Wuhan woos: China and India rewriting future history?
Behind the brouhaha of the recent Macron-Trump and Moon-Kim summits, the Modi-Jinping rendezvous may have made less noise, but could make more substantive global changes. A multi-layered appraisal at the local, regional, and global levels examines the proposition.
All three meetings sought to dissolve local irritants: Emmanuel Macron to reverse his sinking domestic reputation and Donald J Trump yearning for a key foreign policy accomplishment; Moon Jae-in charting a different post-election Korean trajectory than his disgraced predecessor, Park Geun-hye, did with her Saenuri ("New Frontier") Party, with Kim Jong-un, gleeful from successfully testing North Korea's first intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), beginning his isolation roll-back with his southern neighbours and kinsmen; and Narendra Modi pragmatically not disrupting domestic networks thriving on Chinese trade, with Xi Jinping silencing Tibetans by cornering Dalai Lama's alleged fifth-column within India.
Plenty regional issues justified those summits too. In their respective order, not only fraying transatlantic relations, but also as Russian and Turk interests shift from diverging to opposing their Atlantic partners (to wit, NATO interests); Japan's deep concerns over North Korean missile-testing over its own air-space, that too, paralleling growing Chinese challenges; as well as three potentially explosive China-India issues demanding controls: (a) the Doklam face-off last summer alongside Bhutan; (b) the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) transgressing through India-claimed Kashmir; and (c) India's absence in China's Belt-Road Initiative before the June 2018 Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit China will host.
Yet, the meat in all three lay at the strategic level, that is, where global-level considerations and calculations drive decisions. It is here where the China-India exchange resonates relatively louder than those two summits. Without the United States remaining with the 2015 P5+1-imposed caps on Iran's nuclear development (with the P5+1 referring to the UN Security Council's five permanent members, and the one to Germany, a reference better known as 3+3 across Europe, with China, Russia, and the United States representing one side of the equation, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom the other), Iran would be freed to pursue its own nuclear programme as it alone wishes. Iran's nuclear threat upon Israel was a prior catalyst. That fear has since been overtaken by Iran dangerously joining the Russia-Syria-Turkey combination against NATO forces inside Syria, while also permitting the feud with Saudi Arabia to escalate on the side-lines.
Compounding matters, Saudi Arabia's rapprochement with Israel emboldened Benjamin Netanyahu to call Iran a "liar", with evidence so stale that only the United States would gulp (as visiting US Secretary of State Michael Richard Pompeo's Jerusalem visit indicated). It is still crude, but emergent fault-lines suggest Iran, Russia, and Turkey are lining up against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
On the Korean peninsula, "Rocket Man" Kim's ICBM exercises came close to drawing blood last year when the US Seventh Fleet sailed into the Japan Sea off Korea. China went the extra diplomatic (and economic) yard to thwart any confrontation, only magnifying the strategic value of the Moon-Kim summit. With Korean interests spilling over, how China and Japan realign will be as crucial as the US naval presence, if not more. When Shinzo Abe hosts a summit with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Moon on May 9, China will be in full control of the Far East, play secondarily in the Middle East, but most potent where it is most strategic: nuclear-ridden South Asia.
Wooing each other in Wuhan, Modi and Jinping may have a rough 21st Century global road-map. In spite of Doklam, CPEC incursion into Kashmir, China's proprietorship of Hambantoto Port in Sri Lanka, and China becoming the largest foreign partner of Bangladesh, India's fervent NSG membership (Nuclear Suppliers Group), which Pakistan also seeks, cannot happen without China's acquiescence. This is a key to India's passage into great-power status that Pakistan cannot match, even as a NSG member. A deliberate day-long Wuhan "garden party" more suitable to China's benevolent foreign policy approach, as opposed to a more belligerent US counterpart under Trump (and infrequently by China too, as the South China Sea experiment shows), was prepared through three lower-level deliberations.
One reason why India's huge NSG advantage over Pakistan is its economic might. Even behind all the domestic problems being triggered by Modi's economic reforms, especially as these begin to limit India's growth-rate. India still boasts the world's highest growth-rate among countries that matter. That expanding list now extends far outside the OECD boundaries, with India's name now being mentioned in the same breath as before the British Empire began, when China and India boasted the largest economies.
We will, perhaps in our own life-time, see both countries return to being the world's two largest economies, but with India in the driving-seat given its higher economic and population growth-rates. To get there, India must first ride as a front-seat passenger alongside China, its largest current trading partner actually enjoying too skewed a favourable balance. It is not just that India's younger workers may eat away this disadvantage over time, chip by chip, but also that imports from China have created deep retail-level networks. To chop (rather than chip) portions of this deficit through tariffs would pit Modi against more local resentment (he is already bombarded by too many domestic challenges), irrevocably eroding his pre-election support-base, and threatening the Indian transplanting of his very successful Gujarati reforms.
No future projections here will hold if domestic turmoil intervenes; and every major country in the world today is replete with destabilising triggers for even modest future projections to hold. Modi's right-wing supporters could unleash a wider purification campaign across India, further threatening already cowed-down minorities, which Pakistan's evergreen jihadists could easily exploit. Similarly, China's phenomenal economic growth has not been followed by appropriate social adjustments, if indeed that is at all possible since culture is not an assembly-line product like trade merchandise that Chinese leaders can dictate.
Such a historical hindsight among Chinese and Indian leaders (Great Silk Route for China, Hindutva for India), is a luxury for rivals: the United States does not have a deep enough history to draw upon, and even if it did, its policymakers have rarely invoked it upon foreign policy; Russia cannot look back because of the bitter and barbaric experiences it holds; while France, Germany, and Great Britain possess rich and relevant such reservoirs, yet do not steer the strategic global dynamics wheel anymore.
Economic performances, not military victories, have catalysed China's global leadership climb. Though the military is important to India, given its Pakistan, when India sparkles economically, the world is likely to sparkle more than under China's asymmetrically-bent economic thrusts because of more respectable rules and greater transparency. That Jinping and Modi met in Wuhan Museum underscores a historical bond both shared, but also a strategic future road-map that snap-shots scowling across the Atlantic or Korea cannot.
Ian Bremmer's term, frenemies (friends and enemies) aptly explains those Wuhan woos: expect both future coos and shoos in this relationship.
Dr Imtiaz A Hussain is the head of Global Studies & Governance Program at Independent University, Bangladesh.