- Sep 2, 2008
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India and China: A Himalayan rivalry | The Economist
Solid article. Thoughts USMB?
MEMORIES of a war between India and China are still vivid in the Tawang valley, a lovely, cloud-blown place high on the south-eastern flank of the Himalayas. They are nurtured first by the Indian army, humiliated in 1962 when the Peoples Liberation Army swept into Tawang from next-door Tibet. India now has three army corpsabout 100,000 troopsin its far north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which includes Tawang.
Since re-establishing diplomatic ties in 1976, after a post-war pause, they and their relationship have in many ways been transformed. The 1962 war was an act of Chinese aggression most obviously springing from Chinas desire for western Aksai Chin, a lofty plain linking Xinjiang to Tibet. But its deeper causes included a famine in China and economic malaise in both countries. China and India are now the worlds fastest-growing big economies, however, and in a year or two, when India overtakes Japan on a purchasing-power-parity basis, they will be the worlds second- and third-biggest. And as they grow, Asias giants have come closer.
Their two-way trade is roaring: only $270m in 1990, it is expected to exceed $60 billion this year. They are also tentatively co-operating, for their mutual enrichment, in other ways: for example, by co-ordinating their bids for the African oil supplies that both rely on. Given their contrasting economic strengthsChinas in manufacturing, Indias in servicessome see an opportunity for much deeper co-operation. There is even a word for this vision, Chindia. On important international issues, notably climate-change policy and world trade, their alignment is already imposing.
Yet China and India are in many ways rivals, not Asian brothers, and their relationship is by any standard vexedas recent quarrelling has made abundantly plain. If you then consider that they are, despite their mutual good wishes, old enemies, bad neighbours and nuclear powers, and have two of the worlds biggest armieswith almost 4m troops between themthis may seem troubling.
Solid article. Thoughts USMB?