Line of Actual Control confessions, revisiting the debt trap myth, and China blocks Clubhouse
Line of Actual Control confessions, revisiting the debt trap myth, and China blocks Clubhouse
Welcome to today’s The India China Newsletter, coming to you after a busy Monday so please excuse typos.
In today's issue, I'll be looking at:
- Union Minister and former Army Chief V.K. Singh's unusual statement on LAC transgressions and China's response
- The PLA beefing up its presence along the LAC and still no signs of disengagement
- China thanks Pakistan and the UAE on Xinjiang
- The Debt Trap myth gets an overdue correction
- China blocks Clubhouse
This weekend, General V.K. Singh (retd), a former chief of army staff and currently a minister in the Modi government, made some candid remarks on the Line of Actual Control and China:
None of you come to know how many times we have transgressed, as per our perception. The Indian government does not announce it, while the Chinese media does not cover it. Let me assure you, if China has transgressed 10 times, we must have done it at least 50 times.
An unexpected admission, and one that China’s Foreign Ministry expectedly weighed in on. From today’s official transcript of the briefing in Beijing:
The following question is raised after the press conference:
Q: Indian Union Minister of State for State Transport and Highways VK Singh said India and China have different perceptions of the Line of Actual Control (LAC). He said "If China has transgressed 10 times, we must have done it at least 50 times". But the Indian government does not announce it, and the Chinese media do not cover it. "China has been attempting to expand its area by taking advantage of its perception of the LAC...But, the present government has ensured that this does not happen," he added. Do you have any response?
Wang Wenbin: This is an unwitting confession by the Indian side. For a long time, the Indian side has conducted frequent acts of trespass in the border area in an attempt to encroach on China's territory and constantly created disputes and frictions, which is the root cause of the tensions at the China-India border. We urge the Indian side to follow through on the consensus, agreements and treaties it reached with China, and uphold peace and stability in the border region with concrete actions.
Comment: Note the first line from the MFA transcript saying the question was raised after the press conference. This means it wasn’t actually asked by a reporter at the briefing. It’s quite rare for the MFA to add on a question to the official transcript after the briefing, and might suggest just how keen they were to respond to VK Singh’s remarks regardless of the fact that no one asked a question about it.
His remarks aren’t exactly inaccurate - it is true that India patrols up to its LAC which would be seen by China as a “transgression” just as India looks at China going up to its LAC in areas where claims lines overlap as a transgression. Accurate they may be, but perhaps unwise for two reasons. For one, saying “we have transgressed” is a really poor choice of words. You will never hear China saying that because as far as they are concerned, it is their LAC that matters. By admitting “transgress”, he is delegitimising India’s own official position on its LAC. Secondly, and perhaps more concerning, it will be seized on by China to, once again, say the crisis was all because of India’s aggressions, just as it happened last year when India’s Prime Minister said no one had intruded - a remark milked for months by Chinese experts to justify the PLA’s actions. Both statements serve a cautionary note of the dangers of allowing domestic political motivations to take precedence without examining the consequences.
Shishir Gupta writes in today’s Hindustan Times:
According to Indian national security planners, the PLA is engaged in fresh deployment and relocation of both troops and heavy military equipment in all the three sectors with fresh constructions of revetments (sloped protection against ordnance) in the finger areas of Pangong Tso.
There is evidence with South Block to indicate fresh deployment of 35 heavy military vehicles and four 155 mm PLZ 83 self-propelled howitzers in sheds around the Shiquanhe PLA camp, just 82 kilometres from the LAC across Chumar in Eastern Ladakh. Additional deployment of vehicles, heavy equipment and new construction work was observed last month near the Rudok surveillance facility, 90 km from the LAC, with four new large sheds and partition quarters for troops. Both Rudok and Shiquanhe are in the occupied Aksai Chin area.
According to Indian army commanders, there has been a marginal increase, new revetments and relocation of deployments between finger four and finger seven on the north bank of Pangong Tso. It was the Chinese PLA’s aggression on finger the 4 mountainous spur on the northern banks of Pangong Tso on May 5, 2020 that led to escalation of military tensions along the LAC.
The PLA is also strengthening positions around Spanggur Tso with induction of more firepower and troops in late December 2020. “The PLA is strengthening all along the 1,597-km LAC in Ladakh with a view for long-term deployments. The fortifications around Spanggur Tso are designed to support Moldo Garrison in Chushul area with Indian Army dominating heights in Kailash Ranges,” said an official in the know of the military deployments.
Anit Mukherjee says last year’s border crisis may offer an opportunity:
First, this crisis was not of India’s making as revealed by the military’s scramble in responding to Chinese troop deployments in May 2020. Distracted by the pandemic, the government took a while and eventually came up with an appropriate tit-for-tat manoeuvre in end-August. Second, the Indian military has just embarked on perhaps its most significant institutional reform, triggered by the prime minister’s (PM)’s decision to create a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). However, apart from speculative media stories, there has been no official document released by the first CDS, General Bipin Rawat. Commenting on unconfirmed reports, then, just becomes an exercise in punditry.
Yet, to the credit of the Indian Army, the senior leadership appears to be raising deeper questions. For instance, one of the offensive strike corps, historically tasked to operate on the western border, is now being given a responsibility towards the north. Such “rebalancing,” as Army Chief General MM Naravane, put it, was long overdue but raises more questions. Was a crisis necessary to bring about such a change? If the answer is yes, then there is an even more chilling prospect — what other skeletons lie buried, undiscovered, till the next crisis?
