Brothers in arms
China's propping up of Pakistan is to ensure that India continues to remain challenged - and preoccupied - in its own neighbourhood, rather than emerge as a regional counterweight to China.
Chun chi xiang yi", or "as close as lips and teeth", was how Mao Zedong once described China's close relationship with North Korea. For decades, the North was China's only ally, but in Beijing today, there is a new epithet that is currently flavour of the moment for China's mandarins: "Batie", or "iron brother Pakistan".
In recent months, India has been alarmed by the extent to which China has once again begun deferring to Pakistan's interests on key bilateral issues, potentially reversing a two-decade trend that saw Beijing attempt to strike a balance between its historical ties with Islamabad on the one hand, and a sensitive but growing relationship with Delhi on the other.
With India-Pakistan tensions running high after the Uri attacks and India mounting a robust multi-pronged response by carrying out surgical strikes across the Line of Control and isolating Pakistan diplomatically, the extent of China's embrace of India's troublesome neighbour may determine whether India's efforts succeed or fail.
Indeed, the Pakistan factor is looming large as Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Goa on October 15, 2016 at the BRICS Summit, where both sides are confronting a starkly different meeting from Xi's last visit to India in September 2014, when the PM hosted him warmly in Gujarat.
Modi's Xi challenge
The prime minister is likely to forcefully convey to Xi India's displeasure with China's moves to prevent the sanctioning of Pakistani terrorist Masood Azhar at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 1267 Sanctions Committee. On September 30, Beijing extended a technical hold it had placed in March to block the bid, despite the fact that the committee had already proscribed Azhar's organisation, the Jaish-e-Mohammad. Beijing now has until the end of the year to decide whether to approve or effectively veto the bid; the latter outcome appears likelier.
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Also high on Modi's list of concerns is China's continued stonewalling of India's bid to enter the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). While Beijing's opposition was not entirely unexpected at the group's plenary session in Seoul in June, what was a surprise was its move to openly push for Pakistan's entry along with that of India. This was a clear indication, one official said, of a new "re-hyphenation" in its approach to both countries. In fact, Beijing made this plainly evident when it sent its nuclear negotiators to Islamabad on September 23, barely 10 days after they had visited Delhi for talks on the NSG.
Terror Politics
China's repeated support to a globally recognised terrorist has certainly been a reality check for the Modi government, which had harboured ambitions of rebooting ties with China, particularly after the prime minister's landmark May 2015 visit when Xi broke with protocol to host him in his home province of Shaanxi.
As much as India can tolerate-and to some extent understand-China's economic and strategic support to its old 'all-weather' ally, the open backing to Azhar-that too in the aftermath of terror attacks on India-has been particularly galling. While Beijing has stalled India in international forums in the past, it backed moves to list leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba after the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
What is different on this occasion is that Beijing's support appears to go even farther, with officials even publicly suggesting that India was to blame for trying to score political points with the ban-not the state accused of harbouring terrorists.
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After blocking India's move to ban Masood Azhar, China now wants action against global terrorists"There should be no double standards on terrorism," said China's Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong on October 10. The veteran diplomat, a former representative to the United Nations, is an expert on the workings of the sanctions committee. "Nor should one pursue its own political gains in the name of counterterrorism," he added pointedly.
China's backing is not only excusing Pakistani inaction but also damaging a core India concern, says Ashok Kantha, India's ambassador to China until January 2016, and now a Distinguished Fellow at the Vivekananda International Foundation. "China's diplomatic protection," he says, "is encouraging Pakistan to adopt a more irresponsible attitude, including on issues of direct interest to us such as terrorism." Beijing, however, sees it differently. If it sees Pakistan coming under "undue pressure", they will "have Pakistan's back", says Andrew Small, a China-Pakistan expert at the German Marshall Fund.
Uneasy relations
The recent incidents have strained the already complex India-China relationship, which has always required a delicate balance of cooperation and competition. Both sides have managed to keep the boundary dispute largely under control, stepping up engagement across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) which hasn't seen a single shot fired in more than two decades. In fact, they are even moving to broaden engagement along the contested border. Earlier this year, both militaries for the first time held relief drills in the sensitive region of eastern Ladakh along the LAC. In mid-November, Pune will host a sixth edition of counterterrorism exercises between the armies.
