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Jabin T. Jacob, one of the top China watchers in India, advocates the view that India should give an “appropriate punitive response” to Chinese transgressions along the Line of Actual Control. “The Chinese are engaged in these provocations precisely because they judge the Indian side as being unwilling to fight or too weak to fight,” he says.
China’s provocative decision to include a soldier involved in the Galwan skirmishes as an Olympics torchbearer had forced India to announce a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. According to Jacob, fears of an all-out India-China conflict are exaggerated. “Some element of military threat is necessary to make China behave,” he says.
Jacob, an expert in Chinese internal politics, says that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ideological framework—that he created with the help of political theorist Wang Huning—justifies still greater levels of Party intervention in politics, economy and foreign policy of China.
ALSO READ: Xi Jinping is relying more on his ideology czar—Wang Huning
He also warns that the government of India has a lot to do in terms of fixing its policies towards China. Excerpts from an interview:
The Chinese government recently “renamed” 15 places in Arunachal Pradesh. Opposition parties are asking the Narendra Modi government to “break the silence” over Chinese “incursions” in the Galwan region of eastern Ladakh. What should be the ideal response from the government?
That’s a pretty big question—the government has a lot to do in terms of fixing its policies towards China. Most of these are longer-term measures but in the immediate term, India’s Ministry of External Affairs has replied in no uncertain terms that China’s renaming exercise does not change the reality on the ground in Arunachal. However, my concern is that this event might grab the headlines while the general public is kept in the dark about what else the Chinese are doing along the Line of Actual Control. Certainly, Chinese activity across the LAC from Arunachal has also picked up since Galwan.
The government needs to keep the Indian public informed about what is going on at the LAC and let it know what its strategy is to both recover territory lost in eastern Ladakh in its tenure and pre-empt further Chinese bad behaviour. This transparency is necessary for ensuring accountability in Indian foreign policy. The fact is that the government does not seem to have much of a strategy except keep engaging in fruitless discussions and to lean on the United States. The latter is important but ultimately, the US will not be able to fight India’s battles. If we are to prevent further Chinese bad behaviour both on the LAC as well as with other countries, I do not see a way except for India to engage in a short and appropriate punitive response or a tit-for-tat capture of territory across the Chinese perception of the LAC.
I think fears of an all-out conflict, as a result, are exaggerated. The Chinese are engaged in these provocations precisely because they judge the Indian side as being unwilling to fight or too weak to fight. If we do fight, the Chinese will want to keep the conflict limited but they will have gotten the message that they should not take India for granted. As things currently stand, however, India is fast losing credibility as a capable bulwark against China. I think the US, too has understood this, which is why it has decided to go for the AUKUS submarine deal with the British and Australians because it does not believe that it can entirely rely on India being able to counter China.
There is a view that if a prolonged conflict happens between India and China, India can take advantage of the Malacca Strait. We have a presence there. We can park some ships and interrupt China's supply chain. What is your opinion on this suggestion?
War is a condition when all certainties and plans can break down. Sinking ships or even choking the Malacca Straits—I am not even sure that it is quite so easy as you put it.
But the Chinese, too, will not want to escalate the conflict to such an extent. What I argue is that if there is a conflict in a particular area, give the response in that particular area itself. Because that is the easiest way you can limit the conflict. You start extending it to Malacca etc, the conflict gets out of hand.
So, at least in the present context, countering China’s actions on the LAC with actions in the Indian Ocean is not the most ideal option because our actions will affect not just China but also other countries. It is because of a certain intellectual laziness, and a lack of military planning and thinking that we are thinking of these sorts of alternatives, when the idea should be to limit the extent of the conflict and to win it or at least look like having won it, quickly.
After the Joe Biden administration hosted a virtual ‘Summit for Democracy’, China condemned it as the ‘Cold War’ mentality of the US that could trigger new ideological confrontations worldwide. Did this summit actually achieve anything? Can it be termed as the official starting point of another cold war?
