The Young India

Ananth Venkatesh

The author traces China’s fall to the state of intellectual and administrative disintegration that has now led to its confrontations with India.

• The commonplace Chinese citizens were enmeshed in a civil war for four years subsequent to the culmination of WW 2 in August 1945 after the Japanese surrender.
• Then, the civil strife in China had, as its participants, Communist militias pitted against the anti Communist (Nationalist) militias. Also, millions of the Chinese civilians, who were the members of either the Nationalist or Communist camp, participated in this civil war, which spawned additional disorderliness in China.
• However, ever since the 19^th century, China had been experiencing humiliation and subjugation by the Western European powers, which had been penetrating China monetarily by seizing the management of Chinese wealth and its natural resources.
• The country was, in effect, a transnational colony, the financial path of which was being propelled by the arrogance of Britain, France, Germany, each of which, along with an increasingly imperialistic America and Japan, had carved ‘zones of influence’ for itself in Chinese territory.
• The U.S., Japan and the West Europeans directed the economic affairs of their zones respectively, which consisted of enforcing guidelines on trade and levies on overseas goods. These guidelines were fashioned by the imperialists disproportionately in a way that boosted the imperial treasure and ensured the stagnation of the Chinese financial system, which had, prior to becoming a casualty of the spiteful Western imperialism, been extremely potent.
• China underwent economic mortification of this sort, which was worsened by the supplementary political, military and spiritual concessions bequeathed to the West by a debilitating Chinese monarchy. Also, subornment had infiltrated the politics of China during this period of Western monetary exploitation. This subornment was in service as a result of the dissoluteness of numerous provincial Chinese warlords.
• Also, the attempt to Christianize China by the malignant Christian missionaries there kindled the enragement of the non-Christian Chinese. It appeared as if China, which once was a majestic civilization in the ancient and medieval epoch, had come to the point of intellectual and administrative disintegration.
• The military conflicts waged by the Chinese monarchy against Japan and the West in the 19^th century over economic and territorial issues had severely paralyzed China as it was trounced in those wars and was compelled to fork out oceanic war reparations to the victors. China relinquished Korea and Taiwan to the Japanese.

Post-WW2 China, Mao, Nehru, Patel And India:

• Coming to 1949, in this landscape of monetary inefficiency and shortfall, the Communists, directed by Mao Zedong, ultimately battered the Nationalists and conquered all of mainland China. The Communists inherited a fragile Chinese economy and a complete dearth of efficient governance.
• The Nationalists, headed by Chiang Kai-Shek, escaped to the neighbouring island of Taiwan, in which the Nationalists entrenched their government under the autocratic headship of Chiang. Thus, the military of Communist China, in 1949, was not as steely, well-oiled and sophisticated as it became later.
• Also, the Indian military, as opposed to the Chinese, was more effectively organized then, with the Indian military being more regimented and in possession of formidable weaponry. The military lethality of India then was one of the few genuinely constructive bequests of British lordship over India.

Nehru’s Errors

• Therefore, a more street-smart Foreign Minister of independent India would have been able to handle the Tibetan subjugation by China more shrewdly. Nehru, the primary Foreign Minister of decolonized India, was, at the end of the day, predominantly unsuccessful as Foreign Minister. The two-facedness of his professed non-aligned overseas policy was exposed when he refused to condemn unmistakably the Soviet military belligerence in Hungary in 1956 to quell the anti Communist uprising there.
• However, the same Nehru had vocally vocalized contempt for the Anglo-French and Israeli assault on the Egyptian Suez Canal in 1956 subsequent to the Canal’s nationalization by the Egyptian autocrat, Gamal Nasser.
• Nehru’s supposed repudiation, in the 1950s, of the U.S. tender of an eternal seat for India on the UNSC continues to wound India even today as China, whose inclusion in the UNSC was favored by Nehru then, is the primary blocker of Indian penetration into the august UNSC presently.
• Nehru’s internationalization of the Kashmir question in 1949 by taking it to the UN was an oceanic blunder when a continuation of the war against Pakistan for the liberation of Kashmir would have sizably increased the prospects of complete Kashmiri accession to India. This internationalization was despite the righteousness of India’s claim and conflict over Kashmir against the invading Pakistanis.

Sardar Patel Ignored

• There was pragmatic advice from the commendable Indian Home Minister, Sardar Patel, to Nehru that urged Indian military assistance for the relief of the beleaguered Tibetans under the onslaught of the Communist Chinese marauders.
• Patel was a leading advocate against the connection of the Chinese border to the Indian one. Patel had espoused the maintenance of the self-governance of Tibet and the deactivation, by the Indian military, of the devastating Chinese military takeover of Tibet.
• Nehru had attempted to mollycoddle and appease the atheistic Chinese on several issues, including the bordering issue, which procreated the appalling Chinese attack on Indian territorial integrity in 1962.

Failure of the Non-Aligned Movement

• The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which Nehru had fathered, was a voiceless and characterless character as it refused to explicitly excoriate the Chinese bellicosity against India. It was American intervention, pioneered by the then U.S. President, JF Kennedy, and the Presidential warning to Mao that assisted India and ensured the Chinese military disengagement from sizable Indian territory in the Northeast.

In the Next Part, the author writes about China’s Border troubles with India

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