War and Peace

Starting from 1979, China’s changed in policy to focus on economic growth rather than ideology, a stance famously captured in Deng Xiaoping’s quote:

“It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

Sure, the CCP (Communist Party of China) still maintains controls with an iron fist. Sure, they still tightly control what topics cannot be spoken about. Sure, they built the Great Firewall of China to control information flow via the Internet. But all that’s about staying in power, not about ideology.

 

Ironically, it’s the US that focuses on ideology! No, I am not talking about their wars against communism during the Cold War era because those were understandable. Rather, I am talking about the Iraq war which was as much as about those non-existent Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction as it was about the Bush-Cheney idea that toppling Saddam (and later Gaddafi) would set off the spread of democracy in the Middle East.

 

Being from a country that often faces Chinese aggresion, the most recent being at Galwan, I’d never noticed this point until I heard former US President, Jimmy Carter, mention it:

“Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None.”

Yes, yes, China has had and continues to have its standoffs and land grabs with so many of its neighbors from Japan to Taiwan to India to practically everyone in the South China Sea. Carter’s point is that they’ve never gone to war with any of those countries so far.

 

The US, on the other hand, has been in so many wars in the same time window starting 1979 (Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Afghanistan again, and Iraq). Carter wonders whether one of the reasons for China’s rise is that they’ve been spending on economic growth, not wars.

 

It’s against that (and Galwan) backdrop that I re-thought the weird news of how those 20 Indian soldiers had died at Galwan: they were not killed by bullets or grenades; no, they were pushed off cliffs in hand-t0-hand shoving and combat. I had intially dismissed that as too ridiculous to be true. But it turns out it’s true!

 

The road to all this started off all the way back to 1988. The step both sides had first agreed to back then was that neither side would use force. If either side did cross the LAC and were cautioned by the other side, they would pull back. Unlike the Pakistan border, this was actually followed. Both sides felt this still wasn’t good enough and they expanded the agreement in 1996:

“Neither side shall open fire or hunt with guns or explosives within two kilometers from the line of actual control.”

As if that isn’t hard to believe, over time, things have evolved to the point now where neither side even carries firearms too close to the border anymore!