Zhou Enlai talks with Nehru during the Bandung Conference in 1955.
Recently, the situation on the Sino-Indian border has become tense, and it seems that a war is imminent. Many commentaries refer to the “1962 Sino-Indian border war,” but not in detail. More often, they talk about U.S.-India relations, geopolitics, and troop comparisons. The New York Times said during Modi’s visit to the U.S., “India’s suspicions of China are deep-rooted.” The Hong Kong media even said that “the deadly knot in Sino-Indian relations cannot be untied”. Among the targets of Xi Jinping‘s “Belt and Road” unification campaign, only India does not buy it – find out why the two rising powers have such a deep grudge against each other. It helps to assess the prospects for a new round of Sino-Indian conflict.
The 1962 War, the Indian Army was unbeatable
India gained independence from British rule in 1947, just two years after the Chinese Communist Party seized power on the mainland in 1949. India’s socialist-leaning Prime Minister Nehru (1889-1964) soon recognized Red China, the two countries agreed on five principles of peaceful coexistence, and Nehru and Zhou Enlai became like “brothers in arms. But the good times did not last long. Especially after the 1959 Lhasa riots, the Dalai Lama fled to India and set up a government-in-exile, and Sino-Indian relations began to deteriorate. Then the Sino-Soviet split, India supported the Soviet Union and allied with it. Under Mao’s strong anti-revisionist and anti-Soviet policy, the Sino-Indian border war finally broke out in 1962. This was the general political background.
The Sino-Indian border dispute, which is 2,000 kilometers long, involves 120,000 square kilometers. It has remained unresolved for more than 100 years since the fall of the Qing Dynasty when Tibet declared its independence. The most important event during this period was the 1941 Tibetan-British Treaty of Simla, which drew the McMahon Line and the Tibetan independence clause, although the Chinese government did not agree with it, the border was actually maintained according to the McMahon Line, although friction and disputes occurred from Time to time. 1962 Nehru accused China of its Tibetan policy, and the border troops clashed again. On November 21, the Communist Party unilaterally ceased fighting and then retreated 20 kilometers from the contact line – a time when world opinion was dumbfounded: how could the victor retreat on his own initiative? What’s more, the Communists released prisoners of war, buried the Indian dead, and sent back captured war booty: cars were filled with fuel and weapons were polished to a shine.
Nehru was humiliated, and China was not the victor
Zhou Enlai’s united-war tactics made Nehru look bad both inside and outside: at Home he was condemned for misjudging the situation and losing the war, while abroad he was considered humiliated by China. Han Suyin (1917-2012), a Writer who met Zhou Enlai more than a dozen times and played peacemaker between Nehru and Zhou (her husband, an Indian) after the India-China conflict, said that whenever she met Nehru to convey Zhou’s greetings, “he always said coldly: I have learned enough about Zhou Enlai’s friendship.” Soon after, this great ranking figure, who enjoyed a high reputation in the post-war world, fell ill and died in May 1964, with 3 million people mourning. I remember visiting India on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of India’s independence, and was strongly impressed when I visited the Nehru Museum – not a single exhibit of photos and other items of Sino-Indian friendship existed.
However, China was not the victor in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. In terms of border territory, the 90,000-square-kilometer eastern section of “Tibetan South” remained back to the McMahon Line, which India continued to occupy (and later to form Arunachal Pradesh). The Chinese Communist Party continues to control 40,000 square kilometers of Aksai Chin in the western sector. Why did China withdraw from the Tibetan South region, which had hit the Indians hard? Although supply difficulties and U.S.-Soviet pressure suggest that this area south of the “Line of Actual Control” has long belonged to India. If India had really occupied it, would the Chinese Communist Party have given up three times as much land as Taiwan? Therefore, the big right and wrong of the whole war was the Chinese Communist Party’s self-appointed political lesson to Nehru to be pro-Soviet and pro-American and to “betray non-alignment”. The same thing happened in 1979 when Deng Xiaoping sent troops to teach Vietnam a lesson: “self-defense counterattack” was pure deception.
As a result, not only did the Chinese Communist Party and India completely fall out, but also the Asian-African “anti-imperialist” united front, which had been operating for years, collapsed. After the war, statistics show that 75 countries supported India, while only 7 countries, including North Korea and North Vietnam, supported China. The year 1962 was a year of diplomatic reversal for the Communists. The U.S. and Soviet Union further reconciled and signed a nuclear test ban treaty, and there was no room for turning around the differences between China and the Soviet Union after the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Communist China’s Asia-Africa diplomacy turned neighbor into enemy, and all the people turned against each other
In the winter of 1963, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi visited 14 countries in Asia and Africa for 75 days. This unprecedented visit was touted as a strategic strike against the two hegemons, but in fact it was intended to break through the diplomatic isolation caused by the Sino-Indian war. Zhou’s attempt to convene a second Bandung conference fell through due to Nasser and Nehru’s refusal. The most embarrassing was in North African Tunisia, where he was rebuked in the face by President Bourguiba: “You want us to be enemies of the West and at war with India, you scold Tito and Khrushchev …… These words will not be listened to by Africans, they will not be welcomed.” Indonesia, for its part, had a 930 coup shortly after the 1965 thoughtful visit, and the 3.5 million member Indonesian Communist Party was defeated. — In short, the diplomatic remedies pursued by Zhou after 1962 were declared a failure. Only to turn to spending money on foreign aid. It is said that Zhou Enlai received fierce internal criticism from Liu Shaoqi for the abortive Second Asian-African Conference and the missteps of the 930 incident.
Of course, Zhou Enlai cannot be blamed entirely, but the root of the problem lies in Mao Zedong’s line of exporting revolutionary diplomacy without regard for the lives of others. Especially after the success of the nuclear explosion in 1964, he took on the role of a Third World leader and embarked on the crazy desperate path of the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese Communist Party’s diplomacy of making friends from afar and enemies with neighbors, from South Asia to East Asia, ignited fires everywhere, and turned everyone against each other. Looking back at the diplomatic history of the 1960s, when the CCP drew in Asia and Africa to confront the U.S. and the Soviet Union, one cannot help but point out that the Sino-Indian War of 1962 was a far-reaching turning point. Although Nehru had befriended the CCP for many years, he is revered for his philosophical and worldview differences from the CCP’s violent revolution. He and the U.S.S.R. were on the progressive side of the times, while Mao and Zhou’s insistence that Deng Xiaoping should attack Vietnam for the destruction of Cambodia after the Cultural Revolution was globally condemned and caused long-term damage to Sino-Vietnamese relations.
Today Indians are still saying, “32 days of war, leaving a 50-year nightmare!” What was clearly a historic border dispute, Nehru’s mere order: get the Chinese troops out! was expanded into a war in which thousands died in action – much like a preview of today’s Sino-Indian border conflict. Today, 55 years later, the tough stance of the Chinese military and foreign ministry may deter India, but if the border dispute is turned into a war, the situation will be highly complicated and China will pay a price no less than the “victory” in 1962. “. And the resentment between the two peoples of China and India will be more endless.
New York, July 26, 2017
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