Belt and Road Read online

  Given Buddhism’s religious and cultural influence in a vast area stretching from Mongolia to Japan and Southeast Asia, it is hardly a surprise that China and India have increasingly been trying to use it as a diplomatic tool. In the process they have often clashed in their attempts to conquer the hearts of Buddhists in Asia and exert power over different sects, their rites and procedures for reincarnation and enthronement. As China translates its economic power into a form of spiritual might, rebuilding monasteries and pilgrim routes, while creating psychological links with the people of other nations through Buddhism, India is forced to accept that even in this area the rules of great power rivalry increasingly apply. The Dalai Lama is inextricably linked with the border dispute between the two Asian giants. The Tawang monastery’s historical ties to Tibetan Buddhism is an important basis of China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh, which lies to the south of the McMahon Line, the border originally drawn up by the British. China seems to consider that it will only be able to fully subdue Tibet after it annexes Tawang, where the next Dalai Lama may well be reincarnated.

  A description of the role of Tibetan Buddhism within the Belt and Road has been put forward by Wang Changyu, Party secretary at the High-level Tibetan Academy of Buddhism. The Academy’s experience training Tibetan Buddhist monks and its well-developed system of scholarly degrees creates an advantageous position allowing it to “help countries and territories along the ‘Belt and Road’ satisfy their demand for religious specialists and scriptures.” Such exchanges can serve two goals: to showcase “the results of our Party and country’s ethnic and religious policies, displaying the healthy heritage and development of Tibetan Buddhism” in China, while reducing “the Dalai clique’s space of activity, upholding national sovereignty.”2

  Ultimately India constitutes a special challenge to Chinese expansion because, as a separate civilization tracing its origins to the same axial age five millennia ago, it cannot be assimilated into the expanding Chinese orbit in Asia. Frank Moraes recalled in his book, Witness to an Era, how when he went to China as a member of India’s first cultural mission to the People’s Republic in 1952, Nehru briefed the delegation before they departed: “Never forget the basic challenge in South-East Asia is between India and China. That challenge runs along the spine of Asia”. What was true then remains the case today, but the rivalry between the two countries for leadership in Asia has expanded as their status rose and has acquired today a markedly global significance. The rivalry has also been ideologically refined, as countries in the neighborhood and beyond watch the contest between Delhi and Beijing to see which political and economic system comes out on top.

  The standoff at the Doklam plateau was also the occasion for new tensions affecting trade relations between the two countries. In response to China’s incursion in the Himalayas, India approved antidumping procedures against a number of Chinese imports and a planned takeover worth more than $1 billion by China’s Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical of Indian drugmaker, Gland Pharma, was delayed. Doklam provided a pretext, but India is also growing fearful of ceding control over strategic industries to China. After reports that Chinese smartphone companies are sending user data of Indians to China, the Indian government started cracking down on these companies. The next step would be to require Chinese handset makers to set up servers in India to ensure the protection of user data. China responded to the standoff in similar tones: an ambitious high speed train project in south India was delayed after the Chinese railways that completed a feasibility study a year before suddenly stopped responding to the Indian ministry’s contacts.

  These moves could not hide how dependent the Indian economy has become on imports from China. Local manufacturing companies in India are not geared up to supply goods to the rising power and telecom sectors, so in the case of an open trade war India might be forced to import such components from the United States and Europe at prohibitive cost, destroying its own export competitiveness. Meanwhile Indian goods continue to struggle to find markets in China. The trade gap between the two countries has grown inexorably in recent years, reaching a staggering $51.1 billion in the most recent year on record. That this needs to be redressed is clear, but the path to greater Indian competitiveness will only shrink as economic and trade dependency on China extends more generally. It is not surprising that New Delhi is aggressively trying to create a more balanced relationship and an obvious area where this could be achieved is pharmaceuticals. Many Chinese patients travel to India to find drugs they desperately need but are either unaffordable or unavailable in China. Notably, China does not allow imports of drugs from India, even as Indian companies have become one of the dominant global players. Indeed China has lately been trying to pose a direct challenge to Indian drug-makers. Of the roughly 170,000 drugs approved by the China Food and Drug Administration, over 95 per cent are generics, according to the country’s National Health Commission. In April 2018, the government of China issued a new policy package—including tax breaks—to promote the manufacture of generic drugs. China’s aggressive presence in the market for generic drugs is now palpable. For instance, India’s largest drug-maker, Sun Pharmaceuticals, reported a 75 per cent plunge in its third-quarter net profit for 2017–18 as it has been battling increased competition in the generics market from China. Far from reducing tensions, trade is becoming its own source of conflict between China and India, with every protectionist measure triggering a swift and more serious retaliation from the other side.

