The editorial in the People’s Daily of October 14 attacking India’s alleged hegemonism took the memories of senior citizens and Sinologists back to 1959-60, when polemical articles attacking Jawaharlal Nehru appeared in the Chinese media. In those articles Nehru was accused of taking an aggressive line on Tibet in the expectation of aid from the US. Nations tend to see other nations as extensions of their own self-image. There are serious cultural problems in the Chinese interpretation of India and Indian foreign policy.

Whenever a major power emerges the rest of the international system voices concerns about the aggressive nature of that power. The rise of Britain, France, Germany, US, Japan, Russia and Communist China itself have been viewed with apprehension by other powers, and in most of those instances there were wars. Though today all those nations, other than China, are democracies, they were not so at the time of their emergence as powers, except for the US. Even the US, with slavery, was only a partial democracy. The foreign policy of a country is mostly an extension of its domestic values. Since most of the nations listed emerged as powers before they became full-fledged liberal democracies their non-democratic internal values got projected in their external policies, often resulting in aggression. Once nations get fully democratised, their mutual animosities tend to fade as witnessed in Europe with the formation of the European Union.

China expects to overtake the US as the nation with the highest GDP in the next two to three decades. China today has the world’s highest foreign exchange reserves and the highest economic growth rate. They already talk about a G-2 arrangement, sharing world financial dominance with the US. Proposals are afloat in the Chinese strategic community about dividing the Pacific Ocean into spheres of influence between China and the US. Their military modernisation programme is being pushed ahead rapidly, and is not transparent. Consequently there is concern all over the world that a non-democratic China wants to become the untethered hegemon first of Asia, and then of the world.

... contd.