9 October 2020
For all the geostrategic play many are actually going about discounting what I would call the domestic and the immediate for China. Just look at Taiwan, which appeared increasingly amenable at one point to sort of coexisting with China, even under the One China Policy, which America had under Nixon endorsed, which successive American Presidents heeded to mean downgrading the status of Taiwan from an Ally in the Frontline against a Communist Regime, to treating it as an adhoc or quasi state of sorts, almost looking at one time on Taiwan with the same prism as Hong Kong and Macau! In fact, so encouraged was the Chinese CCP regime by the Western embrace of China, that it offered Taiwan a ‘One Country Two Systems’ formula, like how it offered one to retrieve Hong Kong from the UK in 1997! In what can be called out as the first line of Taiwanese defence lies the Kinmen Islands, and in what can be called the biggest change in the status of Taiwan is how the once PRC now downplays that identity and how on its National Day today, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Taiwan-s-Tsai-paints-China-as-aggressor-in-India-South-China-Sea Taiwan for the first time under President Tsai has actually looked upon itself as a state separate from the legacy of the mainland, that Taiwan for all purposes has embraced an identity as an island nation and seeks to empathise with India, https://twitter.com/iingwen/status/1315140681980026880?s=20 with ASEAN vis-à-vis Chinese claims in the Himalayas, or the South China Sea. Remember, initially the KMT held that China and Taiwan ( Formosa) had differences, which were ‘internal’ while externally the KMT was as committed to One China Policy as CCP was, which included their claims across the McMohan Line and the Johnson Line in Himalayas, the status of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia as regions entirely under the influence of the Chinese Kingdoms of antiquity and necessarily integral to the modern Chinese nation. While it is early days, what we can say is that CCP’s belligerence has created room for Taiwan to militarily build up, to seek transfer of American weaponry and to reopen the possibility of US Marines being stationed once more there, under the terms of the US Taiwan Relations Act 1979. The serious rethinking of US on the status of Taiwan is with the introduction of Taiwan Defence Act introduced by Representative Gallagher (Republican from Wisconsin) in June 2020.https://gallagher.house.gov/media/press-releases/gallagher-introduces-taiwan-defense-act
If intelligentsia can connect the dots from Taiwan’s rethink, https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/10/10/defending-taiwan-is-growing-costlier-and-deadlier it would automatically mean a repudiation of One China Policy for better or worse, which means that long repressed Tibetan aspirations, or aspirations of Uighuri Moslems https://supchina.com/2020/05/05/preserving-uyghur-art-and-culture-amid-cultural-genocide/ or aspirations of Inner Mangolian Mongols https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/01/inner-mongolia-protests-china-mandarin-schools-language need not be viewed from the prism of ‘internal matters of China’, but as legitimate struggles of peoples. Of course, one is not suggesting that overnight a new ‘South Sudan’ would emerge from the mass of this People’s Republic of China, but what it means is that insurgent movement with plausible deniability can be sponsored in these areas. While the aim could be anything from just striving to get greater autonomy for these unique peoples and cultures, to a dissolution of CCP’s China as we know it, we know that the US Deep State today would be more amenable to revisit the premise under which it allowed Tibet, Xinjiang and other ‘autonomous’ regions inside the Chinese Bamboo Curtain to a more buffered China downsized and manageable, so that the Western Compact could continue with its global dominance for the coming Century! If China is not ‘contained’ it would end up creating a true global bipolarity with no parallel with the Soviet versus Free World, since it is economically enmeshed with the globe and technologically as advanced as the Leaders of the Free World!
So if you keep seeing videos of Chinese PLA showing how they set up camps on far flung areas of Tibetan plateau, you will find that the Chinese camps are located in valleys, at intersectional fords and consist of hutments which appear to be made of fibre glass or such panels, prefabricated and assembled on site. If you see tactically, the PLA has not moved up to eyeball to eyeball positions with the Indian Army in Eastern Ladakh even in the contested Pangong Tso North and South Shores or the Finger 4 area within. If you read how the Indian and Pakistani troops are deployed in the Line of Control in Western Kashmir, you will be able to compare that ‘hot deployment’ to this one and understand why the PLA is not by setting up these camps, contemplating such an active border management with India as her Pakistani clients have been doing for decades. Incidentally, the PLA did man a border with Vietnam for four years in the late 70s and again a couple in mid 80s, which compares starkly with how the PLA has manned the Indian border. Is it because, somewhere in the back of the Han calculus, these are Tibet’s borders, whereas the Vietnamese border has Yunan and Guangxi which have been ethnic Miao and Yao with whom the ‘Chinese’ share heritage with Vietnam and a contested one where Vietnamese once extended their reach to the whole of Guangxi. So is the Han contemplating conventional military operations or is he thinking of something else? Could these camps be interdictions for potential Tibetan insurgency as rumours are that now under President Xi the CCP is turning to Tibet, to do there what they did in Uighur rather successfully from 2014 to 2019? Is India’s holding of the Kailash shoulder a prelude to Tibetan militia probing and attempting to infiltrate a resistance in Tibet? Remember that people continue to escape the CCP regime in Tibet, in Uighur, in Inner Mongolia, and we know of senior Buddhist clergy being closely monitored and unofficially imprisoned by CCP cadre in Tibet to avert the embarrassment of another escape, starting from the present Dalai Lama. Is that also the reason the Chinese are interested in Humla, Sindhupalchowk and other border areas which used to be traditional routes out from Tibet? Could that also be the interest of the Chinese in Doklam? Could it be their unease with the fact that decades ago the Dalai made an escape with all its attendant consequences?
