Hissing Dragon-Squirming Tiger:

Comparisons, Negotiations

and Attitudes continues....

Despite the two countries having fought a war in 1962 on the boundary and related issues (for China it also meant Tibet), negotiations to resolve the boundary disagreement remain frozen in a time-warp. In reality, there has been no substantive forward movement since the stalemate became manifest in April 1960, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai came to Delhi for six days to settle the issue. The five agreements and one protocol signed thereafter, in 1993, 1996, 2005, 2012, and 2013, are merely ‘stand-still’ agreements to prevent war, which neither country wants. China, because it wants to concentrate on development and to handle its own domestic issues, by ‘keeping the South stable’. India, because it fears China, or fears a war with China. The only new elements that have been added or subtracted from the 1960 situation, and which can influence the negotiations somewhat, are the following:

One, that China has already achieved its stated and unstated aims of the 1962 war, and has ‘knocked India to the negotiating

table’.

Two, it no longer perhaps believes that India is actively trying to ‘free Tibet from China’, and thus need not believe that everything India says or does regarding the border has to do with ‘separating Tibet from China’.

Three, India is not going to try another ‘Forward Policy’, or 'nibbling policy (canshi zhence)’ as the Chinese had termed it.

As we have seen in earlier chapters, the border negotiations are conceptually captive to both the question of Tibet (for only if Tibet was historically a part of China, and not only de facto from 1950, does the question of a ‘historical’ Sino-Indian border arise), and to perceptual problems regarding the common boundary. They are also captive to the Chinese issues of national superiority and of ‘face’.

But just as the Sino-Indian border problem is beset by perceptual problems, so too are the negotiations themselves hostage to yet another set of perceptual problems.

To be continued....