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Karmayogi
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India, China ships compete
in Indian Ocean
8/ 17 June 2008, Chicago Tribune,
By Gavin Rabinowitz
Hambantota, a battered
harbor town on Sri Lanka's southern tip, seems an unlikely focus for an
emerging international competition over energy supply routes that fuel much
of the global economy. An impoverished place still recovering from the
devastation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Hambantota has a desolate air,
a sense of nowhereness, punctuated by the realization that looking south
over the expanse of ocean, the next landfall is Antarctica.
But just over the horizon
runs one of the world's great trade arteries, the shipping lanes where
thousands of vessels carry oil from the Middle East and raw materials to
Asia, returning with television sets, toys and sneakers for European
consumers. These tankers provide 80 percent of China's oil and 65 percent of
India's -- fuel desperately needed for the two countries' rapidly growing
economies. Japan, too, is almost totally dependent on energy supplies
shipped through the Indian Ocean. Any disruption -- from terrorism, piracy,
natural disaster or war -- could have devastating effects on these countries
and, in an increasingly interdependent world, send ripples across the globe.
When an unidentified ship attacked a Japanese oil tanker traveling through
the Indian Ocean from South Korea to Saudi Arabia in April, the news sent
oil prices to record highs.
For decades the world
relied on the powerful U.S. Navy to protect this vital sea lane. But as
India and China gain economic heft, they are moving to expand their control
of the waterway, sparking a new -- and potentially dangerous -- rivalry
between Asia's emerging giants.
Ties between India and
China _ which together have one-third of the world's population _ are at
their closest since a brief China-India 1962 border war. Last year, trade
between India and China grew to $37 billion and their two armies conducted
their first joint military exercise. However, the two nations remain sharply
divided over territorial claims dating back to the war. China claims India's
northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and occupies a chunk of territory in
Kashmir that Indian regards as its own.
China has given massive
aid to Indian Ocean nations, signing friendship pacts, building ports in
Pakistan and Bangladesh, and reportedly setting up a listening post on one
of Myanmar's islands near the strategic Strait of Malacca.
Among China's latest moves
is the billion dollar Hambantota port its engineers are building in Sri
Lanka, an island country just off India's southern coast. The Chinese insist
the Hambantota port is a purely commercial move, and by all appearances, it
is. But some in India see ominous designs behind the project. "We cannot
take them at face value. We cannot assume their intentions are benign," said
B. Raman, a hawkish, retired Indian intelligence official. A 2004 Pentagon
report called Beijing's effort to expand its presence in the region China's
"string of pearls."
"It is a pincer movement,"
said Rahul Bedi, a South Asia analyst with London-based Jane's Defense
Weekly. "That, together with the slap India got in 1962, keeps them awake at
night."
Now, India is trying to
parry China's moves. It beat out China for a port project in Myanmar. India
has set up listening stations in Mozambique and Madagascar, in part to
monitor Chinese movements, Bedi noted. It also has an air base in Kazakhstan
and a space monitoring post in Mongolia -- both China's neighbors. And,
flush with cash from its expanding economy, India is beefing up its
military, with the expansion seemingly aimed at China. Washington and, to a
lesser extent, Tokyo are encouraging India's role as a counterweight to
growing Chinese power.
India's 2007 defense
budget was about $21.7 billion, up 7.8 percent from 2006. China said its
2008 military budget would jump 17.6 percent to some $59 billion, following
a similar increase last year. The U.S. estimates China's actual defense
spending may be much higher. India has announced plans to have aircraft
carriers and nuclear submarines at sea in the next decade and recently
tested nuclear-capable missiles that put China's major cities well in range.
Like India, China is focusing heavily on its navy, building an increasingly
sophisticated submarine fleet that could eventually be one of the world's
largest.
India said that it needs a
military space program to defend its satellites from threats like China's
newly revealed ability to shoot down targets in orbit. The comments by
India's army chief raise the possibility of a regional race that could
accelerate the militarization of space and heighten tensions between the
Asian giants, who have been enjoying their warmest ties in decades. China
destroyed one of its own defunct weather satellites with a ballistic missile
in January, becoming the third country, after Russia and the U.S., to shoot
down an object in orbit.
The Indian military does
not have its own dedicated spy satellites and uses civilian ones to gather
imagery and other intelligence. India has an advanced civilian space program
and frequently launches both types of satellites for other countries,
including an Israeli spy satellite in January. Other Indian generals said a
military space race was almost certain. "In a life-and-death scenario, space
will provide the advantage," said Lt. Gen. H.S. Lidder, who heads the Indian
military department that deals with space technology.
