India becomes a factor in US talks with China

Sandeep Dikshit

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 19

The US has said it would like to hear more from China about its land border disputes with India. For the first time in recent years, China’s tensions with India are openly figuring in American calculus for the region.

‘PLA invaded same area in 2015 too’

The PLA invaded this contested area deeper and longer in 2015, with more people, than ever before historically. We don’t have a lot of visibility and we don’t have a lot of open dialogue with our Chinese counterparts — David Stilwell, Senior US Official

Speaking on the India-China border clashes immediately after high-level talks between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Yang Jiechi, a senior US government official wondered whether the Chinese incursions into the Indian territory since 2015 were a negotiating tactic or “just a punch in the nose to demonstrate their superiority”.

However, the US has clubbed China’s friction with India along with its other long-standing regional disputes such as South China Sea and Hong Kong issues to assert that “the actions that we’ve seen out of China have been not really constructive”, according to Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the US State Department David Stilwell.

The US is watching the India-China border dispute “very closely” and finds the current activity at the Galwan valley and Pangong Tso as similar to the activity in the past on border disputes. In this respect, he mentioned Xi Jinping’s India visit in 2015 when the PLA invaded the same contested area “deeper and longer, with more people, than ever before historically. Then we saw the Doklam issue down near Bhutan, where we saw similar concerns”.

“We don’t have a lot of visibility and we don’t have a lot of open dialogue with our Chinese counterparts, and honestly I’d like to see more of that if we can,” he added.

For the most part India was however a footnote as the US-China dialogue in Honolulu revolved around safeguarding American interests, including full transparency to combat the ongoing pandemic, implementing phase one of the Indo-US trade deal, North Korea, Hong Kong, South China Sea and provocative behaviour around Taiwan.

Stilwell described the US-China relationship overall as intense. “This is terra incognita for the Chinese. They never had a US government actually stand up and insist that they follow through on their commitments,” he said. 

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