Is China going back to Dengism?

The recently concluded visit to India by China’s defence minister, Gen. Liang Guanglie, has breathed some life back into frozen military-to-military relations between the two Asian giants. Since 2010, China’s non-issuance of a visa to a senior Indian military commander in charge of Jammu and Kashmir and a reciprocal snub by New Delhi had halted concrete engagement.

The closure of high-level military channels of dialogue in the last two years was adding fuel to the fire of pre-existing tensions about territorial boundary violations and confrontation in naval waters.
Gen. Liang’s India trip, the first such mission in eight years, yielded concrete announcements about maintaining “tranquillity” on the border, restarting of joint military exercises and even “enhanced cooperation” of the two navies to counter piracy off the coast of Somalia. In an oblique signal to India, which is wary of China’s “string of pearls” strategic encirclement strategy, Gen. Liang also told a Sri Lankan audience prior to landing in Mumbai that his country’s deeper involvement in South Asia was not targeted at any “third party”.
The larger message that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been trying to convey through a flurry of military diplomacy across the world is that China is not a confrontationist power to be feared. While the civilian Chinese leadership has been hawking the “peaceful rise” sweetener to a disbelieving world for years, there is a definite trend of Beijing dispatching its military top brass as supplementary diplomats to 20 countries in 2012 for reinforcing the idea. The official China Daily has endorsed the PLA’s “difficult responsibility of explaining its non-offensive strategy and need to expand” in a manner that does not trigger insecurity spirals in Asia and beyond.
Why exactly does China “need to expand?” As a country grows economically and accumulates huge investible capital domestically, the quest for international markets and overseas political conditions that facilitate easy movement of one’s goods and wealth intensifies. The PLA has tried to allay forebodings that its naval buildup is to bully weaker states with a counterpoint that its real objective is “to stabilise the supply chain” of resources and finished products essential to China’s foreign trade.
But there are non-economic ramifications of China’s hulking military, which is riding on the shoulders of high GDP and surpluses accumulated over the last two decades. Showcase military weapons like the J-20 stealth fighter jet are indicators of China’s political will to bridge its war-fighting capability gap with the United States. Officially, China claims that it is spending about $106 billion this year on defence but critics argue that the true figures are double that amount. To put this sum in perspective, India’s defence budget this year is only $41 billion.
One way of interpreting the vast gulf is to view defence expenses as a percentage of GDP. A bigger economy like China will naturally have a higher budgetary allocation for its military than a smaller economy like India. Nonetheless, the fact that the PLA has had to turn its generals into peace messengers on global tours is a concession by Beijing that hardly any country in the world blithely accepts mounting Chinese military clout as a natural by-product of economic growth that need not cause worry.
Actions and capabilities are not distinct categories in power politics that can be compartmentalised. The proof of the pudding lies in what the Chinese are doing with their vast military. Muscle-flexing in the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and the East China Sea, and a peculiarly cussed diplomacy by Beijing that accentuates sovereignty-based needling of neighbours, are unnerving the whole of Asia. Chinese behaviour in asserting and orchestrating extremely nationalistic positions on territorial claims with Japan, Southeast Asian countries and India does not lend credence to the words of PLA generals who are portraying an innocuous image.
Japan’s annual defence report for 2012 captures a widely shared apprehension that the degree of the PLA’s influence on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign policy is a “risk management issue”. There is no shortage of hawks in China’s civilian establishment, intellectual class and the wider hyper-nationalistic citizenry. But the PLA’s increased public visibility on foreign policy matters amidst what some observers consider a “fractured” decision-making environment in Beijing, is an additional factor that stirs up the “China threat” syndrome. If the upcoming CCP leadership transition, which has been tarnished by infighting and scandals, does not permit smooth handovers in the critical Central Military Commission, high-ranking generals may make a further grab at the cost of civilians for control over policies on sensitive external security domains.
Gen. Liang’s decision to spend five days in India and to meet various stakeholders in our military establishment is welcome insofar as talking is necessary to gain more knowledge about the other side’s priorities and tactics. But clouds of doubt hanging over China’s global expansion in the military realm cannot be dispersed through feel-good words that profess peaceful intentions. In international relations, talk is cheap. Until China displays magnanimity and farsightedness in its myriad territorial spats and slows down the alarming rate at which it is developing missiles, fighter planes and warships, the reassurances from generals will be received with spoonsfuls of salt in the rest of Asia.
As the Chinese economic juggernaut is showing a marked downtick this year, a reversal of militaristic foreign policies which rattle neighbours is a rational shift that the CCP will hopefully undertake. Restraining military expenditure and curbing abrasiveness in foreign relations had been the mantras that underpinned China’s economic ascent under Deng Xiaoping. But he also predicted that the PLA will rise to prominence from the end of the 20th century onwards, by which time China’s economy would have soared to a high enough level that domestic “butter” issues no longer hold back the “guns”.
With China now entering a new challenging phase of economic uncertainty, the dragon may have no choice but to go back to “Dengism” and again mellow down its natural aggression in foreign affairs. The posse of PLA generals, who are fanning out as improvised diplomats holding the dove symbol, could imply Chinese realisation that the state must return to fixing domestic maladies under a horizon that promises prolonged lower economic growth.

The writer is professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs