Is China’s attempt to aggressively engage with its neighbors and lay claim to their territories as their own a result of the frustration it has over not being able to govern its own people effectively, or is there more?
With an unstable political situation in China and frequent people’s dissent, the regime’s flaring up of territorial disputes could be an attempt to make sure that the attention of its people is diverted from issues of national importance to a false narrative of defending the country from an external threat.
National frustration comes out in the form of unbridled aggression in its territories bordering the Himalayas and Taiwan.
Highlights
Otherwise, what can explain clashes with Indian forces at an altitude of 5000 feet in the border area of Tawang on December 9?
They come a year after the encroachments China tried to make on the Ladakh side of its border with India only a year ago, when it had also started building up its garrisons and illegally gaining Indian territory.
Border conflict history between India and China
China and India share nearly 3,500 meters of borders along the Himalayas. They have fought over an internationally unrecognized line of actual control (LAC), drawn in 1962 after a war that had resulted in an Indian defeat and in its annexation of much of Ladakh, which it had renamed as “Aksai Chin.” China now keeps claiming a lot of other territories, besides Aksai Chin to be its own and keeps contending with India on it.
China’s Taiwan strait conflict
On December 13, 3000 kilometers east of Taiwan, the Chinese army orchestrated another misadventure in the sensitive Taiwan Strait. This time it’s not on land, but in the air.
According to the Chinese the Taiwan Strait is a disputed group of islands in Taiwan’s area that belongs to them.
The conflict has been going on since the early 1950s between the PRC and the ROC, the Republic of China, which is nothing but another name for Taiwan. Americans kept on supporting Taiwan against the Chinese in the past, until things died down in the early 1970s through negotiations between the US and Chinese, until they have re-emerged now with China’s aggressive foreign policy near its territories bordering other countries.
China’s aggressive stand endorsed
It was very evident at the recently concluded 29th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing in October that China intended to adopt a hardline foreign policy where President Xi and his newly renewed close guard planned to show the Chinese army going for national pride and glory by eliminating any threats from its borders.
Its narrative that people and the nation had to prepare for “strong winds, rough waters and dangerous storms”.clearly exemplifies the diversion tactics it had been playing for the past many years.
Beijing’s power circles don’t mind the diplomatic tensions it’s repeated encroachments are leading to with New Delhi, Taipei, or the West, as long as it can keep the domestic resentment of its population battered by the consequences of three interminable years of pandemic and multiple restrictions at bay.
It is an inexplicable strategy that can have impacts beyond its imagination, but that’s how the Chinese Communist party has been playing it out. Nothing matters to it more than its image with populations within the country. It will do anything to prove otherwise to its residents. It curbs any protests it sees, under the garb of upholding the country’s national interest, and when its national fervor is at its crescendo, it quietly usurps any popular uprisings that takes place.
