Tao Guang Yang Hui And Doklam

After 70 days of unremitting skirmishes between Indian and Chinese armed forces positioned at Doklam, status quo returned to the snow-clad plateau in western Bhutan. On 28 August, the Union ministry of external affairs issued a press statement on the Doklam face-off, saying that India and China had exchanged diplomatic communication and that expeditious disengagement of border personnel was in progress.

Even though the disengagement of troops began on 28 August, there is still no clarity on whether China will stop building a road in an area that Bhutan claims as its own. Indian troops stepped in at the behest of the government of Bhutan to stall Chinese troops from constructing a road close to the trijunction of India, Bhutan and China.

The road would have disrupted the status quo in force since 2012, when China and India concurred that the boundaries with Bhutan and Myanmar would finally be decided on in consultation with these two countries. It would have also given China greater access to India’s strategically vulnerable “chicken’s neck”, a 20 km-wide corridor that links seven northeastern states to the rest of India.

The Indian and Chinese troops have withdrawn amidst apprehensions that China may strike again.  Skirmishes have erupted before on the 3,500 km-long boundary between the two nations. The Doklam standoff demonstrated that the pushing and shoving along the long border was not over. With China, encroaching on foreign soil is not simply about stretching a hand just that wee bit further. It also has to do with its inherent social and political philosophy that permeates down from its leadership to the man on the ground — that it was time for China to reclaim its hegemony in the region.

On 23 August, China told India to desist from a Doklam-like standoff in future. The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, advised New Delhi to draw lessons from the border incident. “We hope the Indian side will learn lessons from this incident and prevent similar incidents from happening again,” Wang said at a press conference.

A statement issued by Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, declared that “To meet the needs of defending the borders, improving the living conditions, China has long engaged in infrastructure development including the road construction.” When asked if China would continue building roads in the area, Hua reiterated that Chinese border troops “will continue to station and patrol the Doklam area. We will continue to exercise our sovereignty with historic conventions.”  So, the Doklam saga has not ended. On the contrary, it is likely to be replayed with more firepower and verbosity.

Tao Guang Yang Hui
The economic reforms in China during the 1980s and till the middle of the first decade of the new century were guided by Deng Xiaoping’s maxim, “watch cautiously, keep a low profile, bide your time, even as you accomplish something”. The reform strategy was idiomatically named ‘Tao Guang Yang Hui’, which translated into English reads, “hide  your brightness, bide your time”.

The implicit strategy is that China should bide its time till it is ready to assert itself in the global sphere, leading to the “striving for achievement” approach. In recent years, the former laid the foundation for China’s peaceful environment and economic success, while the latter represented a shift towards a more proactive foreign policy and a hegemonic desire to reshape the world order.

With a nominal GDP of $11.3 trillion, China is the world’s second largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP) according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  As of 2016, China is the second largest trading nation in the world and plays a prominent role in international trade. In recent years it has increasingly engaged with trade organisations and involved itself in trade treaties. With this might, it is ready to push forward.

With India, China has achieved a massive trade advantage. Chinese companies have a heavy presence in the Indian telecom industry. The Indian pharmaceutical industry imports 60 per cent of its raw material from China. With its sheer dominance over world trade and massive forex reserve, China now cocks a snook at India, which is striving to enhance its stature in the same space.

Ironically, it is in this space that China seeks India’s participation in the way of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s highly ambitious project along the ancient Silk Route. India has so far snubbed the overtures, pressing Beijing instead to address serious sovereignty concerns arising out of its ambitious land and sea connectivity plan.

At a lecture organised by the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies of the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat said that China was attempting to “change the status quo” along its border with India and that incidents like the stand-off at the Doklam area, were likely to “increase” in future.

Sino-Indian relations are already vitiated along the 3,500 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC). After it came into being, the People’s Republic of China renounced all prior foreign agreements as unequal, partial and obsolete, as they had been imposed during its “century of humiliation” and began to demand re-negotiations on all fronts.

The Sino-Indian border is the only major territorial dispute between the two nations, other than the South China Sea. China’s growing assertiveness in its territorial claims span Arunachal Pradesh, part of Sikkim and stretch to the western sector on Aksai Chin, towards the northeastern section of Ladakh district in Jammu and Kashmir.

The relentless development of infrastructure in the area of confrontation, causes great concern to India. These attempts disregard the mechanism and agreement under which China had begun a dialogue. The Doklam confrontation and the precursor incidents at Depsang in 2013 and Chumar in 2014, recognise new realities — like military-technical advances, the emergence of an aggressive new nationalism in both the countries and propaganda fuelled by jingoism and xenophobia.
Peace could prevail with restraint and demilitarisation of the border.  

The author writes on foreign affairs