China goes on charm offensive in India

NEW DELHI, India — The visit of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to India this week was billed as a charm offensive. But despite an uncharacteristic meet-and-greet with kids at a local school, the Chinese leader was unable to reassure New Delhi that Beijing really has friendship on its mind.

"He failed to assuage India's concerns about Pakistan's complicity with terror, [which is] something he certainly wasn't going to do on Indian soil," said Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University. "Except for the loony left in this country, everybody else pretty much has the view that China uses Pakistan as a cat's paw."

Sino-Indian relations have been fraught since the 1950s, when newly independent India and newly communist China repeatedly skirmished over their Himalayan borders and, in 1959, India offered asylum to the Dalai Lama. The two countries fought a full-scale war over possession of the Aksai Chin region and the eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in 1962, and in more recent years the two nations have continued to butt heads.

"Let's face it," said G. Parthasarathy, India's former ambassador to Pakistan. "China's policy is low-cost, long-term containment of India, and the supply of nuclear weapons to Pakistan is the best manifestation."

(Pakistan is showering China with love as Wen arrives in Islamabad.)

Indeed, many Indian policymakers credit China for arming Pakistan with nuclear weapons and supplying it with sensitive missile technology, such as the M-11 short range ballistic missile. Some go as far as to argue that Beijing is reluctant to pressure Islamabad to rein in terrorist groups because their destabilizing effect on India helps hobble a rising rival for influence in Asia.

Meanwhile, analysts here are often perplexed as to China's true intentions when Beijing takes apparently contradictory positions — like rattling sabers over the disputed border in Arunachal Pradesh at the same time it pushes for closer economic ties.

"There is in fact bewilderment of sorts on our side," said former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal. "We really don't know what they are thinking, and how their decisions are made."

Like Barack Obama's visit in November, Wen's charm offensive came with its own raft of business deals, its own rhetoric of partnership, and even its own American-style photo op, as Wen gave students at New Delhi's Tagore International School a lesson in Chinese caligraphy ("China + India, BFF," was the loose translation).

Indian and Chinese companies inked $16 billion in deals and the two countries agreed to seek to increase bilateral trade to $100 billion from today's $60 billion by 2015. But Indian foreign policy experts interpreted the visit as an attempt to draw India further into economic dependency without offering many political concessions.

While Wen made noises about reducing India's $18 billion trade deficit, for instance, the actual deals that were announced — including the purchase of $8.3 billion worth of coal-fired power generators by India's Reliance Power — will widen it, as will the relaxation of rules on Chinese banks and telecom firms.

And on the political front, Wen resisted India's efforts to get a reference to Kashmir as an integral part of India or to Pakistan's role in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai into the leaders' joint statement. He refused to offer any significant dilution to Beijing's opposition to India's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

And in his statements on the dispute over the borders of Arunachal Pradesh — which China has taken to calling "South Tibet"— Wen essentially relegated the border dispute to part of a 10-prong strategy to improve China-India relations and asserted that it would not be solved anytime soon.

"He brought very little with him," said Sibal. "The calculation seems to be that if China focuses on the commercial and economic side and projects those positive aspects of the relationship, the political side can be ignored."

However, as the spotlight turns to Pakistan — where India is likely to see Wen's statements and decisions as more meaningful — Beijing may be spoiling for a lesson in arithmetic. Already, India has begun to develop an apparently effective strategy to counter China's efforts to stave off India's rise, even if policymakers here still aren't certain they understand the motivations that guide their largest rival.

For instance, in response to Beijing's perplexing change of stance on Kashmir — where China recently began issuing stapled visas to residents, tacitly implying that Indian passports aren't valid for territory still claimed by Pakistan— India refused to include its usual support for China's sovereignty over Tibet and the so-called "One China Principle" in the joint statement issued during Wen's visit.

More troubling for Beijing, India has countered China's moves in Burma, Nepal and Sri Lanka with its own overtures to Japan, Korea and Vietnam, and New Delhi is pushing to further expand the ASEAN Plus Three formulation (which includes the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus China, Japan and South Korea).

In that context, if Beijing boosts military assistance and scripts its own nuclear deal with Pakistan to counter the U.S. deal with India, it may not go down as easily as China expects — however many times Wen and Singh vowed to remain BFFs.

"This time the Indians demonstrated that they are not invertebrates after all," said Ganguly. "They actually have a spine."