XI RELYING ON 'CHISSIA’ To POWER PRC EXPANSION

Xi is banking on a combination of cheap Russian energy and Chinese manufacturing to turbocharge the PRC's geopolitical challenge to the democracies, at a time when the West is scoring self-goal after self-goal.

- MADHAV NALAPAT

Within policymaking bodies in the Lutyens Zone, fragments of Chindia (the assumed synergistic fusion between India and China) still litter some minds. Deng Xiaoping began his wooing of India with the 1981 opening of a route from India to Kailas Mansarovar. Since then, trade between India and China has ballooned, and is presently witnessing a surplus of trade in that country's favour that has crossed US$80 billion. Although Deng kept the PLA on a leash, the military was set free under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Salami-sliced expansion further into India of the Line of Actual Control (which remains unrecognized by Beijing) co-existed with honeyed language from PRC diplomats and interlocuters. Until the always visibly assertive, often aggressive Xi Jinping took charge as CCP General Secretary in 2012, the promise of Chindia was kept alive even though Beijing refused to backtrack on border issues, all the while deepening its cooperation with GHQ Rawalpindi, including through providing logistical and other support in operations directed at India. While Aksai Chin has from the 1950s been occupied by China, after Xi's ascent to the highest office in his country, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir too has entered on a path of becoming a protectorate of the PRC, with the eager consent of the Pakistan Army. Since the second 5-year term of Xi began, hardly any attention has been given to the concept of the Russia-India-China axis, while intense effort has gone into strengthening the bilateral relationship between Beijing and Moscow.

It is no secret that the CCP considers large chunks of Siberian land as having been taken from China by Russia in the past. Nor that Xi's desire is to dominate the European part of Eurasia once he manages to establish not just ascendancy but control. over the Asian part. In such a schema, Moscow will need to be content to serve as a junior partner to Beijing, a status that Moscow appears to have silently accepted.