The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India

by Vijay Gokhale

However, in the 1980s, under Deng Xiaoping, China had begun to ‘normalize’ its dealings with the outside world. Deng’s Modernization Programme needed both external financing and a stable geo-strategic environment, and he introduced consequent changes in how China dealt with the world.

It joined the other nuclear weapons states in supporting an indefinite extension of the NPT. This was in sharp contrast to what Deng Xiaoping had told Indian journalists in Beijing after meeting Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in February 1979, namely that the nuclear powers had no right to ask other countries not to have nuclear weapons when the nuclear weapons states were not committing to eliminate their own nuclear weapons.

China presumed that it had closed the loop as it were; they did not expect India to politically defy the international community. When India tested three nuclear devices in Pokhran on 11 May 1998, the initial Chinese reaction was muted. They expressed ‘grave concern’ and proclaimed that India’s nuclear testing ‘runs against the international trend’.

First, they regarded themselves as having a sound understanding of India’s leadership and foreign policy, and assumed that India lacked the political will to challenge the international community on the nuclear issue. Second, their experience at the NPT Review Conference and the CTBT negotiations had imbued them with a sense of confidence that they had closed ranks with the United States of America and that both shared the common objective of enforcing the global nuclear non-proliferation arrangements without any exceptions.

The decision-making process in China is deliberative, and at the official level (Ministries of Foreign Affairs, National Defence, State Security, etc.), it also pulls in the strategic community’s inputs and weighs the global responses before the matter goes up the political chain of command for a decision. As a result, China’s response time is longer. The Chinese, after full consideration, identified two major objectives: to punish India, and to rectify the damage that India had done to China’s image.

Chinese presumption that America was the key to building the international coalition that would punish India. It set about acting as the main coordinator behind the scenes, to unite the P-5. It followed the American lead throughout and allowed them to take all the credit. The Chinese efforts to build an international coalition also allowed it to disappear into the crowd. This is a classic diplomatic ruse known as ‘Murder with a Borrowed Knife’ (Jie Dao Sha Ren, a Chinese saying that basically meant shooting off another’s shoulders).

The Vajpayee letter that the Clinton administration had leaked, had been drafted carefully. Prior to this, Vajpayee’s team had made their own assessment about the Americans and concluded that the initial US response to the nuclear tests by India would not be the final American position.

Strobe Talbott, the American negotiator, was to recall that he met Jaswant Singh fourteen times at ten locations in seven countries on three continents.

Chinese possibly assumed that India would never be an attractive alternative to the Chinese in Asia, and this assumption led to a misreading of US policy post the Clinton–Jiang Zemin Summit.

The disproportionate dependence of the Chinese on the Left parties in India, with whom the Chinese embassy in New Delhi maintained regular liaison, also influenced their thinking. The Chinese may have thought that the Left had not been as enthusiastic as the rest of the political spectrum about the nuclear tests.

By early 1999, the Chinese began to realize that the economic sanctions were not having the sort of devastating effect on the Indian economy that they had hoped for, and that it was, in fact, Pakistan that was the much more affected party. China also realized that the Americans had resiled from their earlier view that China could play some sort of a larger role in South Asia.

In the case of India-related research, a set of relatively ageing academics, mostly on the wrong side of sixty, determined the ‘line’ on India. Since they were the only ones with access to policy-making circles, the younger researchers simply took their cue from the old guard.

All previous attempts by the Indian Embassy in Beijing to propose various bilateral talks with the Chinese had been met with studied silence. One of the difficulties in dealing with the Chinese, even up to the present day, is the problem of access. Unless they wish to meet you, it is virtually impossible to meet them.

The Joint Secretary for East Asia (equivalent to Director General), therefore, travelled to China in February 1999 for a meeting with his counterpart, the Director General for Asian Affairs. This meeting consisted of accusations and counteraccusations, and at one point devolved into a verbal slanging match. This was intentional on the Chinese part. The Chinese vented all their frustrations on the Indian delegation, but they are also past masters in the art of perception management. Hence, when the leader of the Indian delegation met with the Assistant Foreign Minister Wang Yi (now the state councillor and foreign minister of China) later that same afternoon, the latter declared that the Sino-Indian relationship had returned to the correct path.

Jaswant Singh’s response was to quote a Rajasthani saying of his own—don’t ask the way to a village if you don’t intend to go there.