The Chinese will condemn the summit, obviously. China thinks it can keep provoking without a response from the West or other countries. In particular, it assessed that because the West/the US just came out of a dangerous Cold War with the Soviet Union, it does not have the stomach for another one and that Westerners are quite happy to make profits out of continued economic engagement with China. To some extent this is true but I think governments in the West have finally understood that the Chinese regime poses an existential challenge to freedom and democracy everywhere. The CPC sees liberal democracies as threats to its regime. So, the ‘new’ cold war, actually started quite a long time ago and it was started by the Communist Party of China. The Summit for Democracy is only responding to this reality not creating a new reality.
Coming to China’s internal politics, Xi is trying to rewrite the past of the CPC in his image. The party’s newest official history devotes over a quarter of its pages to his nine years in power. Does Xi’s conception of history offer an ideological framework that justifies greater levels of Party intervention in politics, economy and foreign policy? What are the things he is trying to achieve via this exercise?
In Communist Party history, the third and sixth plenums of the Central Committee have proved to be important occasions. It was in the third plenum of the 11th CPC Central Committee in December 1978 where Deng Xiaoping launched the “reforms and opening up” process. So, the third plenum is seen as a special occasion, where they make big decisions usually focused on economic issues. The sixth plenum is similarly noted for addressing questions of ideology and preparations for the next Party Congress.
For some time now, it has always been the third plenum that catches attention because we look at China as some sort of economic powerhouse.
But, the latest sixth plenum [that was held in November 2021], is also significant because there has been a resolution on Party history. Now, the importance of such a resolution is that they were only two resolutions on Party history before. The first was the resolution in 1945, in which Mao established his dominance in the party. The second resolution was in 1981, in which Deng dealt with, among other things, the question of Mao’s place in Chinese history. Here, what happened was that for continuing the radical change in the Communist party's [economic] policies, they came up with a resolution where they said Mao was mostly right, but he made certain mistakes… more commonly simplified as Mao being right 70 per cent of the time and wrong 30 per cent of the time. And, therefore, the Party would continue to follow what was right. The Party also made a distinction between Mao, the man and Mao Zedong Thought, which had been collectively established by the Party, not just by Mao himself.
Each leader in China today is associated with a certain intellectual body of thought or framework. So, there is Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Jiang Zemin's Three Represents, Hu Jintao's concept of scientific development, and now Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era.
The last Party Congress in 2017 took on board the new formulation—Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era. Now that is a mouthful. What the [November 2021] Plenum does is sort of confirming a shorthand use of “Xi Jinping Thought”. Mao is the only leader who has a “Thought” system against his name. Even Deng Xiaoping only has “Theory” against his name. “Thought” is the highest form of any sort of intellectual framework in communist China, and Xi has created such a framework for himself.
This was essentially a process of solidifying Xi Jinping's power in the Chinese political system, and the party. But some steps had already been taken in this direction.
First, term limits were removed for the presidency of the PRC. Technically, there have never been term limits for the General Secretaryship of the party. But it was just a norm that Deng Xiaoping had initiated that a General Secretary would serve only two terms. But removing term limits on the presidency appears to signify now that there would be no informal term limits either for the General Secretary post. After the Plenum, especially, it looks very likely that Xi will continue as the General Secretary even after the 20th National Congress of the CPC later in 2022, by which time according to the norm he should have stepped down.
Second, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese characteristics for the New Era was made a part of the CPC and Chinese state (PRC) constitutions. So, this is another indicator of Xi Jinping's power. The sixth plenum in many ways confirms the centrality and elevation of Xi Jinping’s place in the CPC.
And so, to answer your question, yes, Xi’s conception of history as laid out in the sixth plenum offers a certain ideological framework—that China’s experiences under the CPC offer the correct path forward for economic and political development. But it is also a deeply centralizing ideology that justifies still greater levels of Party intervention in politics, economy and foreign policy than has been the case so far.
CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Huning is the man who is credited along with Xi in formulating the Xi Jinping Thought. Wang had worked closely with Xi’s predecessors, too. But we see such a visible push in the ideological realm only now. Why?
People tend to make the mistake of assuming that all the changes they see now in China came with Xi. It is not so. The platform was set by his predecessors in many ways. The basic reality is the Party wants to remain in power, and it will do whatever it takes to ensure this.
In 1989, after the Tiananmen Massacre, the Party was under pressure. The Tiananmen demonstrations were organised by students—who, as part of a long tradition in China—saw themselves as the vanguard of the revolution in China. It was also around this time that intellectuals like Wang Huning, Wang Hui and others were all sort of finding their feet as academics.
Essentially, the Tiananmen demonstrations had been the response of the intellectuals to China's economic conditions, where teachers and scholars had lost status and were not getting paid enough. They were often doing two or three jobs to make ends meet in a China where money had become everything. So, they needed to respond in some form to the fall in their traditional status and privileges.
What Tiananmen taught the Party was the continued ability of the intellectual class to articulate grievances and ideas and to mobilise wider Chinese society based on these thoughts. As a result, after the crackdown, the Party decided to co-opt Chinese intellectuals, because it realised that unless it had control over the intellectuals and mobilise them to articulate and sell the Party’s narratives to ordinary people, it would be in trouble.
As a result, intellectuals were able to partake of both political power as well as the benefits of economic reform. This is largely the story of intellectuals in China and why its intellectual elite appears mostly to have abandoned ideas of democracy, seem comfortable to live with an authoritarian regime and are even willing to justify such rule.
Wang Huning, meanwhile, had a somewhat different path to supporting authoritarian rule in China. He had travelled around the United States in the late 1980s—just before Tiananmen—and discovered contrary to the rosy picture often painted of American democracy that racism and economic inequality were rampant and soon came to believe neither the American political model nor its economic model was going to work for China. He came back and wrote this book America against America articulating his positions. Subsequently, in the middle of a promising career at Shanghai’s Fudan University, he was tapped by Jiang Zemin to be his speechwriter and was thus, plugged fully into the Party.
So, Wang Huning has long been trying to strengthen Communist Party rule, to push what you might call a form of authoritarian benevolence. [His line is that] China could only progress if it had strong authoritarian capacity at the top, and it could not afford democracy. Wang Huning's career trajectory is notable because he has served under three successive General Secretaries, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now, Xi Jinping. And he has been consistent, his ideology has been consistent. So, what Xi is doing is continuing what his predecessors were doing. Nothing is surprising about it.
What is interesting, however, was that Wang Huning was made a Politburo Standing Committee member. Usually, Politburo Standing Committee members have to be people with experience in administration, with experience running local governments, provincial governments and/or state-owned enterprises. This is the first time someone has been promoted to the PBSC primarily based on his intellectual contributions to the party. So, it also means that things are changing in China towards a more ideology-fronted politics.
What does the "Chinese characteristics" part refer to in "Socialism with Chinese characteristics"? What are the elements in it?
The idea is to modify ideologies to suit China's national conditions. So, alongside acknowledging that Marxism came from the West, the constant effort now is to Sinicize Marxism. At the 100th anniversary of the CPC, Xi spoke repeatedly of using Marxism, modifying Marxism to suit China's national conditions.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping Thought is not framed just for China. By saying that everything [including Marxism] has to be modified according to [China’s] national conditions, he is also suggesting that the Chinese model is something the world should take a look at as an alternative to Western or Indian models of democratic governance.
On the face of it, this seems reasonable—why shouldn’t there be more evolved, more perfect forms of political governance than what obtains in the West? Except that the CPC worldview considers competing political systems like liberal democracy a threat to its legitimacy and existence and it does not have a coherent critique of liberal democracy or parliamentary democracy except whataboutery and half-truths about China’s economic development path.
How appealing is this Chinese model to the developing world?
