[LST] The Beijing Imperium

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Mihir S Sharma | 29 03 2013
Last Update at 10 40 IST
The Beijing Imperium
The People's Republic of China, as we all know, makes everything. It also owns a great deal - scary ships and even scarier bits of paper with promises of money on them. It throws its weight around in international affairs, and bullies its neighbours. And yet, as its president, Xi Jinping, stressed repeatedly at the BRICS summit this week, it would like to be treated as a developing country.
China is not a developing country, and it should stop pretending to be one. And India should stop enabling this diplomatic deception.
Jinping is a fan of the BRICS summits, the travelling court of the Beijing Imperium, and all its associated anti-Western, third-world trumpeting. The BRICS serves the purpose of allowing China to hide behind genuine developing countries like India and South Africa in order to decry the unfairness of a world order in which, as it happens, it is doing pretty well - Security Council seat, remember? - if not as well as it imagines it deserves.
The BRICS leaders' brilliant idea that they need to replace the World Bank, that hideous relic of World War II-era Eurocentrism, with a developing country-run infrastructure finance bank, is a classic example of the dangerous nonsense resulting from India's blind refusal to challenge China's "developing country" status. The World Bank is supposed to lend to developing countries to build their infrastructure. China would like voting rights assigned proportional to each country's contribution to the bank's corpus; since nobody else has any many - being real developing countries, remember - that means China will get control, and disburse funds as it pleases in order to promote its own national interests in the resource-rich developing world, all the while hiding behind the supposed moral authority other four members of the BRICS. Imperial Beijing will build the infrastructure it needs; but it will be cleverer than Rome with its roads, or the Raj with its railways. That this proposal should have lasted two whole summits without being thrown out on its ear is something Manmohan Singh should be ashamed of. At the very least he's been forced to point out that New Delhi hasn't that much money to give, and so it's uncomfortable with proportional voting rights.
Meanwhile, Jinping, that eminent, idealistic Nehruvian, has a Panchsheel to offer us, apparently: five points that he suggests should guide India's relationship with China. Here they are. I annotate each with a translation from Advanced Party Doublespeak into plain language. One: "Maintain strategic communication and keep bilateral relations on the right track." Translation: Have lots of summits to attack the West, please, and don't make a noise about dams or our naval bases or our help to Pakistan. Two: "Harness each other's comparative strength and expand win-win cooperation in infrastructure, mutual investment and other areas." Translation: our comparative advantage is in making things. Yours is buying them. Get it? If not, Jairam Ramesh, who invented the word "Chindia" and shut all your manufacturing down for you, will explain. Three: "Strengthen cultural ties and increase mutual understanding and friendship between our peoples." Translation: Our rise is peaceful, so stop distrusting us, or else. Four: "Expand coordination and collaboration in multilateral affairs to jointly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries and tackle global challenges." Translation: Try even harder to hate the West. They are imperialists, trying to dominate all us poor developing countries. Yankee Go Home. Five: "Accommodate each other's core concerns and properly handle problems and differences existing between the two countries." Translation: I thought I told you not to make a noise!
Not that we could make a real noise. It is important to remember that, while China is no longer a developing country, India very definitely is. It has as much chance of matching China economically and militarily as it does of beating it at the Olympic medal tally. So, naturally, confrontation is not the answer. Remember, India speaking loudly while China carries a big stick is what got us 1962.
But I would think, for our self-respect and in our national interest, we shouldn't roll over and play dead, either. The problem is that New Delhi's bureaucratic and intellectual circles are so invested in a post-colonial conception of the West as evil exploiters and everyone in Asia as our natural allies that they wind up making the oddly racist assumption that imperialism is something only white people try. Thus, mouthing pious anti-imperialist shibboleths, India is willing to serve the Beijing Imperium through the BRICS Bank. Or New Delhi - actually, Jairam Ramesh again - will invite China, since 2006 the world's biggest polluter, to pretend it's a put-upon developing country at climate-change negotiations and hide behind India's need to step up emissions.
Far more sensible than anyone in New Delhi's corridors of power, evidently, is the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sunusi, who wrote a widely-read op-ed in The Financial Times last week where he pointed out that Africa is willingly opening itself up to Chinese imperialism: "China is no longer a fellow under-developed economy - it is the world's second-biggest, capable of the same forms of exploitation as the West. It is a significant contributor to Africa's deindustrialisation and underdevelopment."
Wise words, those. India's manufacturing has shown no growth for quarter after quarter. Chinese goods fill our markets. We want to denude our forests to sell them iron ore. This is colonialism; the struggling West's feeble investment is not.
China is not a fellow developing country. But it is still a competitor, and one streets ahead. At the very least, India should stop giving it a helping hand.
--
"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those who understand enough
to be afraid and yet retain their fury."


Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone

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