A clash on the India China border, marathon military talks, and rewriting the Wuhan story
Welcome to today's The India China Newsletter.
It's been a very busy Monday on the India China front (pun intended) so please excuse typos in this somewhat hastily put-together newsletter.
Yesterday, the 9th round of military-level talks on disengaging from the on-going crisis on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) finally took place. The previous round, which promised further talks at an early date, happened on November 6, and the delay suggested things were not going very well.
The talks yesterday, reports Snehesh Philip at The Print , went on for 16 and a half hours, which is quite something. There was "substantial" progress, the report said:
Sources said that during the talks, the Indian side — led by 14 Corps Commander Lt Gen P.G.K Menon and included Naveen Srivastava, joint secretary (East Asia) from the external affairs ministry — made it clear that for tensions to come down, disengagement is a must.
They explained to the Chinese side, which was led by South Xinjiang military district chief Major General Liu Lin, that its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) first transgressed, and hence, the onus is on them to pull back.
At the time of writing this newsletter, neither side had put out a statement.
The other big story on Monday that broke a few hours after the talks had ended was of a clash at Naku La in Sikkim that took place last week. The area also had seen an incident in early May but hasn't been the focus of recent tensions, which have largely been confined to the western sector in Ladakh. Media reports had initially suggested injuries on both sides. The Indian Army statement, however, appeared to try and play down what happened last Wednesday:
We have received several queries regarding a face-off between Indian Army and PLA troops in Sikkim sector. It is clarified that there was a minor face-off at Nakula area of North Sikkim on 20 January 2021 and the same was resolved by local commanders as per established protocols. Media is requested to refrain from overplaying or exaggerating reports which are factually incorrect.
The Global Times also played down the incident:
There is no record of this incident in the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) front line patrol logs, the Global Times learned.
In recent days, the focus of the military's top leaders on both sides has been the ninth round of corps commander-level talks, not a new border clash, and the two sides have not been involved in such clashes mentioned by the Indian media.
There have been minor frictions between the frontline forces of the two countries, but if there had been friction involving casualties, it is impossible for them not to be recorded in the Chinese patrol logs.
Do the attempts by both sides to play down the recent incident suggest there is some progress on the disengagement talks, or was the incident, as the Indian Army said, actually a minor one? We'll have to wait and see what transpires in the coming days as both sides take forward the outcomes of yesterday's talks.
Shiv Aroor at India Today sounds a note of caution saying how a key understanding reached in September to not add troops to an already tense front line has increasingly been diluted. He does reports, in a separate story, that the communications between both sides do appear to have somewhat improved, in part thanks to India's professionalism in promptly returning a PLA soldier who had transgressed. Shiv interestingly reveals the Army insisted on his prompt return even if some intelligence agencies were hoping to use the soldier as leverage:
A senior source said, "We of course don't take such things into our military calculations on ground, but the Chinese appear to be genuinely moved by the gesture. The Indian Army's ethos in a difficult situation has surprised them, and they are grateful."
The quick handing over of the PLA soldier is being seen in an especially positive light since word has trickled out that it was the Indian Army leadership that insisted on clean, clear repatriation of the soldier. At least one intelligence agency had wanted to play wait and watch, possibly in order to assess the possibility of leverage.
Between 14 Corps Commander Lt Gen PGK Menon and the Army leadership in Delhi, it was decided that there would be none of that, and the soldier was quickly handed over at the Moldo crossing point on January 11. The Army's alacrity apparently wasn't lost on the Chinese and has been interpreted as an act of unusual professional goodwill.
In this weekend's paper, I had a piece looking at China's border village construction program which has been in the news, as I mentioned in last week's newsletters, after a village built 4-5 km within what India sees as its territory. More such cases may come to light as a plan to redevelop 628 villages in Tibet, going back to 2017, comes to fruition.
The Press Trust of India reports:
The government has sent notices to Chinese apps, including TikTok, that the order to block them will be continued. The notice has been issued by the Ministry of Electronics and IT after reviewing replies of blocked apps, according to a source who did not wish to be identified.
When contacted, TikTok confirmed to have received a reply from the government. "We are evaluating the notice and will respond to it as appropriate. TikTok was among the first companies to comply with the Government of India directive issued on June 29, 2020," a TikTok spokesperson said.
An interesting New York Times piece on China's vaccine diplomacy running into hiccups, including because of a spike in cases at home leading to a greater domestic demand.
A sad development in the mining tragedy in Shandong: nine miners who remained trapped in a gold mine two weeks after an explosion were confirmed dead Monday, bringing the accident’s death toll to 10. The news came just after 11 miners were rescued this weekend after being trapped underground for days.
And finally….
This long read from Global Times is a good example of how the state media in China is rewriting Wuhan’s handling of the novel coronavirus outbreak. The narrative is now turning on its head the delays of the first few weeks and cover-up by local authorities — a failure of bottom-up governance, which the Party leadership too apparently believed as it sacked the leaders of Wuhan and Hubei in the spring of 2020, a fact that the State media in China have entirely forgotten as it contrasts with the now widespread narrative of a flawless response — by suggesting that top-down mobilisation was what was key to China’s success and explained the failure in many countries in the West to contain the virus:
The top-down mobilization, led by the government and participated by social organizations and residents, is key to the success of closed-off residential management, which was common practice in early days of the epidemic. It is in contrast with community engagement in Western countries without a unified leadership of the government, which failed to contain the outbreaks, according to some Chinese experts.
Some Western media outlets questioned the power of the people in the fight, claiming that "the outbreak has exposed the powerlessness of private charities, civic groups" and other social organizations that could help the effort, as the NYT mentioned in an article in February 2020. A year on, it is time to correct this perception.
In comparing the role of community work and social mobilization in some Western countries like the US amid the pandemic, there cannot only be a reliance on grassroots power in fighting it when we clearly see the federal government of the US failed to coordinate and allocate resources, Wang Hongwei, a professor at the Renmin University of China's School of Public Administration and Policy, told the Global Times. "The efficacy of social mobilization should be built on an effective crisis-response mechanism, led by the government," Wang said.
Thank you for reading.