Opinion | Imagine what China and India can do together

The two Asian powers share common cause on several fronts, from globalisation to climate change, and both would be wise to focus on cooperation instead of military brinkmanship

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A Chinese and an Indian soldier mend a barbed-wire fence at the Nathu La border crossing between India and China in India's northeastern Sikkim state. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:45am, 29 Jul 2017Updated: 10:52am, 29 Jul 2017

The current tensions between India and China, facing each other in a military stand-off on Bhutan’s Doklam plateau, are dominating perceptions of the two countries’ increasingly hostile relationship. Yet this obscures the extent to which opportunities for cooperation between India and China exist.

There is, first of all, the regional plane, where China and India have notably strengthened their cooperation. China has acquiesced in India’s participation in the East Asia Summit and India has joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. While Asia is devoid of meaningful security institutions, interlocking economic and trade relationships could knit China and India closer together.

A worker sorts coal on a conveyer belt near a coal mine at Datong, in China's northern Shanxi province. China and India are working together to address global issues such as climate change and environmental protection. Photo: AFP

But the two countries’ cooperation need not be confined to Asia. China and India have broadly similar interests and approaches on a wide range of international questions, from most issues of international peace and security to the principles of world trade and the ways and means of coping with globalisation. They have already begun working together in multinational forums on such issues as climate change and environment protection, and have no real differences on matters like encouraging biodiversity, promoting dialogue among civilisations, promoting population control, combating transnational crime, controlling the spread of pandemic disease and dealing with challenges from non-traditional threats to security. All of these areas provide a realistic basis for further long-term multilateral cooperation.

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One exception, however, is the issue of combating international terrorism, where China’s indulgence of Pakistani terrorist groups at the United Nations (marked by its continued blocking of an otherwise unanimous decision to list Masood Azhar as a terrorist) is arguably not in its own long-term interests. But that can change, since China is not invulnerable to the siren calls of Islamist fanaticism in its own western areas.