The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India

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India's relations with the People's Republic of China have captured the popular imagination ever since the 1950s but have rarely merited a detailed understanding of the issues. Individual episodes tend to arouse lively debate, which often dissipates without a deeper exploration of the factors that shaped the outcomes. This book explores the dynamics of negotiation between the two countries, from the early years after Independence until the current times, through the prism of six historical and recent events in the India-China relationship. The purpose is to identify the strategy, tactics and tools that China employs in its diplomatic negotiations with India, and the learnings for India from its past dealings with China that may prove helpful in future negotiations with the country.

spent nearly four decades in the Indian Foreign Service and retired as foreign secretary in January 2020. He worked on matters relating to China for the better part of his diplomatic career. His assignments in Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing, between 1982 and 2017, and his postings in New Delhi at various levels, have given him insights into Chinese negotiating behaviour. He has had personal experience in conducting negotiations with China across a range of issues since 2000, including on some of the issues dealt with in this book. He now lives in Pune with his wife, Vandana, and devotes his time to the study of China.

China is our largest neighbour and the country with which we have had prolonged negotiations on a variety of issues since 1950. This book explores how China negotiated with India from the carly years after Independence until the present, and what lessons India may draw from this about negotiating with the Chinese. It explores this through six important events in our bilateral. relationship, which covers the period from 1949 to 2019. These are: (1) Recognition by the Government of India of the People's Republic of China on 30 December 1949; (2) the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India of 29 April 1954; (3) India's nuclear tests in 1998; (4) China's formal recognition of Sikkim as a part of India on 11 April 2005; (5) the India-China diplomatic negotiations on the 123 Nuclear Deal in 2008; and (6) the listing of Masood Azhar as a terrorist in the UNSC 1267 Sanctions List on 1 May 2019.

From the Indian perspective such narration might be useful in discerning how China negotiates and also how this might have changed as China accumulates greater power in the international system, as well as the instruments and means that China deploys in the pursuit of its goals.

We've often heard claims being made about the long historical connection between India and China. However, relatively little is known about their diplomatic interaction in the pre-modern age, aside from travelogues of monk-scholars from China to India in the first millennium of the Common Era, and sporadic diplomatic expeditions from Indian kingdoms to the Tang and Song imperial courts from the seventh to the twelfth centuries. More recently, the Chinese government has been highlighting the naval expeditions of Zheng He, in the early fifteenth century, to the Indian Ocean, including the Kerala coast, in order to legitimize their growing presence west of the Malacca Strait. Evidence of an Indian (possibly Tamil) settlement in Quanzhou, in the Fujian province of modern China, also attests to trade links in the mid-second millennium of the Common Era. There is little recorded history of how the two major Indo-Pacific civilizations interacted in political and diplomatic terms. This might be explained by the absence of direct contact across a shared boundary because, despite Chinese claims to suzerainty over Tibet since the thirteenth century (Yuan dynasty), Tibet was mostly left to its own devices. Since China's business with India was mostly through maritime routes, the opportunity and necessity of political interaction was limited.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages