CCG President writes in South China Morning Post: to build on their new-found consensus, both powers must not only set shared goals but also wisely manage challenges
That India is supposed to be “claiming” Tibet or Xinjiang is fantasy. Delhi recognized Tibet as Chinese in 1954 and has never laid claim to Xinjiang. To assert otherwise is to advertise ignorance with confidence, a spectacle more depressing than the error itself.
The relevant precedent is Sino-Russian: decades of ideological enmity, border disputes far deeper than anything between Delhi and Beijing, yet set aside for the foreseeable future. The India–China conflict is narrower, but Tibet cements the asymmetry. Beijing controls Himalayan headwaters and high-altitude radar; combined with satellite guidance advantages, this produces an imbalance built into the map that can’t be overcome or negotiated away. India’s only option is to ensure China never exercises that advantage, by aligning interests much as Russia has done.
Modi’s business constituency has pressed for a thaw for years, driven by the prospect of profit. Unlike other elite enthusiasms, however, this one carries wider consequences: large-scale employment, urbanisation, even poverty relief all require Chinese inputs at industrial scale. No other economy has either the capacity or the experience.
Beijing is no naval threat in the Indian Ocean: it has neither the incentive nor the resources, its priority lying instead in securing food flows from South America across the Pacific, via corridors from Peru to Brazil. If it ever tried, it would face a United States without the economic capacity to sustain dominance there. That Delhi should chase an American alliance on this basis is baffling.
Even Silicon Valley and Wall Street’s Indian-American grandees, once boosters of the U.S. connection, have largely drifted off, absorbed in asset hoards and Ivy League admissions for their offspring.
With the high-capitalist segment of the diaspora gone from the scene, what sustains the U.S.–India connection is vanity. India’s foreign-policy cadre, backed by its American fixers—second-rate academics and journalists who built careers repeating Washington’s catechism—will work to obstruct any rapprochement with China. What remains is a policy in the hands of a narrow, insecure elite, craving a prestige that is invisible abroad and useless at home.
That India is supposed to be “claiming” Tibet or Xinjiang is fantasy. Delhi recognized Tibet as Chinese in 1954 and has never laid claim to Xinjiang. To assert otherwise is to advertise ignorance with confidence, a spectacle more depressing than the error itself.
The relevant precedent is Sino-Russian: decades of ideological enmity, border disputes far deeper than anything between Delhi and Beijing, yet set aside for the foreseeable future. The India–China conflict is narrower, but Tibet cements the asymmetry. Beijing controls Himalayan headwaters and high-altitude radar; combined with satellite guidance advantages, this produces an imbalance built into the map that can’t be overcome or negotiated away. India’s only option is to ensure China never exercises that advantage, by aligning interests much as Russia has done.
Modi’s business constituency has pressed for a thaw for years, driven by the prospect of profit. Unlike other elite enthusiasms, however, this one carries wider consequences: large-scale employment, urbanisation, even poverty relief all require Chinese inputs at industrial scale. No other economy has either the capacity or the experience.
Beijing is no naval threat in the Indian Ocean: it has neither the incentive nor the resources, its priority lying instead in securing food flows from South America across the Pacific, via corridors from Peru to Brazil. If it ever tried, it would face a United States without the economic capacity to sustain dominance there. That Delhi should chase an American alliance on this basis is baffling.
Even Silicon Valley and Wall Street’s Indian-American grandees, once boosters of the U.S. connection, have largely drifted off, absorbed in asset hoards and Ivy League admissions for their offspring.
With the high-capitalist segment of the diaspora gone from the scene, what sustains the U.S.–India connection is vanity. India’s foreign-policy cadre, backed by its American fixers—second-rate academics and journalists who built careers repeating Washington’s catechism—will work to obstruct any rapprochement with China. What remains is a policy in the hands of a narrow, insecure elite, craving a prestige that is invisible abroad and useless at home.
China-India disputes are deep routed cannot be resolved over night.
Indian claim over Tibet, and part of Xinjiang, China cannot
compromise over its territorial integrity, there will be never normalization of relations .