The Chinese intrusion into Ladakh has been discussed in both the Indian media and in the European-American media. Both treatments have been superficial and the latter has been almost trivial. We think the Chinese action is rooted in strategic & tactical logic besides being consistent with the vision laid out by Chairman Mao Zedong & Premier Zhou Enlai back in 1949.
We began discussing this issue and laid out a historical-strategic model back in 2008-2009. In this article,
we describe why the current Chinese intrusion into Ladakh makes
perfect sense, both strategically and tactically.
Since it took power in 1949, the Chinese leadership has been single-minded in pursuing their long term goal of reestablishing Chinese control and hegemony over legitimately Chinese sphere. Their definition of legitimacy is derived from the Qing empire in 19th century, or just before British took over India. In fact, the single mindedness of purpose demonstrated by China’s leadership over the past 60 years can be compared favorably with that of the 19th century British.
1. Two Mega Events loom ahead
First why now? The Middle East & Asia is facing two mega events that could transform the geostrategics of this vast region.
- The first is something no strategist could have envisioned even as recently as five years ago. That is America becoming self-sufficient in energy production within the next 5-10 years. This is tomorrow in strategic terms. America’s needs for Middle Eastern oil and its consequent dominant presence in the Middle East was thought of as permanent. Not any more. Americans are just tired of the Middle East and want out especially since they don’t need Middle Eastern oil. Who could potentially replace America in the middle east? Who needs vast quantities of Middle Eastern oil for the next 10-20-30 years? China. But substantive Chinese presence in the Middle East would need protected access to it.
- The second is the looming American withdrawal from Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is where the World meets on land“, as we wrote in our October 2009 article titled Afghanistan- Its Strategic Importance to America. That poor land is of enormous strategic importance to China as well. Simply put, Afghanistan is the door to the Middle East for China. So China has been preparing for entry into Afghanistan. China also need minerals from Afghanistan and Chinese investments in Afghan resource properties have been welcomed by President Karzai and blessed by America. The conflicts that may emerge were discussed in some detail in our December 2009 article titled The Battle For Afghanistan, Kashmir & Tibet – A Post-American Withdrawal View Of The Region.
We believe the Chinese leadership has been planning for its entry into the Middle East since it came to power in 1949. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were visionaries far ahead of their time & their counterparts in the rest of Asia. They also had the historical perspective of the Qing dynasty. The easiest path is of course the sea. But that route goes through the narrow choke hold of Malacca Straits. It would take at least a couple of decades for China to challenge the dominance of the American Navy in the Indian Ocean.
The other more lucrative & more sustainable access is via land. The Chinese Army (PLA) entered Xinjiang (new frontier) in 1949, almost immediately after taking control of China in 1949. In 1955, they took administrative control of Xinjiang and made it an autonomous region of China. Xinjiang gives China a large frontier with Tajikistan and access to Afghanistan through Tajikistan. This is fine but not safe enough. After all, Tajikistan is essentially under the control of Russia. And dealing with Russia is not easy whether it be with Stalin in 1949 or with Putin now.
The only land border China shares with Afghanistan is a small corridor called the Wakhan Corridor. According to media reports, China is building a tunnel under the Wakhan corridor for all-weather access to Afghanistan as discussed in our June 2012 article Is This Why China Wanted the Land From Tajikistan?. But this is a small, limited capability access fit only for low-volume traffic.
What China needed and badly needs today is a safer, broader land corridor into Afghanistan, a corridor it can seize from a soft, pliant country.
That country, of course, is India. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai understood very early that Indian leadership was neither as intelligent nor as determined as the British rulers of India. In fact, they had utter contempt towards Indian leadership and Indians in general. They were not unique in this regard. No one is Asia had the slightest respect for a huge society that was continuously conquered and subjugated for 1,000 years. Mao & Zhou had won China after a long arduous war. Now they faced Nehru’s India, a soft, weak, and dreamy regime that had never experienced war in their lives.
2. China & India in post-1947 Af-Kash-Bet
The entire saga from 1947 to today is evidenced by the map below:
(src wikipedia)
Even before Mao & Zhou took power, Nehru’s India did something neither 19th century Britain nor today’s China would ever dream of doing. The newly created Pakistan had attacked the region of Kashmir in 1948 and tried to seize it. After a brief war that the new India “won”, India went to the UN rather than militarily take back the northern areas of Kashmir that Pakistan had occupied. Thanks to this act of suicidal lunacy, the area called Gilgit-Baltistan still remains under Pakistani occupation.