Encouraging India's role
as a counter to China, the U.S. has stepped up exercises with the Indian
navy and last year sold it an American warship for the first time, the
17,000-ton amphibious transport dock USS Trenton. American defense
contractors -- shut out from the lucrative Indian market during the long
Cold War -- have been offering India's military everything from advanced
fighter jets to anti-ship missiles. "It is in our interest to develop this
relationship," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said during a visit to
New Delhi in February. "Just as it is in the Indians' interest"
Officially, China says
it's not worried about India's military buildup or its closer ties with the
U.S. However, foreign analysts believe China is deeply concerned by the
possibility of a U.S.-Indian military alliance. Ian Storey of the Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore said China sent strong diplomatic
messages expressing opposition to a massive naval exercise India held last
year with the U.S., Japan, Singapore and Australia. And Bedi, the Jane's
analyst, added "those exercises rattled the Chinese."
RIVALS - Is a collision
among
China, India and Japan
inevitable?
29 June
2008, Washington Post, By Bill Emmott/ Nayan Chanda
Asia's re-emergence has
been a long time coming. Before the industrial revolution, India and China
accounted for nearly half of the world's output of manufactured goods. After
a long hiatus scarred by colonial rule, two bloody world wars, civil strife
and revolutionary upheavals, the continent began its painful crawl back to
the forefront of the world economy. Japan had already emerged from the ashes
of war to become a leading economic power by the 1980s, at which point Deng
Xiaoping set China on its amazing trajectory. In 1991, with national
bankruptcy looming, India also undertook free-market reforms.
Numerous books, from
William H. Overholt's The Rise of China (1993) to Peter Engardio's
Chindia: How China and India are Revolutionizing Global Business (2006),
have expressed breathless enthusiasm over Asia's rising powers. Yet others,
such as Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro's The Coming Conflict with
China (1997), have foreseen disasters just around the corner, from
regional conflict to environmental catastrophe to war with the United
States. In Rivals, Bill Emmott splits the difference, offering a
sober, nuanced assessment of the opportunities and dangers that Asia's rise
presents. But because so much writing about Asia is either celebratory or
alarmist, this cautious, hedging, not-sure-how-it-will-turn-out book is
refreshing.
Emmott, a former Tokyo
correspondent and editor of the Economist, starts by noting an important
U.S. foreign policy achievement that has been overlooked in the general
dismay over the war in Iraq. He credits the Bush administration for spotting
the shifting regional balance produced by China's phenomenal economic growth
and for embracing India as a counterweight. Though lacking the drama of
Nixon's 1972 visit to China, the (yet to be implemented) U.S.-India nuclear
agreement, he says, was "an act of grand strategic importance."
Emmott proceeds to explore
the dynamics of economic and demographic change in China, Japan and India.
In his view, ancient rivalries and mutual suspicions among the Asian powers,
aggravated by their expanding populations, could spoil the happy march
toward prosperity. Although Asia may not be in a full-fledged arms race, he
says, it is certainly in a "strategic-insurance-policy race," in which
China's military spending has been rising 18 percent a year and India's has
been going up 8 percent. "It will be quite a surprise if China does not have
aircraft carriers by 2020 or so," he notes, "and India has already announced
that it will have at least three."
Japan, too, would be
building up its military insurance policy if it did not have constitutional
constraints on its armed forces and a close military alliance with the
United States. But "the main problem in Asia," Emmott concludes, "is fear
and suspicion of China. It is not going to go away." So what should be done
to avoid conflict?
Emmott offers a series of
recommendations for the United States, the European Union and the rising
Asian powers, some of which may strike readers as worthy goals that have
little practical chance of attainment. He says, the United States and the
European Union should urgently "scrap or reform all the top organizations of
global governance in which China, India and Japan are not properly and fully
represented," including the Group of Eight leading industrial countries, the
U.N. Security Council, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Japan, with help from its former enemies, should leave behind its bitter
history and acknowledge its wartime atrocities. India should rise above its
suspicion of its neighbors and develop cooperative relations. China's "main
weakness is its authoritarian, unaccountable and sometimes brutal political
system," he says, "but it would waste space to recommend that that system be
changed." Instead, Emmott urges Beijing to be more transparent about its
decisions because "by keeping so much secret . . . China encourages other
countries to believe it has a lot to hide."
Emblematic of the fine
balance of this book is Emmott's observation that armed conflict among
Asia's rivals is "not inevitable but nor is it inconceivable." Sketching a
"plausibly pessimistic" scenario, he suggests that an economic downturn and
popular discontent could lead the Chinese Communist Party to wrap itself in
the flag of nationalism and slide into conflict with neighbors over Taiwan,
the Korean peninsula, Tibet or Pakistan. But he thinks there is also reason
for "credible optimism." With encouragement from the rest of the world, the
Asian powers could lift millions more people out of poverty with their
dynamism, innovation and faith in a unifying religion: money. |
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