China and India: The Struggle for Mastery in Eurasia.

• Author: Macaes, Bruno
• Position: COMMENTRY - Essay

In June 2017, Chinese troops were spotted on the Doklam plateau, extending a road through a piece of land disputed between China and Bhutan. India perceived this as an unacceptable change to the status quo and crossed its own border--in this case a perfectly settled one--to block those works. The Doklam plateau slopes down to the Siliguri Corridor, a narrow strip of Indian territory dividing the Indian mainland from the North Eastern Region states. If China were able to block off the corridor, this would isolate the North Eastern Region, a devastating scenario in the case of war. Two months later, at the other end of the Himalayan range, perfectly poised on a tiny lake peninsula high in the mountains, Indian and Chinese troops engaged in a cinematic stone-throwing battle, mysteriously captured by a camera placed behind mountain rocks.

The Doklam standoff ended with a choreographed disengagement on August 28. India agreed to withdraw its troops in a designated two-hour period before noon and the Chinese did the same in a similar window that afternoon. The withdrawal was monitored from New Delhi in real time, so that the process of disengagement was completed under verification. By agreeing to discontinue construction works on the road, China seems to have met India more than halfway, but it also used the occasion to state that it would exercise its sovereign rights in the future. More than a resolution of the crisis, the negotiation was meant to avert the risk of an accidental conflict. Troops from both countries remain in the area, but are now separated by a few hundred meters. Indian Army Chief, Bipin Rawat quickly warned, "As far as the Northern adversary is concerned, flexing of muscles has started. Salami slicing, taking over territory in a very gradual manner, testing our limits or threshold is something we have to be wary about. Remain prepared for situations that are emerging gradually into conflict."

India's rejection of a major Chinese geopolitical and geoeconomic project, the Belt and Road, may have triggered the confrontation. One month before the Doklam standoff, China had gathered about thirty national leaders at its first summit devoted to providing guidance for the Belt and Road. The occasion was used to promote the initiative abroad with a blitz of television programs and interviews, comprehensive newspaper coverage, music videos and even bedtime stories for children. For the first time, the Belt and Road was the main story in most international media outlets, and many in Europe and the United States were introduced to the concept for the first time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these initial moments of international fame were also marked by a very public display of the geopolitical difficulties and pitfalls faced by the Belt and Road. European Union countries present at the summit declined to sign a joint statement on trade, uncomfortable with its omission of social and environmental sustainability, as well as imperfect transparency requirements, particularly in the area of public tenders. As for India, it announced just one day before the event that it would not be participating, explaining that in its current form the Belt and Road will create unsustainable burdens of debt, while one of its segments, the economic corridor linking China and Pakistan, goes through the disputed areas of Gilgit and Baltistan in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and therefore ignores Indian core concerns regarding sovereignty and territorial integrity. Journalist Ashok Malik from the Times of India called the boycott the third most significant decision in the history of Indian foreign policy, after the 1971 decision to back the independence of Bangladesh and the 1998 nuclear tests.

The Belt and Road

In two separate speeches in the fall of 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward a bold new development strategy encompassing more than 60 countries across Asia, Europe, and East Africa and totaling investments estimated to be in the trillions of dollars. The initiative has both a land and a sea component, known respectively as the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road. The preferred abbreviation in China for the combined initiative is Belt and Road, while outside the country it is often referred to as the New Silk Road. Unlike the original Silk Road, however, the new project is not predominantly about transportation infrastructure but about economic integration. The initiative does not attempt to unbundle production and consumption--the vision of the original Silk Road--but rather to unbundle different segments of the production chain. It attempts to create a set of political and institutional tools with which China can start to reorganize global value chains and stamp its imprint on the rules governing the global economy.

Transportation and communications networks are no doubt a precondition for the development of global value chains. But the...