| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Chinese troops destroy Indian posts, bunker |
| 2007-11-30 |
| A few weeks before the first ever India-China military exercises, the real war games have begun. On November 8, Chinese forces demolished some unmanned Indian forward posts near two Army bunkers against which Beijing had raised objections since July. "The Chinese came, destroyed the posts and went back," said an Army officer. The incident is learned to have taken place around November 8. The revelation came on the day a 12-member People's Liberation Army delegation landed in Kolkata on a recce for the military exercises to be held next month in China. The destroyed posts were near the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet border tri-junction. Intelligence sources in Gangtok on Friday said that a "third bunker" located near the two disputed ones had been destroyed by the Chinese. But, Army sources attached to formations overseeing the location said the structures were fibre glass huts, which are manned by a few soldiers when winter sets in. Senior Army officers in Kolkata were tightlipped about the incident, particularly because the Chinese army delegation led by a senior colonel is in the city. "I have nothing to comment," said a defence spokesman. The two disputed bunkers at Doka La, near Torsa Nala, had been set up about two years ago. The Chinese first objected to them in July, after which a series of border personnel meetings took place till September. Beijing wanted the bunkers to be shifted but the Indian Army stood its ground and continued to man and arm the bunkers. The Chinese were left smarting. It is believed the attack on the unmanned posts earlier this month were carried out by the PLA "to show their strength". Indian officials feel if the Chinese had any objection against these bunkers they should have lodged a protest soon after they were established, or at least within a year. Border disputes between China and India are nothing new, because China does not recognise the border and even triggered a war over it. Even the Line of Actual Control is difficult to demarcate at places because of the mountainous terrain. Two decades ago, in 1986, the two countries had come perilously close to a skirmish in the Sumdorong Chu valley. In view of the latest dispute, the visit of Defence Minister A K Anthony and chief of Army staff Deepak Kapoor to Sikkim and north Bengal during the weekend is being considered significant. They will land in Siliguri on Saturday and visit the border at Nathu La on Sunday. However, military observers believe confidence-building measures like joint war exercises will prove instrumental in easing border tensions. |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #13 A lethal epidemic might solve many problems as well. I think this is a much more likely scenario. Inadvertently or not, the Chinese government has actively contributed to a massive AIDS epidemic. Originating with corrupt and unhygienic plasma collection methods in Henan Province during the late 1990s, through a combination of inaction and coverup, the Politburo has allowed infected people to migrate into large city centers and has yet to adequately deal with the issue. The upshot is the world's largest medically caused AIDS epidemic. Rest assured that all who publicly protest about it are arrested promptly. Everything I have ever studied and encountered first hand in my relationships with Chinese people and travel to Taiwan all confirm Zhang Fei's analysis. Communist China's corrupt Mandarins have painted themselves into a serious demographic corner and there's going to be Hell for breakfast before it is over. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-11-30 23:43 |
| #12 A: Unlike WWI, the surreal slaughter will not be acknowledged, much less publicized. A very wide front will insure that soldiers see only the carnage they are involved in. Engineers with backhoes will dispose of the dead. No offense - when Chinese armies were sent to war in antiquity, CNN reporters weren't on hand to report on friendly casualties. People who reported negative information and caught were executed as spies, typically after gruesome and lingering tortures, to set an example. Word got out anyway. The reason for this is simple. Like I said earlier, individual Chinese aren't automatons. Every Chinese has a sense of region and place. Shandong people will look out for other Shandong people, and Shanghai natives will look out for other Shanghai natives. This is actually pretty natural, given that the vast majority of the people from a given area are probably blood kin from hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. Chinese soldiers - from rank and file to officers - and porters will report the conditions from the front. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that if wave after wave of fresh troops are going to the front and no one is coming back - or logistical requirements are the same as they were when the first wave hit - that no one is coming back. China is not the US - in China, everyone is related to someone and generally doesn't leave his home region and zone of comfort (since welfare payments are non-existent most places and - where they exist - only apply if you're native to the region from many generations ago), unless he's got opportunities elsewhere. Jobless people stay in their hometowns and farm. Missing people are noticed. Big time. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2007-11-30 23:11 |
