On the menu today: If you’re looking for discussion of what might just be a step toward peace in the Middle East, check out Rich Lowry, Noah Rothman, Phil Klein, James Lynch, and the editors.
Your friendly neighborhood newsletter writer spent a bit more than a week on an intense, fast-paced, wide-ranging trip to India, thanks to the Hudson Institute think tank, with particular help from Walter Russell Mead, the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship over at Hudson, and the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies. I’ll share a lot more reporting about India in the coming days, but for today, we’ll start with what India’s top China expert told me about the ambitions and capabilities of Xi Jinping and the regime in Beijing. The short version: The clock is ticking. For the full version, read on.
Trouble on the Sino-Indian Border
On a rainy Monday night in New Delhi, I sat on a couch alongside Jayadeva Ranade, considered by many to be India’s top expert on everything related to the People’s Republic of China. He’s president of the Center for China Analysis and Strategy, and has served as a member of the India’s National Security Advisory Board. He spent much of his career in the Research and Analysis Wing, his country’s foreign intelligence service, including serving as additional secretary, a senior administrative post.
Ranade met with a group of American political journalists, including myself, at the offices of Nitin Gokhale, a longtime veteran of Indian television news journalism and the founder and CEO of StratNewsGlobal, a news website and foreign policy think tank.
I asked Ranade about the status of Xi Jinping, and the intermittent rumors about infighting at the top levels of the Chinese government.
“He’s in the saddle,” Ranade answered. “He doesn’t see any opposition to him within the system right now, or within the PLA. I don’t get that feeling — maybe occasional rumbles, but nothing too serious.”
“Xi hasn’t backed off from his ambitions, which I must say, in my view, is unusual,” Ranade continued. “Any political leader who specifies by which date he will achieved which milestone — they do not tend to do that, because they might not achieve them. . . . But the Chinese are on track. They may not build the world’s finest army by 2027, which is their 100th anniversary [of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army], but they’re well on their way. They’ve built warships, 378 now. Submarines, airborne corps — things like that, they move pretty fast.”
And Ranade surmises, the Chinese are building up that navy with the intention to use it, or to at least have the option of using it soon.
“They’re gearing up for a crisis in the Taiwan Strait,” Ranade declared bluntly. “Xi Jinping has made it very clear, including recently, that reunification with Taiwan is a top priority. But he hasn’t spelled out how he’s going to go about it, and whether it’s going to be a military action or whether it’s going to be through some other means. My own hunch is that he will continue to apply military pressure, but he would prefer to resort to capturing Taiwan from inside, through what is called the ‘united front’ tactics.”
China’s “united front” tactics are wide-ranging influence operations, often targeting local politicians and thought leaders, media and propaganda campaigns, buying influence, and occasionally assault and intimidation. The effort is designed to undermine the target country’s ability to resist China’s pressure.
Ranade noted that China has become skilled at using the openness of free societies to maximize its propaganda efforts.
“It’s like hiding in plain sight. In a democracy, particularly, they do small things that do not appear very alarming which should cause concern. . . . [In free societies, Chinese] ambassadors and diplomats get time on television or at public forums to give a talk, or write articles. We don’t have the same privileges inside China.”
The Indian government is, so far, not pledging to come to the rescue of Taiwan in any military conflict in the Taiwan Strait. (Like most of the world, India does not recognize the self-evidently independent and sovereign nation of Taiwan as an independent and sovereign nation. Then again, neither does the U.S. government.) But the Indian government has objected to China “militarizing” the Taiwan Strait and has a lot to lose in a shooting war that disrupts trade routes and freedom of navigation.
On September 3, Xi Jinping hosted numerous world leaders in Beijing for China’s “Victory Day Parade,” celebrating the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
“At the September 3 parade [in Beijing], they unveiled eight new technologies — all home-grown, home-built, etcetera, which appear to be quite dangerous, going by the specifications that we see,” Ranade observed. “At least six of them have been tested and deployed in the Western theater, which is what we are facing.”
At the parade, China showcased three road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missile, the new Jinglei JL-1 air-launched ballistic missile, and a silo-based variant of other nuclear missiles. “The parade also unveiled the DF-17 hypersonic missile, alongside an extensive suite of cruise missile systems,” according to a summary by the Observer Research Foundation, another Indian foreign policy research organization.
The parade also showcased the newest version of the DF-26D intermediate-range ballistic missile, which has the unnerving nickname of “The Guam Killer.”
There are a lot of countries in the Indo-Pacific region that are deeply concerned about the rise of China and the growing capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army, but India is one of the few nations whose military has fought the PLA in battle in recent memory. Back in May 2020, when most of the world was focused on the Covid pandemic, the Chinese and Indian militaries faced off in the Eastern Ladakh’s Galwan Valley region, part of their lengthy border of more than 2,000 miles.
To prevent border skirmishes from turning into all-out shooting wars, the Chinese and Indian border patrols don’t use firearms — which does not mean their weapons aren’t lethal. The battle in 2020 featured Chinese soldiers “in riot gear used bamboo poles with nails stuck on them, clubs wrapped with barbed wire and stones.” (A picture of the nail-studded rods can be seen here.)
The Chinese killed 20 Indian soldiers with melee weapons; reportedly, four Chinese soldiers were killed and one injured. Right now, about 50,000 Indian troops are stationed along their border with China, with a corresponding number of PLA troops believed to be on the Chinese side.
In light of these hostilities, you may be wondering why Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended that big Chinese military parade in Beijing hosted by Xi Jinping, alongside Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un, among others, a meeting I previously called a board meeting of the “Global Instability Bad Boys’ Club.”
