India-China trade ties not on an even keel

With 2021 trade surplus of a record $676 billion, Beijing has become a bigger-than-before threat to India, dominating trade with smaller nations and a loss-making India to slowly render them helpless, thereby hastening an inevitable vassalage before the CPC. Today’s bigger picture of the omnipresent Chinese perfidy needs to be borne in mind by the Indian establishment.

Covid effect: India had to make ‘distress import’ of medical apparatus and raw material from China last year. File photo

Abhijit Bhattacharyya

Commentator and Author

The Chinese media has again highlighted the bilateral trade deficit figures of India, even as the Communist Party of China (CPC) inexorably tramples upon New Delhi’s finance and commerce.

What began in 1999-2000 with a modest deficit of $743.85 million has skyrocketed to $69.38 billion in 2021. The gap has widened to an unbridgeable extent in recent years. China’s exports to India have today reached $97.52 billion against India’s $28.14 billion to China.

What’s worrying is that there’s nothing to suggest that this humongous deficit will be capped any time soon. It’s worrying also because China’s overall 2021 trade surplus has hit a record $676 billion.

With such financial and economic muscle having penetrated deep inside India, and the weak Third World countries along with profit-seeking corporations and the stock market monopolists of the West chasing the “Chinese dream” to make dollars, India should be ready for further hijacking of commerce and trade and forcible occupation of territory by the CPC with its expansionist border law.

The scenario appears grim. The whole of $69.38-billion trade profit of China is more than that of India’s 2022-23 $65-billion defence budget. In 2021, China turned the “worst of times” for India into its own “best of times”.

Thus, while Indians were dying due to the Chinese-origin virus during the second wave of the pandemic, Chinese exports soared to an unprecedented height owing to Delhi’s heightened “distress import” of medical apparatus and raw material of Covid-related products. Delhi’s distress was the Dragon’s gain.

Beijing resorted to an aggressive publicity drive through its CPC-controlled print media. The year 2021 was the “dollar over dead body” year fulfilling China’s relentless pursuit for export, cash and profit.

So, what next? Can India reduce her addictive dependence on China which has already emerged as a monopoly merchant in the South Asian market? Will India go the way her smaller neighbours are going into the Chinese pocket?

It’s an incorrect political question to pose undoubtedly. Yet, it needs to be impressed upon by India herself that unless and until she tries her utmost to come out of over-dependence on sub-standard Chinese products, troubled times could degenerate into a chronic financial disease for the moneyed and mercantile men of India, for their inability to implement the “self-help” slogan.

Indeed, this unending outflow of foreign exchange reserves, for buying Chinese stuff, from state coffers, in medium and long terms could well create an avoidable difficulty with $256-billion debt (43% of the total outstanding of $596 billion) maturing in the next 12 months.

No doubt India today has a healthy foreign exchange reserve of $632.7 billion (as on January 7, 2022), but occasional dipping of foreign currency assets and value of gold in reserves are potential pressure points, notwithstanding Delhi’s comfort zone of the reserve which is adequate enough to fund more than 12 months’ imports.

For India, however, this adverse trade balance and potential depletion of foreign exchange constitutes only a part of the Chinese challenge as it needs to be linked to, and synchronised with, her sovereignty, territorial integrity and unity. India simply cannot be seen to lose territory for trade; as was done by Russia facing the Napoleonic invasion (19th century) and Hitler’s naked aggression (20th century).

Thus, with 2021 bumper trade surplus of a record $676 billion, Beijing in 2022 has become a bigger-than-before threat to India, dominating trade with smaller nations and a loss-making India to slowly render them helpless, thereby hastening an inevitable vassalage before the CPC.

In fact, the Chinese have wanted India to be just that for several years. Hence, their former World Bank employee audaciously advised India in 2017: “If you are poor, what’s the point of being secure and sovereign, with your own independent state? We in China don’t see things the same way.” Join the “club for cash” and ignore “sovereignty” issues.

When will India’s wealthy and influential section of the merchant and trading class give respect to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of their own country? When will they hold the country’s territory over trade and profitability? When will they visit the families of those soldiers whose bodies come back in coffins? Can’t they ever make any contribution to the bereaved widows and orphans? Should they put the entire onus solely on the state to bear the financial compensation to the dead soldier’s kin?

That said, today’s bigger picture of the omnipresent Chinese perfidy needs to be borne in mind by the Indian establishment to go all out to extricate the 1.3 billion heads from a potential disaster waiting to happen.

Thus wailed FBI Director Christopher Wray: “No country poses a greater threat to the US than the Chinese” which has “stolen staggering volumes of information” and causes deep job destroying damage across a wide range of industries, so much so that “we are opening new cases... every 12 hours.”

The FBI Director should know better. It’s the wealthy Wall Street corporations who have damaged the Washington state most. It’s simple: They entered the Dragon’s sanctum sanctorum for dollars; they are trapped and any attempt to extricate oneself from the Dragon’s gang will result in inevitable fatality.

Coming back to India, it seems there’s no end to Delhi’s agony. Day in and day out, India appears to be weakening herself. Else, how the espionage-riddled Chinese telecom gets it? Huawei bagging Rs 150 crore Airtel deal? How come Vodafone-Idea has “given... expansion contract to ZTE? How the Chinese companies are getting respite inside India despite all crimes in the hinterland? How will India deal with a bigger threat to her safety, security, unity, integrity and sovereignty?

By only through diplomatic semantics in meet-the-press briefings! And taking “note of” and expressing “concern” and “regret” through the media? Let’s be real. Chinese communists are bigger capitalists than the capitalists. Today’s Chinese officials have become venture capitalists.

So, it’s no longer a surprise to find Chinese-owned non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) committing massive fraud in India and getting booked under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

The single aim of the CPC is profit, that too at any cost, by ravaging the economies of other countries, in which India is a primary target. Hope India realises the reality, now at least.