China’s propensity to nibble away at territories of its sovereign neighbours is too well-known by now to bear repetition.
Be it Nepal, Bhutan, India, Myanmar or Vietnam, China has employed a range of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics against its neighbours. Given the fact that India has been perhaps the worst-affected by China’s expansionism, New Delhi needs to put in place a range of measures to thwart Beijing’s plans.
China’s expansionism is in the news once again with media reports about the Chinese building a settlement of a hundred odd houses in Arunachal Pradesh’s Upper Subansiri district.
An NDTV exclusive report that appeared Monday (18 January) claimed, on the basis of satellite imagery from Planet Labs (a planet monitoring and geo-analytics company), that China has established a village about 4.5 kilometres inside Indian territory south of the McMahon Line that demarcates the boundary between India and Tibet.
China disputes the legal status of the line, though it recognises a Line of Actual Control (LAC) which approximates most of the McMahon Line.
The northern parts of the Upper Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh are disputed by both China and India and the area along the Tsari Chu river (also known as ‘Lensi river’ by the local Galo tribe) where the Chinese settlement has come up has been under Beijing’s control since 1959.
Hence, to say that the Chinese have entered Indian territory and established a settlement in land belonging to India is factually incorrect.
But be that as it may, it remains a fact that it has been China’s constant endeavour to lay claim on parcels of Indian territory and proclaim them as part of China, establish a military presence there and then build infrastructure and settlements.
China has been expanding its territory at the cost of its neighbours, and has got away with it all these decades. And that has emboldened Beijing to be more brazen.
It is high time now that New Delhi, individually and collectively in association with other affected countries like Bhutan, Myanmar and Vietnam, starts standing up to China’s expansionism and takes preemptive measures to foil its salami-slicing.
Here are five robust measures that India needs to adopt to thwart China’s designs:
1. Populate the remote areas along the LAC: China takes advantage of the absence of human habitation in the remote and often inhospitable areas along the LAC and thus sneaks into and claims those areas.
India should follow China’s example and offer incentives to tribals of Arunachal (and also locals in other states along the LAC) to settle down in those areas. China has been offering free houses, employment and other opportunities and incentives to its citizens, mainly Hans, to settle down in newly-developed townships along the LAC.
These resettled families form the eyes and ears of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Many of them are veterans of the PLA and the People’s Armed Police (PAP), and form the first line of defence.
India has done this, albeit on a limited scale, at Vijayanagar in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh.
About 200 ex-servicemen of the Assam Rifles were provided incentives to settle down with their families in the newly-developed Vijaynagar, which was then an inhospitable area close to the LAC, in 1964.
But this was not replicated in other areas. The government of India needs to adopt this policy and offer free housing, employment and livelihood opportunities, free or subsidised rations and other incentives for people to go and settle down in the remote areas along the LAC.
2. Redouble efforts to develop infrastructure in border areas: Over the past six years, the pace of infrastructure development in the areas along the 3,488km LAC has picked up pace.
In fact, the achievements in this regard over the past six years are much more than what was achieved over the past 60 years.
But India has a lot of catching up to do with China, which has been assiduously building roads, bridges, tunnels, military garrisons and townships along the LAC since the early 1960s.
India, thus, has to divert a lot of its resources and attention in developing border infrastructure and increasing its military presence along the LAC.
3. Install latest surveillance hardware and ‘eyes in the sky’ along LAC: India has lagged behind in procuring sophisticated radars and other surveillance equipment even as China has gone ahead and developed satellite early warning systems all along the LAC. In the past decade, China has also installed a network of surveillance cameras, often in territory claimed by India.
India has, once again, lagged behind in this. The Indian Army has been hamstrung by the absence of modern surveillance equipment and has had, till recently, to rely on human intelligence and physical surveillance.
It is only over the past six years the process of procurement and deployment of sophisticated drones, cameras, radars and other surveillance hardware has started.
But, once again, India has a lot of catching up to do. And, hence, it has to stretch its resources, if necessary, to put in place a robust surveillance system to thwart Chinese incursions.
4. Replicate Chinese manoeuvres: In a brilliant strategic move, the Indian Army occupied crucial hilltops and heights on the south bank of Pangong Tso in Ladakh in end-August last year.
This has given the Indian Army a huge advantage over the Chinese as the heights it now occupies look down on Chinese military garrisons and all Chinese moves can be closely monitored.
After occupying strategically-located peaks on the south bank, the Indian Army also occupied some high areas on the northern bank. This has unnerved the Chinese and that is why China has been repeatedly insisting that troop pullback start from the Pangong Tso area.
India needs to outsmart China in other sectors, including Arunachal Pradesh. Despite China’s installation of high-tech surveillance equipment, there are still many areas that are blind spots.
India needs to choose ‘disputed’ areas along or near the LAC which will accord it strategic advantage over China and occupy these areas that it claims as its own. The time to do so is now since effective surveillance by China is hamstrung due to the harsh winters in the Himalayan heights. Indian Army soldiers, with smart planning, can easily occupy strategically-located areas that will accord India decisive advantage over China.
China needs to be defeated at its own game.
5. Launch information warfare against China’s salami-slicing: Many countries, including the US, now acknowledge and have hit out against China for its incursions into territories belonging to India. While this is a welcome development, New Delhi needs to build on this and shame China on the global stage.
A 360-degree information warfare needs to be launched against China to expose its salami-slicing tactics and its expansionism.
India needs to get on board other countries like Bhutan, Myanmar and Vietnam (Nepal is also a victim as well, but Chinese influence over it is too strong to allow it to speak out against its expansionist neighbour on this) to expose China’s design to the world.
India, individually and jointly with the above-named nations, needs to put this topic on the agenda of different fora like the United Nations and multilateral mechanisms like BRICS and G-20.
Despite an impression gaining ground in some strategic circles, China is still mindful of and sensitive to international opinion and would not like its expansionist designs to get exposed on the international stage.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Panchsheel Agreement (the five principles of peaceful co-existence that India signed with China in 1954) that China has observed only in violation needs to be replaced now with the above-mentioned multi-pronged ‘Panch-Shield’ strategy.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.