Notwithstanding calls on India's social media to boycott cheap Chinese goods, trade and investment are growing, and Prime Minister Modi is aggressively courting Chinese investment in railways, manufacturing and smart cities. Officials point out that investment from China this year alone was double paltry $400 million India received from the country in the past decade.
But what is evident is that the re-emergence of Pakistan as a major factor poses new challenges for a sensitive relationship. "We know China and Pakistan have a long-standing strategic investment, but what one can say with a degree of confidence is that their strategic relations are certainly not getting eroded; if anything, they are getting stronger," says Kantha, the former ambassador. "For China," he adds, "the relationship with Pakistan is clearly important, and some now describe Pakistan as China's only ally."
Higher than the Himalayas
For much of the past two decades, the lofty rhetoric China and Pakistan often used to describe their relations as "higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the oceans, and sweeter than honey" was not often reflected in reality. This was, after all, a relationship forged in the heights of the Karakoram Highway in the 1960s-when the two countries battled a common enemy, India-and one that has historically had immense strategic value, with China offering Pakistan missiles and aircraft, and illicitly helping its nuclear programme.
As China's economy lifted off in the 1990s, caution and self-interest, rather than romanticism, began dictating its approach to a neighbour whose periodic descents into chaos were viewed warily across the Khunjerab Pass. This was all the more evident after the normalisation of ties with India following Rajiv Gandhi's 1988 visit, when Beijing understood it needed to improve relations with its biggest neighbour to the west-and that to do so, it had to be seen to effect what one official described as "a better balance" with India and Pakistan.
But insiders in Beijing believe this two-decade 'tactical shift' may now be at a crucial inflection point, with China once again tilting back towards its old 'all-weather ally'. Signs of this change in China's approach, officials say, date back to around 2009, a time when the United States, which had emerged as Pakistan's principal military and financial donor, began winding down its presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan was seen by Washington as a needed ally in its 'war on terror', but as the US started to move out, China began to rapidly scale up its engagement.
The CPEC factor
China's stakes in Pakistan were dramatically raised soon after Xi's new government took over in 2013. That same year, Xi told the Communist Party's central committee that 'peripheral diplomacy' would be his focus, starting with a plan to revive the old Silk Road through a land 'belt' to Central Asia and a 'maritime silk road' to the Indian Ocean. Xi decided Pakistan would be the fulcrum of the plan, named the 'Belt and Road', with the land and sea arms converging on the unlikely location of Gwadar, a dusty port in Balochistan that had come under Chinese management after the Singaporeans withdrew, citing huge losses.
Beijing will in the next decade complete what it calls the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), linking Kashgar, in China's western Xinjiang province, to Gwadar, comprising $35 billion worth of energy deals and infrastructure projects costing $11 billion. The idea is to correct the imbalance in China's ties with Pakistan, says Han Hua, a leading South Asia strategic expert at Peking University. "We have largely only had a military relationship, but now we are adding a whole new component," she says. So for the first time, China will be shipping in tens of thousands of engineers, workers and personnel into Pakistan, as well as pouring in billions of dollars. For better or for worse, Beijing is now deeply invested in the country's success.
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Why China needs Pakistan
China sees CPEC as serving two purposes: shoring up the teetering economy of its close ally which will also ensure a stable western periphery for China, and providing an outlet for its enterprises, struggling with overcapacity at home, to move projects overseas en masse. For China's planners, the project also has strategic value in securing access to the Arabian Sea for energy imports, alleviating their 'Malacca Dilemma'-long persisting fears that a rival power could block the narrow Malacca Straits and hold the Chinese economy hostage.
