Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: China’s spirit is willing but its flesh is weak!
Although President Xi Jinping, who has been purging officials left, right, and center to spruce up both the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and his government, to free them of “lethargy and corruption, things don’t seem to be working well for China. Worried that the PLA is not war-ready, he hectored them in January to pull up socks.
And China’s ailing economy cannot, despite hefty defense budgets, arrest the Dragon’s irreversible decline.
It is, therefore, behaving like those losers who try to stop others from winning.
So, despite these polycrises, and to divert the masses’ attention outside and whip up ‘nationalistic’ feelings, Beijing is deepening bilateral defense ties with the smaller neighbors of its principal Asian enemy—India—which gave the PLA a bloody nose or two in 2020 during the Eastern Ladakh conflict.
China’s threats to Taiwan and its posturing in the South China Sea are also part of the same exercise.
Off and on, Beijing also claims parts of Indian territory as its own.
On Tuesday, therefore, India rejected the Chinese ‘objections’ to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s weekend visit to Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern Himalayas which Beijing claims as a part of South Tibet.
A day later, a Chinese military delegation wrapped up a visit to three of India’s closest neighbors—the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Nepal—to boost bilateral defense ties, deepening relations in a region that New Delhi considers its sphere of influence. All these neighbors, debt-trapped by China, have refused to learn lessons from each other’s plight.
The PLA delegation held “in-depth discussions” on bilateral defense cooperation and reached various points of “consensus” during a visit from March 4 to 13, China’s defense ministry said in a statement, without elaborating, according to the media reports.
Their talks also focused on regional and security issues, the statement said, adding it “enriched the content of defense cooperation” between China and the three countries.
Post-Ladakh, and especially in the last few months, ties between Beijing and New Delhi have soared further, already strained by disputes over how their borders should be drawn to the passage of Chinese survey vessels in the Indian Ocean. In 2020, relations nosedived after 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers—some reports said over 40 PLA men– were killed during a border skirmish in Ladakh.
With India set to emerge as the third-largest economy in this decade—and potentially upstaging China as the second-largest in the next decade—Beijing is trying to throw spanners in New Delhi’s wheels wherever it can.
As part of this tactic, China this year elevated ties with the Maldives when its newly-elected President Mohamed Muizzu paid his first state visit to Beijing after winning on an “India Out” campaign platform. Even at the cost of hurting its tourism-based economy, Male is following Sri Lanka’s fate.
It is, on the contrary, enthralled that China would provide it with “military assistance”, a media report cited the Maldivian defense ministry as saying earlier this month.