Demographically and economically, India and China are the big birds in the Asian nest. Both countries claim to recognise how important it is that they do not repeat the history of conflict that has marred their relations. President Hu Jintao’s official visit to India this week has been accompanied by much talk on both sides about the religious and commercial interplay, reaching back thousands of years, between these two ancient civilisations.
The more prosaic reality is that neither has any real affection for, or much knowledge of, each other. After a brief postwar embrace of Third World “brotherhood”, still referred to in India as the era of Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai, the two countries fought a bitter and still unresolved border war in 1962. They have been edgy neighbours ever since.
Misunderstandings run deep. The Chinese hold the creative chaos of Indian democracy in ill-disguised contempt. Indians fret that China, having raced ahead of them in the growth stakes, is set to dominate Asia geopolitically and keep India at the margins of regional diplomacy. The sanctuary given by India to the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetan refugees is consistent with Indian respect for human rights, but is viewed by China as provocative intervention in its “internal” affairs. Geopolitically, India deeply distrusts China’s strategic alliance with Pakistan, and China dislikes the new warmth of India’s relations with the United States almost as much as it did India’s earlier embrace of the Soviet Union.
Both governments are, however, committed to pragmatic diplomacy, and Mr Hu and Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, have got to know each other fairly well. The two giants have business that urgently needs to be handled well. Their companies are rivals in global markets for the energy and raw materials needed to power their fast-growing economies and, with both nations increasingly short of water, management of the Himalayan watershed could become a serious source of tension.
They also have potential synergies, pooling Indian creativeness in science and technology with China’s dynamic industries. Even so, the modesty of the agreements reached this week shows how difficult it is to put relations on a smoother track.
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It did not help that, on the eve of Mr Hu’s arrival, the Chinese Ambassador to India publicly restated China’s claim to “the whole of Arunachal Pradesh”, a 33,000-square-mile swath of territory along the disputed frontier where China’s claim stems, provokingly, from its annexation of Tibet. That unpromising start to a trust-building endeavour made it politically impossible for Mr Singh to use this visit to speed up the resolution of the broader border dispute, a quarrel that both India and China need to consign to history.
Economic development has fundamentally changed the relationship between India and Pakistan, and so it will alter the theme music to which the giants, China and India, dance. China has much to learn from India’s intellectual and creative achievements, and India needs to study China’s successful investment in infrastructure. These two countries have more in common with each other, and with the West, than they care to admit — but there is a real value in understanding the extent of shared values.