Clearing the atmosphere

A veteran Chinese diplomat and scholar, responding to Frontline's invitation, sets out the facts of 1959-62 as he understands them, in order to "clear the atmosphere" and pave the way for a friendly and cooperative Sino-Indian relationship in the future.

YE ZHENGJIA

When I learnt from the web-site that the Indian Prime Minister was pointing an accusing finger at China for the so-called "armed aggression" against India in 1962 as a pretext for his decision to go nuclear in May 1998, I felt very sad rather than angry. China and India, which together have a population of more than 2.2 billion, have to co-exist in peace. Both countries urgently need a peaceful environment to develop their economy and improve their people's welfare.

The fact puzzles me why it is so hard for India and China to come to understand each other 36 years after the 1962 border conflicts. I feel it is necessary for the younger generation to know the real facts of the history of Sino-Indian relations during the unfortunate period. A lot of misinformation has been spread in the Indian press all these years, while from the Chinese side nothing has been presented to the public and to the world to clarify the facts of history.

As a witness from that period of unfortunate development in China-India relations, I feel it is my duty to tell the younger generation of India and China the hard facts, with the honest intention of promoting a better understanding for a friendly and cooperative relationship between our two great countries in future. The impression which I have gathered from general Indian thinking is that it was China that had committed aggression and betrayed India's earlier friendship towards China. However, that is not true. In fact, it is the "forward policy" persistently pursued by the then Government of India which culminated in the 1962 border war.

N. RAM
Ye Zhengjia.

Let me recall the historical process right before the war. After the failure of the Tibetan rebellion of March 10, 1959, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a letter to Premier Zhou Enlai on March 22, 1959, and openly raised a territorial claim with China. Premier Zhou wrote back on September 8 to Prime Minister Nehru and pointed out that as the Sino-Indian boundary line had never been formally delineated, the boundary question had to be settled by peaceful negotiations.

As Nehru refused to negotiate and accused China of not accepting his claims, Zhou pointed out that the root cause of the long-pending dispute over the boundary issue lay in the British colonial government in India which expanded territorially into Tibet after failing to instigate Tibet to split from its motherland. Zhou told Nehru that although China could not recognise the illegal "McMahon Line", the Chinese armed forces had never crossed that line. China's good intention was to maintain peace and tranquillity along the border to facilitate a negotiated settlement of the boundary question. That, however, did not mean that China had accepted that line. Zhou, in his letter, suggested to Nehru for the second time that the status quo and peace and tranquillity on the border should be maintained pending a final settlement of the boundary question. Zhou also pointed out that until early 1959, generally speaking, the atmosphere all along the Sino-Indian border was good.

After the Tibetan rebellion, tension was increasing owing to forward movement by the Indian armed forces. In the eastern section of the Sino-Indian boundary, they had even crossed the "McMahon Line". It was this action on the Indian side that led to the final bloody clash at Longju on August 25, 1959.

After the second bloody border clash at Kongka Pass on October 20, 1959, Zhou wrote again to Nehru on November 7, reiterating his earlier suggestions for maintaining the status quo of the border. He further suggested that both sides should withdraw their armed forces 20 km from the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Zhou also suggested that the two Prime Ministers should meet at the earliest date. As a result of subsequent diplomatic consultation, Zhou came to New Delhi to meet Nehru between April 19 and 25, 1960. That was followed by three rounds of official meetings that year. However, all those efforts made no headway.

From 1961 onwards, the Indian armed forces, taking advantage of the stoppage of patrolling on the Chinese side, encroached on Chinese territory and set up a series of checkposts on the western section of the border in a planned way. The then Indian Defence Minister, V. K. Krishna Menon, openly declared in early June 1962 that India would use military means to settle the boundary question. On June 20, 1962, Nehru stated in the Indian Parliament that India had set up some new patrolling checkposts, endangering Chinese checkposts. He said that it was due to these activities on the Indian side, to a large extent, that the Chinese were forced to act. Nehru assured Parliament that India's position had improved and would become even better in the future. On September 26, 1962, Nehru declared at a press conference at Lagos in Nigeria that India would deal with the Chinese by using force.

In the face of increasing tension on the Sino-Indian border, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sent notes to the Indian Embassy in Beijing repeatedly on August 4, September 13 and October 3, 1962, and proposed to the Indian Government that the two sides should meet immediately without precondition in order to ease tension. But all the proposals were rejected by India.

