The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (5 page)

China’s role in the 1971 war captures much about the relationship: the oscillation between hope, self-deception, public exaggeration, and resigned realism on Pakistan’s part, and on China’s, a blend of tempered support, gentle scolding and steely pragmatism. The Washington-Beijing liaisons have since become a feature of almost every Pakistani crisis. It is not difficult to trace a line straight through to Sino-Pakistani-US relations around the Kargil crisis or the aftermath of the Bin Laden killing: Bhutto’s disappointing visit to China in November 1971 would be mirrored by Nawaz Sharif in June 1999 and Yousuf Gilani in May 2011, episodes that will be dealt with in later chapters. Over the decades to come, China would become Pakistan’s only reliable diplomatic, economic and military backer. But would it be there for Pakistan in its hour of need? The answer in 1971, and ever since, has been: only up to a point. As a
Dawn
editorial in February 1972 put it:

Had we…not presumed that we would get unlimited Chinese support, regardless of our objectives and conduct, the country might have been saved from humiliation and defeat. The People’s Republic of China has been a great friend of Pakistan. Let us honour this friendship by being rational and realistic and by not imposing unnecessary burdens and strains on the friendship. Objective reality must be measured by its own size and not by the length of its shadow.
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1965

The seeds of the Pakistanis’ misplaced hopes had been sown six years earlier. The Indo-Pakistani war in September 1965 did not involve a great deal more Chinese military activity than in 1971, and the war itself was a disaster for Pakistan, from the first failed attempts by Pakistani troops to precipitate an insurgency in Kashmir to the appearance of Indian artillery within range of Lahore International Airport. But the effect of China’s stance during the conflict on public opinion in Pakistan was profound.

As one strong account of China’s role puts it:

Of all of Pakistan’s supporters, China spoke the loudest. She gave Pakistan unqualified moral support and, at the same time, threatened India with ‘grave consequences’…By linking the Sino-Indian and the Indo-Pakistan conflicts, the Chinese fostered a sense of urgency among the powers about terminating the Indo-Pakistan war…it inhibited some of the great powers from siding openly with India and from putting as much pressure upon Pakistan as they might otherwise have been inclined to do; [and] it contributed to bringing about ceasefire on terms acceptable to Pakistan.
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When Liu Shaoqi, the Chinese Prime Minister, arrived on a visit to Lahore in February 1966, he was carried in the arms of cheering crowds, prompting the US Consul General to lament that “Pakistan is lost”.
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China’s crushing victory in its own war with India in 1962 was itself one of the sources of Pakistan’s overconfidence, leading Rawalpindi to underestimate the capabilities of the Indian armed forces when it launched its ill-conceived venture in Kashmir.
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The prospect of Chinese involvement was also part of Bhutto’s pro-war case to Ayub Khan: Indian troops in Assam would be forced “to fight on two fronts” if, as Bhutto also mistakenly believed, India moved against East Pakistan and China entered the war.
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Aziz Ahmed, Ayub Khan’s foreign policy adviser, also argued that “the most powerful factor in Pakistan’s favour was its growing friendship with China which would stop India from invading Pakistan even if it was driven out of Kashmir.”
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In practice, most of the great powers did not believe that Beijing was willing to embark on an all-out war with India again in 1965, but it gave serious signals that a military intervention might be in the offing. China had the requisite manpower positioned, and CIA analysts believed that its deployments were “adequate for small-scale frontier clashes”, which “would cause the Indians great consternation and divert
Indian effort and supplies away from fighting with the Pakistanis”.
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China’s Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, flew in to Karachi in the first days of the war and announced that Beijing backed Pakistan’s “just action”.
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The Chinese government and media kept up a drumbeat of denunciations of India’s “naked aggression”, and steadily escalated its claims of Indian “intrusions” into its own territory.
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This culminated in a threat that if the Indian government did not dismantle “all its military works for aggression on the Chinese side of the China-Sikkim boundary or on the boundary itself ” within three days, it would be responsible for “all the grave consequences of its inaction”.
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The statement prompted the Indian diplomat in Beijing who had received the note to ask the perhaps superfluous question, “Is this an ultimatum?” (the answer: “Yes”).
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It was published in full in the
People’s Daily
, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, on 17 September. Although China had resisted Pakistan’s requests to make military preparations earlier in 1965, not believing that war with India was likely, it finally stepped up its mobilization on the Sikkim-Tibet border and in Ladakh, the two locations that Mao had decided should be readied for possible intervention.
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Liu Shaoqi sent a letter to Ayub Khan assuring Pakistan that it would respond to an Indian attack. China also reached a set of agreements with Indonesia and Pakistan about the joint supply of military equipment, much of which was to be airlifted from Hotan. Detailed planning meetings were undertaken with the Pakistani army and air force over their needs for tanks, recoilless guns, shells, and aircraft.
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But cooperation on logistics was more straightforward than on strategy. On 19 September, during the crucial period after the Chinese ultimatum, Ayub Khan embarked on a secret mission to Beijing with Bhutto (which nearly proved fatal—an Indian air attack struck the airfield just as they were about to take off).
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Ayub Khan was seeking support, equipment, and clarity on what a Chinese response would actually amount to. He was thrown by the answer he received. China would maintain pressure on India “for as long as necessary”, he was told, but he was encouraged by Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi to mount guerrilla attacks on India “even if one or two major cities were lost”. “You must keep fighting,” they insisted, “even if you have to withdraw to the hills.” A stunned Ayub Khan replied, “Mr. Prime Minister, I think you are being rash.” He returned from Beijing “tired and depressed” and “decided to put the China card back in the deck”.
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The Pakistani leader
ship had no intention of prolonging the conflict in those circumstances and soon signed a ceasefire agreement. As one Pakistani diplomat described it: “Pakistan fought in the British tradition—short-duration wars that come to a head, then a ceasefire. The Chinese experience of warfare was very different—extended conflict over the length and breadth of the country. Even if they had ‘stood by us’, there were two very different conceptions of what that meant.”
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Mao had decided that China would intervene under two conditions—that India attacked East Pakistan, and that Pakistan requested Chinese intervention.
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In the end, neither of them obtained.

