Amid Crisis Lesson in StateCraft

Context: China’s systematic strategic influence in Britain and its simultaneous pursuit of anti-imperialist stance holds lessons for India’s foreign policy calculus.

Difference between India’s and China’s Anti-Imperialist Stance

• While the Indian elite is utterly comfortable with its British peers, China has never disowned its founding ideology nor has it forgotten China’s past conflicts with imperialist powers.
• China’s narrative: “Century of humiliation” at the hands of Britain and other European powers.
• While India finds it hard to separate the inherited grievances from its current strategic imperatives, China successfully transformed British hostility into near acquiescence.

China’s Influence Operation/Network 

• Infiltration of the British ruling caste: Chinese companies have penetrated Britain’s once-mighty institutions and are promoting Chinese interests.
• Illegitimate use of corruption and coercion: to shape decision-making in target nations.
• Building on the Leninist tradition: of using the capitalist contradictions to advance socialism. 
• Lenin famously declared that greedy capitalists will be happy to sell the rope that communists intend to hang them with.  

Lessons for India from China’s Influence Operations

• Separate anti-imperialist ideology and the pursuit of national interest : China’s past conflicts with imperialist powers never came in way of its strategic alliances.

• Probe the inter-imperialist contradictions : instead of treating the West as a collective.

• China separated Britain from the US and weakened its Five Eyes alliance of the Anglosphere (the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

• Influence operations can shape policy evolution: in targeted nations, but can’t eliminate politics. 
• While China was close to winning over a critical section of the British elite, there was a major revolt in the Conservative Party against the Huawei decision.
• Restructure relationship with Britain: 
• Britain is an important middle power that can help expand India’s strategic options.
• Britain’s recognition of keeping China out of post-Brexit foreign economic and strategic policies provides a huge opening for India.

Conclusion: Its right to engage with our tragic past with Britain, but India must necessarily focus on the present and future possibilities with it.