Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
that was even vaguely pro-Indian would make Chinese strategists exceedingly nervous.
Given the tensions of the Tibet crisis, China saw the establishment of Indian outposts north
of disputed border lines as a casus belli, and in one month of fighting in the autumn overran
Indian forces. Neither side deployed its navy or air force, and so the fighting was limited to
remote regions where few people lived, as opposed to the Indian-Pakistani border, that in
addition to passing through swamps and deserts, cuts through the agriculturally rich Punjab
inhabited by millions.
The Indo-Chinese border is still in some areas a matter of dispute. The Chinese have
built roads and airfields throughout Tibet, and India now falls into the arc of operations of
Chinese fighter pilots, even as the Indian air force is the world's fourth largest, with over
1,300 aircraft spread over sixty bases. Indian satellites and reconnaissance aircraft provide
intelligence on Chinese troop movements in Tibet. Then there is the rise of both countries'
navies. The rise of the Chinese navy was covered in the preceding chapter. Because India
has no equivalent of the Mediterranean, no enclosed seas and clusters of islands to lure
sailors, even as the earth is warm and productive, India until recently has been more or less
a land-bound nation framed against the open ocean. But that has suddenly changed with
advances in military technology that have compressed oceanic geography, and with the de-
velopment of the Indian economy, which can finance major shipbuilding and acquisitions.
Another factor driving India seaward is the threat of China itself, as China's own naval as-
pirations move it beyond the Western Pacific into the Indian Ocean.
China has been helping to build or upgrade ports around India: in Kyaukpyu, Burma;
Chittagong, Bangladesh; Hambantota, Sri Lanka; and Gwadar, Pakistan. In all of these
countries China is providing substantial military and economic aid, and political support.
China, as we know, already has a great merchant fleet and aspirations for a blue-water
oceanic navy that will guard its interests and protect its trade routes between the
hydrocarbon-rich Middle East and China's Pacific coast. This is occurring at the same
time that India has aspirations for a Monroe Doctrine-style presence throughout the Indian
Ocean from southern Africa to Australia. The greatly overlapping naval spheres of in-
terest aggravate the border issues in the Himalayan north that are still outstanding. China is
merely seeking to protect its own sea lines of communications with friendly, state-of-the-art
harbors along the way. But India feels surrounded. The futuristic possibility of a Pakistani-
Chinese naval center of operations near the entrance to the Persian Gulf in Gwadar has
led to the expansion of the Indian naval port of Karwar on the Arabian Sea. The port and
energy pipelines China is building at Kyaukpyu in Burma have caused India to initiate its
own port and energy complex at Sittwe, fifty miles to the north, as India and China quicken
their competition for routes and resources in western Indochina.
Still, one can only repeat, the Indian-Chinese rivalry represents a new struggle without
the force of history behind it. The interactions that India and China have had in the distant
past have usually been productive: most famously the spread of Buddhism from India to