| #11 Unlike WWI, the surreal slaughter will not be acknowledged, much less publicized. A very wide front will insure that soldiers see only the carnage they are involved in. Engineers with backhoes will dispose of the dead. Not in today's world. Pakistan tried this during the Kargil war, disavowing the bodies of their dead soldiers, burying others in secret. It still got out, and generated tremendous resentment. Kargil was also India's first media war and the TV footage of funerals did not go down well. The public will not tolerate mass casualties. Governments will fall. |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-11-30 22:43 |
| #10 Zhang Fei: I would expect the traditional style of recruitment to be used, the "man tax" levied on every village, town or city. Of course this means that those given to the army will be the utterly worthless and unwanted, the retarded, the jails to be emptied, the derelicts, etc. Strong families with good potential in their son are not going to be at issue. I also note in the demographic analysis, that these men are not only surplus because they can never mate, but also because they will never have the opportunity for a job. This implies that they really are out in the cold and to a great extent on their own. A starving army of homeless. So on one hand they are being expelled from their town, and on the other they are being offered clothes and food, a job. The last thing they would be told is that they are cannon fodder. They would think they are joining the regular army. Importantly, the sales pitch from the leaders to themselves is that they have to put a huge number of soldiers on the border, because the other side is doing so as well. But equally important, the real armies have to stay far back. There also has to be equal hesitation to commit either navies or air forces. Amazing rationalizations, really stretching the boundaries of reason. By the time the conflict begins, a large part of those to be killed off will already be at the front, perhaps hundreds of miles from escape and on foot. News on either side will have to be strictly controlled. Unlike WWI, the surreal slaughter will not be acknowledged, much less publicized. A very wide front will insure that soldiers see only the carnage they are involved in. Engineers with backhoes will dispose of the dead. Survivors will be sent on dangerous attacks, so that there will be little or no record of massacre. As horrible as it sounds, it may come to pass. A lethal epidemic might solve many problems as well. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-11-30 22:24 |
| #9 With one child per family I suspect Chinese leaders will face much the same problem as European leaders in fielding aggressive armies - the mothers have everything invested in just one offspring, one very protected offspring, and they will not easily send it off to war. Out of a billion people there will still be large numbers of potential soldiers available, but nowhere near the numbers one would expect from a 'normal' demographic distribution - such as the Muslim world. Hence China's increasing emphasis on improving their war technology. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2007-11-30 21:56 |
| #8 A: Zhang Fei: What I have called "demographic war" is truly a bizarre phenomenon, precisely because it is based on murderously cold reasoning masquerading as irrationality. I think your theory is based on the idea that the average Chinese male is like a worker ant that will do anything and everything for the hive. I'm afraid that's wrong. The average Chinese is no automaton and worships nothing and no one (and certainly not the leaders of the current Communist Party). He's nationalistic to a fault - out of personal self-interest - and has no problem having somebody else fight for his country. But if you ask him to personally lay down his life, he'll balk. At the height of its ideological fervor, just after the Communist victory in 1949, the Chinese cried uncle after losing just a million men during the Korean War, despite Mao's war aim of unifying the Korean peninsula. Roughly 2/3 of the 21,000 odd Chinese prisoners taken alive defected to Taiwan. For comparison, in all of WWII, the US took a few hundred Japanese POW's. Note that all of the preceding was before the mandatory one-child family policy came into play. Today, the government would be risking its very existence if it carelessly threw their lives away on some foreign adventure without end. Any knowledge of Chinese history - with which all Party members, including the late Mao Zedong, are likely acquainted - would tell you that some of China's biggest rebellions occurred in the wake of successful military campaigns - in part because of conscription and high taxes. My point is that the average Chinese's view is that patriotism means lip service. Yes, every Chinese you meet will say he supports the government - that's what he's been taught to say since he started school. He probably even thinks he supports the government. But if personal sacrifice is involved, I expect every