Indo-China Relations: Power Play or Power Dilemma?
by Rajiv Ranjan
CHINA-INDIA BRIEF #102 27 Sep 2017 - 10 Oct 2017
Centre on Asia and GlobalisationLee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
India and China, two of the world’s oldest civilisations and simultaneous rising powers, are engaged in a geopolitical power-play. Competition between the two, however, is not inevitable and as past experience has shown, constructive engagement can bring great benefits to both sides. Both countries cooperated successfully, along with other members of the BRICS, to establish the New Development Bank. The India-China climate alliance was another example of bilateral cooperation for a mutually beneficial cause. Besides high-level engagements, people-to-people exchanges are also increasing with greater numbers of people from both sides visiting, working, and studying in the other’s country. Today, globalisation has brought the two neighbours closer together than at any other point in history. Yet, it has also made their relationship far more entangled and complex.
Both India and China are undergoing a process of power accumulation with the ultimate aim of re-establishing themselves as great powers within the international system. As contiguous neighbours, they will need each other’s help to fulfil their ambitions. However, their relationship continues to be marked by distrust. Many in India and China perceive their relationship as a zero-sum game, whereby strategic policies which serve the national interests of one are seen to be detrimental to the other.
We can analyse the power accumulation process in China and India by focusing on three aspects of power - political, economic, and military.
Political power largely comes from membership in powerful international organisations and groupings, such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), Group of 7 (G7), and voting rights in economic institutions including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and strategic alliances. Permanent membership in the UNSC has also vested China with veto power. The Asian superpower has been economical in using this right, exercising it only11 timessince joining the UNSC in 1971. Yet, closer inspection of China’s behaviour reveals a more recent and disturbing trend – out of these 11 vetos, 10 were cast in the last twenty years between 1997 and 2017. This increasing willingness to exploit its political power to maximise its interests would undoubtedly make New Delhi more apprehensive of Beijing.
In 2016,India’s GDPwas $2.264 trillion, a fraction of China’s, which stood at$11.199 trillion. Additionally, in 2016, China was rated as theworld’s largest economyin terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) by both the IMF and World Bank. There is also a clear disparity in terms of defence spending as China allocated $151.43 billion in 2017 towards defence, compared to India’s allocation which was roughly one third of that at $53.5 billion. A comparison of their overallmilitary strengthshows that India would require substantial financial investment, technological upgrading, and administrative overhauling to catch up with China.
While China currently surpasses India in all three aspects of power, it is undeniable that the latter has made significant strides in these same areas. Over the last few years, India has strengthened its strategic partnership with other major powers, most significantlywith the US, undergonecontinued and sustained economic growth,and made advancements in military technology, including nuclear strike capabilities. These developments, among others, are seen by both policy-makers and academics in Beijing as New Delhi’s growing clout in international politics and more importantly, as a balance to China. Similarly, most strategic analysts in New Delhi view China’s rise and its growing influence in South Asia, India’s backyard, as detrimental to its own rise. China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has also been seen as an attempt to enlarge Beijing’s sphere of strategic influence and as a detriment to India’s sovereignty.
This relationship between New Delhi and Beijing represents a power dilemma - a situation in which each state seeks more power to respond to what it perceives as the growing power of a rival, which in turn causes the rival to try to increase its power, and so on in an action-reaction pattern. As a result, both might find themselves worse off. When one state is wary of another state gaining political power by acquiring membership in coveted international organisations or by making strategic partnerships with different states across the globe by virtue of its economic and military heft and enlarging its sphere of influence, it could well instigate the other to do the same, fueling the rivalry further. Opposition to India’s membership to the NSG and silence over India’s bid for permanent membership of the UNSC can be interpreted as Beijing’s strategy to deny India greater international power. The power play at Doklam reflected the deepening power dilemma between the two. If their worsening relations are not handled well, the hard-earnedsuccesses of previous governmentscould potentially be undone.
Fortunately, despite the on-going strategic competition and power dilemma, both countries have been keen to avoid misadventures that may destabilise relations, which in turn, may hinder the process of power accumulation. In fact, both New Delhi and Beijing have continuously made efforts to mitigate the misunderstandings that keep occurring in their relations. For instance, India was a founding member of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and more recently, was accepted as a full member of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), something that was only possible with China’s acquiescence.
What is clear is that both India and China need to reformulate their existing engagement policies and strengthen confidence-building measures in order to overcome the existing ‘power dilemma’. By showing greater assertiveness, China is simply giving India incentives to look for balancing partners. Instead, China should seek to earn India’s goodwill, for instance, by supporting the latter’s bid for the UNSC. New Delhi could similarly take a step towards repairing bilateral ties and helping to erase the unhappy memory of Doklam by choosing to participate in the BRI.
Although India has pursued a strategic partnership with the US, it must manage this relationship carefully. History has shown that allies tend to sacrifice their ambitions to be under shadow of the hegemon. Bandwagoning with China could potentially be more beneficial as the US-China engagements from 1972 onwards demonstrate, with Beijing very much the junior partner. Needless to say, any attempts to balance each other constructs a loop that traps both India and China and their ambitions. But that in no way signals that both are destined to fall into the proverbial ‘Thucydides trap’ in Asia.
Rajiv Ranjan is currently an Assistant Professor at College of Liberal Arts, Centre for Global Studies, Shanghai University, Shanghai. He has previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), New Delhi and was a Senior Visiting Scholar at the School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University, Jinan.