Gokhale told me Modi’s efforts to improve relations with China is “basically a tactical adjustment.” Ranade concurred.
“Our relaxation of tensions with China, or attempt to defuse tensions with China, started last year — that is before Trump and all that. The idea was to reduce the tensions at the border, because it costs a lot in terms of manpower as well as money,” Ranade said. “Having that force deployment is disconcerting, to say the least, because you never know when temperatures are going to rise. There has been some disengagement in two places — in the Depsang Plain and Demchok — but the rest of 4,058 kilometers” are unchanged.
But from the Indian perspective, the status quo leaves them at a tactical disadvantage.
“You have to see the terrain to understand it. It is more favorable to the Chinese, a lot of flat land on the other side — at a height, but flat land,” Ranade explained. “By the time we reach the Line of Active Control, we’ve gone three to four days’ climb, plus a few days of climatization. The Chinese can just drive right down. So that’s the difference, and that’s why we can’t withdraw, up to a point. We’re telling them to go back to 2020 [positions], which they haven’t. So that’s the state of play today.”
Ranade predicted what event will trigger the next escalation in tensions in India’s relationship with China.
“The next flashpoint or tension point will be when the 14th Dalai Lama’s reincarnation takes place, or succession issue comes up,” he told me. “At that time, the Chinese will make clear what their intentions are. We have to navigate that, it’s going to be tough. The Chinese are going to insist not only that we recognize their selection, but also seize all assistance to the Dalai Lama’s establishment. . . . We will be facing a difficult time at that stage.”
In July, the Dalai Lama announced that he would remain in his role of spiritual leader until his death, and that in keeping with tradition, he would be reincarnated, where his spirit will reborn into a child. He declared that his inner circle — a small group of closely allied monks — will have the “sole authority” to locate his successor. (For more details on how the reincarnation process usually works, check out Gathering Five Storms.)
Throughout the week, the government officials and think tank experts that briefed us emphasized that India lives in a rough geopolitical neighborhood, with neighbors that even Israel might find challenging. India shares:
- a roughly 2,000-mile border with Pakistan, which sees India in an intensely adversarial manner and had a brief shooting war with India earlier this year.
- an even longer border with China, which is disputed, as discussed above.
- a roughly 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh, where Islamist groups are seeing a significant resurgence of power and influence under the current interim government.
- A roughly 1,000 mile border with Myanmar, which has been run by a military junta that seized power in a coup in 2021.
- A roughly 1,000 mile border with Nepal, which just forced out its prime minister after the “Generation Z protests.”
- And a 359-mile border with Bhutan, which is quiet compared to the rest of India’s neighbors.
Experts close to the Indian government believe that China sees India as a potential serious impediment to its ambitions — 1.46 billion people (even more than China), the world’s fourth-largest economy, and probably a top five military power in the globe, attempting a major defense modernization program. To prevent India from becoming a serious obstacle and major regional rival, China wants India to be tied down with dangerous borders. And when there’s instability and violence in India’s neighbors, refugees often end up coming across the border into India.
Ranade underlined how much Xi Jinping sees the United States as a serious adversary that needs to be neutralized for China to fulfill his ambitions.
“What happened to the old Soviet Union, that’s a nightmare to him,” Ranade emphasized. “The [Chinese Communist Party National Representatives Congress] before the last, they circulated a small video to all party members, pointing out how the Soviet Union collapsed and what the reasons were. Xi looks at the United States as the main threat, someone who is persistently trying to bring down the Chinese Communist Party and prevent China from achieving its ambitions.”
ADDENDA: Bits and pieces of news while I was gone . . .
It turns out that according to federal prosecutors, the devastating California Palisades fire was allegedly “intentionally and maliciously” deliberately set. Bad Florida Man! Bad! The Palisades fire was fully contained on January 31, so 251 days, or eight months and nine days, have passed since then. According to the permitting progress on dashboard on the Los Angeles County website, as of October 8, the county had issued . . . 523 building permits. The county estimates that more than 12,000 parcels of land were damaged or destroyed by the wildfires. At this rate, the county will issue permits for all those parcels of land in 5,769 days, or nearly 16 years.
. . . Leftist political streamer Hasan Piker, who contended “America deserved 9/11,” is accused of using a shock collar on his dog to keep the animal still during his multi-hour podcast. You know, sometimes it’s the last person you would suspect . . . and sometimes it’s exactly the first person you would suspect.
. . . Thanks to all my Morning Jolt guest-writers including Noah Rothman and Dominic Pino, but in particular, a million kudos to Audrey Fahlberg for snagging arguably the political scoop of the year, in her reporting on Virginia’s Democratic state attorney general candidate Jay Jones and his deeply disturbing and thoroughly deranged fantasies of seeing his political foes shot and their loved ones dying in their arms.
Virginia Democrats, no one is saying you’ve got to vote for Republican Jason Miyares for another term as state attorney general. But remember you do have the option of leaving that part of the ballot blank and not endorsing this stone-cold sociopath. Or writing in a candidate.
It’s a free country. Jay Jones is free to stick around as the Democratic Party’s candidate. Democrats are free to vote for him. And we are free to judge those who declare, with their votes, that publicly expressing violent fantasies about the slaying of your political enemies is not disqualifying from the position of the state’s top law enforcement officer. We all say we want to slam the brakes on America’s accelerating cycle of political violence, but when the opportunities to rebuke it come along . . . eh, I guess we’ll see if Virginia’s electorate thinks Jones declaring he “wished [then-Speaker of the House Todd] Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms” is a forgivable sin.
The sordid history of Ralph Northam serving his full term in the face of disgraceful scandals indicates that Virginia Democrats have an unlimited appetite for humiliation.