Despite the disagreements, China’s support left a significant impression on the Pakistani public, especially by comparison with the United States, which responded to the war by cutting off aid and military supplies. While Pakistan’s president only gave measured thanks to China in his public statements, students in Karachi paraded with banners of Zhou and Chen and called on the Chinese ambassador to convey their appreciation.
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A “huge crowd” burned down the US Information Library.
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“Bitterness toward the U.S. is deep-seated”, noted a State Department research memorandum.
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The 1965 war had a catalytic effect on the Sino-Pakistani relationship. From that point on, with US military aid suspended, China became Pakistan’s primary arms supplier, a position it has relinquished only for brief periods ever since. China also established itself as the populist cause, a true friend of Pakistan’s by contrast to the untrustworthy Americans—whatever the actual level of material support either side was providing. It was also the year that Pakistani officials claim to have started negotiations with China for the technology and materials necessary to build a nuclear bomb, barely a year after China’s own first test.
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Although Pakistan’s efforts to improve relations with Moscow and Washington in the aftermath of the war would lead to a temporary cooling in political ties with Beijing, the tone and pattern of cooperation between the two sides was now set.

1962

The path to the “all-weather friendship” had been a tortuous one. Although Pakistan has the distinction of being one of the first states to recognize the People’s Republic of China—and the first Muslim one—it would be more than a decade before the relationship began in earnest.
When the first Pakistani ambassador, Major General Nawabzada Agha Mohammad Raza, presented his credentials to Mao in 1951, he was coolly received—“I have great pleasure in receiving the letter of credentials of the King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, presented by you.”
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“There was no mention of the fact that the Ambassador was representing Pakistan,” a successor of his Indian counterpart noted gleefully in a speech to the US Congress.
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At the time, there was little doubt that Beijing tilted in India’s direction. Pakistan was a country run by feudal landlords, industrialists and the military. It would formally ally itself with the United States by joining the region’s two Western treaty organizations, SEATO in 1954 and CENTO in 1955, and signing a bilateral cooperation agreement with Washington in 1959, resulting in substantial American aid and military supplies. SEATO in particular was conceived with the clear intent of containing China, and Pakistan quickly agreed to the establishment of an NSA listening post at Badaber, near Peshawar, to spy on Chinese and Soviet communications.
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Beijing’s bedfellow in the early 1950s was India, its anti-colonial, non-aligned neighbour across the Himalayas that had inherited most of the socialists during Partition, among the other spoils, and would ultimately end up in close security cooperation with the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split was one of several factors that eventually prised the relationship apart, but the 1950s—at least for a few years—represented the high point of “
Hindi-Chini bhai bhai
”, the Hindi phrase used at the time meaning “Indians and Chinese are brothers”. It was India, not Pakistan, that consistently supported Beijing’s assumption of the Chinese seat at the United Nations in Taipei’s place. While India played a key role in helping to squash Tibetan appeals at the UN after Chinese troops invaded in 1950,
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Pakistan was providing transit facilities for US aircraft to supply the Tibetan rebels.
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The “five principles of peaceful coexistence” mentioned in the preamble to the agreement reached by China and India in 1954 formed the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement’s own principles in subsequent years, and would assume a central role in Chinese foreign policy over the decades to come.
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China’s dealings with India would, however, prove to be one of the cases to which the five principles—“Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty”, “Mutual non-aggression”, “Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs”, “Equality and mutual benefit” and “Peaceful co-existence”—least applied.

