Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
China in middle and late antiquity, as Buddhism went on to become the established religion
of the Tang Dynasty. Despite the issue of Tibet, in which Tibetan autonomy or independ-
ence is in India's geopolitical interest but clearly harmful to that of China, the high wall
of the Himalayas essentially cuts the two countries' populations off from each other. Only
in recent decades, as indigenous militaries in the East have developed sea, air, and mis-
sile power, has a new Eurasian-wide geography of conflict come sharply into focus. The
death of distance, much more than civilizational divides, is what ails India-China relations
today. Only Indian policy elites worry about China, while the problem of Pakistan con-
sumes the entire country, northern India especially. Moreover, India and China constitute
among the world's most dynamic and complementary trading relationships. In a way, the
tension between India and China illustrates the problems of success: the momentous eco-
nomic development that both New Delhi and Beijing can now utilize for military purposes,
especially for expensive air and naval platforms. Certainly, the new India-China rivalry
richly demonstrates Bracken's point that the technologies of war and wealth creation go
hand in hand, and the finite size of the earth is increasingly a force for instability, as milit-
ary hardware and software shrink mileage on the geopolitical map.
To wit, for the first few decades following the Cold War, India and China had relatively
low-tech ground forces that were content to watch their own borders and to serve as bul-
warks for national consolidation. Thus, they did not threaten each other. But as planes, mis-
siles, and warships entered their military inventories, even as their armies became more
expeditionary, suddenly they saw each other at opposite sides of a new battlespace. This is
not only true of India and China, but of states across the broad sweep of Eurasia—Israel,
Syria, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and so on, who are in a new and deathly geographical
embrace of overlapping missile ranges.
Behold, then, the Indian Subcontinent. Bounded by seas and mountains, it is still internally
vast, and its lack of a natural basis for early political unity and organization shows up still,
for China remains better organized and more efficiently governed than India, despite Ch-
ina's lack of democracy. China adds more miles of highways per year than India has in
total. Indian ministries are overbearing and weak reeds compared to China's. China may be
wracked by strikes and demonstrations, but India is wracked by violent insurrections; not-
ably that of the Maoist-trending Naxalites in the central and eastern portions of the country.
In this regard, Fairgrieve's description of a “less advanced” civilization compared to some
external ones still holds.
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He who sits in Delhi, with his back to Muslim Central Asia, must worry still about unrest
up on the plateaus to the northwest. The United States will draw down its troops in Afgh-
anistan, but India will still have to live with the results, and therefore remain intimately
