India and China - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 294

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India and China
Himalayan Struggles
Wen Jiabao, China's premier from 2003 to 2013, was unexpectedly fulsome. Speaking in
Delhi's rather drab Indian Council of World Affairs' conference hall in December 2010, he
was full of talk about China's and India's joint aspirations, their friendship, their coopera-
tion, and about how their two-way trade would almost double to $100bn a year by 2015.
He had brought a weirdly large posse of 400 businessmen 1 with him on a two-to-three day
visit to India and had presided with Manmohan Singh over a flourish of $16bn business
deals and joint agreements. In his speech, there was even a personal tribute to Mahatma
Gandhi that rivalled a similar line President Barack Obama had deployed in Delhi a month
earlier. 2
The Chinese and Indian civilizations had 'once added radiance and beauty to each other
and deeply influenced the process of human civilization,' he said. 'The great Chinese and
Indian nations which have suffered all kinds of hardships but strived unceasingly will def-
initely glow with vitality, shoulder the historical mission and join hands to shape new glory
of oriental civilizations.' As I sat there and listened to him, it seemed that Wen meant it and
that, sometimes almost adlibbing, he was using this relatively low-key moment in his visit
to establish China as a friend.
Suddenly his tone and even his demeanour changed, and he put India firmly in its place
as an unequal neighbour, taking China's usual rigid line on the two countries' decades-old
dispute over its mountainous 3,488-km border. Lecturing like a stern headmaster, he said:
'It will not be easy to completely resolve this question. It requires patience and will take a
fairly long period of time', adding that 'only with sincerity, mutual trust and perseverance
can we eventually find a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution'. The tone and
phrases were typical of China's patronising style of negotiation - I had heard it 20 years
earlier when I was in Hong Kong and Beijing was stalling British negotiators on the terms
for the territory's return in 1997 to Chinese sovereignty.
This dashed any hopes India may have had of making progress on the border issue. It
sounded as though Wen was reflecting sharply differing views inside China's government
over how to treat India, as he moved from the more constructive approach to that of the