How Does China See India – and Does It Matter for Their Relations?

Security relations are undoubtedly not only about the hard military core – understanding technology certainly comes first, but behind every machine there is a human. Even the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine may serve as a case in point one day. While this is something that will need to be researched in the future, it is already assumed by some that the Russian government underestimated the Ukrainians due, in part, to a psychological factor: the Russian contempt toward Ukrainians and the stereotype that Ukrainians are somehow inferior to Russians. The value of a weapon is a crucial factor, and so are the skills of the soldier holding it, but above them there is a politician who may make a decision partially based on how he sees the other nation. In that sense, perceptions have consequences.

Is this how can we approach Sino-Indian relations? Scholars should certainly analyze mutual perceptions as a potentially important factor. It cannot be ruled out, for instance, that the Russian supremacist view of Ukraine may be similar to Chinese thinking on India. Do the decision makers in the PRC follow a bold policy toward New Delhi – in the two Asian countries’ political relations and with regards to their border dispute – because they perceive India as an inferior nation? Among other such questions, one could similarly ask if it matters that both India and China are civilization states, and, if so, in what way does this historical fact unveil itself in their current relations?

Ever since the 2020 tensions, I have notice a rising wave of interest in Beijing-New Delhi relations on the Indian side. The past three years offered us a number of Indian books on the subject, some of which I summarized in a December 2021 text available on The Diplomat’s website: “No Dragons in the Title Please.” A new entrant on the list, and a book that promised to address the subject of perceptions in its very title, is Shyam Saran’s “How China Sees India and the World” (Juggernaut 2022).

It is not that the question of viewing each other did not appear in earlier literature, including even the more recently popular books. Reshma Patil’s “Strangers Across the Border” was an account of how Indians and Chinese perceive each other but on the personal level, and mostly against the canvas of private trade. Ananth Krishnan’s “India’s China Challenge” offers an interesting group of case studies on what we could consider India’s soft power in China – examples of contemporary Chinese individuals interested in certain aspects of Indian culture. These, thus, were two people-centric approaches, which would not necessarily tell us how perception may matter for policymaking. What Shyam Saran – a veteran Indian diplomat with deep experience of China – has attempted, in turn, was to briefly describe the history of China, with a focus on Indian overtones and on interactions between the two civilizations.

The question prompted by the title – how does China see India and the world? – is not really satisfactorily answered, however. The same applies to the second part of the title, which promises “An Authoritative Account of the India-China Relationship.” The author states in the introduction that “this is not a book about India-China relations.” The book is certainly not without value as an introduction to Chinese history as seen by an Indian, but what the title seemed to announce was the reverse perspective.

“In dealing with the China challenge, India needs to analyse these deeper strands in Chinese perceptions in Chinese perceptions of India and the prism through which the Chinese minds interprets Indian foreign policy behavior” – on this the author and I agree. One finds here, for instance, an attempt to root these perceptions in much earlier history, but the result appears to be only generalized statements and repetitions that probably occurred due to a hasty manner of writing and editing.

Take these two quotations. “In China, the notion of itself as a ‘middle kingdom’ – civilization centre – came later as China began to see itself as a culturally advanced centre […] In India, the idea of centrality did not take hold, perhaps because of patent plurality and its constant and sustained encounters with different people.” Does the author suggest here that China had less sustained encounters with different people than India? Then, commenting on Chinese naval expeditions during the Ming dynasty, Saran concludes that “[t]rade and politics went together and both reinforced China’s sense of centrality in what is today called the Indo-Pacific.” The main point is same – that China felt, and probably still feels, superior – but when it comes to reasons of this attitude is the second quote not a completely reverse conclusion to what was claimed earlier about Chinese isolation being the reason of hegemonic tendencies?

Similarly, a promising thread begins later, when the post-World War II era is covered. At that period, the author tells us, the Chinese felt superior to Indians because India was seen as a failed model of an Asian state: a country that retained a colonial administrative structure, and then a country that failed to build a robust economy for decades, and stayed much behind the PRC in the development race. All this appears to be much more convincing then the earlier musings on perceptions in the ancient and the medieval era. But once again, the author does not add conclusions that would throw new light on the present relations between the two Asian powers. If this was the dominant view of India in China since the 1940s, then conversely, when India’s economic growth picked up over the past three decades, did the PRC’s way of thinking about India change? And does the point about retaining the model of British administration still matter after so many decades, apart from the significance of the colonial legacy for the countries’ border dispute?

To be fair to the author, the significance of perceptions for foreign policy is very hard to grasp and measure. We may feel intuitively that the perception is there, but state administration is usually hard to penetrate with survey-based research, especially in a country like the PRC. Even when we are able to conduct research, there remains the issue of causality: Will we be able prove that it was a particular perception that led to a particular foreign policy course?

Still, probably a more focused approach – greater sources picked from a much more narrowly-defined period – would have helped the author to reach more original conclusions. The way forward in this kind of research, I believe, has been shown not by Shyam Saran, but by a less-famous Indian expert, Abhay Kumar Singh, who in his “India-China Rivalry: Asymmetric No Longer” zoomed in only on recent publications, and on a much more precisely described subject: How do Chinese strategy experts perceive the rivalry with India?