While the border dispute between India and China ultimately brought them to war in 1962, in the 1950s it was Pakistan that had territorial issues with China. Beijing laid claim to 3,400 square miles of Pakistani territory in Kashmir, encompassing tracts of the old principality of Hunza, whose rulers, the Mirs had traditionally recognized Chinese suzerainty.
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When the British seized control of the kingdom in 1891, the Mir fled to China.
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During Partition, the Kuomintang, China’s ruling party at the time, conducted secret negotiations over restoring Hunza’s status as an independent state under Chinese fealty, before the Mir finally decided to accede to Pakistan. Sporadic Chinese border violations around Hunza were being reported from 1953, and in 1959 Ayub Khan announced that “any Chinese intrusions into Pakistani territory would be repelled by Pakistan with all the force at her command.”
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In September 1959, the Pakistani government received a Chinese map showing a line of territorial claims running from the Mintaka pass down to Shimshal pass and eastward. In October, following Sino-Indian clashes, Ayub proposed a “joint defence union” with India, stating that “I can see quite clearly the inexorable push of the north in the direction of the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.”
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Both Pakistan and China had mostly been careful, however, not to antagonize each other. China refrained from denouncing Pakistan’s membership of the Western treaty organizations, saving its verbal firepower for the United States, and when the countries’ two prime ministers met on the sidelines of the Asian-African Bandung conference, Muhammad Ali Bogra assured Zhou Enlai that the military agreements did not reflect any Pakistani hostility towards China: India, he explained, was still the focus.
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Even Ayub Khan’s “joint defence union” proposal—which was summarily rejected by New Delhi—prompted little more than a raised eyebrow from Beijing, a letter faux-innocently asking against whom the joint defence was proposed.
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1959 instead proved to be one of the pivotal years in the unravelling of the Sino-Indian relationship.

In many ways, the road to the Sino-Pakistani all-weather friendship runs through Lhasa. The 1959 uprising there, the Chinese military’s subsequent crackdown, and the Dalai Lama’s fifteen-day journey on foot across the Himalayas to find asylum in India redounded significantly to Pakistan’s benefit. Nehru’s attempts to tread the line between accepting Chinese sovereignty and supporting Tibetan autonomy no longer cut any ice in Beijing, which was paranoid about India’s supposed designs
to establish Tibet as a “buffer”.
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China’s perception that India had supported the uprising and cooperated with the CIA to arm the rebellion eventually led Mao to believe that “forceful blows” needed to be struck.
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It was the intersection of the Tibet issue with the two sides’ border dispute that resulted in outright war. Two years earlier, as part of its campaign to establish full control over Tibet, China had completed the 750-mile Aksai Chin section of the Western Military Road that linked Xinjiang with Lhasa. The road crossed a flat plateau and was serviceable in winter, whereas direct routes from the centre of China into Tibet suffered from hazardous terrain and climatic conditions, as well as insurgent attacks from Tibetan tribes.
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India belatedly discovered the road in 1958 and claimed that 112 miles ran through Indian territory. Border talks accelerated in the aftermath, culminating in Zhou Enlai’s proposal for a comprehensive settlement in April 1960: an east-west territorial swap, in which Chinese control over Aksai Chin and Indian control over the southern slope of the eastern Himalayas would be acknowledged. Nehru rejected the proposal.
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His “forward policy”, adopted in November 1961, instead saw a steady increase in altercations and tension, as the two sides’ troops went nose-to-nose. Mao concluded that negotiations, restraint, or a period of “armed coexistence” would not stop India from its policy of using military force to challenge Chinese control of disputed territory. He authorized the PLA chief of staff to conduct a “fierce and painful” attack on the far weaker Indian forces.
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In a multi-stage series of offensives in October and November 1962, China overran Indian positions and routed its defences in the east, before calling a unilateral ceasefire and withdrawing troops. It was a devastating defeat for India and for Nehru himself, who was physically and mentally broken by the experience. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, personally blamed Zhou Enlai for having hastened his death.
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