The most startling tourist distraction in China is a map of India. Seeing is disbelieving. India gets a serious haircut. The Chinese have excised the Himalayas from India and either made it completely theirs or handed it over to independent or disputed states that become a buffer in Asia’s most powerful neighborhood.
Start from northwest and head northeast. Jammu and Kashmir has been allotted an indeterminate status, except of course for that part on the eastern edge of the old kingdom that was gifted to Chou en Lai by Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1963 and now lies firmly embedded inside China. India is permitted to sneeze through a couple of passes in Himachal and Uttaranchal before Nepal sprawls independently midway. Sikkim, east of Nepal, is still shown as a sovereign state adjoining sovereign Bhutan. To the east of Bhutan begins the sweep that takes you into Arunachal Pradesh, the whole of which is shown as part of China, with Chinese names for its small cities and landmarks. The Chinese case for the wholesale absorption of Arunachal rests partly on some vague ethnic compatibility, although they do not extend this suggestion into calling Northeast Indians of Han descent. They use a political yardstick to measure this map. Tawang paid a tribute to the Chinese emperors, so ipso facto it is part of China. By this logic, Afghanistan should be included in the map of India, since the province paid tribute to the Mughal emperors for hundreds of years, at about the same time that Tawang was purchasing peace with the Ming dynasty.
The People’s Republic of China loses its republican sheen when it comes to territory, and turns imperial even if it cannot always get imperious. This distinction between China and the People’s Republic of China tends to escape general observation, but it glittered in the intellectual landscape of Brajesh Mishra, national security adviser and principal secretary to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who led the negotiations that resulted in the first joint declaration between India and China in Beijing this week as well as the memorandum of understanding by which China informally recognized Sikkim as part of India. We only reiterated our assurance, first given in 1954 and repeated by Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, that we accepted Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. We did not say that Tibet was part of China. This may seem semantic, but the Dalai Lama has always argued that Tibet was never part of China and therefore cannot be claimed by the successor state of People’s Republic of China.
However, there were enough Tibetan princes through as many centuries as you can count on one hand who came to Beijing bearing gifts as their tribute to the overlord. In fact, they came so often that the Chinese got a little tired of such frequent displays of loyalty. There had to be a reason, and there was. The custom was that anyone who brought a gift to the imperial court would get a royal present in return. The imperial gift was always much more valuable than the yak-skin or whatever the Tibetan princes delivered to the Chinese emperor. So each time a Tibetan princeling felt in need of some decent silk, he picked up a patch of goatskin and turned up at the palace. The mandarins caught on. The palace passed an order restricting the fealty of the Tibetans. Attitudes have not altered that much, which is why Beijing is puzzled at the new Tibetan intransigence. All that the Tibetans have to do is to sing the national anthem and they are gifted a road, or an apartment building as reward.
The Chinese, I am pleased to report, are human. They can quadruple their Gross Domestic Product in 17 years, they can stuff the malls of America with their mass-produced goods, and they can build the Three Gorges Dam, but they still cannot manage the traffic. Health warning: Do not cross the street in China on a green light. Read again to get this instruction right. Wait for the light to become red, and then cross. Why? Let me explain.
You stand at a kerb, patiently, obediently waiting for permission from the lights to cross. Eventually green comes up. At precisely that very moment, every driver in the vicinity, including some at right angles to you, steps on his accelerator and turns his vehicle in your direction. It is not a matter of a straggler bus or a speeding car beating the turning lights. Traffic in China is completely indifferent to traffic management. But why cross the street on a red light then? Because when the lights are red you are at least careful, you know what you are getting into, hesitation comes naturally to your tense mind and you can take suitable physical precautions. Green makes you careless, with attendant consequences.
Only a fool would consider the Great Wall hewn through thousands of miles of mountain unimpressive. But the most remarkable fact about it is not the effort in stone, but its proximity to Beijing. It is only an hour by highway from the city. It is as if the defense of China were synonymous with the defense of its capital city. The actual borders of China, even if you forget the claimed ones, lie thousands of miles beyond the wall. Conquerors and marauders, in other words, had license to do what they wanted to the people beyond the wall; all that the ruling class wanted to ensure was its own protection and safety.
But the Chinese were not the only power to make a virtue of such a conceit. Why did the defense of India begin at Panipat, which is about as far from Delhi as the Great Wall is from Beijing? Which brings us to another question. Has a wall ever saved a capital? The wall did not save Beijing when it mattered. Only an army can save a nation, not stone or barbed wire. A wall provides only a notional sense of confidence, and may be counterproductive, for it can protect that invader as easily as it separates him from the defender. The Chinese gave the invader more depth through the Great Wall than they kept for themselves.
The Great Leap Forward in modern Shanghai is a flyover that literally takes a 15-km leap from one end of the city to the other through a trajectory across a multi-storied sky. When I last visited Shanghai, in 1988, it looked like a cleaner version of Calcutta. Fifteen years later, only Calcutta looks like a cleaner version of Calcutta. Shanghai has become a Manhattan that begins in New York and ends in Washington. That, trust me, is not too wayward an exaggeration. Shanghai’s boom starts from the sea and echoes for hundreds of miles along the Yangtze. Historically Shanghai has been a collection of the world’s cities: a British quarter here, a French quarter there. It is now an American quarter everywhere. A Chinese friend remarked a little regretfully that modern China did not have any faith. A few days after that lunch I disagreed. Not only do the Chinese have faith, they have become fundamentalists. They are fundamentalist achievers. All the passion that we reserve for the Babri Mosque or a Ram temple, the Chinese conserve for high-rise apartments, highways, infrastructure, consumer goods and massive projects. We can sneer at the corruption in new China, but does it really suit a pot to call the kettle black? The legacy of the first generation of modern China’s leaders was a disconnect between ambition and ability. They mixed high ambition with low achievement, but they did create a modern mind out of opium-eaters. Deng Ziaoping, master of the second generation, was a cat with a dream. He preserved a Communist party with the lure of collective wealth sponsored by state capital. Deng’s message was: keep your head low, your eyes open and chase the boom. Prosperity has been uneven; it always is. Half of China is a parasite on the other half. The nouveau riche have become very rich indeed because the lowest end of pay in a slave factory is sometimes as low as $100 annually. But growth keeps the peace.
Arab News Opinion 29 June 2003