We feel sure that neither Mao nor Zhou could believe this monumental stupidity. This region, they realized, was the key to China’s dream – a land access to Pakistan and then to the Persian Gulf, a dream that had eluded Russia for centuries. And this fit perfectly with their own plans for taking back lands that belonged to China, the Qing Empire of China.
The first step was to take back the top of the world, the Tibetan plateau that contained enormous mineral resources and was the source of all the major rivers that flow into Asia, from Amu Darya into central Asia, to Brahmaputra into India, to the Mekong into South East Asia all the way to Vietnam.
Tibet was essentially a protectorate of British-ruled India until 1947. But in 1951 that same Indian Army was under the control of Nehru’s India and not the British. So the new Chinese Army
walked into Tibet in 1951 and took control of that enormous region. We termed this as the Greatest Acquisition of the 20th century in our October 2011 article.
Now China had Tibet and Xinjiang. But the only road access between Tibet & Xinjiang was through a piece of territory called Aksai Chin (see map above), which had been ceded by China’s Qing dynasty to India’s Sikh Kingdom of Rana Ranjit Singh. The British took control of Aksai Chin when they defeated the Sikhs after the death of Rana Ranjit Singh and Nehru’s India inherited Aksai Chin in 1947.
Control of Aksai Chin was crucial to China. It was also the only land route to Pakistani-occupied Kashmir without going through Indian Kashmir. So China first built a road between Tibet and Xinjiang through Aksai Chin. Border control was never an Indian priority and they did not find out about this road till 1957. Then push came to shove and China occupied Aksai Chin, a large 14,000 sq. mile region. Nehru dismissed this loss by arguing “not a blade of grass grows there” in the Indian parliament. (do you see any parallels to today’s Ladakh incursion?)
Now China had Aksai Chin that connected Tibet to Xinjiang and Tibet to Pakistani-occupied Kashmir. China then persuaded Pakistan to cede a portion of land between Xinjiang and their occupied Kashmir (area marked with red lines in the map above). Through this area, China built a road connecting Aksai Chin to the Northern Areas of Kashmir through the ancient pass called Karakorum pass.
3. Has Pakistan ceded control of Gilgit-Baltistan to China?
The land road between Aksai Chin and Pakistani-occupied Kashmir through the Karakorum pass is important but neither reliable nor high-volume. So it doesn’t really do much for Chinese oil imports or Chinese traffic. So if you were China, wouldn’t you want to control a large portion of the Pakistani occupied Northern Areas (Gilgit-Baltistan) of Kashmir.
This brings us to September 2010 when Selig Harrison, veteran American journalist and analyst, broke the story titled China’s Discreet Hold on Pakistan’s Northern Borderlands. We covered this in detail in our September 2010 article titled Baltistan – Where the World Meets for the Next Geo-Crisis? A couple of very brief quotes show the extent of Chinese control:
- “China wants a grip on the region to assure unfettered road and rail access to the Gulf through Pakistan. It takes 16 to 25 days for Chinese oil tankers to reach the Gulf. When high-speed rail and road links through Gilgit and Baltistan are completed, China will be able to transport cargo from Eastern China to the new Chinese-built Pakistani naval bases at Gwadar, Pasni and Ormara, just east of the Gulf, within 48 hours.”
- “But reports from a variety of foreign intelligence sources, Pakistani journalists and Pakistani human rights workers reveal two important new developments in Gilgit-Baltistan: a simmering rebelion against Pakistani rule and the influx of an estimated 7,000 to 11,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.”
So now, the Chinese Army is resident in Gilgit-Baltistan or the Northern Areas of Pakistani-occupied Kashmir. How does it look in an updated map?
(src wikipedia – Chinese control via our red lined annotation)
The red lines across the green area represent our estimate of Chinese hold on Pakistani-occupied Gilgit-Baltistan area. The corridor at the top left or north-western corner of the map is the Wakhan corridor that links Afghanistan to Chinese Xinjiang, the corridor under which China is reportedly building an all-weather tunnel. With these areas of Gilgit-Baltistan, China’s entry into Afghanistan becomes easier.
But if you were Xi Jinping of China or his military team, how would you look at this map above? You would look at the narrow yellow corner where India’s Ladakh province juts into the narrow border linking Chinese Aksai-Chin to Gilgit-Baltistan. To the immediate west of this corner is the short white line that represents the Siachen Glacier, the 18,000 feet+ plus ridge where India maintains a large troop presence.
