Reassuring and Unnerving India } 757
the boundary along the detested McMahon Line would face similar charges.
In addition, a conciliatory Chinese leader—perhaps along the lines of Zhou
Enlai or Deng Xiaoping—who was willing to “abandon” that territory would
be charged with endangering the Sino-Pakistan entente, thereby founding
the security of “China’s Tibet” not on a solid balance of power favoring China
but on Indian pledges of friendship that could easily shift.
China’s leaders certainly recognize as well as foreign analysts the tectonic
shifts underway in response to China’s growing power. The outcomes of these
shifts could well be the most decisive factor in determining the course of
human events in the twenty-first century. The good outcome would be that
China finds another statesman of the caliber of Zhou Enlai or Deng Xiaoping
who can succeed in reassuring its neighbors. The bad outcome would be an
ambitious politician who rides the wave of nationalism to lead an effort to
break out of the anti-China encirclement that Chinese nationalists imagine
malevolent American hegemonists have engineered around China.