One very important point is that Westerners have a certain notion that because they have democratic political systems, because they are liberal or because they call for accountability of leaders of African or Asian countries, they are somehow right.
Now, this is a problem because political systems around the world cannot copy the Western way in everything. Most Third World countries have problems with simply providing the basics to their citizens. There is a need to address questions of hunger, disease, and such basics alongside talking about people's civil and political rights. Somehow the western world has never quite been able to deal with this reality. Westerners deem very high accountability standards as being necessary or the right thing to follow, without taking into consideration prior conditions in a Third World country. That is one part.
The second part is that the West is simply not willing to acknowledge that it had a role in creating these prior conditions that now exist in the Third World in the first place and that it has a role in perpetuating the unequal economic and political global order negatively affecting these countries.
Here is where China makes a difference. China goes into these [poor] countries and works with the government of the day without lecturing or hectoring them—at least this has been the Chinese record so far though this, too, has been changing over time. And so, Third World governments are usually happy to get a Chinese alternative because in Africa, for example, the French or the British, have not managed to rid themselves of their colonial-era approaches.
A World Bank loan or any Western loan might be at a lower rate of interest than a Chinese loan but comes with such conditions that many Third World countries are unable to meet. So, they say the Chinese government asks no questions, and they do something useful. They do not question our leadership. They also do not make comments about corruption or the nature of the people.
Chinese have been politically savvy, this way. And Chinese aid workers or experts in the field in these countries are usually also willing to live a very simple life. When Westerners come, they want five-star treatment, they want business class travel. Large parts of Western aid budgets can go into taking care of Westerners rather than being of any use to the locals. The Chinese put money into projects that local leaders want or that the local community can visibly see and use —hospitals, government buildings, even stadiums. And Chinese tech is so cheap. Even in India, the entire telecom revolution has been possible only because of the availability of cheap Chinese telecom infrastructure.
Mao's ideology had a significant impact on the Indian left. Will Xi have any such impact?
I don't think Xi will have any impact here. Mao's politics was very different because he had innovated in Marxism. In India, the left movement has by and large been rather bookish except to an extent the Naxalites, who sort of learned from Mao. India doesn't have much of an industrial proletariat so from where are you going to draw your vanguard from? The Naxalites decided to apply the Maoist method here by saying that the peasantry would be the vanguard. Meanwhile, the regular left movement in India is dominated by the upper castes and they continue to be comfortable in dogmatic, orthodox Marxism. They have looked largely agape at China’s economic transformation being unwilling or unable to implement the same sort of reforms where they were in power in India. So, there is a certain conservatism that naturally follows the identity of the left leadership in India.
However, even Naxalism did not go very far. Today, Maoists have influence in certain tribal pockets in India. Again, they understood that in tribal areas, where there is no peasantry as such, they needed the tribals to be the vanguard. But it is quite unlikely that this will succeed over the long run because today the capacity of the state is way too overwhelming for such insurgent tendencies to make a lasting impact.
Another thing is that since 1962, most Indians have been naturally suspicious of the Chinese. Now, with Galwan, a new generation of Indians is likely to continue in that vein. So, no, I do not think Xi Jinping Thought will influence Indians.
China has been cracking down on almost an entire consumer-facing technology. There are also certain crackdowns on the ed-tech sector, cosmetics sector, etc. So, one of the latest narratives, at least in the Western media, is that China is redefining the meaning of tech. Do you think that should be the way we see it? Should these crackdowns be taken in their separate silos? Or, should we see that there is a larger realignment when it comes to technology in China?
There is a larger framework, here. That is why I think we should never forget the fact that this is a Marxist-Leninist party in charge of China. A Marxist-Leninist party depends on controlling all levers of power. Anything that is public-facing needs to be in the party's control.
