BENGALURU: China is our largest neighbour and the country with which we have had prolonged negotiations on a variety of issues since 1950. This book explores how China negotiated with India from the early years after Independence until the present, and what lessons India may draw from this about negotiating with the Chinese. It explores this through six important events in our bilateral relationship, which covers the period from 1949 to 2019.
These are: (1) Recognition by the Government of India of the People’s Republic of China on 30 December 1949; (2) the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India of 29 April 1954; (3) India’s nuclear tests in 1998; (4) China’s formal recognition of Sikkim as a part of India on 11 April 2005; (5) the India-China diplomatic negotiations on the 123 Nuclear Deal in 2008; and (6) the listing of Masood Azhar as a terrorist in the UNSC 1267 Sanctions List on 1 May 2019.
From the Indian perspective such narration might be useful in discerning how China negotiates and also how this might have changed as China accumulates greater power in the international system, as well as the instruments and means that China deploys in the pursuit of its goals. We’ve often heard claims being made about the long historical connection between India and China.
However, relatively little is known about their diplomatic interaction in the pre-modern age, aside from travelogues of monk-scholars from China to India in the first millennium of the Common Era, and sporadic diplomatic expeditions from Indian kingdoms to the Tang and Song imperial courts from the seventh to the twelfth centuries. More recently, the Chinese government has been highlighting the naval expeditions of Zheng He, in the early fifteenth century, to the Indian Ocean, including the Kerala coast, in order to legitimize their growing presence west of the Malacca Strait.
Evidence of an Indian (possibly Tamil) settlement in Quanzhou, in the Fujian province of modern China, also attests to trade links in the mid-second millennium of the Common Era. There is little recorded history of how the two major Indo-Pacific civilizations interacted in political and diplomatic terms. This might be explained by the absence of direct contact across a shared boundary because, despite Chinese claims to suzerainty over Tibet since the thirteenth century (Yuan dynasty), Tibet was mostly left to its own devices. Since China’s business with India was mostly through maritime routes, the opportunity and necessity of political interaction was limited.
(Excerpted with permission from The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India by Vijay Gokhale, Penguin Random House India)