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Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier
Published July 18, 2015 | By admin
SOURCE: caixin.com
While much of the world focuses on the competition between China and the United States (and Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam) in the East China Sea and South China Sea, another geopolitical struggle of equal importance is continuing and escalating in South Asia and the Indian Ocean involving India, China, and the U.S. At the geographical center of this latter struggle is the country of Myanmar, situated between India’s northeastern states, Bangladesh, southwestern China and Southeast Asia, bordering the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. It is in that region, writes Bertil Lintner in his new book Great Game East, that “21st century Asia’s most serious superpower rivalry” will likely play out.
Lintner, a journalist and former correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, has been writing on Asian politics for over three decades. He is steeped in the history of the region’s diverse ethnic groups and political rivalries. He uses the term “Great Game East” to differentiate this current geopolitical struggle from the 19th century competition between Great Britain and Russia in Central Asia. The Great Game East, Lintner notes, involves not only geopolitical rivalries among nations, but also ethnic conflicts within India’s northeastern states, Bangladesh and Burma.
Since the time India broke away from British rule in the wake of the Second World War, various ethnic tribes in the northeast region of India, East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), and Burma – Nagas, Mizos, Manipuris, Karens, Kachins, Mons, Arakanese Buddhists, Rohingya Muslims, and others – sought their own independence by engaging in armed uprisings against their rulers. Some of these groups fought with the British against the Japanese invader during the war. Naga tribesmen, for example, helped British troops halt Japan’s advance into India at the Battle of Kohima in April to May 1944. Some of these ethnic peoples were influenced by Christian missionaries; others by Marxism, frequently the Maoist variety. Foreign powers often supported the insurgencies: China and Pakistan supported rebels in India and Burma; India supported rebels in Burma and Tibetans in China. Armed rebel groups established sanctuaries across borders, and benefited from both the drug trade and the arms trade in the region.
India initially dealt with its rebellious ethnic groups in the northeast by brutal counter-insurgency methods then shifted to political accommodation, but problems remain. Lintner believes that India will continue to use a combination of reconciliation, financial support, direct force and attempts to divide rebel groups to maintain control of its northeastern region.
Burma, ruled by a repressive military junta since 1962, remains, in Lintner’s words, a “cockpit of anarchy,” but its geographical position between India and China and astride the seas connected to the Indian Ocean, attracts the attention of China, India, and the U.S. China has provided military and economic aid to Burma, helped develop Burma’s naval base on the Coco Islands, and is planning to build an oil pipeline through Burma. India, which has naval stations on the nearby Andaman and Nicobar islands, has since the early 1990s attempted to “wean Burma’s military government from its close relationship with China.” More recently, the U.S. has politically engaged Burma despite previous concerns for its human rights record as part of its “pivot” to Asia. China’s rise and the reactions of India and the U.S., Lintner concludes, have dragged Burma into “a superpower rivalry that it may not be able to handle as the competition intensifies.”
This is a timely and important work that sheds light on the important geopolitical developments occurring in South Asia. Lintner’s knowledge of the history and geography of the region informs every page of the book. He is able readily to shift focus from the local to the regional to the global and his judgments and conclusions are cautious and empirically based. The book also includes valuable appendices that set forth a chronology of events, an identification and history of the many ethnic insurgencies of the region and a description of rebel missions to China.
If indeed we are in the Asian century, Lintner’s Great Game East will be an important guide to our understanding of how this came about and what to expect in the immediate future. The Asian balance of power as a whole may well depend on developments in this region as well as the marginal seas off China’s east coast.
Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.
Published July 18, 2015 | By admin
SOURCE: caixin.com
While much of the world focuses on the competition between China and the United States (and Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam) in the East China Sea and South China Sea, another geopolitical struggle of equal importance is continuing and escalating in South Asia and the Indian Ocean involving India, China, and the U.S. At the geographical center of this latter struggle is the country of Myanmar, situated between India’s northeastern states, Bangladesh, southwestern China and Southeast Asia, bordering the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. It is in that region, writes Bertil Lintner in his new book Great Game East, that “21st century Asia’s most serious superpower rivalry” will likely play out.
Lintner, a journalist and former correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, has been writing on Asian politics for over three decades. He is steeped in the history of the region’s diverse ethnic groups and political rivalries. He uses the term “Great Game East” to differentiate this current geopolitical struggle from the 19th century competition between Great Britain and Russia in Central Asia. The Great Game East, Lintner notes, involves not only geopolitical rivalries among nations, but also ethnic conflicts within India’s northeastern states, Bangladesh and Burma.
Since the time India broke away from British rule in the wake of the Second World War, various ethnic tribes in the northeast region of India, East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), and Burma – Nagas, Mizos, Manipuris, Karens, Kachins, Mons, Arakanese Buddhists, Rohingya Muslims, and others – sought their own independence by engaging in armed uprisings against their rulers. Some of these groups fought with the British against the Japanese invader during the war. Naga tribesmen, for example, helped British troops halt Japan’s advance into India at the Battle of Kohima in April to May 1944. Some of these ethnic peoples were influenced by Christian missionaries; others by Marxism, frequently the Maoist variety. Foreign powers often supported the insurgencies: China and Pakistan supported rebels in India and Burma; India supported rebels in Burma and Tibetans in China. Armed rebel groups established sanctuaries across borders, and benefited from both the drug trade and the arms trade in the region.
India initially dealt with its rebellious ethnic groups in the northeast by brutal counter-insurgency methods then shifted to political accommodation, but problems remain. Lintner believes that India will continue to use a combination of reconciliation, financial support, direct force and attempts to divide rebel groups to maintain control of its northeastern region.
Burma, ruled by a repressive military junta since 1962, remains, in Lintner’s words, a “cockpit of anarchy,” but its geographical position between India and China and astride the seas connected to the Indian Ocean, attracts the attention of China, India, and the U.S. China has provided military and economic aid to Burma, helped develop Burma’s naval base on the Coco Islands, and is planning to build an oil pipeline through Burma. India, which has naval stations on the nearby Andaman and Nicobar islands, has since the early 1990s attempted to “wean Burma’s military government from its close relationship with China.” More recently, the U.S. has politically engaged Burma despite previous concerns for its human rights record as part of its “pivot” to Asia. China’s rise and the reactions of India and the U.S., Lintner concludes, have dragged Burma into “a superpower rivalry that it may not be able to handle as the competition intensifies.”
This is a timely and important work that sheds light on the important geopolitical developments occurring in South Asia. Lintner’s knowledge of the history and geography of the region informs every page of the book. He is able readily to shift focus from the local to the regional to the global and his judgments and conclusions are cautious and empirically based. The book also includes valuable appendices that set forth a chronology of events, an identification and history of the many ethnic insurgencies of the region and a description of rebel missions to China.
If indeed we are in the Asian century, Lintner’s Great Game East will be an important guide to our understanding of how this came about and what to expect in the immediate future. The Asian balance of power as a whole may well depend on developments in this region as well as the marginal seas off China’s east coast.
Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.