You would look at this small, jutting corner of Ladakh and imagine an Indian airbase with Indian army presence, an airbase that could snap this one solitary Karakorum pass that is the lifeline to Aksai Chin. Wouldn’t you be worried about that Indian military presence if you were Xi Jinping or a Chinese strategist?
Of course, they don’t need to imagine. India’s reactivated Daulat Bed Oldi air strip is precisely in that small corner jutting into the Aksai-Chin border with Gilgit-Baltistan. India is building its military infrastructure in the Depsang plateau that houses Daulat Beg Oldi, a military infrastructure that could poses a big threat to Chinese plans when completed.
So if you were China, would you not try to pressure India into withdrawing the Indian army from this corner and leaving it unprotected? And would you not unilaterally enter that area and establish Chinese military presence on the Depsang plateau?
Now you would not do that to any Russian territory because Putin would immediately surround the intruding Chinese troops and send Russian troops into other areas that belong to China. Heck, even pacifist Japan would react militarily to such a blatant intrusion into the disputed Senkaku islands.
But here you are dealing with India which fears a row above everything else. You would expect India’s prime minister to verbally minimize such a small intrusion and ignore it, wouldn’t you? You would expect the Indian government to wait until your prime minister visited Delhi a month after the initial intrusion. And you would use the intervening period to solidify your intrusion with supplies and a new road, wouldn’t you?
We don’t know what you would do but
that is exactly what China has done. Their real objective is to seize control of the relatively small Depsang plateau to eliminate any danger to the Aksai-Chin & Gilgit-Baltistan border. But they would be satisfied now with a negotiated withdrawal of the Indian army from and demilitarization of the Depsang plateau. That would postpone any danger to their border. And also if the Indian army goes back in, the Chinese army can then officially respond militarily to take possession of that plateau. This is why we call their recent intrusion into the Depsang plateau a smart move.
When you get control of this plateau, you would isolate Indian troops on the Siachen Glacier ridge and essentially force India’s withdrawal from that area as well. That would make the integration of Aksai-Chin & Gilgit-Baltistan much easier. But if you achieve this, why would you remain satisfied?
Look at the blue line near the lower left or south-eastern corner of the above map near the lower boundary between Aksai Chin and Ladakh. If you were Xi Jinping, wouldn’t you really want possession of Ladakh from that blue line all the way across to Chinese controlled green area of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir?
What would that map look like? And what possible basis would you have to claim that territory?
4. Realization of Mao-Zhou Vision of the new Qing dynasty
That map would look like this with blue lines crossing India’s Ladakh representing Chinese occupation:
(src wikipedia – the small red arrow in northern Ladakh is Daulat Beg Oldi – annotation ours)
The blue lines crossing Ladakh from Aksai Chin’s lower boundary into Gilgit-Baltistan represent future Chinese demand for Ladakh territory. If we were Xi Jinping, this is what we would want. This would be our broad, safe land corridor all the way from Tibet through Aksai-Chin, through newly seized Ladakh into Gilgit-Baltistan to Khyber-Paktunkhawa (North West Frontier Province of old) and Afghanistan.
Hegemony over Af-Kash-Bet, that continuous land mass spanning Tibet, Kashmir & Afghanistan, would be China’s. But by what historic right could China claim this? Look at the map of the Qing Empire below:
(Qing Empire – 1820 – src Wikipedia)
According to this map, Ladakh (low south-western area in yellow) is a protectorate of the Qing Empire. They called it Little Tibet just as they called India’s Arunachal Pradesh as South Tibet. Now we ask you, if Tibet is Chinese as Indian Government admits, then why aren’t Little Tibet and South Tibet also Chinese?
This is the basic Chinese position and they kinda have a point. They wouldn’t if Indian prime ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee had insisted on legally defining what Tibet means before giving away India’s rights in Tibet to China. But then foresight, courage and backbone are just not Indian virtues.
In summary, if we were Xi Jinping, we would order our army to enter Ladakh before our first meeting with India’s Government. Wouldn’t you as well?
Note: the blue line at the lower south-eastern corner of Aksai-Chin & Ladakh border is Pangong Lake or Pangong Tso. It is gorgeous.
Bollywood fans might remember it from the song below from “Dil Se” which is filmed near Pangong lake.
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