756 { China’s Quest
India, unlike Japan, is not protected by alliance with the United States, and
in a situation of looming “encirclement” Beijing might well target India as the
weakest, most vulnerable link. New Delhi’s strategy thus seems to be to use
the threat of Indian alignment with the United States and Japan to induce
Beijing to adopt more conciliatory policies toward India, especially on the
territorial dispute. This is a tack that requires a tilt toward Washington and
Tokyo adequate to rouse Chinese apprehensions, but not so pronounced as to
produce Chinese hostility and punitive measures. Overplaying the US-Japan
card could induce the Chinese hostility toward India it was intended to avoid.
Yet Indian fears of China’s growing presence in SA-IOR are real and strong
and could lead, if not handled properly by Beijing, to emergence of a counter-
vailing India-Japan coalition.
In Japan, there remains a strong aversion to Japanese military power and
the practice of power politics. Memory of the catastrophic consequences of
those things in the 1930s remains strong. So too does guilt for Japan’s actions
in that era, guilt that comingles with esteem for China’s civilizational achieve-
ments. There is also recognition of the deep economic ties between Japan and
China, and of the potential heavy costs if political conflict disrupts those ties.
It thus remains unclear how far and how fast even a determined Japanese
leader like Shinzo Abe will be able to go in forging a security partnership with
India. What is clear, however, is that China’s growing power and the assertive
application of that power are not reassuring Japan and India, but are nudging
those countries together out of common apprehensions.China’s QuandaryBeijing will have to move deftly to avoid pushing its two apprehensive neigh-
bors into a coalition to contain it. A major thrust of Chinese diplomacy will
have to be reassurance of Japan and India. The track record of China’s efforts
in this regard indicates that China’s leaders and diplomats are cognizant of
this fact. Overall, however, Chinese efforts to reassure Tokyo and New Delhi
have not been highly successful.
Nationalist passions and elite competition in China make difficult a shift
by Beijing to policies better designed to reassure China’s neighbors. Any
CCP administration that pulled back from the current strategy of assert-
ively establishing an ongoing and de facto Chinese presence in the disputed
East China Sea would be charged with weakness and lack of patriotic zeal
by a rival in the Politburo, by the PLA, by bloggers, by impassioned mobs
in the streets of China’s cities, or by some combination of these. How could
rising China allow itself to be pinned in by “little Japan”? ardent Chinese
nationalists would say. Similarly, a Chinese leader who advocated abandon-
ing China’s claim to the southern slope of the eastern Himalayas and drawing