Hissing Dragon-Squirming Tiger:

Comparisons, Negotiations

and Attitudes continues...

One of the two ancient broad alternate Chinese methods of ensuring

the stability and development of the state, as given in their ancient

teachings of statecraft, the ‘Ba’ system, is a classic hegemonistic system.

It advocates China’s controlling all the ‘barbarian’ countries on her

periphery. How to do this is also prescribed in the ancient Chinese

strategic and military classics: ‘Use barbarians to fight barbarians’ has

always been advocated as one of the favoured ways of maintaining

control over the peripheral regions. Pakistan’s approach to China in the

aftermath of India’s 1962 war provided them with just this opportunity.

This is in spite of Chairman Mao’s belief that Pakistanis were just

Indians who were only temporarily separated, as he is reported to have

remarked in 1968 while receiving the visiting Pakistani Foreign Minister. But, as earlier explained in Chapter Six, if Pandit Nehru had accepted Ayub Khan’s ‘joint defence’ proposal, then this may never have come about, even though it is a reality today.

JAPAN AND THE SUGGESTED USA-JAPAN-AUSTRALIA-INDIA

QUADRIPARTITE RELATIONSHIP



After the USA, Japan and India are seen by Chinese strategic analysts to be

the likely threats to China. Japan, for China, is a serious and dangerous contender for power in East Asia. This is more so because Japan’s maritime

self-defence interests collide with China’s intention to create a capable

‘blue-water’ navy in the near future. Having seen China’s CNP

projections, it is easy to see why any cooperation between Japan and India,

and even more so any Japan-India-third country cooperation is seen as a

potentially threatening combination aimed at ‘containing China’. For

example, using Chinese CNP scores, it can be seen that a hypothetical

Japan-India-Russia collaboration would outweigh China on CNP, and

thus ‘contain’ China from the east, south-west, and north. Similarly, a

Japan-USA-India maritime collaboration could theoretically contain

China from the southern and eastern seas, and the combined CNP would

be formidable. The immediate and strongly negative Chinese reaction to

the once-proposed quadrilateral Japan-USA-Australia-India maritime

cooperation is explained by this concern.

To be continued....