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The chill wind from China

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K. M. PANIKKAR, DIPLOMAT, historian and political courtier, in an engaging memoir entitled, In Two Chinas, recalls his time as Indian ambassador to China in the fading twilight of the Kuomintang's regime's last months through to the Communist accession t o power and its consolidation over the next critical years.

Of his first impressions, Panikkar writes: ``It did not take me long to discover that the Kuomintang attitude towards India, while genuinely friendly, was inclined to be a little patronising. Independence of India was welcome, but, of course, it was unde rstood that China as the recognised Great Power in the East after the war expected India to know her place...But I soon realised that even in regard to America, the attitude of China was one of patronising condescension...To the Kuomintang, which had inh erited the mantle of the Son of Heaven, America was no more than the great barbarian for whose dollars and equipment she had immediate need, but for whose culture she had no great admiration. Chiang himself was in no sense pro-American, while those aroun d him like Chen Pu-li and Chen Li-fu were aggressive Confucians who believed in the racial and moral superiority of the Chinese.''

As with Chang, so with Mao. What was true of America became true of Russia. The Middle Kingdom complex may undergo its various permutations, but its roots show little sign of withering. Chiang Kai-shek was committed to restoration of the farthest expanse s of the Manchu empire, his arch rival Mao Zedong was little different. Turkey, based on the Anatolean plateau, is all that remains of the Ottoman empire, whereas contemporary China runs along the old Manchu frontiers, except for Outer Mongolia whose ind ependence and sovereignty were guaranteed by the might of Stalin's Red Army.

Panikkar accepted that there was a common Chinese and Indian pride in ``the message of Asia Resurgent,'' but that they differed ``in their conception of social life, and perhaps more than even that, in their attitude to the world. India had taken up open ly the position that the world could not be divided into sheep and goats...the Faithful and the Kaffir...Mao Zedong, on the other hand, had publicly proclaimed his faith that there can be only two camps and all who are not of the Faithful are Kaffirs''. Panikkar took it upon himself to prove to his hosts that there could be a possible third way, a formidable task at the best of times since the pride of the mandarin, as Lord Curzon once remarked, ``is beyond human conception''.

As a struggling revolutionary, Mao was grateful to Nehru for answering his appeal with the despatch of an Indian medical mission to the Communist-controlled area of China, but as China's new ruler in 1949, his earlier friendliness turned to hostility as the following lines in the Shanghai publication, World Culture, testify: ``Nehru is a rebel against the movement for national independence, a blackguard who undermines the progress of the people's liberation movement, a loyal slave of imperialism.''This diatribe appeared as Mao's legions were preparing in 1950 to enter Tibet, a country no more Chinese than Czechoslovakia is German. Like Mongolia and Xinjiang, Tibet was an imperial Manchu acquisition and the Communist Government in Beijing was keen to cl aim its historical inheritance. India's mild protests were brusquely brushed aside, provoking from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel a warning to Jawaharlal Nehru. ``I doubt if we can go any further than we have done already to convince China of our good intentio ns, friendliness and goodwill. In Peking, we have an ambassador (Panikkar), who is eminently suitable for putting across the friendly point of view. Even he seems to have failed to convert the Chinese. Their last telegram to us is an act of gross discour tesy...in the wild insinuation that our attitude is determined by foreign influences. It looks as though it is not a friend speaking in that language, but a potential enemy...we have to consider what new situation now faces us as a result of the disappea rance of Tibet as we know it, and the expansion of China almost up to our gates.''

These were penned in December 1950, a week or so before its author's death, but Patel simply restated a timeless geopolitical truth, first articulated by Lord Curzon at the turn of the 20th century, that a friendly, independent Tibet was vital to Indian security.

The Sino-Indian relationship has been an unequal one for the past half-century. While India has long recognised Beijing's sovereignty over Tibet, Beijing refuses to acknowledge Sikkim's status within the Indian Union. The facade of normality in Sino-Indi an relations scarcely conceals the undercurrent of mistrust. Commenting on the visit to Washington by the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and his talks with the US President, Mr Bill Clinton, Liberation Army Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese military, sneered that India's ``big power diplomacy'' aims only to ``isolate and attack Pakistan''. The Chinese Communist party organ, The People's Daily, claimed that the US strategy is to ``use Japan and India to contain China''. Just as America had u sed China to contain India and Vietnam and break the back of the former USSR.

In an age, grown accustomed to the concept of total war, a report from the Beijing correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Damien McElroy, says plans are afoot to use nuclear explosions to blast a tunnel through the Himalayas for what would be the worl d's largest hydroelectric plant. The goal is to divert the flow of Asia's great rivers to the arid regions of China's north and west. The proposed power station, according to official Chinese projections, will produce twice as much electricity as the Thr ee Gorges Dam, being built on the Yangtze river. The new project would commence once the Three Gorges Dam is completed by 2009.

China's state-run media reported that a 38 million kilowatt power station at Muotue on the Yarlung Zangbo river in Tibet would harness the force of a 9,840 ft drop in terrain over a few miles. First, a tunnel would be drilled through Mount Namcha Barwa. At the bottom of the tunnel, the water will flow into a reservoir and then diverted along some 500 miles of the Tibetan upland to the arid fastnesses of Xinjiang and Gansu. There are also plans to replenish the waters of the Yellow river in China's north through gigantic water diversion schemes.

Chinese Vice-Premier Wen Jibao, tipped as a future Prime Minister, who is the driving force behind these schemes, is quoted as saying, ``In the 21st century, the construction of large dams will play a key role in pushing the national economy forward.'' B ut this is also calculated to push the national economies of some of China's principal neighbours, India among them, backward.

The lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo flows south, where it becomes the Brahmaputra, irrigates Assam and Bengal before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. The ecology of these plains will be devastated. An important, densely populated segment of India wil l be at the mercy of China in regard to water flows from the Yarlung Zangbo. The water will be held back during the dry season to keep the reservoir full for power generation. During the monsoon months, the Chinese will be forced to release the water in bursts. The sudden, unexplained floods in Arunachal Pradesh some weeks ago which washed away roads and bridges and cut off the province from the rest of the country is a foretaste of things to come. Water, like oil, can be made into an instrument of host ile diplomacy and war.

China's focus on the south and west as a source of energy has already disturbed other neighbours as far apart as Vietnam and Kazakhstan. For, apart from the Brahmaputra, Chinese development plans in Tibet will affect the flow of water into the Mekong, th e Irrawaddy, the Ganga and the Indus. Vietnam has issued a strong statement criticising the construction of 14 dams on Chinese stretches of the Mekong. Phan Thuy Thanh, a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Hanoi, emphasised that any scheme ``should ensure the sustainability of the ecological environment of the entire river as well as legitimate and equal interest of all the countries located in the region.''

Quite so. Vietnam is concerned that sudden releases of water from overburdened Chinese dams during the monsoon season would greatly swell its usual death toll of 600 people to a vastly higher and unacceptable level. Perhaps, China is conveying a none-too -subtle message to India and Vietnam and countries beyond. The signal from India must also be hard and clear. The next decade will be a critical one for Sino-Indian relations. The Chinese Communist Party has long lost its revolutionary elan. It is now th e midwife of crony capitalism which, in turn, has become the breeding ground of ever deepening societal crisis. A civil society remains a distant dream and the military may well emerge as the dominant influence in government, the guarantor of the Chinese political order. Imperial Japan showed how lethal is the cocktail of militant nationalism, ethnocentric conceit and unbridled military ambition.

In His Last Bow, Sherlock Holmes tells his friend Watson, ``There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before the blast. But it's God's own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.''

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellogg College, Oxford, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)