Understanding China

Few will believe when China says that His Holiness Dalai Lama is hell-bent on breaking or damaging the: "growing" Sino-Indian ties. His Holiness is visiting Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, which China considers as its own territory. Arunachal, so goes the Chinese logic, belonged to Tibet. Obviously, Beijing cannot digest the fact when the Dalai Lama, Tibet's highest spiritual land political leader, says that Arunachal is an integral part of India and as a Buddhist is visiting Tawang, which houses a world famous monastery.
However, the fact remains that Chinese animosity towards India is not confined to territorial disputes alone. It is, in a sense, civilizational. And India could ignore this unpalatable truth only at its peril. Just consider how China, routinely through its officials in international meets, Armed Forces near the Line of Actual Control, spokespersons and state-controlled media, says and does everything possible to humiliate India.
Recently, it even criticised the visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Arunachal Pradesh and that too on the very day when as high as 74 per cent of people in the State voted in the Assembly elections and reaffirmed their identities as proud Indians. All this is beside the facts of engaging in activities in the so-called "string of pearls", countries surrounding India (Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan) that have ominous implications for India.
And yet, one finds in India powerful voices sympathizing and justifying the Chinese behaviour, given the unresolved territorial disputes between the two countries. These sympathizers include communist leaders, powerful media barons and retired Indian diplomats. These pro-China elements in India may not be exactly fifth columnists, but one thing is clear: All of them literally hate the United States. They are sure that China is the only country that can challenge the US and end the so-called unipolar world or American hegemony.
In the process, they underplay the fact that in the name of multipolar world, China is striving for a unipolar Asia, where, true to its theory of middle kingdom, China will not allow another pole, whether it is India or Japan, to make the world truly multipolar. Historically speaking, that has been the Chinese tradition. China throughout ages has done everything possible to halt the growth of Indian influence and dent its neighbour's eminence.
Southeast Asia as a region has always been the battleground for influence by India and China. Many French and Indian scholars once referred to the region as "Farther India" or "Greater India", L'Inde Exterieure and the Hinduized or "Indianized states". On the contrary, many Chinese writings identified the region as Kun Lun or Nanyang or "Little China".  It is because of this that many even refer the landmass between India and China as "Indo-China", which now includes Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.  In fact, according to a map produced in Chinese text books in 1954, China's traditional sphere of influence went beyond Southeast Asia to include Mongolia, parts of Central Asia, the entire Himalayan regime including northern Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. Illustrating the country's lost  "tributary system" (Chinese mainland, the imperial centre and other countries as its subordinates paying regular tributes), this map was intended to create a popular support for Beijing's efforts to wipe out the "humiliation" of the "territorial losses" in the past at the hands of the Western and Japanese "imperialists". 
Historian KM Panikkar described the expansion of Indian culture and influence both in Central Asia and Southeast towards the countries and islands of the Pacific as one of the momentous factors of the period immediately preceding the Christian era.  In fact, other historians often describe the concept of "Farther India", a geographic area consisting of the present-day Southeast Asia, save, perhaps, the Philippines, because of the fact that this whole region developed under the India's "cultural influence" the "Hindu kingdoms" of Sri Vijaya (parts of Malaysia and Indonesia), Funan (Vietnam), Kambuja (Cambodia) and Champa (Thailand)].  No wonder why French historian Coedes was emphatic that but for India, this whole region would not have been "civilized". As he said, "Without India, its past would be almost unknown; we would know scarcely more about it than we know about Australia".
The "Indianised" Mekong valley, Malay Peninsula and Indonesia in general, and Kambuja and Champa in particular, played a very important role in stemming the growing Chinese influence. Both Kambuja and Champa have exceptional claims to the gratitude of Indian people. If the ever-expanding empire of China did not extend its authority to Singapore and if the Indian Ocean remains today what its name indicates, it is due to the resistance, which Kambuja and Champa put up against the constant pressure of China. Between them they still mark the boundary of Chinese culture and expansion.
However, the fact still remains that after the Mongols took over China in the 13th century, they consistently tried to establish hegemony over the countries of the southern seas. Their main tactics in this endeavour was to first split up the old Indian states of Farther India into smaller principalities and then make them constantly fight against each other so as to compel some of them to become the Chinese protectorates under the Chinese governors.     
In fact, this policy of divide and alienate India was repeated in 1950s by Communist China, even though the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in his zeal for "Asian unity", went out of the way to espouse the cause of China's entry in to the United Nations and then bring the then virtually ostracized Communist China's Prime Minister Zhou En-lai to the first-ever forum of Asian and African leaders at Bandung in 1955.  It was at Bandung that emerging trends of tussle for Asian leadership between the independent India and communist China became clearly discernible. Since then Beijing's policy "anything that diminishes Indian leadership tends to strengthen the Chinese magnetism" has been scrupulously maintained. In fact, Bandung and then the Sino-Indian war in 1962 have been the two most momentous events in eclipsing the Indian influence in Asia.
A 1974 poem by Mao Zedong displays the scorn with which China viewed India. The poem is like this:
Prakash Nanda, INFA