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Fire and Stone
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Holding 1962 as a benchmark, India is preparing for a war that will not be |
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao
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Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab
The ministry of external affairs has said that bilateral relations with China
are complex and sensitive. This is because China’s diplomacy has five unique
features. For one, China is never too anxious to accomplish something however
important as it believes the adversary would take advantage of this. According
to Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, ‘no political power in China
could replace the leadership of the communist party.’ China has institutional
memory, continuity and unlimited patience to wait until its core demands are met
in a favourable geo-political milieu. Case in point is China’s worsened
relations with the Soviet Union in the Sixties and Seventies.
Even as a weak nation, once China sensed Soviet Union’s desire to improve bilateral relations in 1982, it set three demands before border negotiations could commence. |
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These were the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the disputed
bilateral border and Mongolia, and Afghanistan, and that Soviets persuade
Vietnam to withdraw its troops from Cambodia. Beijing also insisted that the
Sino-Soviet border run along the central line of the Amur river and not the
Chinese side of the river as wanted by Moscow. Once general secretary Mikhail
Gorbachev agreed to all Chinese demands, in less than three years, the
longstanding border dispute was resolved in May 1989, and the two countries
formed a strategic partnership as equals. |
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