Mischief is integral to Chinese foreign policy. The dragon nation acts with a complete lack of dignity in much of its engagements with its neighbours. Apart from the 1962 war with India, this is evident also in situations like the ‘salami slicing’ of others’ border regions, including India’s. By covert, calculated and minor actions, China ultimately seeks to make a big gain. This would require that nations in the neighbourhood keep a close watch on what the ‘dragon’ is doing in the darkness of the night. China’s latest provocation on India is the renaming of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, an integral part of India in the North-East sector. Despite China’s repeated attempts to usurp territory in Arunachal Pradesh and having been driven away by the brave Indian ground forces, it keeps calling Arunachal Pradesh as ‘South Tibet’ – this, when China’s unlawful ‘occupation’ of Tibet since 1951 is still a matter of serious global concern.
China’s dictator Xi Jinping has been trying several tricks along his nation’s southern border in recent years. The PLA troops he sent in 2017 to grab Doklam — a Bhutanese territory that the red nation first designated as a ‘disputed’ land and where it set itself on construction activity — were confronted and halted by the Indian Army. With prompt alert from the US too, Xi’s game went awry. Then Xi attempted a provocation directly against India in 2021-22, when he sent PLA troops into Galwan Valley to grab Indian land. There too, India managed to drive the Chinese out though both sides suffered unspecified numbers of casualties. The argument that the border regions between India and China are not well-demarcated and hence such skirmishes were natural runs counter to Xi’s proclivities to give pin-pricks to China’s neighbours on a regular basis. He has been doing this with Japan, Taiwan etc and even with the West and principally the United States in the oceans where too ‘usurpation’ is his principal agenda. These, in gross violation of the territorial rules governing the seas. Unscrupulousness too should have its limits, and Xi knows as much – a reason why he is not taking these confrontations to a higher level.
Unfortunately, Xi has not been able to govern China properly even as he employs crude methods to put down dissent also within the Chinese Communist Party. His notorious contribution to the world is, most-remarkably, the Covid19 pandemic that upset life and devastated the economies across nations. Even now, in fresh recurrences, China is battling with the pandemic and related economic problems in major ways. Understandable, as his eyes are set on the neighbours’ backyards.
