Nuclear history

As China considers its position on the Indo-US civil nuclear initiative at the International Atomic Energy Agency this week, Beijing will do well to ponder on its own atomic history. There are many similarities in the way the nuclear attitudes of China and India have evolved over the decades. Looking back at their own integration into the global nuclear order should give some pause to some Chinese analysts who argue that Beijing cannot accept a change of global non-proliferation regime to accommodate India. Long before it became a champion of the non-proliferation regime, China was an outsider that constantly challenged these very same rules. Like India which until recently criticised the international arms control regimes as discriminatory and unacceptable, China too denounced them in the early 1960s. As the US and Communist Russia unveiled the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, a year before China conducted its first nuclear test, Beijing rejected ‘non-proliferation’ as a ‘joint plot” by the superpowers to keep it down. Although the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 protected China’s status as a nuclear weapon power, Beijing dismissed it as a symbol of unacceptable ‘superpower hegemony’. It is only after Deng Xiaoping put China on the course of sweeping economic reforms and foreign policy pragmatism in the late 1970s that China began to review its attitudes towards to non-proliferation and arms control. China signed on to the NPT in 1992 and was only a few years ago admitted to the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Although Chinese analysts tend to question the Indo-US deal in terms of norms and legality, Beijing, one should assume, will take a political view of the issues involved. If China sees that India’s rise is irreversible and its accommodation into the global nuclear order inevitable, Beijing will have few incentives to oppose the Indo-US deal. While some in China apprehend that the deal could accelerate the construction of a strategic partnership between New Delhi and Washington, others recognise that Beijing’s opposition — explicit or implicit— might push India closer towards the United States.

Unleashing Pakistan

It is not the United States alone that shapes China’s power calculus on India. Pakistan is as important. Nuclear history also tells us that after India’s first nuclear test in May 1974, Beijing moved quickly to assist Islamabad’s nuclear weapon programme and allowed it to acquire atomic parity with India. As the Indo-US deal separates India from Pakistan, China’s traditional policy of promoting parity between New Delhi and Islamabad has come under severe stress. Beijing has three options on the nuclear deal. One is to stay neutral and go with the flow at the IAEA and the NSG. Second, is to use Pakistan and the Europeans to block or delay the deal at the IAEA and the NSG. Third, is to come out openly in support of the Indo-US deal, and position itself as a genuine partner of India. The problem for China is that the first option will have little credibility, the second will undermine relations with India, and the third demands a fundamental recasting of Beijing’s traditional South Asia policy in New Delhi’s favour. Beijing’s dilemmas are not impossible to resolve. After all the Bush administration has managed to improve relations with both India and Pakistan while discarding the past “even-handed” policy in South Asia. China, which is acutely sensitive to changing regional balances, cannot be blind to the fact that India is pulling away from Pakistan on all indicators of power. This demands that China swallow the lump in its throat, accept India’s new nuclear status and work with the new geopolitical reality in the subcontinent. Inertia, however, is a powerful retarding force on all governments, and it is never easy to change old policies.

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