We know that Hong Kong has now been placed under a new security law, one that allowed CCP to administer its version of justice to the Hong Kong inhabitants. We can see from the way the UK and the rest of the western compact have reacted by repealing or halting the provisions that enabled Hong Kong to be treated as a distinct entity, one clearly not at par with China, with preferential trading and financial rules. Now if all this holds, it would actually end up with severely cramping up the functioning of business operations for multinationals and others who currently operate from Hong Kong. We also saw the spectacle of a Hong Kong protestor waiving an Indian tricolour on the Chinese National Day, again, an hitherto fore unheralded sense of transnational connect to India, whereas India has officially no policy toward Hong Kong, having never complained even politely about the way protests were handled on this special territory!
We see the protests in Inner Mongolia about the imposition of mandarin there in schools, which was unique and which was again unprecedented. We know suddenly there is realisation of the near genocide that has visited the Uighurs, with satellite images of camps, with documentaries about their working under Chinese approvals, and then famous Uighur dissidents who have spoken to the Western media and made clear that Chinese CCP has not held out hope for reform from within and to embrace a more pluralistic society with more internal democracy that Western Compact hoped would come about through their engagement with the Chinese!
So can we really see if these issues of ethnic minorities would be exploited by US led Coalition against China? For any strategic calculus to ignore these existing fault lines would be improbable. Can one fancy a Jihad by Uighuris under CIA tutelage? An ‘Intifada’ style resurrection inside Xinjiang? Can we foretell if the Tibetans seeking Independence from China and hoping to return the Dalai Lama to Potala Palace in Lhasa would give up on their dreams or would they plan a series of measures to create unrest and ensure conditions that would focus world attention on the cause of the Tibetans and obtain concessions from CCP? Can any Bloc actually sanction China today? Go beyond the current level of banning apps on Smart Devices and actually boycott Chinese goods and services? No one imagined that 2020 would be the year that China under President Xi would make a push like the one she has. No one could predict this broad based advancing of Chinese Dreams of ‘restoration’, a dream where the Middle Kingdom sees itself as a kind of natural global potentate in its revisionist versions of history. So having come this far, would China settle for less? The only motivation would be costs. Costs of keeping Divisions in Tibet and Xinjiang, costs of keeping troops in far flung camps, over extended supply lines, garrisoning what appear to be key valleys and fords on the map! Costs of pressure from US Seventh Fleet, from strategic bombers and naval ships frequenting the Straits of Taiwan, with two carrier groups in the Indo Pacific region? What if 2021 actually sees the arrival once more of Marines to Taiwan? What if now the LAC would need constant manning going forward? What if the PLAN would need to sail out from Hainan and keep patrolling in SCS and Malacca and Hormuz? Right now, in 2020, Chinese force levels are at a stretch, given their planned upgrades and accretions, by 2035, they would be much better positioned to counter US led military presence and pressures. While the Indian leadership has been reticent, the DRDO and military formations have been testing missiles for MBTs, for Air Dominance, for IRBM cruise missile roles and Long Range torpedoes, all in just these last two months, which the CMC in Beijing must not think of as more than coincidence?
Sometimes, there is a larger dynamic at play, like that for the CCP here. Instead of moving toward a more representative and democratic umbrella framework, the CCP regime appears to have taken a more regressive step consolidating itself in a totalitarian and authoritative manner. The wave of repression it has unleashed in Autonomous regions and amongst its dissidents is suggestive not of what we see in the glitz and buzz of China’s mega cities. What gives? What ever the fault lines, the energies that have been unleashed are offering more than one level of inducement for countries to coalesce into a front against CCP’s China. Is the CCP’s external posturing a compulsion to distract from internal dissensions? Or is it just the overweening ambition of President Xi whose appetite for risk taking has shown no signs of diminishing! Either way, a series of dominos have been set on, which land up at the door of the Quad. That is how the Quad is, not because of individual desires or aims or ambitions, but because a whole lot of players across the spectrum inside and outside CCP China are looking to members of the Quad individually and as a grouping to somehow retrieve this situation!
(Concluded)
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