When President Xi Jinping, while speaking on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Party of China on July 1, claimed that “the Chinese people have never bullied, oppressed or enslaved the people of other countries, not in the past, not now, and not in the future”, he hit the West where it hurts the most. It is an undeniable fact that no other civilization, save the one having its origin in Medieval Europe, which has wreaked so much havoc on humanity, yet the same neo-imperialists, who now operate from across the North Atlantic Ocean, pretend as if they are the only civilized lot left on the planet.
President Xi’s speech apart, the truth is that today the armies of his country and India, another ancient civilization which too has not enslaved people of other countries, are standing face to face on the lofty Himalayan mountains.
Anyway, the main thrust of this article is just not what Xi said about the colonial powers of the West as well as East – Japan, of course – but how much China and India were similar and dissimilar in the last one century.
When the CPC was founded in 1921, India was witnessing Non-Cooperation/Khilafat movement and the Communist Party of India too was in its formative stage. Four years later in 1925 the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was formed.
When the Nationalist Kuomintang Party came to power in China in 1928, like many times in the past, the country soon became a victim of aggression from outside. This time it was Japan which occupied Manchuria in 1931 and later a large part of that country. It is estimated that at least a couple of crores of Chinese perished during the occupation of Japan which almost continued till the end of World War-II in 1945.
Though China was mired in civil war during this period yet the Communists under Chairman Mao Zedong fought the Nationalist Kuomintang and occupying Japanese forces simultaneously.
Earlier, in the 19th century the British imperialists addicted millions of Chinese with opium leading to the two Opium Wars.
The Communists finally came to power on October 1, 1949, that is two years after India got independence from the British imperialism. Here the struggle for freedom was largely peaceful though the British colonial powers were directly responsible for the killing of four to five million people during the famine of Bengal during the early 1940s.
Though history is written by the victors and not by the vanquished and defeated lot yet the same history records that between 1757, that is Battle of Plassey and 1947, when the British left India, eight and a half crore Indians died of famines – almost all of them man-made. About 2.5 crore were starved to death between 1875 and 1900.
These are just a few examples of barbarism perpetrated by two small island nations – Japan and Britain – on China and India, the two countries much bigger in size and population. As both Britain and Japan are islands, they fully exploited this geographical advantage as in the past it was difficult to launch naval expeditions on them.
For examples, the Spanish Armada launched on England failed in 1588, so were the German attempts in two World Wars.
In the same way the geo-economic factors are largely responsible for China and India being repeatedly attacked by outsiders. If the fertile land in Yangtze-Hwang Ho region of the mainland China attracted aggressors, mainly from the north, in India the equally fertile land in the riverine belt of Indus, Ganga-Yamuna and Brahmaputra always allured foreigners from the north and north–west.
It is said that the Great Wall of China was built to check the invading forces from north. In contrast the Indian subcontinent has its own natural boundary, that is huge Himalaya and Hindukush. So right from Aryans to Alexander to Mongols, all came through narrow Khyber Pass first to invade India and then to make it their homes – though Alexander returned after a brief stay in the western part of the subcontinent.
As India and China have fertile land, a great asset then – and even now – the rulers were not too much tempted to conquer and subjugate mountainous and rough terrain in the neighbourhood. This does not mean that kingdoms within China and India were not engaged in fighting among themselves.
Another special feature is that Indian and Chinese communities are settled in other countries of South and South-East Asia. They were not actually conquerors but were engaged indifferent works.
But the British and Japanese imperialists came through sea-routes to subjugate India and China respectively. By 20th century the fertile land and jungles were not the only attractions. Now the colonial powers had their eyes riveted on the rich mineral resources too.
Whatever may be the past, after independence and revolution India and China adopted different ideologies during the early decades of nation-building. While the subcontinent got partitioned and new countries, first Pakistan and then Bangladesh came into being, China too did not remain one as the Nationalists retreated to an island called Taiwan.
During the early years the two countries fought the first and only war in 1962. Believe it or not, the bone of contention was the McMahon Line drawn between the two countries by the same British rulers of India.
However, by the turn of 21st century the border tension subsided and scope for new cooperation arose between the two countries. It was soon declared that 21st century belongs to Asia and a new concept, Chindia, was coined. Leaders of the two countries started meeting frequently causing a lot of uneasiness in the West. Soon China replaced Japan to become the second most powerful economy after the United States.
As China started becoming over-ambitious, this development was not liked by the United States, nor by Japan, which was pushed down to the third powerful economy. Perhaps as revenge to the past China started flexing its muscle in South China Sea and in the process alarmed Japan, the close ally of the United States. Thus, the two former imperialists – one of the West and the other of the East, have joined hands.
But what is alarming is that China, unlike in the past, too is being viewed as the country which is nurturing the imperialist design. True, unlike the then Soviet Union, it is not using the Communist ideology to spread its tentacles. But the economic and military expansion of Beijing has certainly unnerved countries of the world.