After Tiananmen, when the CPC realised that the intellectuals were slipping out of control, it began to co-opt intellectuals. After the economy started growing, and especially, the private sector in the 1990s, it began to allow businessmen to join the Party. But gradually, as the economy started becoming more complex and the Party perceived that the private sector, especially the tech entrepreneurs were beginning to resist the Party’s strictures, it also started introducing more measures to control the economy and private players; these measures have intensified under Xi. Today, every major economic enterprise, public or private has a Party cell – there is no longer anything significant that can be called the ‘private sector’ in China. Western companies are fooling themselves if they think they are engaged in a free market enterprise in China.
The same thing applies to the big tech. For a long time, all these guys operated freely because they were in a developing [phase]. Today, the Party sees the advantages of controlling these segments, including for strategic purposes. But the desire to control tech is not unique to China. All countries have tried to encourage the development of technology and its control for reasons of state, to enable better governance and control of their populations.
But the crackdown in China is not only about tech. Chinese traditional culture also comes into play here.
Parents need to be able to control their children. Men, especially public figures, including TV and film stars, need to look masculine. So, there is a crackdown on male movie stars and singers for looking too effeminate. Men need to look like men, women need to know their place and so on. There's a new Chinese expression called “online civilisation” which the CPC has come up with where the idea is to ensure a level or degree of appropriate behaviour online. And, this “appropriate” behaviour adheres to both the Party's requirements under Marxism as well as the tenets of traditional Chinese culture.
Controlling the service economy and the data being gathered as part of the new economy both within China and outside by Chinese companies is also important for the CPC because it does not limit its ambition only to the Chinese people. China’s communists want to ensure that the regime is secure from all possible angles—domestic and external.
There is, in addition, another important concept called “military-civil fusion”. Essentially, what we understand in India as civil-military integration is just that civilians need to work in good coordination with the military but with civilian supremacy underlined. In the Chinese case, military-civil fusion demands that at all stages, the civilians need to be able to think as the military does. And the military should be able to rely on civilians for logistics, roads, shipping, technology, etc. So, any technology that the civilians develop should be thought of from a military application point of view also – all Chinese commercial ships built, for example, can also be quickly modified for military purposes when the need arises. And whatever important applications the military develops, they push it for use for the civilian sector, too. So, for the Communist Party, technology is a political and economic tool. It is a tool for foreign policy, too—so that it can reach out to multiple countries.
A few months back, China passed a new land border law that says its borders are sacred. How worried India should be in this context?
I do not think there is anything particularly new about this border law. It is just putting on paper what the Chinese have been doing for a very long time. But certainly, it means that the Chinese are trying to get the world to understand better what they are doing by putting it in a framework that others would understand. So, the idea of this and many other Chinese laws is to give China’s illegal actions in occupied Indian territory, in the South China Sea or anywhere else for that matter, a veneer of legality and to create an excuse for further actions of this kind.
There is this expression called “lawfare”—using legal means to achieve political and security interests. What will happen now is that the Chinese will say, ‘we have this law to protect our land, but the Indians are violating it.’ The Chinese are now trying to make it look like they are a regular, law-abiding nation. But that law—all laws in China—can be set aside whenever it suits the CPC’s interests.
Can we say that the CPC has a new view about going to war? It is taking a belligerent stance against Taiwan. It is cultivating anti-Japan sentiments among its citizen and is posturing aggressively against India.
The Communist Party has always seen war through a political lens. They are willing to engage in war when it makes political sense and their early leadership had much experience of war, having fought for decades as insurgents and in the civil war with the then ruling Kuomintang party.
Soon after the People’s Republic of China was born, they engaged in the Korean War. There were brief conflicts with the Indians and Russians, of course. Then in 1979, the war with the Vietnamese which people think ended in some sort of stalemate. But the fact is that the war at the border continued right up to the late 1980s. So, the People’s Liberation Army has engaged in conflict willingly and for considerable periods.
Because of the economic growth and economic capacity, the Party has tried to settle a lot of disputes [in the past four decades]. But on Taiwan, it has never ruled out the option of using force. And it might be the only instance, in which the Chinese will proactively start a full-fledged conflict under certain conditions—the Taiwanese declaring independence, for example.
