By occupying the key strategic heights in the south bank of the Pangang Tso, particularly the Black Top, Indian forces seem to have touched a raw nerve among many within Chinese strategic circles.
There has been much displeasure over the fact that in 1962, the People’s Liberation Army had reportedly seized this highland with “82 casualties”, but now it has been recaptured by India “without firing a single shot”, which they say is “totally unacceptable”.
It is further argued that given the current state of preparedness among the Indian military, it is very difficult to regain this highland through a hand-to-hand combat, while it is equally unrealistic to expect India to back down through negotiations and thus there has been a growing clamor among Chinese military circles for a forceful counterattack against India.
Other than that, the use of Special Frontier Force (SFF) by India in the China-India border confrontation has been yet another sore point and the consensus on this issue among Chinese strategists seems to be that “the reactionary force based on hatred towards China, the minions of India can only be physically eliminated.”
However, some Chinese strategists believe that by not reacting immediately, the PLA is actually buying time, building strong defences and fortification so as to launch a more severe counterattack in a more appropriate time.
Rumors are rife in the Chinese internet that China will take the opportunity of the US election to carry out a military expedition either against Taiwan or against India. Christmas time is also seen as an opportune moment for a counterattack against India when the US will stay distracted, and India will also be inconvenienced due to heavy snow.
The idea is to carry out “a small scale conflict at the tactical level” or an ambush attack by luring Indian troops into the Chinese territory. However, if this gets escalated into a larger military conflict, Chinese generals like Wang Hongguang, a former deputy commander of China’s Nanjing Military Region, suggest a four pronged strategy to deal with India, firstly, by seizing air supremacy over Ladakh and simultaneously capturing electronic control systems, destroying India’s command network, air defence network (radar network), and air command network, secondly, targeting India’s key infrastructures, artillery positions, armored clusters, logistics storage warehouses, oil depots etc., thirdly, occupying key strategic heights, dividing and trapping the Indian deployments by cutting off the Depsang Plain and the Siachen Glacier, and finally, occupying National Highway 1 from Srinagar to Leh and thereby cutting off the connection between Ladakh and the outside world.
This way, China, if willing, can seize the whole of Ladakh in case of a large-scale military conflict with India, he further asserted.
Similarly, Chinese internet is full of commentaries urging the PLA to use its propaganda machinery to exploit caste and religion-based fault lines in the Indian military and create rifts between its officers and soldiers to bring down the morale of the Indian forces. They further advocated formation of a joint front with Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and others to launch a combined offensive against India where “China recovers Ladakh, Arunachal and the northeast, Pakistan captures Kashmir, Nepal gets its claimed land, Sikkim becomes independent, Bangladesh gets West Bengal, Bhutan comes out of India’s shadow and India is reduced to its princely state era.”
Regardless of whether China chooses to escalate or de-escalate, the present tension at the LAC, we in India should take note of the fact that as a direct fall out of the present crisis and before that the Doklam standoff of 2017, a greater realization has been setting in within the Chinese strategic circles that India in the west, with 3 million square km of land area, with a comprehensive national strength ranked fourth in the world, with 1.3 billion people with an average age of 27 years, who has always considered China as an adversary, is a bigger threat to China’s rise than even the US in the east, which is a relatively aging society, a globally stretched out troops and against whom it believes it enjoys some sort of local military advantage.
Therefore, despite “strategically despising” India, Chinese strategists feel “tactically, it can no longer ignore India”.
In fact, there has been a growing consensus in China that a China-India conflict is somewhat inevitable, if not now, but in the future and most likely earlier than the Sino-US conflict and if China handles this well, it will provide more mileage to China at the global level but if it falters, “the China-India conflict in the new era will mark the beginning of China’s decline”.
