29 June 2017
A Kink In China’s New Silk Road
‘One Belt, One Road’ bypasses India.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Consider these three apparently unconnected stories in the news this week:
Two Chinese teachers were recently kidnapped in Pakistan by Isis. The security services tracked them to a network of tunnels near the border with Afghanistan, and last week Pakistani commandos fought a five-day underground battle against the militants to reach the cave where the captives were being held. Unfortunately, the captors escaped with their hostages, and this week it was reported that the two teachers have been murdered and beheaded.
President Trump welcomed India’s prime minister Narendra Modi to Washington. Mr Modi was the first foreign leader to be a guest of Mr Trump for dinner at the White House. During Mr Modi’s two day trip, Mr Trump is expected to authorise the sale of twenty-two Predator surveillance drones (worth $2 billion) to India.
China made a formal complaint to India, accusing Indian border guards of crossing into Tibet from Sikkim state, and claiming that the Indian army had obstructed road works on the Chinese side of the border.
In fact these aren’t separate stories but chapters in the same story. And that story is all about the spread of Chinese power and influence westwards.
President Xi’s plans for a new Silk Road – his “Belt and Road Initiative” – is a grand scheme to build a new economic belt stretching all the way from China to Europe by establishing new roads (by sea and land) across Asia. China intends to spend between $4 trillion and $8 trillion on huge infrastructure projects in sixty-eight countries.
Pakistan is one of the most significant countries in the scheme. Beijing is spending $55 billion to build 21 power stations there. It has already built a huge port at Gwadar on the Indian Ocean, and is now upgrading and expanding it even further. The ‘China-Pakistan economic corridor’, including an oil-pipeline, will run the length of Pakistan from the Chinese border in the Himalayas to this port, giving land-locked western China vital access to the sea.
But that all now hangs in the balance following the abduction and murder of the two Chinese teachers. The incident has infuriated Beijing and embarrassed Islamabad. There is a suspicion that militants including the Taliban have targeted the corridor; at least forty-six Pakistani workers have been killed by terrorists while working on its projects. Chinese workers have been evacuated from the volatile Balochistan province and its capital Quetta, a centre of Islamist activity where the two teachers were seized, but there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese working elsewhere in the country (more than 70,000 visas were granted to Chinese people last year). Beijing has demanded more protection for them, and Islamabad has promised 15,000 extra troops to guard corridor projects.
This week China showed that it is keenly aware of the threat which terrorism in Pakistan poses to its great project; foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuan announced that China will conduct ‘shuttle diplomacy’ between Pakistan and Afghanistan to try to contain the cross-border traffic in terrorism between the two countries. Foreign minister Wang Yi visited Kabul and Islamabad last week to get both countries to sign up to a ‘Crisis Management Mechanism’.
Meanwhile, India looks on with some trepidation. India is one of the few countries which have not enthusiastically welcomed the new Silk Road plan. India is wary of Chinese expansionism. The two countries are economic competitors, two rival Asian giants growing side by side. India is concerned that the Initiative is a Chinese plot to grab control of the Indian Ocean from under its nose (China is building a massive port in Sri Lanka, too). And it finds Chinese involvement with India’s traditional enemy Pakistan particularly worrying. The ‘China-Pakistan economic corridor’ enters Pakistan from China via Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, territories which India considers its own and over which Pakistan and India have fought at least three wars. China has offered to mediate between the two countries over the dispute, but India has rejected the offer, fearing that mediation may be an excuse for China to move troops into the territory. Indeed, India and China went to war with each other over Chinese-occupied north-eastern Kashmir in 1962; and China’s accusations of cross-border incursions at the other end of the Himalayas this week proves that this conflict still smoulders.
Moreover, India is concerned that the spread of Chinese influence westwards isn’t just economic, but also military. Islamabad has just confirmed that it’s in discussions with Beijing about China building a military base in Pakistan. Officials have admitted that there are ‘clear possibilities’ for China to build a naval base on the coast towards Pakistan’s border with Iran, giving China’s navy access not just to the Indian Ocean but also to the Persian Gulf. The port of Gwadar seems the obvious place.
Such statements confirm US suspicions; only last month a Pentagon report suggested that China had ambitions to extend its naval power westwards in this way. The USA is just as concerned as India, if not more so. It’s already trying to contain Chinese ambitions in the South China Seas; it now seems that it will have the same job on its hands in the Indian Ocean and, more seriously, in the Gulf. Pakistan is an important strategic ally of the US, and receives huge amounts of military and economic aid from America, but now it looks like Pakistan is preparing to switch alliances to a power which appears to offer it more muscle against India.
No wonder India’s prime minister Narendra Modi was invited to dinner at the White House. No doubt those twenty-two Predator drones will be used to track Chinese nuclear submarines in the Indian Ocean. And no doubt their sale won’t be the last piece of military co-operation between the USA and India.
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