India-US relations: cooling and warming up (merged thread)

[Bill Moore]

Ray,

Extracted from the document you provided a link to, overall does India's leadership concur with the US view depicted below?

It is perhaps fair to surmise that US policy is not inclined in pursuing a zero-sum contest with China in South Asia and the rationale in opening a dialogue with Beijing on the subcontinent is to reassure China about US intentions and seek collaboration for US objectives in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Simultaneously, Washington is seeking to reassure India that a Cold War-type condominial relationship with China will not reappear in South Asia. Robert Blake, US diplomat for South Asia, remarked after his bilateral interactions with his Chinese interlocutors, “We understand that the Chinese understand that India can be a very important force for good and for stability in this part of the region. So it is important for all of us to work with India.”58 The US and India too, held their first strategic dialogue at the level of Foreign Ministers in June 2010.

[Ray]

I wonder if anyone believes that US line.

It merely sounds too ambivalent with loopholes.

It is the Bush dictum - either you are with us or against us - it is the reverse throwback to the US.

But then, I presume India has to make the best of a bad bargain!

I wonder if anyone trusts the Red Chinese.

“We understand that the Chinese understand that India can be a very important force for good and for stability in this part of the region. So it is important for all of us to work with India.”

This is a real gas!

The Chinese understand anything beyond their own expansionist interests? One has to check the Chinese history of imperialist expansionism to include Mao and his Red Chinese successors!



The concept of Han culture began with the Shang dynasty, 1750 -1040 BC, whose political centre was located north of the Yellow River. The Shang provided China’s first written history as well as the assertion of central cultural superiority over the surrounding people by designating as barbarians everyone who did not yet acknowledge the central government supremacy. The Chinese distinguished between ‘raw barbarians’ (shengfan) or the unassimilated people and the ‘cooked barbarians’ (shufan) or assimilated taxpayers who enjoyed the fruits of Chinese culture. For example, Han Chinese officials separated the ‘cooked’ Li of the coast of Hainan, who enjoyed the benefits of Chinese civilisation, from the wild ‘uncooked’ Li of the central forests, far from the influences of Han culture.


Barbarians were given generic names in the Chinese classics and histories: the Yi barbarians to the east, the Man to the South, the Rong to the west and Di to the north (when westerners arrived by sea, they were officially designated until the late 19th century as Yi). Until the 1930s, the names of outgroups (wai ren) were commonly written with an animal radical: the Di, the northern tribe, were linked to the Dog; the Man and the Min of the south were characterised with reptiles; the Qiang was written with a sheep radical. This reflected the Han Chinese conviction that civilisation and culture were linked with humanity; alien groups living outside the pale of Chinese society were regarded as inhuman savages. To be labelled a barbarian was a cultural rather than racial distinction.

That the custom of sharply distinguishing went along with calling China the Middle Kingdom (zhong guo), , which began by ruling the Central Plain (zhongyang) in North China. Rather than using outright military conquest of outsiders, the theory of ‘using the Chinese ways to transform the barbarians’ (yongxiabianyi) was promulgated. By Chinese cultural absorption or racial integration through intermarriage, a barbarian could become Han Chinese (hanhua). To be counted within China, groups accepted the rituals and cosmology that gave the Han dynastic state the Mandate of Heaven to rule over mankind. Non acceptance of this politicised culture left one outside of Zhongguo or China.

This is paraphrasing from James Olsen's An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of China