Under fire from the West over Xinjiang, China today thanked Pakistan and the UAE for their support:
China appreciates the objective and fair stance held by Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates on affairs related to China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a press conference on Monday, in response to remarks made by Pakistani Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed and Ambassador of the UAE to China Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri recognizing Xinjiang's development.
In a recent interview, Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed said that facing the increasing population of ethnic groups in Xinjiang as well as its economic development, the lies made by a few politicians from the West and the US for political purposes have been debunked.
Ambassador of the UAE to China Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri also highly praised the achievements made in Xinjiang's economic development and poverty alleviation work, as well as its effective anti-terrorism and de-radicalization measures.
Both the senator and the ambassador talked about their previous experiences of visiting Xinjiang, which proved that the lies some anti-China forces were spreading about Xinjiang are a total farce. Their attempt to interfere with China's domestic affairs by hyping Xinjiang issues will not succeed, Wang said at the press conference on Monday.
Since 2018, more than 1,200 people, including UN officials, foreign diplomats, reporters and those from religious groups, from over 100 countries have come to visit Xinjiang. China welcomes more people to visit the region and see the local residents' happy lives with their own eyes, Wang said. "We believe that there will be more voices of justice speaking out like Pakistan and the UAE," Wang said.
Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire take apart the China ‘debt trap’ myth - a favourite of some Indian strategic experts and subsequently a talking point that the Trump administration pushed too - in this detailed piece in The Atlantic:
Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota. A Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in the port was a cautionary tale, but it’s not the one we’ve often heard. With a new administration in Washington, the truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.
The notion of “debt-trap diplomacy” casts China as a conniving creditor and countries such as Sri Lanka as its credulous victims. On a closer look, however, the situation is far more complex. China’s march outward, like its domestic development, is probing and experimental, a learning process marked by frequent adjustment. After the construction of the port in Hambantota, for example, Chinese firms and banks learned that strongmen fall and that they’d better have strategies for dealing with political risk. They’re now developing these strategies, getting better at discerning business opportunities and withdrawing where they know they can’t win. Still, American leaders and thinkers from both sides of the aisle give speeches about China’s “modern-day colonialism.”
The other side of the debt-trap myth involves debtor countries. Places such as Sri Lanka—or, for that matter, Kenya, Zambia, or Malaysia—are no stranger to geopolitical games. And they’re irked by American views that they’ve been so easily swindled. As one Malaysian politician remarked to us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss how Chinese finance featured in that country’s political drama, “Can’t the U.S. State Department tell the difference between campaign rhetoric that our opponents are slaves to China and actually being slaves to China?”
Comment: The ‘debt trap’ idea was always more sound than substance and was, quite frankly, lazy analysis that didn’t really bear out in reality (as evinced in several cases of supposedly trapped countries renegotiating deals). It also ignored the agency of China’s partner states, which is something often completely missing in most analysis of the BRI. Having said that, this isn’t to say there aren’t any issues with Chinese projects, including Hambantota which is discussed in this piece and was a clear example of corruption as has been widely documented — an important broader context that’s perhaps missing in the piece.
And finally…
I spent my Saturday evening exploring the Clubhouse app (a handy explainer here) and ended up spending hours listening to a quite extraordinary discussion on Xinjiang, involving Han Chinese living in Xinjiang as well as Uighurs who were mostly overseas and sharing first-hand stories including of relatives detained in the camps. It was the kind of dialogue that doesn’t happen in China and just listening in was quite an experience.
These two threads capture the flavour:
Clubhouse has a very limited reach - only those who get invites and folks on iPhones - but even these limited exchanges felt unprecedented to me. Alas, it was too good to last and the app was blocked in China today (unsurprisingly). Considering many of those speaking were overseas and that many in China still tweet via VPNs, this doesn’t mean the story is over, but the blocking will surely limit the potential reach of the app in China and make at least a few people think twice about being involved in such conversations (not that they weren’t earlier considering the risks involved in an app that requires real name registration).
The New York Times reports:
One by one, the chatroom participants took the digital microphone as thousands quietly listened in.
A Chinese man said he did not know whether to believe the widespread reports of concentration camps for Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang. Then a Uighur woman spoke up, calmly explaining that she was certain of the camps’ existence because her relatives had been among those interned. A man from Taiwan chimed in to urge understanding on all sides, while another from Hong Kong praised the woman for her courage in coming forward.
It was a rare moment of cross-border dialogue with people on the mainland of China, who are usually separated from the rest of the online world by the Great Firewall. For a short time, they found an open forum on the social media app, Clubhouse, to discuss contentious topics, free from the usual constraints of the country’s tightly controlled internet.
By Monday evening, the inevitable happened: The Chinese censors moved in. Many mainland users reported receiving error messages when they tried to use the platform. Some said they could only access the app by tunneling through the digital border using a VPN, or virtual private network. Within hours, more than a thousand users had tuned in to hear a discussion about the ban in a chatroom titled “Walled off, so now what?” Searches for “Clubhouse” on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo were blocked.
Add Clubhouse to the long list of websites blocked in China — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. In Sunday’s newspaper, I wrote a short profile of theYouTube star Li Ziqi, and the soft power lessons from her rising to become, last week, the most followed Chinese account on YouTube, and a great ambassador for China all over the world, ironically on a platform that’s banned there.
If you aren’t familiar with her, here’s one of her videos (in fact, her most popular one so far):
Very therapeutic, especially after a long Monday….
Thank you for reading!