Chinese officials are at pains to point out that CPEC isn't just empty talk. According to Zhao Lijian, who is overseeing the programme in Islamabad as the Deputy Chief of Mission in the Chinese embassy, $14 billion has already been invested in 30 'early harvest' projects, of which 16 are under construction. These are mostly energy projects aimed at reducing Pakistan's soaring energy deficit, including a coal power plant in Sahiwal that will go online in June, a dam in Karot, the Sukkur-Multan section of the Karachi-Lahore expressway, and the second phase of the Karakoram Highway from Thakot to Havelian in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Beijing is also moving forward to create new global financial institutions to underpin the Belt and Road and CPEC, setting up a $40 billion Silk Road Fund and the $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which China is the biggest shareholder, contributing around one-third. India is the second, having committed an $8 billion stake with an eye on ensuring that it-and other countries-have a voice in how this new rival to the Asian Development Bank will be run. Tellingly, one of the AIIB's first projects was a $300 million motorway in Pakistan, part of CPEC.
Chinese officials say CPEC will ultimately benefit not only Pakistan but India and the region, as it is helping stabilise Pakistan. China's primary interest, they insist, is stability in the neighbourhood, a prerequisite for its investments to succeed. "So this will ultimately also benefit India as well," says a foreign ministry official.
The military dimension
Not everyone in India might agree with that assessment. After all, the larger reason for China going all-out to boost Pakistan is what Chinese strategists describe as "seeking a favourable balance" in South Asia. In other words, China's propping up of Pakistan is to ensure that India continues to remain challenged-and preoccupied-in its own neighbourhood, rather than emerge as a regional counterweight to China.
Beijing has been doing so on the military front for decades. China's Communist Party and People's Liberation Army (PLA) leadership have deep historical and institutional ties with the Pakistani military, which many in Beijing see as having played a key role in ensuring ties remained close, despite periodic domestic upheavals in Pakistan.
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As Pakistan's military ties with the US grew rapidly during the 'war on terror', Beijing's often outdated arms exports became less valuable. But with the US now scaling back and even reviewing crucial exports such as F-16 fighter jets, China's support has become crucial. And Beijing appears more than willing to fill the gap. The two countries are jointly producing JF-17 Thunder light fighter aircraft, while talks for an export variant of China's new fifth-generation stealth fighter are ongoing. In August, both countries moved towards clinching China's biggest ever military deal-the $5 billion sale of eight attack submarines likely to be deployed in the Arabian Sea.
Even CPEC has clear military dimensions, which explains the Pakistani military's increasingly prominent role in its development. Its army has raised a special security division of 15,000 troops to guard projects, while Army Chief General Raheel Sharif has made several visits to Beijing to personally guarantee the safety of Chinese personnel. Privately, many Chinese officials see the military as a more favourable interlocutor in pushing CPEC, rather than a weak civilian government.
One of CPEC's most important projects is the upgradation of infrastructure in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, starting with the Karakoram Highway. In the event of a conflict between India and Pakistan, this link will allow China to rapidly transport materials and assistance, even if it is unlikely to involve its own troops directly. Officials believe it is only a matter of time before the PLA has boots on the ground in PoK, ostensibly to protect Chinese personnel. This year, China and Pakistan have for the first time begun joint patrols in areas bordering PoK and Xinjiang.
The New Axis?
For Pakistan, China is the best bet to fill the void left by declining American economic and military support. While China is unlikely to "backfill US financial support like-for-like", says Small of the German Marshall Fund, "the commitments of loans, investments and even some grants will still be there on a significant scale". "There is a far greater premium being placed," he adds, "on ensuring that Pakistan isn't economically weakened."
Pakistan, however, isn't turning only to China. In 2014, Russia ended a self-imposed embargo on the sales of arms to Pakistan. Last year, it sold Pakistan four Mi-35 helicopter gunships. The sale raised eyebrows in New Delhi because it marked a departure from earlier indirect military sales-Russia has previously sold the RD-93 jet engines for the JF-17s. The recent first-ever Russia-Pakistan military-to-military exercises were held in September, over which New Delhi lodged a strong protest with Moscow.
"Russia should step away from progressing its defence ties with Pakistan, a state long active in abetting, financing, sponsoring and exporting terrorism," says Ajai Malhotra, former ambassador to Russia. "Russia has always been attentive to our sensitivities about weapon deliveries to Pakistan and we must emphatically convey our concerns to President Putin at the forthcoming bilateral summit in Goa."
