It is extraordinary that the former US National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in his seminal book, On China, published in 2011, considered it appropriate to add a prologue devoted to relations between India and China. It is marked by factual inaccuracies and seems only aimed at glorifying Mao Zedong’s great abilities as a military strategist. In fact, Mao drew a lot from Chinese classics and history.
Based on his understanding of Chinese sources, Kissinger writes that in 1962 Mao decided through military action to “stamp” India back by military action, and that he claims to his commanders that he has strategic principles based on the so-called historical experience of China. of defeating India in “one and a half” wars. Both of the examples Kissinger cites are clearly ersatz, revealing Kissinger’s insufficient knowledge of ancient India.
The fact is that there was no war between India and China during the Tang period (618-907 CE). A small event in A History of Sino-Indian Relations by Yukteshwar Kumar of Cheena Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan is referred to. This involves the mention of Emperor Harshvardhan who sent a missionary to China in 641 CE. After his death and the decline of his empire, Wang Xuanze, the Tang envoy to the court in Thaneswar and his entourage, was allegedly attacked by local feudal powers. Apparently, Wang fled to Tibet and tried to regroup before launching a military campaign against some North Indian towns. If this is the story to which Mao referred, it is apocryphal in its scope and meaning. To give an exaggerated twist, the narrator and Kissinger, his eager audience, reflect rather badly.
Throughout history, the extreme fringes of all empires have often faded and diminished, and this was true for both the Indian and Chinese empires. However, India and China did not share a border at the time. Tibet was then completely independent and even the mounted soldiers sampled according to Wang Xuanze were, of course, Tibetans. Mao clearly sought to reinterpret historical events in a way that Chinese Chauvinism in the past could make a substitute claim to a distant event.
Incidentally, the year 641 CE also coincides with the presence in India of the legendary Chinese monk Xuanzang who was still searching for Buddhist writings and other religious and philosophical texts. After nearly 17 years of wandering, including a stay at Nalanda University, he took a rich trump card to Chang’an in China to spread the teachings gathered in India among his fellow Han Chinese. It was undoubtedly a period marked by the absence of close nationalism, which allowed Chinese monks such as Fa Xian, Xuanzang and Yi Jing from China and Dharmaratna, Kasyapa Matanga and Bodhidharma from India to travel unhindered to share ideas and knowledge. exchange. Xuanzang’s journey was extensively recorded in the classical Chinese text Da Tang Xiyu Ji (Great Tang Records on the Western Regions) and immortalized eight centuries later by a Ming era writer, Wu Cheng-en, in his fascinating fictionalized work, Travel to the West.
If Mao was referring to an ‘Indian kingdom’ that approached the Tang court to rule over another ‘Indian kingdom’ during this period, he was probably referring to the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Kuche, home to the famous fifth. Century Buddhist monk Kumarjiva, located on the northern Silk Road in present-day Xinjiang. The small kingdom of Kuche was then populated by the Kushans and used the Indic script. It was one of the many kingdoms in the “Western Regions” (Xiyu) against which the Tang emperor Taizong waged military campaigns. Kuche, like many other neighboring kingdoms in Central Asia, were influenced by Indian culture, religion, and scripture, but were different from India, which lay south of the Himalayas.
That Kuche, which lay in present-day Xinjiang, was within the scope of Indic culture, emphasizes only the limits of Han influence in the region, of which the Uigyurs have resisted and challenged through the centuries to the present day. Mao, like his Tang predecessors, could not really tell the difference between Tianzhu, as India was known in classical Chinese texts, and Xiyu, or Western regions, which cover large parts of present-day Xinjiang and Central Asia.
The second example that is undoubtedly quoted by Kissinger and attributed to Mao is equally remarkable. The ‘half war’ in which Mao gets credit for defeating India allegedly took place when Timur (the crippled Timur) dismissed Delhi in 1398 CE. No imagination could be claimed as a victory by the Han Chinese, who themselves first overthrew the Mongol yoke of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 CE. The Yuan dynasty, founded by Kublai Khan when he conquered Han China, had nothing to do with Timur, who was a member of the Turkish Barlas tribe, a distant Mongol family based in Transoxania, in present-day Uzbekistan.
In fact, Timur planned to invade China next. In 1404 CE he set out on an expedition against the Ming Dynasty in China. If he had not died of disease in Faryab in present-day Kazakhstan in February 1405, not long in his campaign, he would also have knocked on the gates of the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, as many foreign military forces did later in ‘ China’s century of humiliation ‘before the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
It is a fairly common refrain for Chinese strategists to position the Chinese PLA as an invincible force. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping allegedly said that the Chinese PLA had crossed the southern border to ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’. As it turns out, it was the eager Vietnamese army that taught the Chinese a lesson they would not hastily forget.
Chinese writings often refer to the 1962 border conflict as China ‘teaching India a lesson’. Of course, they comfortably ignore the garbage the PLA received during the military uprising over Nathu La and Cho La in Sikkim in September 1967. In July 2017, during the Doklam crisis, the hardline Communist Party mouthpiece asked Global Times to teach . India was a ‘bitter lesson’ and issued a thinly veiled warning that China would ‘suffer greater losses in a military conflict than in 1962’. After the unilateral action by the PLA that led to the persistent stand-off in eastern Ladakh since April this year, the tireless Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, warned India along the same lines.
Chinese strategists often forget that the age of teaching someone is over. Unilateralism and military aggression, especially against a large country like India that is determined to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity at all costs, will simply not work. The way forward, to resolve border tensions between India and China, is through dialogue and peaceful negotiations.
The author, a former Indian ambassador, is currently director general of the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis, New Delhi. Views are personal