Actually, it is not much of a surprise if only we care to appreciate
the nuanced change in China’s stance on many issues. In December 1996
that President Jiang Zemin most unexpectedly told his Pakistani hosts
that India and Pakistan must set aside their differences and foster
an economic relationship. During the Kargil war, the Chinese stance
was a tacit acceptance of the LOC in Jammu and Kashmir as the international
border.

The Chinese are great empiricists. In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping
said that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. Such an honest assessment
of icons in public is simply unthinkable in India. Now, the new Chinese
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has given us some new numbers to think about.
On April 21st while speaking to the Mr. Fernandes , he noted that ”
during the past 2200 years, or about 99.9% of the time , we have devoted
to friendly cooperation between our two countries”. Indeed so.

Obviously, 1962 accounts for the overwhelming bulk of the missing 0.1%
in Wen Jiabao’s historical arithmetic. But it has cast a disproportionately
long shadow. We cling to the idea that India was attacked. Neville Maxwell
in his India’s China War held us primarily responsible for the border
war. He was vilified in this country, although privately his views have
considerable greater support among the Indian cognoscenti. An IFS luminary
who was liaison officer to Zhou Enlai during that Chinese Premier’s
ill-fated visit to New Delhi in April 1960 bemoans that India blew a
great opportunity of settling the border question at a time when the
Chinese were also keen to close the issue. Sections of the Congress
party along with Opposition MPs like Atal Bihari Vajpayee sabotaged
Jawaharlal Nehru. It is poetic justice that BJP MPs are doing to Mr.
Vajpayee on Pakistan what Mr. Vajpayee himself did to Panditji on China
by speeches that were long on emotion and eloquence but short on substance
and facts.

Some scholars, however, locate the roots of the 1962 conflict in domestic
Chinese upheavals. In his monumental The Origins of the Cultural Revolution
, Roderick Macfarquhar, the distinguished India-born Sinologist who
teaches at Harvard, has called the 1962 battle Mao’s India War. Younger
scholars in some Chinese universities are beginning to take a new look
at that episode free of old stereotypes. The truth is complex. Dr. Sarvepalli
Gopal whose first death anniversary fell recently and who, along with
Jagat Mehta, was responsible for formulating India’s case on the border
issue laughingly admitted before his death that had he been engaged
by the Chinese as an independent expert, he could well have made out
an equally valid and strong claim on their behalf. Three years back,
two retired IFS officers and China experts C.V.Ranganathan and Vinod
Khanna offered such a balanced perspective on the emotive border issue
in their India and China: The Way Ahead that remains the most incisive
and constructive work on this subject.

A small fraction of the troublesome 0.1% that Wen Jiabao implied must
surely be the period immediately following the May 1998 nuclear tests
by India. In a most perplexing move, Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee wrote
to President Bill Clinton pointing to China as the reason for India
going nuclear. The letter became public. Soon thereafter, Mr. Fernandes
himself was widely quoted as having said that China is India’s enemy
number one. He has, however, consistently denied ever having made such
a statement. Fortunately, the damage by both the Clinton letter and
Fernandes’s purported statement was contained quickly. A measure of
our maturity in handling the situation is reflected in the fact that
Mr. Vajpayee’s government having earned a Sinophobic image steadfastly
refused to heed the protectionist pleas of Indian industry that raised
the bogey of Chinese goods swamping Indian markets. Over the pas two-three
years in a remarkable turnaround, large segments of Indian industry
has developed self-confidence to compete with China both in India and
elsewhere including in China itself.

While the two countries keep meeting to resolve the boundary question
on the basis of landmark agreements signed in 1993 and 1996 and while
the economic relationship expands, new scholarship keeps emerging to
give contemporary meaning to Wen Jiabao’s statement. The works of Chinese
scholars like Xinriu Liu and Wang Bangwei have greatly enhanced our
knowledge of the cultural contacts between India and China. A little
over a decade ago, Tan Chung, the well-known Indian scholar of Chinese
ancestry whose father set up the Cheena Bhavan at Santiniketan, brought,
for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, a comprehensive
volume called Across the Himalayan Gap that had described in detail
the multi-faceted relationship between the two ancient civilisations.
Then came Louise Levathes’s When China Ruled the Seas, that looked at
the colourful Admiral Zheng He’s voyages to the Malabar coast in the
very early 15th century. Subsequently, The Unknown Hsuan-Tsang, by the
reputed historian Devahuti, author of an earlier classic on Harsha,
appeared.

Zhang Zemin now the chairman of the Central Military Commission broke
all protocol while greeting Mr. Fernandes. He joked that he likes meeting
young people and since Mr. Fernandes is four years younger to him, he
was very pleased to spend time with him. Zhang Zemin went on to add
that since Mr. Vajpayee is three or four months younger to him, he is
eagerly looking forward to the Indian Prime Minister’s visit. The momentum
and atmospherics generated by Mr. Fernandes’s landmark trip should not
be lost. One immediate offshoot should be greater support to Indian
academics working on the 2200 years of Sino-Indian interactions that
remain largely unexplored and that Wen Jiabao recalled in a Nehruvian
fashion.