Decoding Beijing's Coercion Tactics |
Listen to this article:
In his book China’s Wars: The Politics and Diplomacy Behind its Military Coercion, author Vijay Gokhale, former foreign secretary of India, uses select case studies pertaining to China’s previous wars and ‘grey-zone’ coercion – tactics that deliberately fall short of triggering the conventional thresholds of armed conflict – to synthesise existing information on China’s behaviour to address ‘Beijing’s military coercion’ in the future.
Vijay Gokhale’s China’s Wars: The Politics and Diplomacy Behind its Military Coercion, Publisher: Simon & Schuster India.
The ‘China Threat’ prognosis shapes the underlying intellectual landscape of the book’s six chapters, besides the preface, introduction and endnotes. By the author’s admission, no new sources or facts are employed; however, he devotes a chapter each to the Taiwan Strait crisis (1958), the India-China border war (1962), the Sino-Soviet border conflict (1969) and the China-Vietnam War (1979), and follows-up with discussions on China’s actions involving the Philippines and Taiwan in recent years, along with lessons for India. All this purports to highlight patterns of coercion embedded in China’s behaviour over the years.
The aim of the author is to use the case studies to understand how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) uses force as a deterrent. He does admit that China has not engaged in major wars since the late 1970s and has not opted for habitual aggression or protracted conflict, aiming only to intimidate the adversary through psychological deterrence rather than to destroy it. Coercion is seen as a path to diplomacy in order to spare prolonged conflict and such behaviour, according to the author, serves a diversionary purpose, especially to rally Chinese people around the flag in times of domestic distress.
The book is a robust informational source. It employs a levels-of-analysis framework, although Gokhale doesn’t organise it thus, identifying the occurrence of war as his dependent variable and uses the category of ‘grey-zone tactics’ as his set of independent variables, with corresponding variables at the system, national/society and individual levels for each of the wars he catalogues.
The 1958 Taiwan strait crisis
The first chapter covers the 1958 bombardment of the offshore islands of Jinmen and Mazu. The author identifies the seizure of these islands as one of the PRC’s objectives, alongside inducing a reset in US-China relations at a time when the US was overstretched in West Asia, specifically Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. The author asserts that China’s bombardment was aimed at thwarting any Taiwanese ambition of retaking the mainland and to domestically lessen resistance to the Great Leap Forward.
India-China war of 1962
Chapter two deals with the India-China border war of 1962. Building on the context of the Jinmen island bombardment, Gokhale outlines key developments in the run-up to the 1962 war. One interesting facet was US President John F. Kennedy’s assurance to China that the US opposed the use of force by either side in the Taiwan area. This assurance, in effect, eased pressure on China from a two-front war........