative is the most volatile element in relations
between great neighbours. The Chinese made major concessions to
resolve the border disputes with Russia The 15 rounds of talks that have
taken place between India and China have lifted a lot of myths about the
border regions and clarified perspectives. Perhaps the time has come to
draft and sign accords covering most of the border and thus isolating the
few areas in dispute in the western as well as eastern sectors. The sight of
a border treaty will help both governments to focus exclusively on the
points of dispute. It will also be very helpful to show the people of
both countries as well as others how much of trade goes on between Indians
and Tibetans all along the long and rugged borderland extending from the
Korakoram ranges in the west to the Himalayan slopes in the east.
At the same time, both India and China must do more to activate
the BRIC forum where the two are joined by Russia and Brazil. There is ashyness
in both countries to give BRIC a high transcontinental profile. Representatives
of the four powers will hold their meeting next month in Bangalore rather
than New Delhi for reasons not explained to watchers of this momentous
inter-regional group. The Indian media too happens to be shy of the BRIC
profile. Yet BRIC’s silent footprints will speak far more eloquently about
the global shift of power in this century. SININDIA is at this point of time
not a strong soundbyte of global change in the process of time.