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Perhaps no other topic agitates the contemporary strategic imagination more than the implications of China’s rise not just for the future of the ruling regime in Beijing but also for Africa, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. But in the recent past, nervous apprehension (mixed with considerable excitement) about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitions has given way to another sentiment, that China may be inching toward overreach both economic as well as geopolitical as public opinion across many Western democracies coalesces into China skepticism, if not outright antagonism.
In a recent book, “How China Loses: The Pushback Against Chinese Global Ambitions” (Oxford University Press, 2021) Luke Patey presents a tour d’horizon of China’s expanding global footprint as well as growing backlash against Beijing’s grand schemes and geostrategic jostling across continents. Drawing on research and travel across Africa, South America, and parts of the Asia-Pacifi
Peking’s “expansionism” has been the major justification for the United States’s containment policy. The sudden Chinese attack on Indian border forces in October, 1962, was denounced by India as unprovoked aggression, and it still contributes to the American image of a China that is, as Mr. Nixon sees it, “expansionist.” Now this pillar of the containment doctrine is carefully examined by Neville Maxwell, who breaks it up and throws it to the winds. His book is an object lesson in international astigmatism, primarily that of the Indians, but also ours. His story tells us something about the Chinese style in boundary disputes, if not in foreign relations generally, and raises questions to ponder as we look at the Sino-American future and the question of Taiwan in particular.
The ongoing India-China face-off in Eastern Ladakh may appear to be a small-scale confrontation between conventional forces. But it is still one between nuclear-armed states, and the threat of escalation cannot be denied. In its wake, India has carried out a series of missile tests, while China too has fired a number of ballistic missiles near the Paracel and Spratly Islands, apparently to warn the US, but hardly something New Delhi can ignore. This analysis makes three key points: the threat from China is likely to persist; India needs to adapt balancing responses to the threat to the requirements of a nuclear weapons environment; and Indian policymakers should be mindful of the possibilities of actual military combat, be it a marginal war, or a trans-domain conflict that involves use of advanced technologies influencing both the nuclear and conventional spheres.