Is Beijing Preparing For Another Confrontation With India At The Border Soon?

A group of researchers from Dartmouth College, USA, together with colleagues from Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Defence Academy made an attempt to develop a statistical understanding of how various factors like overall China–India relations, internal political affairs, international political issues, and domestic economic situation contribute to the likelihood of Chinese incursions across the Indian border with a lead time between 1 and 6 months.

These researchers assembled a dataset by compiling monthly information on Chinese incursions into India from 2005 to 2019, together with a monthly dataset containing 18 independent variables that serve as a measure of aforementioned factors. Their findings were disseminated through a paper in the peer-reviewed journal of ‘Humanities & Social Sciences Communications’, published by Nature Portfolio.

Their findings suggest that strengthening India-US relations positively contribute to the likelihood of Chinese incursions over the period of next six months, which can be considered as increasing the chances of conflagration at the border, and therefore also as a corroboration of author’s assertion that publicised instances of growing US-India cooperation could be an indicator of impending Chinese aggression at the border.

In light of the aforementioned observations, it is important to take note of the US’ approval of the sale of 31 MQ-9B armed drones to India at a cost of $3.99 billion in February and the entry of India’s state-run Cochin Shipyard Limited (CSL) into a Master Shipyard Repair Agreement (MRSA) with the US in April that enables it to repair the US Navy Ships, marking the entry of third Indian shipyard after Larsen & Toubro (L&T) and Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL).

Both of the above developments are alarming from Beijing’s point of view. The sale of MQ-9B drones empowers the Indian military against China, as was observed during the border stand-off in the aftermath of the Galwan Valley clash when at the request of the Indian Army, the Indian Navy flew one of its MQ-9Bs – taken from the US on lease – along the LAC to provide real-time battle picture of the Chinese activities to the Indian troops stationed in the eastern Ladakh sector.

The ship repair agreement with Indian shipyards enhances the US Navy’s ability to operate in the Indian Ocean, thereby limiting the PLA Navy’s ability to do the same, which is an essential requirement for China in the event of a war with the US, as the Indian Ocean happens to be a major trade route for China’s energy and raw materials supplies.

There is no shortage of such developments, take for example, the meeting between the National Security Advisors (NSAs) of the US and India in June in New Delhi to discuss the progress of the US-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) – a mechanism for military-technical cooperation on critical and emerging technology areas, including Artificial Intelligence (AI),

This should also ring alarm bells in Beijing, considering the fact that President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on AI in his quest to make China a dominant power, going so far as to issue a mandate to become fully modernized by 2035 and on par with the US military by 2050, as part of which the PLA is making relentless efforts to research, develop, and operationalize AI for military purposes.

So, unless Beijing reconsiders its approach toward its relations with India, the only behaviour it is likely to engage in is that of more aggression sooner rather than later.

If we look at the timeline of major incidents of friction at the LAC since 2014, namely, the Doklam military standoff, the Galwan valley clash and the clash at Yangtse in December 2022, they have occurred after intervals of 2-3 years.

Therefore, based on the discourse within the strategic circles in China pertaining to India and the US, and the aforementioned empirical evidence pertaining to Chinese incursions into India from 2005 to 2019 as well as the trend of major incidents of Chinese aggression since 2014, occurrence of Chinese aggression at the LAC in the duration of next 6-12 months should not come as a surprise.

How Pakistan Might Factor In The Future Chinese Aggression At The LAC?

Another larger geostrategic factor, particularly responsible for China’s aggression in the eastern Ladakh sector is Beijing’s ambitious $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project.

Strictly geopolitically speaking, the CPEC project is aimed at addressing China’s energy security needs by providing it a land corridor for transporting energy resources, thereby reducing its reliance on maritime routes passing through strategic choke points in the Indian Ocean, which as pointed out earlier, would come under threat in the event of a conflict with the US

This land corridor passes through the Gilgit-Baltistan region in the Pakistan Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (PoJK) which is claimed by India, and is therefore under risk of an eventuality of war between India and Pakistan.

Also, the infrastructure projects led by the Modi government near the LAC, for instance, the expedited construction of the 225-km Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) road in eastern Ladakh provides the Indian military with an opening to the Karakoram Pass, threatening the China-Pakistan Karakoram highway to the north of this pass, which serves as a major communication route to the CPEC across Khunjerab Pass in Pakistan’s illegally occupied city of Gilgit.

So, China and Pakistan are hand -in-gloves in their efforts against India because of their shared perception of India’s rise as a potential threat to the CPEC project, which is a game changer for both the countries.

According to a Pakistani media report citing Dr. Wang Shida, the Deputy Director of CICIR’s Institute for South Asian Studies, China was forced to enter into the Kashmir dispute because of India’s change to J&K’s status in August 2019.

“India ‘opened up new territory on the map,’ incorporated part of the areas under the local jurisdiction of Xinjiang and Tibet into its Ladakh union territory and placed Pakistani-administered Kashmir within its so-called union territories of Jammu and Kashmir,” Wang was cited by Express Tribune as having written shortly before the violent Indo-China standoff in June 2020.

“This forced China into the Kashmir dispute, stimulated China and Pakistan to take counter-actions, and dramatically increased the difficulty in resolving the border issue between China and India,” Wang further said.

It is in this light that the recent spate of terror attacks in India’s Jammu region along the Line of Control (LoC) – de facto border between India and Pakistan – as well as the uptick in ceasefire violations by the Pakistani Border Action Teams (BATS) in recent weeks must be viewed.

Experts suggest that this spurt in violence in Jammu could be part of a well-planned strategy of China and Pakistan to stretch the Indian military thinner by forcing it to deploy troops on two fronts. This is because the stand-off with China forced India to divert its troops from Jammu to Ladakh region, leaving the former vulnerable to militancy.

For years, India’s security experts have feared the prospect of a two-front war along the country’s northern and western borders, and according to the author, India is not very far from finally coming face to face with these fears, if China decides to commit another act of aggression in the Ladakh sector.

With tens of thousands of troops from both sides equipped with heavy weaponry currently deployed along the LAC, the Ladakh sector is a tinderbox waiting to be lit by the next major confrontation between the two sides.

Therefore, early resolution of the current border stand-off in Ladakh is very important because if it does not happen soon, the risk of a Sino-Indian regional conflict is only going to increase with the progress of CPEC.

This is because, per the US Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) 2023 annual report on China, the CPEC energy pipeline could be completed in a decade at the earliest, relieving China of its dependence on maritime routes for energy imports.

And as the author pointed out earlier, Beijing is probably gearing up for the final phase of its competition with the US, which it expects to last for the next 2-3 decades, meaning China’s resolve to protect its investments in the CPEC is currently perhaps the highest ever.

 

Tanmay Kadam is a geopolitical observer based in India. He has experience working as a Defense and International Affairs journalist for EurAsian Times. He can be contacted at tanmaykadam700@gmail.com