  Until recently these tensions might be regarded as little more than peripheral skirmishes, but as the Chinese and Indian economies have grown in size and global economic integration has deepened, they are now highly dependent on each other and, together, represent a critical percentage of global economic growth. Whether the two governments are able to reach a stable economic order, and which form it will take, cannot but dramatically impact the rest of the world. Their rivalry is no longer a strictly Asian affair.

  Calculating the global economy’s center of gravity—the average location of economic activity measured on a globe across different geographies—provides further clues to what is going on. In the three decades after 1945 this was located somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, reflecting how Europe and North America concentrated a large majority of global economic activity. That Washington saw itself as leading a bloc encompassing the Atlantic is, from an economic point of view, what you would expect. By the turn of the century, however, the center of gravity had shifted so far eastwards it was now located east of the borders of the European Union. Within ten years we should find it on the border between Europe and Asia, and by the middle of this century most likely somewhere between India and China, on the roof of the world.

  An open struggle for mastery between China and India may never materialize, but as a latent conflict it is already one of the most important variables in world politics. It brings different trends and forces together. It was perhaps always to be expected that India would emerge as the main obstacle to Chinese expansion. That role may yet strengthen or dilute, but it is difficult to see it disappearing in the near future. More likely, those who are growing concerned about Chinese power will increasingly place their bets on India as a first point of contact, a power-balancer. To this fact China itself will be forced to respond, bringing the tectonic clash closer to the surface of world politics.

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  The 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States opens by describing a strategic environment of growing competition with revisionist powers. Revealingly, the first example is how China is using its military and economic power to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the “Indo-Pacific region” to its advantage. China, it adds, is pursuing “Indo-Pacific hegemony.” Later the document stresses the capacity to deploy military force in three key regions. Two of them are, unsurprisingly, Europe and the Middle East. The third—and in fact the first one mentioned in this context—is the Indo-Pacific.

  Our mental maps are being redrawn. O
ne of the most striking examples of this is the new concept of the Indo-Pacific. The first thing to note is that it signals an extension, an enlargement of the orbit within which actors operate. As often in the history of geopolitics, the concept was originally employed by biologists aware that marine life in the Pacific and Indian oceans formed a single continuum and that borders were an obstacle to scientific work. Geopolitical thinkers have slowly come to the same conclusion. Can political and economic questions be addressed within the confines of a narrow definition of the Western Pacific or the Indian Ocean? Or should we attempt to combine the two areas in a larger geopolitical unit? The answer should never be taken for granted, but many recent developments point towards the need to think in terms of larger and larger units, and these larger units—as opposed to the limit case of the whole planet—are not abstractions but practical considerations for the actors involved.

  What gives force to the concept of the Indo-Pacific is first of all the expanding role of China and India on the global stage. Seen from the traditional centers of political power in Europe and North America, it is still tempting to think of China as an East Asian nation and of India as a South Asian nation, but we know that this now flies in the face of reality. For two decades China has been extending its influence and activities to the Indian Ocean. It has invested in ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, sent its submarines across the Malacca Strait with increasing frequency and even—in the most dramatic instance of this overall development—opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti at the other end of the Indian Ocean. More recently this expansionism has been given a catchy name: the Maritime Silk Road.

  India has followed suit, albeit more slowly, reflecting the gap in the historical development of the two countries and the ten or fifteen extra years it took New Delhi to understand that economic autarchy was an idea whose time had passed. What happened then was that India started to realize that, if China was increasingly present in its own backyard, perhaps the inverse movement had become necessary. At first this may have looked like a pure game of power. How to prevent China from abusing its newly found presence in the Indian Ocean without developing corresponding leverage points in the Western Pacific? Far from surprising, a decision to do so was always inevitable, and merely reproduced dynamics of mutual pressure and influence the countries have become used to along their land borders and peripheral regions in Kashmir, Tibet, the Northeast and the Himalayas.

  More substantial concerns quickly emerged. First, trade and economic development. We have grown so used to think of India and China as the two economic giants in Asia that we forget there is a third pole of development which, in the aggregate, may turn out to be just as significant. What is more, both India and China are discovering that in a world of deepening economic integration and transnational value chains, their development is closely linked to Southeast Asia, where opportunities for trade, infrastructure investment and sourcing abound. What should India do? By turning west it would face the stagnant or turbulent Middle East or then the mature European economies. By turning east it can find ample ground for investment and booming trade relations with Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

  New Delhi certainly thinks that it cannot abandon Southeast Asia, with its unmatched economic potential, to Chinese economic interests if the relation between the two countries is to preserve, over the long term, the promise of an eventual balance and parity. This brings us to an equally important point: the economic and trade links between China and India and the physical infrastructure of transport and communications needed to support them. The economic links between the two countries are bound to dominate the world economy by the middle of the century. Should India leave the development of this network of economic links to China? It seems far more prudent to ensure from the very start that this will be a collective project, pregnant with rivalry but where both countries can have a major stake.

