Routledge Contemporary Asia Series. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. xii, 227 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$54.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8153-6825-0.
Three politically sophisticated editors from the University of Singapore have produced an important study of the relations of China and India. They sought able researchers from the two countries to address new challenges in economics, environment, energy, and water. The authors were invited to propose policy solutions to make cooperation more likely and conflict less likely.
The eleven well-informed authors do an excellent job of exploring the issue areas. Their major finding is that the sources of India-China tensions and mistrust are so powerful that even were they implemented, the book’s policy proposals could not produce cooperation. Zha Daojiong’s stunning study of energy, in chapter 7, concludes that politics and leadership in China are so constituted that it would be unwise to expect a near term turn to cooperation. The editors conclude that, given the clashes over river waters from the Himalayas, cooperation “seems out of reach” (212). Arunabha Ghost notes that “The intersection between maritime and energy security is a potentially serious source of friction” (151).
Politics within China makes the genuine partnership sought by the Indian authors virtually impossible. Studying Chinese politics, however, is not the book’s purpose. Therefore, the writers do not deeply probe the political forces that prevent cooperation. For example, instead of asking why did Mao’s China invade India, the editors passively note that “China and India unwisely fought a war in 1962” (11).
The editors claim that China and India mistrust each other because each makes the other feel insecure. Actually, China is condescending to India and, as the essays show, a threat to India. Hu Shisheng notes that to the Indian government, the trade imbalance is “a national threat” (86).
Yet the Indian authors are enthusiastic about partnership. They tend to seek a less market-oriented Third World of “greater South-South cooperation around an India-China axis” (123). Arunabdha Ghosh hopes India and China “form an unbeatable alliance to address energy security issues” (154).
The Chinese are not interested in such a partnership. Zhao Gancheng notes that China’s GDP is almost four times that of India’s. In the world economy, the two states do not share “common ground” (40). As with the BRICS New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, the PRC’s notion of cooperation is that India has a subordinate role and China leads. The two imagine cooperation very differently.
In the quest for cooperation, the Indians are self-critical in ways the Chinese are not. Prem Shankar Jha even dismisses the Indian government’s concerns (shared by Japan, Germany, and the USA, among others) over unfair Chinese trade practices which create huge imbalances. Indian firms seeking markets in China “find themselves hampered by duty structures, non-tariff barriers, quotas, local production requirements, closed vender loops and restricted Government buying” (65). Jha, however, suggests that it is India that must change. “India needs to accept that Chinese investors need … to import the bulk of their labor force from China” (31–32). Instead, India has opted to have Japan, not China, build a high-speed rail system.
On the Chinese side, Zhao argues that it is supposed Indian non-competitiveness in pharmaceuticals, actually a globally competitive Indian sector, that keeps Indian goods out of the Chinese market (47), a conclusion not shared by Hu Shisheng (82). Yet, Hu argues that, with the exception of China’s highly protected tobacco sector, India has only itself to blame for the trade deficit.
Baru accurately describes the issue. While India, wanting to strengthen “the voice of the developing world,” welcomed China into the World Trade Organization, the Chinese state’s neo-mercantilist privileging of industrial exports “posed a threat to other developing country exporters” (55). Some analysts in both Africa and Latin America describe the PRC’s de-industrializing of the global south (except for transfers of low-end industry, as to Ethiopia) as neocolonial, Pan Jiahua notes, meaning, Pan writes, China “wins at the expense of the other” (100). One major cause of the recent rise of the global south is a financial globalization which makes cheap capital abundantly available to the global south.
This book establishes that economics, energy, and water provide no basis for important cooperation. But surely both countries would cooperate against deadly pollution and on other environmental matters. Yet, on the environment too, both Chinese and Indian authors agree that the forces of rivalry, competition, and conflict are basic (95, 112). Ghosh concludes that cooperation is merely rhetorical. Competition is the true reality (158), a conclusion shared by Uttam Kumar Sinha in an exploration of disputes over river waters (chapter 9).
Nevertheless, the editors may have been far-sighted in seeking policy suggestions to promote cooperation. Surely, it is not wrong to try to weaken the forces of dispute and war. Politics remains a contingent arena. It is mutable. Political interests and leaders can change. There may yet come a time when the policy suggestions for cooperation of this major study become applicable. I surely hope so.
But, for now, as this work persuasively depicts, Chinese political ambitions preclude partnership with India. In fear of Chinese threats, the Asian nation that India prefers to cooperate with is not China but Japan. India and Japan are even planning a joint mission to the moon.
Edward Friedman
University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA