Ladakh stand-off is a signal to India against infrastructure construction in ‘disputed territory’, says expert

China will continue to deny India space on the global stage owing to widening asymmetries, experts observe

The 2020 stand-off in eastern Ladakh was a signal from China to India over how the situation is likely to play out if it continues to pursue infrastructure construction in the “disputed territory”, Isaac B. Kardon, Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval War College said. These observations also resonate with the recent clash between soldiers of the Indian Army and China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Yangtse area in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh. At the same time, China will continue to deny India space on the global stage owing to widening asymmetries, experts noted.

“Indian military was building infrastructure in disputed territory and they (PLA) wanted to take steps to check that... That’s probably the acute cause,” Mr. Kardon said. He also referred to recent report of the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress (CPC) held in October, which talked of resolutely countering threats that impinge upon their sovereignty.

End November, several China experts from India and abroad who speak fluent Mandarin, analysed and debated the outcomes of the 20th CPC, which consolidated President Xi Jinping’s power as well an unprecedented third term. The deliberations were held under the 5th edition of the ‘India Forum on China’ in Goa organised by the Delhi-based think tank Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS) and the India office of the German think tank Kondrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in cooperation with Goa University.

Former Indian Ambassador to China Ashok K. Kantha noted that Mr. Xi’s dominance has become so much more pronounced, and it has implications for India and the world, on which Israeli scholar Tuvia Gering, who specialises in Chinese security and foreign policy, referred to Mr. Xi as not just China’s most powerful man but also its “storyteller-in-chief” propagating ‘Chinese style modernisation’.

The 20th CPC Congress has promoted hardliners in Chinese diplomatic groups, noted Chang Young-Hee, Research Professor, Sungkyun Institute of China Studies, Seoul. Giving the case of Madagascar as an example, Jabin T. Jacob, Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University said the CPC is testing out elements of a new foreign policy and exploits local circumstances to do so. Foreign policy is increasingly an ideological tool for the CPC, he remarked. The arrival of new China has had different meanings and depictions since 1949, said Professor Alka Acharya, Honorary Director of ICS tracing the evolution of Chinese policy with its leaders.

There was consensus among the experts that Mr. Xi has consolidated power even at the cost of undermining the party and under the clarion call to make China great again, which has also become the bulwark for the China-U.S. contest.

“In the ‘new era’ under Mr. Xi Jinping, ‘Crossing the river by feeling the stones’, a dictum of the reform era generally attributed to Deng Xiaoping, has been denounced completely, if we look into Xi’s criticism of a ‘weak, hollow, and watered-down party leadership’ of the reform era, as well as the writings of China’s top scholars such as Wen Tiejun,” noted Professor B.R. Deepak with Jawaharlal Nehru University. The “stones” have been identified as “symbolic norms defined by the West”.