Last Wednesday, the foreign ministers of China, Russia and India held a meeting in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin. This was the first time that the trilateral forum had taken place in China. In the joint communiqué issued afterwards, it was emphasized that trilateral cooperation among the three “is not targeted against any other country or organization.” On the same day, People’s Daily and Liberation Daily ran the exact same article titled “Who says India is being lured into the ‘NATO family’ that the U.S. and Japan are attempting to construct?” It begins:
According to the article, such talk does not upset China; however, it has “displeased” India and put New Delhi in an “awkward” position. To support this assertion, the piece quotes Pranab Mukherjee, India’s external affairs minister, as saying during his recent visits to Thailand and Korea that “China remains an important priority of our foreign policy and a key component of our ‘Look East’ policy.” The article ends by urging America’s neo-conservatives and Japan’s right-wingers to abandon their “Cold War thinking” and their attempts to draw India into their sphere of influence in hopes of containing China. Otherwise, it warns, they risk becoming “the laughingstock of history.” On the heels of the trilateral forum in Harbin came a five-day visit to China by Sonia Gandhi, the chair of India’s ruling Congress party. Last Friday she met with president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao. She is the first foreign political leader to be received by Hu and Wen following the 17th party congress. Given that Gandhi is not a head-of-state, the Indian press called the meetings “a rare honor.” To underscore the “great importance” Beijing attaches to Gandhi’s “milestone” visit, last Saturday People’s Daily and China Daily both gave front page coverage to her meeting with Hu. The day Gandhi met with Hu and Wen in Beijing, Xinhua ran a piece titled “Indian futurist predicts: China, Russia and India together may save the world.” In it, Jagdish Chandra Kapur, publisher and editor-in-chief of India’s World Affairs Journal, is quoted as saying that only by uniting China, India, and Russia can the world “be saved from the brink of collapse.” The concept of a China-Russia-India “strategic triangle” was first proposed in 1998 by then-Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. While Beijing dismissed the idea at the time, there has been increasingly favorable treatment of the notion in the Chinese media.
Shanghai’s Dongfang Zaobao, in a February 14, 2007 article titled “A China-Russia-India ‘strategic triangle’ is to reshape the world,” declared that “the strategic triangle is solidifying” in “a world that is no longer unipolar.” Noting that the concept has “filled the U.S. and Japan with anxieties,” China Radio International characterized the trilateral cooperation as “a smart choice,” since the triangle is “the most solid of all geometric figures.” Despite the rhetoric, it remains to be seen if Beijing will become an aggressive promoter of the policy. Beijing declared last year that “no major problems and obstacles” exist between Russia and China now that the two sides have settled their decades-old border disputes. China and India, however, have not yet resolved their boundary issue despite 11 rounds of talks, although progress was reported after the latest round this past September.
