Indian Ambassador: China Could be a Source of Anxiety or Opportunity

Dec. 15 – Indian Ambassador to China, S. Jaishankar, in a speech made  at the Sichuan University in Chongqing spoke about managing the tensions of the Indo-China relationship.

He said China was at a crossroads between creating regional anxiety or creating opportunity. This comes as China and India are extensively collaborating at senior levels in the climate talks in Copenhagen. Excerpts of the ambassador’s speech is featured by the Indian Express below:

“My first few months as Ambassador in China were more than a little perplexing. Rarely a week went by without an alarmist or negative story about India-China relations. Conversations with my diplomatic colleagues in Beijing indicated that they also were obviously influenced by this turn of events. Yet, when I put down the newspaper or logged out of the computer and went to work, I was confronted with a very different picture of our ties. The challenge, in fact, was to keep up with the increasing engagement between the two nations.”

“So, the question that I ask myself is how can there be such disconnect between the substance of the relationship and its projection. Is one real and the other a concoction? Is something getting “lost in translation?” Let me attempt an answer, however tentatively. To me, one seems to reflect our hopes and aspirations, taking into account the enormous strides we are making daily in our engagement.”

“The other appears more rooted in our fears and anxieties, possibly derived from past history, and prone to exaggerating our divergences. It is easy to dismiss the latter as lacking a sense of responsibility. But its persistence and intensity is difficult to ignore. The lesson for those of us charged with building this relationship, therefore is to pay greater attention to public perceptions of its state.”

“With that in mind, I thought that it would be appropriate to discuss in a spirit of candor how we can better serve our interests. A starting point may well be the question what does China mean for India today. I would be safe in asserting that most Indians regard China with respect for its achievements over the last three decades. Beyond that, for some, let me be honest, China could be a source of anxiety. For others, it could well be an opportunity. Whichever way, China’s remarkable progress has been a strong inspiration for reform and change in India itself.”

“It is not an easy relationship to describe, characterized as it is by both similarities and distance. Whatever the sentiment, there are two sharp realities about the relationship that cannot be ignored. One, we are seeing the parallel but not congruent rise of China and India which makes an already complex matrix even more dynamic.

Second, and again this too has a time differential, we are witnessing changes on a scale that has not been seen since the rise of the United States and the USSR. The past, therefore, cannot serve as a guidance for the future. Ideally, we should be shaping our ties; at the least, we should managing them; clearly, we do not have the option of neglecting them.

”