This was never in fact an objective. India had hoped that the full normalization of relations following the visit of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to China in December 1988 might lead the Chinese to re-consider their nuclear assistance to Pakistan, but this did not happen. Hence, the Indian side had no illusions about the nature of the Sino-Pak nuclear alliance by the time of India’s nuclear tests.

lessons to be drawn from the Chinese behaviour? One important lesson is the outsized importance that China attaches to its image. This is so because the Chinese State and the Communist Party of China are one and the same.

Chinese Communist Party derives its own legitimacy in part from the image it portrays to its people. While the authoritarian system is conducive to image-shaping within China, the international environment is more difficult

China expends substantial diplomatic capital in image-building abroad. This includes grand spectacles like the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2016 G-20 Summit in Hangzhou as well as projections of China as a benign an...

The Chinese leadership is thin-skinned; unsettling them by impugning their self-image and how they want the rest of the world to view them can work to the other side’s advantage.

The trick lies in separating the Chinese from the pack, and in ‘isolating’ them, and thereafter keeping a steady course even if the Chinese use methods like intimidation, falsehoods, victimhood or fear psychosis to put maximum pressure on the perceived rival or adversary to change course.

The Indian experience in 1998–1999 showed that a clear strategy coupled with a cogent and logical argument or narrative, and the ability to stay the course, could get the Chinese to change course.

Two treaties between the Sikkim Raja and the British, in 1817 and in 1861, gave the British a degree of control over Sikkim, and more importantly, by the terms of the latter treaty, they also secured the right to trade with Tibet through Sikkim territory.

the British as promising, Khamba Dzong and the Chumbi Valley.

Hence, when boundary negotiations began with China in the late 1950s, the Sikkim-Tibet frontier was deemed by the Indian side to be a part of the agenda for the India–China boundary talks. In 1956, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai acknowledged the special relations that India had with Sikkim, but subsequently avoided any discussion with India on the Tibet–Sikkim boundary during the border talks in the late 1950s and in the official level talks in 1960.

Ambiguity over the status of Sikkim, which had served China well until 1974, was no longer tenable. On 11 September 1974, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement: ‘The Chinese Government solemnly states that it absolutely does not recognize India’s illegal annexation of Sikkim and that it supports the people of Sikkim in their just struggle for national independence and sovereignty and against Indian expansion.’ 12 This position was reiterated on 29 April 1975, the day after Sikkim acceded to the Union of India. Thus, an issue that China had claimed was not a subject for discussion between India and China, now became a bone of contention between them.

Chinese were conscious that they were the only country that refused to recognize the merger as legitimate. However, China is never shy of standing alone on any matter that it deems to be of core interest, until it has weighed all the consequences.

The 1954 Trade Agreement between India and the Tibet Region of China had, similarly, identified six border passes in the Middle Sector through which trade and other intercourse could take place between the Tibet region of China and India. India had assumed that this was tantamount to a recognition of where our boundary lay. The Chinese first kept their counsel, then dissimulated when pressed and finally said that the boundary had not been a subject for discussion at the time, and that the six passes named in the 1954 agreement were only a specific modality for a specific purpose—namely trade. Now, forty years later, the Chinese were offering up the same formula for Sikkim.

There were sceptics inside the Indian establishment who derided such thinking as archaic or even obstructive. They felt that a bilateral agreement on border trade constituted a Chinese acknowledgement of the ground reality in Sikkim, and were confident that, in time, it would lead the Chinese to de jure recognition on Sikkim as a State of India. The solution to the Sikkim Question, therefore, tested the mettle of the Government of India in its entirety. Had the officials in the External Affairs Ministry buckled under pressure, the Chinese might have achieved their objectives rather easily.

It is also important to look at Chinese behaviour when it concerned China’s own sovereignty and territorial integrity. The People’s Republic of China had not exercised sovereignty over the island of Taiwan for a single minute of a single day since they had founded the new government in Peking on 1 October 1949. Yet all foreign governments desiring to have a relationship with Beijing had to first explicitly recognize China’s absolute and unconditional sovereignty over Taiwan.

They wanted a formulation that improved upon what Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had given them in 1988, namely that Tibet was an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, with a much more explicit acknowledgement. In the end, the Chinese did not explicitly acknowledge in the Joint Statement issued at the end of the Vajpayee visit that Sikkim was a part of India, but India on its part added further legitimacy to the Chinese claim over Tibet by averring in the Joint Statement that ‘Tibet Autonomous Region is part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China’.

At the end, the compulsions of democracy might have led to India compromising on the ideal outcome. This is a pitfall that India shall have to deal with in the future as well, and one that the Chinese are beginning to exploit.