On October 12, 1962, Nehru told the press at Palam airport before he left for Ceylon (Sri Lanka) that he had already ordered the armed forces to clear the Chinese from the NEFA. By that statement, India actually meant to occupy the Chinese checkpost by force at Tzedong, north of the "McMahon Line". That declaration of Nehru's was seen by the British and American press (such as The Guardian of October 13 and The Washington Post of October 15) as India's ultimatum to China. On October 14, Indian Defence Minister V. K. Krishna Menon told a meeting of Congress workers at Bangalore that the Government had come to a final decision to drive out the Chinese. He believed that it must be the responsibility of the Army to protect India's borders. He declared that the Indian Army was determined to fight the Chinese to the last man.

LAST year, Major General (Retd.) Lei Yingfu, the then Deputy Director in the Operational Department at the Headquarters of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army, drew on his personal experience of the Sino-Indian border dispute to shed some light on the inside decision-making process by the top Chinese leaders. In his memoir, My Days as a Military Staff in the Supreme Command, he told the story vividly of how hard the top Chinese leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai tried to avoid conflicts with India but were finally forced to take defensive action. Major General Lei's memoir confirms my own general impressions from that time. Here I would like to reproduce some of his recollections for Indian readers:

In early November 1959, a decision-making meeting of top leaders, including Mao Zedong, Liu Saoqi, Zhou Enlai, Peng Zhen and Hu Qiaomu, was called in Hangzhou to discuss the way to avoid increasingly bloody clashes along the Sino-Indian border. When Major General Lei reported to the leaders about the situation on the frontier and the emotional demands of the border guards for counter-actions, Chairman Mao said that as long as the border guards of either side faced each other, border clashes could not be avoided, and so he suggested a policy of disengagement. He further said that if the Indian side refused to do that, China would withdraw its forces unilaterally 20 km from their positions (p. 202).

Mao's suggestion was unanimously adopted and Zhou wrote a letter in this spirit on November 7, 1959, to Nehru. When his suggestion for both China and India to withdraw 20 km from the LAC was rejected, the Chinese side unilaterally did it and stopped patrolling within the area vacated from January 1960. During that period, Mao explained his policy of peace towards the Sino-Indian border to many quarters along the following three broad lines: (1) As a socialist country, China stood for peace and against war, and it did not want others' territory. (2) China needed a long period of peaceful and stable international environment so that it could build a prosperous country. (3) The main war threats to China were from the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not from India. China wished to have good neighbourly relations with India, which had jointly initiated with China the famous Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence (P. 204).

THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi on January 24, 1957.

From June 1962, the Indian armed forces speeded up their forward movement. They crossed the "McMahon Line" in the eastern section, killing Chinese border guards and their officers, and setting up a series of checkposts in the western section, some of them at the back of the Chinese checkposts. The Government of India mistook the Chinese conciliatory and restrained attitude to be weakness and China as easy to bully. It was reported that Nehru had described to his trusted colleagues the Chinese approach toward India as "bark without bite". It was the repeated armed provocations and encroachments on Chinese territories from the Indian side for two years that forced Mao to change his mind (p. 205).

In October 18, 1962, Mao Zedong said at an enlarged meeting of The Political Bureau: For many years, we have taken a number of measures to seek a peaceful resolution of the boundary issue but India rejected all of them. They intentionally provoked ever more violent armed clashes. They are bullying others too much. Now that Nehru is determined to fight with us, we have no way out but to keep him company. As the saying goes, "from an exchange of blows, friendship grows." Maybe we have to counter-fight them before we can have a stable border and a peaceful settlement of the boundary question can be expected. However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means (p. 210).

If we look back to such factual accounts of the background to the outbreak of the 1962 war, it should be clear which side was responsible for that war. Although it is no use blaming the other side for that unfortunate history, yet it is necessary to clear the atmosphere in order to calm down the agitated emotion on this subject and pave the way for rebuilding our friendly and cooperative relationship in the future. I earnestly hope the great Indian people will think it over.

Professor Ye Zhengjia is Senior Fellow at the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), Beijing. An interview with him by N. Ram was published as part of Frontline's cover feature on "India and China: What Lies Ahead?" in the September 25 issue.

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