The thaw in Russia-Pakistan ties coincides with a significant realignment of Russian and Chinese interests. China has in recent years supported Russia's position on a range of issues from Syria to Afghanistan. China remains one of the largest buyers of Russian military hardware; since 1992, it has bought billions of dollars worth of combat jets, warships and submarines. Russia and China have recently held military manoeuvres in the South China Sea.
These shifts coincide with an increasing closeness between India and the US which manifested itself in a strategic partnership and the August 31 inking of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) pact between the two militaries. There is dismay in Moscow over the growing military relationship between Washington and New Delhi. US sales of $4.4 billion worth of aircraft and helicopters to India over the past three years were second to Russia's $5 billion sales to New Delhi in the same period.
Is a Russia-Pakistan-China axis a distinct possibility? Petr Topychkanov, an associate at the Carnegie Moscow Centre's Nonproliferation Programme, calls it a short- and medium-term development. "There is an absence of long-term strategic interest of Russia for any kind of axis with such unpredictable and risky players, such as China and Pakistan," he says. China's developing conventional and nuclear capabilities could be a serious concern for the Russian armed forces. Pakistan simultaneously plays friendships with the US, Saudi Arabia, China, and now Russia. "Russia's long-term interests," he says, "don't necessarily coincide with interests of other friends of Pakistan."
The Pakistan Dilemma
Recent history has shown that Beijing has itself had clear limits on how far it will go to push Pakistani interests. This is, after all, not the 1960s or '70s; in an increasingly multipolar, post-Cold War world, there are no blocs or permanent alliances but shifting relationships based on self-interest.
The fact is that China's overriding strategic concern is not India. It is more preoccupied with the growing challenge posed by the US and its partners on its periphery. Beijing's "biggest fear is India becoming a Japan or South Korea", says one Party academic candidly, suggesting it would not be careless enough to push India into that position.
China is hence facing what some insiders describe as a "Pakistan dilemma", as it weighs its ambition to build a regional counterweight to India against its fears of an India-US alliance. The former agenda is especially pushed by its military and security agencies which view India unambiguously as a clear threat.
This explains China's schizophrenic approach to India. Beijing is keen to develop investment and trade ties and is pushing companies to invest in India as they deal with a slowdown at home. It is courting India's support on issues such as reforming global financial institutions and trade talks where they have common ground.
But on security matters, including terrorism, Beijing appears to be deferring to the interests of its security agencies, which see Pakistan as key to ensuring stability not only in the western Xinjiang region, where Beijing is dealing with a jehadist threat, but also in Afghanistan. This explains why Beijing is often prepared to tolerate Pakistan's fostering of anti-India terrorists. Beijing's rationale is that as long as Islamabad demonstrates willingness to crack down on groups that target China such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement-which in China's view it has done-it has no reason to complain.
This is despite the fact that there certainly are concerns in Beijing about the security situation in Pakistan. Even China has been pressing Pakistan to change course and has started questioning the logic of its repeated backing of Masood Azhar, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry was quoted as telling top officials in an internal meeting, according to an October 6 report in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper.
Beijing's careful response to the Uri attacks and the Indian surgical strikes underlines this dilemma. Its approach seemed to be aimed at giving neither India nor Pakistan satisfaction. While Beijing condemned the Uri attacks, it didn't do so unequivocally, also calling on both India and Pakistan to ensure stability. But when Pakistan sent two special envoys on Kashmir to Beijing, they only managed to get an audience with a junior foreign minister, and Beijing did not issue a statement in support of Pakistan's stand. Even at the UNSC, China has rebuffed repeated Pakistani attempts to bring up Kashmir, repeating its stand that it was an issue for India and Pakistan to resolve.
Balancing act
China's new embrace of Pakistan-and its raised stakes in that country-have complicated this balancing act in recent weeks. Beijing has appeared unusually unnerved by India's more robust-than-expected response to Uri and by the surgical strikes as well as by Modi's invoking of Balochistan.