  Finally, there is the question of Japan. India increasingly sees Japan as its primary source of technology. The symbiotic relationship between an aging technological powerhouse and a young country still on the path of industrialization cannot be missed. In return, Japan sees in the Indian navy an indispensable partner in its efforts to contain Chinese expansion and safeguard freedom of navigation in the East and South China seas. Both countries know that they will find in each other a receptive ear when expressing concerns about the rising threats to the Asian maritime commons. It is no coincidence that the concept of the Indo-Pacific first saw the light of day during a 2007 visit by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to India, where he spoke about the “confluence of two seas.” In the spring and summer of 2007, the Indian navy sailed all the way up to Vladivostok, the home port of the Russian Pacific Fleet, and conducted a series of bilateral and multilateral exercises with the United States, Japan, Russia, and China.

  There is a page in K.M. Panikkar’s India and the Indian Ocean—a book published in 1945—where the great strategic thinker seems to discover the Indo-Pacific, like a navigator crossing a far-flung strait. He noted that the strategic position of the Indian Ocean had dramatically changed since the nineteenth century. Then all that mattered was the connection to the Atlantic and—after Suez—the Mediterranean. Japan’s lightening conquest of Singapore and the Bay of Bengal showed that the Indian Ocean could be controlled from the east and Japan’s defeat would not be able to put the genie back in the bottle, not least because China would in the future have even more advantages than Japan. The connection that would increasingly matter was that between the Indian and the Pacific.

  The Indo-Pacific as a concept of political geography is neutral, objective. Every actor is coming to the realization that it needs to act in this extended sphere or, in other words, that its objectives in a more limited area cannot be pursued within that area alone. China and India may be more directly implicated in the change of perspective, but it affects an external actor like the United States no less powerfully, for instance when it realizes that it is better able to develop a coherent policy towards China and India if it thinks of the two together as part of the same system.

  Nevertheless, this is no more than the beginning of the story. Although every actor shares an understanding of the Indo-Pacific as a single system, their understandings are to some extent mutually exclusive. When the United States speaks of the Indo-Pacific as a space of freedom managed by a condominium of India, America, Australia and Japan, this is not only a project very different from China’s Maritime Silk Road, but may in fact be defined in opposition to it. What these four countries seem to share, what separates them from other democracies in the region, is a deepening suspicion of Chinese plans.

  It is here that we come face to face with the most singular and important fact about contemporary geopolitics: political and economic integration, the dilution of borders, goes together with increasing competition about how this enlarged space is to be managed and defined. That one of the great civilizational borders existing today is being slowly removed should not be underplayed. We have only to think how difficult a similar process would be on the other end of the Eurasian supercontinent to realize this. Consider how momentous a transformation it would look to us if Europe and the Middle East were thought of as a single unit. It is a process of that kind that we are watching along the Asian littoral arc as the border between East and South Asia—a border which has in the past stopped whole armies in their tracks—is being questioned, doubted and perhaps, in the end, forgotten.

  The Indo-Pacific thus appears as a test case of wider processes of Eurasian integration. To a considerable extent, sharp divides between regions of the kind we have been discussing have their root in the age of European colonial empires. They sometimes originated in the competition for territory and areas of influence between rival European powers. In other cases, they followed from the administrative imperative of each of these powers, which found it convenient to organize their territories in separate units. Often these divisions were superimposed on older and
more permanent racial or religious divides, but European colonial power did much to reinforce them or even create them where they had a very incomplete meaning. Different regions in Asia were connected to the center in Europe in such a formalized way that relations among themselves could not be directly established but had to pass through the center, which worked as a hub assigning and distributing culture, ideas and money to the regions. Much more fundamental than the borders between these different regions, the division between region and center was the organizing principle of the whole system.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, as the age of European empires seemed to be coming to an end, visionary authors such as Halford Mackinder or Alfred Mahan started to advocate the idea of a Eurasian supercontinent from which these modern divisions had been removed. Unknown to them, a new age of divisions—ideological rather than cultural or political—would then follow, but this was perhaps no more than the last breath of the clash between European civilization and a world caught up in the throes of modernization. In our time we have returned to the question of Eurasia with renewed vigor. Major actors such as India or China outgrow their historical boundaries. Civilizational borders seem less fixed, more fragile than we thought and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the process is developing much faster in the former imperial regions, whose borders were less central to the system, than in the borderlands between Europe and Asia. East, Southeast, South Asia. As the regions dissolve, Eurasia coheres.