West straining Sino-India ties: State media

Simran Sodhi

Tribune News Service

Beijing, May 25

Amid President Pranab Mukherjee’s ongoing visit, China seems to be softening its stance towards India with state news agency Xinhua running an article blaming the West for the hyped tension between “the dragon and the elephant”. One of the reasons for this could be growing Chinese apprehensions that India, Japan and the US are getting together as a power bloc to challenge Beijing’s dominance in the region.

The report talks about the Chabahar port and how this is also being used to drive a wedge between the two Asian giants. “One of the latest targets of their smear campaign is a New Delhi-Tehran deal on developing Iran’s port of Chabahar. The seaport is 100 km from Pakistan’s Gwadar seaport, which is co-developed by China. Those media claim the Elephant-Dragon rivalry is unavoidable,” said the Xinhua report today. The report goes on to add that such hype is both “untrue and harmful”.

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The report comes out heavily in its criticism of the Western media, which it blames for creating such tension between China and other nations. The report goes on to state: “Yet the distorted coverage of China-India ties lays bare a deep and unfounded bias against China among Western media”.