India Must Watch Out for China’s Non-Military Tactics

Context: The World, especially the Western countries, have often missed China's covert efforts to achieve its objective of reshaping the world order.

China's non-military strategies for building a new world order:

• Utilising Information as a new tool of warfare: Hacking of US government employee's data.
• Recovering from image setback post the covid pandemic: Example: it signed an important trade agreement with the European Union with vague promises about the use of forced labour.
• Based on "The side-principal rule" of ancient Chinese warfare: which proposes avoiding a frontal collision with an enemy's powerful sword at his point of strength, but rather using one's sword to cut into the warrior's exposed side.
• Based on Rule of Unrestricted Warfare: Nothing is forbidden, e.g. fomenting terror can be used as a tool of unconventional warfare.
• New domination strategy: in various forms -
  • Economic aid: For instance, the Belt and Road Initiative that drags countries into a debt trap.
  • Smuggling: By one estimate, 80% of the world's counterfeits—a $1.8 trillion industry—are produced in China.
  • Cultural: The hundreds of Confucius Institutes set up in universities across the world.
  • Media and fabrication: manipulating foreign media by influencing journalists and opinion-makers through cash and kind, and providing media outlets revenue through advertisements.
  • International law: China lobbied for more than a decade to become a member of the World Trade Organization, and after having achieved that, it has been subverting and ignoring its rules.
• Hiring Western leaders as "advisers" or "consultants" (Bureaucratic Breach): Like former US secretaries of state, former national security advisers, former US trade representative, etc.
  • David Cameron, former British prime minister, heads the UK-China Fund, which seeks to raise $1 billion for projects under China's Belt and Road Initiative.
• Focus on lucid and incisive thinking instead of developing new technology:
  • E.g. Beijing-linked Hutchison Whampoa group took over the Cristobal and Balboa ports at the two ends of the Panama Canal, which links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and has vital strategic importance.

Conclusion: It is imperative our leaders must also examine Beijing's non-military strategies to counter it effectively while securing India's national interests.