In the recent past, India's ties with China have been largely insulated from its troubles with Pakistan. This was evident during the Kargil war when Beijing largely stayed away, and also in the wake of the Mumbai attacks of 2008 when China, as its officials often like to remind Indian interlocutors, quietly sent envoys to Delhi and Islamabad to calm tensions, and later supported moves at the UNSC to sanction LeT leader Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and its affiliate organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
Yet the recent tensions with Pakistan have been viewed somewhat differently, and Prime Minister Modi's remarks on the situation in Balochistan alarmed Beijing even if they were, in reality, not very different from China's unexpected statement in July expressing "concern" over protests in Jammu & Kashmir.
One reason is because the post-CPEC embrace of Pakistan is effectively pushing both countries in a direction where they "will become mutual stakeholders of each other", says Hu Shisheng, a strategic expert at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, an influential state security-affiliated think-tank. "This means any disturbance in Pakistan," he says in a clear message to India, "will get Chinese interests disturbed." It is hence unavoidable, says Hu, that Pakistan will become "a bigger factor" in India-China relations.
Hu probably reflects the popular sentiment in Beijing when he says that "if Modi's government starts to view Pakistan as an enemy and makes disturbances within Pakistan, or even starts a proxy war within Pakistan and disrupts CPEC, not only relations between Pakistan and India, but [also between] China and India will become very problematic". In Hu's view, "China's Pakistan policy is becoming more and more proactive and aggressive in a constructive way, while India's Pakistan policy is becoming more and more proactive and aggressive in a destructive way." "So under such circumstances," he warns, "this is a really big concern."
Options before India
The irony is that China's policymakers are aware that in many respects, its long-term goals in the region align more closely with India's than Pakistan's. In Kashmir, China wants to see a resolution of the dispute and stability that would allow its projects to continue unimpeded. In China's view, as is often forgotten, the resolution of Kashmir is in some sense a prerequisite for a final resolution of the boundary question with India. Beijing hasn't been prepared to discuss the status of the PoK-China border in the western sector as part of the boundary talks with India-or even negotiate pending a resolution of Kashmir-because of Pakistani sensitivities.
Even in Afghanistan, China, like India, is wary of the Taliban's growing influence and wants a stable environment to push infrastructure and development projects. Beijing has also reached out to Delhi to work on joint projects, which may present an opportunity for both countries to build, step by step, much-needed trust in the neighbourhood. It isn't lost on Beijing that Pakistan's interests, in both regions, lie not in ensuring stability but in fomenting trouble.
"The problems between India and Pakistan are not a Chinese problem," says Long Xingchun, director of the Centre for India Studies at China West Normal University. "China really welcomes the improvement of India-Pakistan relations and for them to solve their problems. China hopes to deepen economic ties both with Pakistan and India. CPEC is not just a project for China and Pakistan, but in the future may be extended to India, Iran and Afghanistan and benefit the region if related countries could settle their disputes and differences. China doesn't have a vicious intention towards India through CPEC."
For China, the pull of India's market is another increasingly prominent factor in its calculus, emerging as potential leverage for Delhi and a further complication in its Pakistan dilemma. Beijing is more than aware that India's market is the biggest in its western periphery. China's e-commerce and real estate billionaires like Jack Ma and Wang Jianlin are making thrice-a-year trips to India, not Pakistan. As much as both countries insist that economic ties may run on a parallel track, increasingly adverse public opinion in India, evinced in recent viral social media calls to boycott Chinese goods that even helpfully showed consumers how to identify 'Made in China' barcodes, underline this may not always be the case.
This presents a challenge for both countries, says former ambassador Kantha, to manage an increasingly complex relationship. The problem is, this task has become all the more difficult with the reintroduction of Pakistan as a prominent factor. "China also has a desire to strike a balance," says Kantha. "India is not expecting China to downgrade relations with Pakistan as a prerequisite for enhancing relations. But what we really expect is that when we look at aspects of China's engagement with Pakistan that have a negative implication for us, they must understand our concerns." "The narrative about India-China relations," he adds, "is getting a little vitiated. This isn't desirable for either country." Changing this narrative, for Modi and Xi, will perhaps be the most pressing task when they meet in Goa.