From The Asian Age:
One passion of Chinese diplomacy is to go in for numbered policy pronouncements, like the “ten-pronged strategy” unveiled in the joint declaration with India during President Hu Jintao’s visit last November. Another fetish is to enunciate diplomatic principles with another state and later, at an opportune time, reinterpret them unilaterally to add force to Chinese claims and ambitions.
Defining high-sounding principles to advance bilateral relations or dispute resolution helps Beijing to hold the other side to basic parameters, including a one-China policy, and foster a belief that the enunciation of cadenced concepts is progress by itself. Yet the idea behind formulating such principles is to bind the other party to them more than oneself. The principles devised are invariably so general and nebulous that Beijing, in any event, has ample room to reinterpret them or emphasise a single principle over the rest. [Full Text]
Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. Read also Beware the Dragon by Kuldip Nayar, veteran journalist and and former Indian high commissioner to Britain:
The Dalai Lama’s exhortation not to isolate China is sensible advice, because China is a non-conformist power which can do anything when isolated. But I am not able to understand why India will have joint military exercises with China. Such exercises are not mere games. There has to be a purpose behind them. Beijing has not given up its old attitude towards us. Once again it has begun claiming our territory. The last time when hostilities broke out and China occupied Aksai Chin forcibly, all that started with China making its claims.
Beijing has once again said that Arunachal Pradesh is its territory. It has refused to give visa to an Indian Administrative Service officer from Arunachal Pradesh. This stand is similar to the one it took when it did not allow the Arunachal Assembly Speaker and the state’s former chief minister Gegong Apong to visit China. It was not long ago that Beijing’s ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi publicly said that Arunachal was Chinese territory.
When border talks are going on, India expects China not to do anything that may disturb the efforts being made for conciliation. China should realise that it has taken many years to prepare the ground for talks and we have not gone far yet. [Full Text]
