Sino-Indian Relations
Although China and India are separated by veritable natural borders, including the lofty Himalaya Mountains, foreign policy between these two nations is extremely complex. The two nations, among the oldest continuous cultures in the world, coexisted peacefully because of this geographic separation for thousands of years, until the present. Since present-day India’s formation, some territorial squabbling has occurred between the two nations, but the conflicts are largely local in scale and nowhere as fierce as the bickering between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Physically, it is logistically difficult for China and India to wage war upon each other. Neither country can access the other easily by sea, since any navy traveling toward the other country would have to pass through Indochina. The high mountains in the Himalayas make land engagement also improbable, and even aerial forces are impeded by the natural obstacles. The Sino-Indian War of 1962 was likely abbreviated by these exceptional circumstances.
China and India are both of substantial interest worldwide, and especially in industrialized nations such as the United States and the member states of the European Union. Although neither is able to compete directly with Europe or North America militarily or economically, they exert enormous influence because they hold large amounts of foreign debt, particularly from the United States, and are a critical supplier of cheaply made goods and textiles, China more so than India. Evidently, this pattern of export to more advanced nations is even being replicated within Chinese-Indian relations, since trade relations dating back to the Silk Road are more prominent than ever, with cheaply made Indian products flowing toward China.
This degree of economic interdependence has led to more economic, though not necessarily political, cooperation between China and India, and China has recently agreed to back India’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. China is generally considered to be more advanced than India, but both countries have booming economies poised to become extremely critical in the world economic balance.
Significantly, both China and India are nuclear powers. China has a fairly stable international situation and is actually one of the most progressive states on nuclear policy; it is one of five nuclear weapons states, along with the United States, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, and is the only one among them to state an unqualified policy of “no first use”. This policy ensures that China will only use nuclear weapons during a war if it is attacked with nuclear weapons first. However, India is far more concerning, since it has long had tensions with Pakistan, both nations have nuclear weapons, and both, along with Israel, have never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In fact, China sometimes uses its economic ties with India to force concessions from the Indians (as well as the North Koreans and the government of Iran) regarding their nuclear program.
