Wang Yi’s visit to Delhi: How China’s perfidy and provocations are testing India’s nerves

File image of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The whirlwind tour of China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and his mission for “united front” with India against the West remained elusive and his non-committal and evasive approach to Galwan skirmishes and aftermath received a cold-shoulder in New Delhi.

Multilateral cooperation is the main signal during this visit as bilateral ties are marred with several controversies or even enmity. Wang’s ostensible purpose of visiting India at a short notice is to prepare for the upcoming BRICS summit meeting later this year in China. While the previous meetings hosted by Russia and India were in a virtual mould, China intends to invite the BRICS leaders for an in-person meeting after it hosted recently the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Nevertheless, with 19 cities in China in various stages of lockdown due to the spread of the pandemic, doubts are expressed on whether China will be able to host such a meeting. Communist Party portals promoted “vulture journalism” in India during the virus-upsurge in April last year, not perhaps knowing that a similar situation could arise in China itself.

However, China is not intending to let India into the largest multilateral institution, the UN Security Council. Being the only permanent member not to have endorsed Indian candidature explicitly, Beijing has been non-committal on this issue, as External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar pointed out.

Second, in the background of the June 2020 border carnage that resulted in 20 Indian and 4 Chinese soldiers killed, Wang’s visit has nothing new to offer. Wang did not re-iterate the border agreements that China signed with India in 1993, 1996, 2005 and 2013, nor did he commit to ushering in peace and tranquility in the border areas, except for an anodyne comment that India needs to take a “long term vision”.

However, as it happened just before the BRICS summit meeting in September 2017 at Xiamen in the aftermath of the Dokhlam incident, China may likely concede to the Indian demand for complete “disengagement and de-escalation in all friction points” on the border, but not before gaining terrain military operational advantage across the Line of Actual Control.

Already, China had built civil-military use 200 “well-off society villages” across the LAC out of a total of 624 in Tibet. Some of these are inside the Indian claimed areas. It had also constructed bridges across Pangong Tso. Indian military response then has to be proactive in nature.

The ensuing “abnormal” nature of the bilateral relations was stressed by Dr Jaishankar when he reminded Wang about the troop deployment across the borders and the necessity to resolve this issue as a precondition for normalising bilateral relations.

Third, Wang’s visit to Delhi should be seen from the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine since 24 February and the intractable and inextricable nature of the warfare. A day after the war began, President Xi Jinping extended “in principle” support to Moscow. Aligning gradually with the Russian position, China had been vocal of Western sanctions on Russia and its envoy to Moscow had made statements encouraging Chinese companies to seize the initiative to invest in Russia. A joint statement between Presidents Putin and Xi earlier on 4 February declared “no forbidden areas” in strategic cooperation between the two.

Pursuing this coordination, Wang’s visit is intended to rope New Delhi into this “united front” with the intensification of Russia-India-China trilateral meetings. The 18th meeting of this grouping on 25 November last year extended their support to Beijing Winter Olympics, although China’s move to pitch Qi Fabao — a military officer involved in the carnage at Galwan — to carry the torchlight led to Indian diplomatic boycott of these sports events.

The current China’s assessment is that the Ukrainian war has sapped the military and economic strengths of both Russia and the western governments, thus providing it with a strategic opportunity to assert itself and fill any vacuum at the global and regional orders. Beijing is then jockeying for diplomatic influence as seen in Wang’s visits.

Fourth, Wang’s brief visit to Kabul also brought in the recent Chinese scheme to exclude India from the Afghanistan solution. Since the Taliban marched into Kabul in August last year, Beijing has been on the overdrive to prop Pakistan into the region, besides floating a “Himalayan Quad” of select South Asian countries. China also avoided participation in New Delhi organised national security advisors meeting to find an amicable solution.

Fifth, Dr Jaishankar raised the plight of nearly 30,000 self-paying Indian students registered in medical colleges in China. For the past two and half years since the virus-outbreak at Wuhan, no visas were issued nor flights allowed into China. Despite Wang assuring that their condition would be resolved, precious time has been wasted.

Sixth, last year witnessed substantial growth in bilateral trade volume between India and China despite the pandemic situation. In fact, a 2005 target of $100 billion trade by 2010 was met only in 2021, increasing the trade volume to over $120 billion, mainly the balance of payments position in favour of China. This has been partly achieved with discrimination against Indian products entry into China, despite the World Trade Organisation rules of fair market access. In more than the last decade, India lost nearly a trillion dollars to China in trade deficits, triggering speculations about emergence of tariff wars between the two countries. Wang’s visit has not been able to address this issue.

Seventh, Wang’s visit to Delhi was preceded by his attendance at the 48th Organisation of Islamic Countries meeting held at Islamabad on 22 March. Wang raised the Kashmir issue at this forum and supported Pakistan’s stance, enraging New Delhi. Before this event, China had tried to raise the Kashmir issue at the UNSC thrice in 2019 and 2020 to no avail. While China insists that all countries should abide by its “one China” policy, it adopted double standards by raising Kashmir at several multilateral fora.

China’s perfidy and provocations are testing New Delhi’s nerves on this issue and contributed to marring Wang’s visit to India.

The author is Dean of School of International Studies, JNU. Views expressed are personal.

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