Asymmetrical Indian and Chinese Threat Perceptions - India as an Emerging Power - page 124

Yet it does seem clear that Beijing conveyed an essentially similar message to
Moscow regarding India. In any case, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
fundamentally redefined (and thereby eviscerated) the 1971 treaty during his
1986 visit to India. 32 This move was an important step in the process of Sino-
Soviet normalization that culminated in Gorbachev's May 1989 visit to China.
Soviet arms sales to India continued, but it was now clear that Moscow would not
endanger Sino-Soviet amity by supporting India against China.
New Delhi chose not to attempt to match the Sino-Pakistan entente with a
Indo-Japanese partnership. Regarding the Indo-Soviet link, China was in fact
able to uncouple New Delhi and Moscow. New Delhi has failed to achieve any
comparable uncoupling of Beijing and Islamabad. Again the point is that China
has been far more successful than India in shaping its security environment and
this difference is reflected in the asymmetrical security perceptions of the two
sides.
CONCLUSION
There seem to be two satisfactory explanations of the phenomena of
asymmetrical Chinese and Indian perceptions of threat from one another. The
first is the probable existence of a calculated but highly classified Chinese
foreign policy strategy toward India. This strategy is probably translated into
guidelines for public media which prohibit or carefully limit and control public
talk about Indian threats to China—much less of Chinese threats to India. Any
public talk of one country threatening the other is disallowed. The objective is to
delegitimize the framing of Sino-Indian relations in terms of security
considerations. It follows from this that India has no grounds to object to Chinese
military ties to Pakistan or other South Asian countries, or to cooperate with third
powers hostile to China.
We can call this Chinese strategy a 'good neighbor policy', mulin zhengce in
Chinese. It serves two key objectives. The first is to dissuade India from
cooperating with great powers hostile to China—formerly the Soviet Union and
now the United States. The operational mechanism for achieving this is
cooperation between India and China in constructing a New International
Economic and Political Order premised on the interests of the Third World and
developing countries. The second objective is to induce India not to object to
China's military-security ties with countries of South Asia—Pakistan, Myanmar,
Nepal, and Bangladesh. These relations do not in any way constitute a threat to
India, Beijing insists, and it is thus unreasonable for New Delhi to object to
them.
Both of these policy objectives are served by downplaying talk of security
threats within the India-China relations. When translated into guidelines for
gongkai publications, this policy helps explain why there is so little discussion in