Chinese to talk a good game but look for a way out*. Because in the Chinese scheme of things, only the family is worth sacrificing for, not the nation or any notion of morality or principles. Because that's been the rule in China for thousands of years, and the decrepit mish-mash of Western (communist and capitalistic) ideologies that is today's Communist party can't change that value system. Every Chinese I've met is survival-oriented. You know how we say "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game"? Well, if I had to sum up their worldview, it would be "it's whether you win or lose, it's not how you play the game". A shorter version would be "by hook or by crook". But only for their personal interests - not for some ephemeral nation, religion, ideology or moral principles. I think John Derbyshire, a long-time China watcher (and my favorite columnist) at National Review, put it best when he said that the Chinese people are fundamentally atheistic and have been for thousands of years. That is to say they believe - all ideological cant required for physical survival aside - that when you die, you die alone, no matter what anyone says. This seriously gets in the way of dying for the Emperor or becoming part of the Divine Wind a la Imperial Japan. Bottom line is that the Chinese government will go for what it views as the sure thing (such as the Korean War, where Mao mistakenly thought the PLA would sweep aside the token force of American troops just as his forces had overrun the Nationalist Chinese armies) but won't throw away the lives of ordinary Chinese just to cut down their numbers. Because this could lead to the untimely end of the regime, and the deaths of all of their loved ones, given the lack of historical Chinese squeamishness about massacres. (In case you're wondering, entire families of Nationalist politicians were killed during the Chinese Civil War, in addition to large numbers of people who were viewed as friends of those families). * In Chinese history, that has included removing the existing government by hacking to pieces the rulers and every one of their friends and relatives. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2007-11-30 21:48 |
| #7 "However, military observers believe confidence-building measures like joint war exercises will prove instrumental in" Allowing China to observe India's military operating procedures in more detail. |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2007-11-30 21:20 |
| #6 Zhang Fei: What I have called "demographic war" is truly a bizarre phenomenon, precisely because it is based on murderously cold reasoning masquerading as irrationality. Unlike any other war, its real purpose is not to win or lose something tangible, but to kill men. That is why it has to be choreographed in such a way as to both guarantee stalemate and limit technology that could break the stalemate. It is based in the realization in both China and in India that surplus males are a disaster, that unless they are eliminated, they threaten to destroy both nations. In its way, it is as if there were 30 million voracious tigers loose in a nation. An awesomely destructive force. Both nations would draft any excess males they can catch. Give them a cheap uniform and half a pound of rice a day, a rifle and some bullets and send them to the front. The only other weapons used are machine guns and some artillery. The professional armies remain in the rear to prevent accidental breakthroughs. It is much like World War I trench warfare, using dueling human wave attacks against machine guns. Even if there are a hundred thousand casualties A DAY, it will take well over a year to solve the problem. It is an unthinkable thing. But neither country would feel they have a choice. If the Chinese don't act, they could very well face a civil war ten times the size of the Taiping Rebellion. Something they still remember with a shudder. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-11-30 19:24 |
| #5 A: I still have a feeling that demographic forces beyond the control of either nation are going to propel them into a protracted and bloody war. The only way such a thing is going to happen is if the Indians insist on having the war. The Chinese are pretty rational about this. They're relentlessly expansionist, but do apply a cost-benefit calculation. The odds are good that they'll nibble, digest, nibble, digest some more. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2007-11-30 18:56 |
| #4 As per their new investments or collusions wid their non-Chinese, East-South Asian neighbors, the post-USSR/Cold War RUSSIANS are learning vv econ competition wid CHINA that they = Russ policies cannot remain EURO-CENTRIC forever. EURO-CENTRICITY is NOT "GLOBALISM" NOR [purist]FREE MARKET CAPITALISM. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-11-30 17:55 |
| #3 Are the Chinese trying to piss everyone off? |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2007-11-30 17:25 |
| #2 I still have a feeling that demographic forces beyond the control of either nation are going to propel them into a protracted and bloody war. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-11-30 16:30 |
| #1 Hmmmmm...isn't that kinda, like...war? |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-11-30 15:35 |