China's Wars: A useful guide to China's paradox of power and insecurity

Vijay Gokhale's China's Wars examines Beijing's use of military coercion and diplomacy, offering insights into China's strategic behaviour and its implications for India

China’s Wars; The Politics and Diplomacy Behind its Military Coercion

By Vijay Gokhale

Published by Simon and Schuster

210 pages  ₹699

 

The People’s Republic of China will be the first power to truly rise and challenge the existing superpower in the era of nuclear weapons. Therefore, how its ambitions manifest themselves is a concern for the world. For India, in particular, the challenges of China’s rise are manifold with unsettled borders, a checkered history, lack of sustained interaction and systemic rivalry to boot. Therefore, it occupies a central location in India’s strategic thinking. 

India’s former foreign secretary and ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale is one of India’s eminent thinkers on China and since his retirement in early 2020, he has produced a number of lucid and accessible books on the country. China’s Wars: The Politics and Diplomacy Behind its Military Coercion is a valuable addition to expand one’s understanding of China. 

Mr Gokhale looks at China’s four wars/conflicts against Taiwan in 1958, India in 1962, Russia in 1969 and Vietnam in 1977, and the recent grey zone strategies, particularly against the Philippines and Taiwan. Across all these incidents, China not only uses its military in a decisive manner but also accompanies the wars with propaganda. It maintains a distinction between how it communicates with friends and adversaries. China often claims that it “resorts to the use of force to press for peace”. While this may sound contradictory, China uses this maxim to blame opponents for escalating disputes and unilateral actions, and sees and projects itself as a victim and its actions as a response to provocations/injustice. 

One significant point the author makes is that China’s arguments have remained the same across its many conflicts, which is visible in the case of two conflicts involving India too. China never agrees to restore the status quo ante, negotiates only from a position of strength, interprets history in a peculiar way and denies the same right to opponents. Mr Gokhale argues that “India must prepare for a prolonged period of armed coexistence with China”, and that China’s coercion against India is likely to continue in some form or the other. What the author does well is to situate the 1962 war within the global balance of power context. India’s assessment of 1962 is incomplete and the lessons learnt are not public. However, several parallels between 1962 and 2020 are apparent from reading this chapter, even if the author has not made that comparison as such. 

While Mr Gokhale quotes another scholar’s work to refer to the 2020 Galwan crisis and elsewhere, he does not share his own view on this or the 2017 Doklam standoff or on the efforts to reconcile the differences between 2017 and 2020 via the informal summits or sideline meetings. This is understandable since in 2017 he was India’s ambassador to Beijing and, thereafter India’s foreign secretary and retired only a few months before the Galwan crisis. 

India today faces the prospect of being caught between a struggle involving declining and aspiring hegemons. Many scholars in India and abroad have argued that China’s behaviour towards India changed after the India-US nuclear deal. On several occasions in his book, Mr Gokhale also alludes to China’s coercion towards India possibly being linked to its proximity to the US. However, he does not suggest a way out of this dilemma for India, although the issue is more urgent than ever before. 

It is also unfortunate that the book is excessively dependent on Ketian Zhang’s works on China’s coercive strategies and thus repetitively relies on her arguments. At the same time, there is insufficient referencing to actual Chinese foreign policy statements, especially when arguing about China’s potential future behaviour. For example, Xi Jinping’s reports in the last two party congresses have significant coverage on the party’s perceptions and aspirations. Similarly, there are plenty of speeches from Chinese leaders, including at the United Nations. Taken together, these sources reveal a lot about China’s current self-perception expressed through terms such as “the world is undergoing changes not seen in a century”, which underscore China’s worldview and ambition. China's tactics against its adversaries flows from these. 

There are also a few stylistic problems — longish paragraphs, absence of subheadings, end-of-the-book notes, and lack of indexing of terms and names. These are of course easily correctable changes, and do not diminish the value of this book. One feels that the author has a lot more to say about China and its attitudes, but has restrained himself given that he was recently in service. There is a lot to read between the lines, which is what makes the book interesting as well. 

China is a paradox of power and insecurity, and its risk appetite may be heightened. If there is one question that remains unanswered it is “whether China goes to war when it feels strong or when it feels weak”. It may take years of effort to come close to a definitive answer to this question. Given China’s rise this is a question that will determine whether we live in the world of peace or of chaos. Mr Gokhale’s recent book is an informative addition to that repository. 

The reviewer is professor and associate academic dean, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O P Jindal Global University