But by and large, the Chinese have engaged in provocations cleverly, grabbing territory little by little—“salami-slicing” as it is called—and with such overwhelming capacity that others have to think twice before they do something. For instance, they have encouraged anti-Japanese sentiments and intrusions by their fishing vessels into Japanese territorial waters precisely because they believe they can afford to do it without Japan responding violently in response. They believe they do not need Japan more than Japan needs China and that it is a soft target. By hitting Japan, they are also indirectly targeting the United States. Similarly, with India. The message is for the United States.
All said the Chinese communists might talk a great deal about war and threaten neighbours all around. They are rapidly modernising and upgrading their military but they understand they are not ready yet for major conflict. Failure in war is much more consequential for an authoritarian regime and that might keep it also restrained in most circumstances. But China will continue to engage in asymmetric warfare such as cyber-attacks and salami-slicing grabs of territory as we have seen in the South China Sea, Doklam and in eastern Ladakh.
In this condition how do you see the role of the QUAD alliance? And, India's role in it. There is no military component in QUAD. How does that work?
The QUAD, by saying that it is not a military alliance, is doing itself a disservice. Because as far as the Chinese are concerned, the QUAD is a military alliance. So, the claim that it is not a military alliance, is not going to help. India is doing [military exercises along] with the United States as well as others in the Malabar naval exercise [that involves India, Japan and the US as permanent members]. Our former Navy chief recently said the Malabar and the QUAD are very different. And that precisely is the problem. Malabar is a navy exercise and QUAD is an initiative from the Ministry of External Affairs. Now if you continue to work in silos, you will never get your China policy right. You need to be able to integrate these things. That is the central problem we have, that there is a lack of coordination between different agencies.
Remember, we also need to send a message to the rest of our neighbourhood, to the Southeast Asian counties, for example, that they have a reliable partner or fall back in case the Chinese turn aggressive or in case they want to respond in kind to China. I think the QUAD is not doing that. Some element of military threat is necessary to make China behave.
The CPC replaced the Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo amid forced labour allegations in December. The replacement happened just a day after US President Joe Biden signed a bill banning goods from Xinjiang unless companies can prove they are not made with forced local labour. How should we read this action? Will the new Xinjiang party secretary Ma Xingrui find a place in the party’s Politburo soon?
I don’t think we should read too much into the timing of the replacement—there is no connection with what the US has said or done. The change is part of a normal routine of changes and transfers of leaders that happens in time for a Party Congress—the 20th Party Congress is slated towards the end of this year. Chen was previously Party Secretary in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and so has spent considerable time in the role of Party Secretary of a province. He is, therefore, probably headed for a position of some sort in Beijing. Chen has done the job the Party expected of him of keeping Xinjiang and before that TAR under control, the Chinese will not care about what the Americans say or do.
And yes, given that the Xinjiang party secretary is usually a member of the Politburo, Ma may be a contender for a seat at the next Party Congress.
The Global Times editor Hu Xijin resigned in December 2021. There are reports suggesting that he was possibly removed for reasons stemming from “unhappiness over his highly visible international remarks”. Hu Xijin continues to be an influential figure on Twitter. What does his resignation signify? Can it be seen as an ordinary retirement?
I don’t care either way whether Hu’s retirement was ordinary or not. The Chinese system has become one in which each person has to shout louder and longer to make it look like they are loyal to the Party and Xi Jinping personally. So we will always have a merry-go-round of court favourites—they will come and go. Hu Xijin was loud and brash but ultimately, he was a liar, a propagandist for an authoritarian regime. Even ordinary Chinese folk know this. And we, too, should remember that at all times. Hu’s successors will be equally bad. We should pay attention to what they are saying but as only one thing among several other things that we should be paying attention to—we should be able to sift the wheat from the chaff in the information and news coming out of China.