The repetition of position at multiple meetings fulfils two objectives—it allows the Chinese to understand the time-table of the other side in resolving an issue, and it allows them to test the other side’s bottom line. Both are leveraged for benefit.

If China can persuade India in the future to permit Chinese merchandise to transit Sikkim, it will be a ‘golden goose’. It will allow China to transport goods in a secure and commercially profitably way overland through Tibet to the Indian heartland, where half a billion Indians live, thus giving it access to a major global market that is not dependent on transit through any other country. It will, equally importantly, become the shortest route from mainland China to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. The port of Kolkata is just 725 kilometres away from the Tibet frontier in Sikkim. In contrast, the China–Pakistan corridor is over 1500 kilometres and the China–Myanmar corridor is over 1100 kilometres, and both cross inhospitable terrain and politically unstable territories. The transit through Sikkim is, therefore, the most viable route for China to the Indian Ocean, and Sikkim becomes a good bet for China to overcome their Malacca Dilemma.

Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). Two sets of guidelines were established for nuclear exports and nuclear-related exports, and the membership was systematically expanded to rope in any Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signatory who had the relevant technologies.

Non-proliferation was a raison d’être for the Americans to invade Iraq. And China had come out of the nuclear cold, finally joining the NPT in 1992 and the NSG in 2005.

NSG’s endorsement of the India–US nuclear deal in terms of giving India a clean waiver to source nuclear technology and materials without signing the NPT,

After India had tested in 1998, China’s approach on the Nuclear Question vis-à-vis India was shaped by two concerns. One was over the convergences between the Americans and India, and the conclusion of the Indo–US nuclear deal suggested to the Chinese that such convergences were growing.

Declassified papers show that India’s chief atomic scientist, Homi J. Bhabha, had written letters to Prime Minister Nehru in 1963 about India possessing the capability to test a nuclear weapon.

A telegram from the US State Department in March 1966 referred to the probability that India would be in a position to test a nuclear device within a year of such a political decision being made by the Indian leadership.

India was seeking iron-clad guarantees from the Americans and the Soviets that they would individually or together come to India’s assistance in the event of a Chinese attack.

America refused to give specific guarantees, mainly out of concern that exclusive nuclear guarantees to India would alienate Pakistan, which was a strategic ally.

China had a clear vision about nuclear weapons. China’s first-generation leadership led by Mao Zedong saw nuclear weapons as a counter-power

The subsequent generations of leaders, in the post-Cold War period, saw nuclear weapons as a guarantor of China’s status as a true world power with no equal other than the United States, especially in the Indo–Pacific region. To maintain this image, it was essential for China to preserve strategic asymmetry both in terms of optics and in terms of ground realities with other aspirants, especially India which had tested a device in 1974.

The think-tank community remained convinced that despite the diplomatic recovery that India had made after 1998, the United States would never agree to relaxation in the nuclear sanctions imposed by the NSG and, consequently, India’s existence outside the NPT regime would continue to marginalize it in international affairs.

The first message was for India, namely that China’s nuclear posture was oriented towards the United States and, therefore, India had nothing to worry about. The second message was for the United States, namely that India’s nuclear programme was oriented towards Pakistan (not China) over the Kashmir issue, and that South Asia was a powder keg prepped to explode into nuclear war.

This soft public approach was combined with evasive replies whenever Indian representatives raised the NSG issue with Chinese counterparts. This issue was raised on more than one occasion by both the then External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan. 9 The Chinese would invariably respond by showing ‘understanding’ for India’s position but always with the caveat that all nuclear-related activity should be within the framework of international obligations. Chinese counterparts never referred directly to the NPT or the CTBT in these conversations. This is a typical Chinese negotiating tactic that is designed to generate hope in the opposite interlocutor that the door for further discussion remains open, without disclosing the specific Chinese position.

China had felt let down by the Americans in the aftermath of the 1998 Indian nuclear tests, and the feeling had grown that the US was looking at India as a regional counterbalance to China. The Indo–US nuclear deal was seen as further confirmation that these larger geo-strategic considerations were in fact in play.

On the eve of Bush’s visit, the China Defence News confidently wrote that the intention of the United States was to penetrate India’s nuclear weapons programme in order to control it, and that the Indians would not allow this to happen. 13 Therefore, the nuclear deal would not be successfully concluded.

The Separation Plan was offered by India to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), vide which the Government of India undertook the following commitments: identification and separation of civilian and military nuclear facilities and programmes in a phased manner; filing a declaration regarding its civilian facilities with IAEA; taking a decision to place voluntarily its civilian nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards; and signing and adhering to an Additional Protocol with respect to civilian nuclear facilities.