Is China’s President Xi Jinping about to be reduced to a caricature? His bluster at Tiananmen Square—the site of the massacre of the students who led China’s democracy movement in 1989—to mark hundred years of the Chinese Communist Party was ridiculous at best, given how almost in the same breath he talked of peace and bashing heads bloody on a steel wall. Sentences such as, “Peace, concord, and harmony are ideas the Chinese nation has pursued…China has always worked to safeguard world peace” give way to a belligerent “heads (will be) bashed against the bloody great wall of steel” if China is bullied, inside the span of a few sentences. It is not known which world leader can use such rhetoric in public without inviting all-round condemnation. Nor is it known who has been bullying China. In fact, it’s just the reverse. China, guilty of both economic and geopolitical overreach, is the biggest bully in the world, and has made coercion, intimidation, force and plain blackmail the instruments of its state policy. Ask the countries that have got caught in China’s debt trap “diplomacy”. Ask Australia and other countries against whom China has used economic coercion to enforce its own trade rules. Ask India with whom China refused to share hydrological data of the Brahmaputra river because of the Doklam stand-off of 2017, even though it was agreement-bound to do so. Unscrupulous to the core, China’s Communist leadership uses even an essential item such as water as its weapon to meet its strategic goals, even if that means causing either floods or droughts and bringing misery to countless common people. And these are just a few examples.
Xi’s bluster could have been dismissed as just that—bluster—but for China’s potential to cause actual harm to other countries and its actions on the ground, especially along the Line of Actual Control and in the South China Sea region. There is only one way to describe a country that has made muscle-flexing or wolf warrior “diplomacy” the core of its foreign policy—a dangerous bully. It is said that China believes in winning a war without firing a single bullet and is hence engaged in a 24X7 unrestricted warfare with the rest of the world. The fact is the world is paying a very heavy price for such a warfare, if the coronavirus pandemic is taken as one of the most dangerous manifestations of it. At the same time, the possibility of a kinetic conflict cannot be ruled out, and it can happen anywhere.
That China is world power is because the rest of the world has allowed it to control the supply chains, with a firm eye on profit margins. Ironically, it is these heads that Xi Jinping threatened to bash against the steel wall in his CCP centenary speech. Instead of dismissing the reference as mere rhetoric, those who have worked hard to make China a “great power”, a partner of the West, need to learn a lesson from it. China is an uncontrolled beast and the West has played a part in making it one. However, many of them still believe that China will help them reach climate goals and hence cooperation is necessary. Even as baby steps are taken to operationalize the Quad to contain China, and others converge on the Indo-Pacific, many of them are not averse to cutting trade deals with China. It is as if security/sovereignty and trade can exist in different silos. While decoupling from China may not be easy, and may not happen in the immediate future, sooner or later countries such as India will have to diversify their import baskets, while also moving towards self-sufficiency. That is the primary way of containing China.
As for bashing heads on steel walls, it’s hoped that Xi Jinping is intelligent enough to keep it at the level of the rhetoric, for in the real world, any attempt to bash the enemy’s head on the wall may result in a Galwan like situation or much worse. And we all know what happened in Galwan.