China Needs to Put its House in Order Before Casting Aspersions on India’s External Affairs Minister

Global Times (GT) published an articlerecently, authored by Wang Daming, which was heavily critical of India’s External Affairs Minister (EAM), S. Jaishankar. It initially talks about the high-level diplomatic dialogues and several bilateral meetings, on border issues, and how both countries has tried to narrow down differences to ‘reach a mutually acceptable solution at an early date’. Having said so, the author then quotes from a speech of the EAM during the World Leaders Forum hosted by The Economic Times, where he said: ‘There is a general China problem. We are not the only country in the world which is having a debate about China…India has a China problem… a special China problem that is over and above the world’s general China problem’. Wang argued that the EAM’s remarks followed India’s internal logic that China was a ‘bad guy, who had created a ‘China problem’ for all countries, and India’s China problem is no exception. Consequently, India has adopted a series of anti-China policies … in recent years’.

However, the article was soon taken down by the Global Times even as its Chinese version was retained.

In this context, the author needs to be asked as to who started the confrontation in Ladakh in May 2020? Despite the euphoria of the informal summits between Prime Minister Modi and President Xi in 2018 and 2019. the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had ingressed into Ladakh, and the Indian Army had to mobilize its forces at five locations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Three years prior to this, China had actively sought to change the status quo in the Batang-la and Doka-la areas in Southern Sikkim.

The author then proceeds to say that Jaishankar’s diplomatic wrangling had won him some fans. However, the diplomatic strategies and tactics he led were full of tricks that had neither the moral sense of Jawaharlal Nehru’s diplomacy nor the ethic sense of Indira Gandhi’s diplomacy. This begs the question whether the author of the GT piece, or his mentors in Beijing would like India to accept the changes in Ladakh as a fact of life?

Unabated development
Just a few days back, there were reports of ‘consolidation’ of the Chinese positions in Ladakh, particularly in the north bank of the Spanggur lake, that lies near to the Pangong lake. Post-2020 standoff, the quick development of the infrastructure close to LAC in Tibet has been going on unabated. A large army camp with double-story buildings and other structures, including a helipad strip, has now come up. Does GT mean that all this should be ignored for the sake of ‘normalisation’? This aggressive attitude towards India and its EAM in reality hides more serious issues within China.

Has China Demoted its Defence Ministry?

Shanshan Mei and Dennis J Blasko point out in  Defence One that China does not have a functional defence minister. The authors explain that among the various significant personnel changes at the Third Plenary meeting of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), are two that did not happen: Admiral Dong Jun, the country’s defence minister, was neither added to the Central Military Commission (CMC) nor appointed a State Councillor. This is an apparent demotion for the Defence Ministry and could complicate the military-to-military relationship between China and the United States. The head of the Ministry of National Defence is always a member of the CMC, giving him direct access to Xi Jinping, the Chairman of the CMC. The Defence minister is also a State Councillor, allowing him to regularly meet the Chinese Premier. Presently, Dong does not have these privileges (he was appointed to the post in December 2022, two months after his predecessor General Li Shangfu was removed from office as was his predecessor General Wei Fenghe). This appears to be an intentional effort to downgrade the defence minister’s role in the party-state bureaucracy, according to Mei and Blasko.

Is PLA ready?

In the meantime, the war on corruption in the military, which has brought down more than a hundred generals, is continuing. According to The South China Morning Post (SCMP), Beijing has declared ‘an overwhelming victory in the fight against graft, while PLA generals have praised Xi’s command over the campaign as having saved the military at a critical time’. But there are many cases still unresolved — many of which involve military officers who were promoted when Xi was at the helm. The news report also stated that the campaign was far from over, given the rampant corruption in the military before Xi took over, the vast amount of money being spent on modernising weapons, and the insular culture of the PLA as the armed wing of the party.

With no effective defence minister and many generals still under dragnet of anti-corruption campaign, China is clearly not ready.

In the course of the interactions with US National Security Advisor (NSA) Jake Sullivan in Beijing at the end of August this year, General Zhang Youxia, Vice Chairman of the CMC, said to have stressed upon China’s resoluteness to  implement ‘the strategy of building the army politically in the new era, carry forward the spirit of thorough self-revolution, continue to deepen political training, strive to create a new situation of building the army politically’.

Self-Revolution

The self-revolution that Zhang is speaking about seems to be a return to the difficult days of Maoism. The China Media Project, monitoring the Chinese press, explains: ‘[It] refers to a process by which the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping proposes to remain “pure” by rooting out corrupt and ineffectual cadres from their own ranks… Posited as Xi Jinping’s answer to the historical problem of dynastic rise and fall, it promises to confer the Party with an indefinite mandate to rule or continued political legitimacy—all without having to stand up to external supervision or seek popular support through competitive elections’. Xi first used the slogan in 2015 in a speech to the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms, asking the members to “dare to self-revolutionise”.

A year later, in a speech for the 95th anniversary of the CPC’s founding, Xi elaborated on ‘the goal and tasks of the Party’s self-revolution, and discussed the requirements for realising self-purification, self-innovation, and self-improvement. If the Party is as pure, selfless, and capable of self-correction …it needs to answer to no one’.

China seems to be back in Mao’s days. Wang Junwei, a scholar at the CPC’s Institute of Party History and Literature, believes that it is the only way to ‘save the People’s Republic from the same fate that befell the Qing, the Ming, and every other dynasty before them. It is a difficult problem that has not been solved by China’s feudal dynasties for thousands of years’, adding that Xi’s political thinking has been forged in the context of the fall of Soviet Union in 1991.

That is why the Ladakh confrontation is a minor issue compared to Xi’s other headaches. The column of an ‘expert’ may temporarily (or not) help Beijing to tackle India. But there remain other unsolvable problems for China, and in this light, the GT column is probably a way for China to divert India’s attention.

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This is a modified version of the article originally published as Claude Arpi. 2024. Why China Should Fix Its Own House Before Commenting on Jaishankar. Firstpost. 16 September.