Neanderthals with nukes
This FT story reminded me of the opening scene in 2001, where a primitive club turned into a space station:
Brutal details emerge of deadly China-India border clash
Soldiers battered each other with clubs during fight that claimed at least 20 lives
I predict that the hominids currently clubbing each other to death on the China-India border will eventually be capable of sending rockets into space.
PS. Et tu, Nepal?
Tiny Nepal has snubbed its powerful neighbour India by adopting a new political map depicting disputed mountain territory as its own in the latest example of rising geopolitical tensions in strategic areas of the Himalayas.
Under the changes, which come as New Delhi and Beijing are vying for influence in the region, the Nepali parliament this weekend passed a constitutional amendment altering the country’s official map to depict the Lipulekh Pass and other disputed areas as definitive parts of Nepal.
Isn’t nationalism wonderful?
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17. June 2020 at 09:11
The LOA was never fully established when India gained independence, and it became particularly problematic when China invaded Tibet in 1949. The two countries are obviously wrestling over position, in an area that has strategic implications. There is nothing wrong with defending the borders of your country or, in this case, perceived borders.
History has taught us that multicultural societies fail. People gravitate towards similar cultures and values, and a place they can call their home, which is why you see such conflict in the U.S, U.K., and most of Europe these days. India is another example of a country that has consistently fought amongst itself for these very same multicultural reasons.
Wanting to help people is great, but inviting them to live with you for extended periods of time creates a clash of values that generates indeterminable and interminable conflict. Roger Scruton talked a great deal about this, as have many others. Borders are necessary. Patriotism and nationalism, to some extent are necessary to obtain peace and preserve culture.
17. June 2020 at 09:25
You should probably read up on geopolitics in the area before making comments. Countries protecting their borders is nothing new. Both the countries have decided to not use firearms as that will lead to escalation. US went to war against communist threat to its country even even communists were no where close to its borders. These hominids seems much more civilized than people who massacre with napalm.
Also, India has been launching rockets for a long time now.
17. June 2020 at 09:38
Reminds me of the south China sea dispute. China makes a ridiculous claim to territory on the grounds that 1000 years ago blah blah blah, repeats that claim, gets international agencies it has captured to represent that claim, uses military force to enforce that claim via salami tactics, until we all enter a compromise that gives China half of what was never theirs.
And then other nations see an opening to air their own territorial disputes, allowing china to swoop in and claim the pieces.
India shouldn’t back down. This has gone on far enough. If India submits, the US continues to be inept at diplomacy, who exactly will step up?
17. June 2020 at 09:50
Akash, How do you know that India is not to blame?
As for the South China Sea, why should other countries also have a portion of “what was never theirs”?
17. June 2020 at 10:04
Hmm, why is Sumner trolling Akash? I can’t imagine it’s for blog views, as nobody reads this site. Living in the Philippines, notwithstanding Duterte sold out to the Chinese, I would wager India is more right than China on the border dispute.
17. June 2020 at 10:05
I’m not sure which we’re closer to now, Civil War II or World War III. Both seem about 1000x more likely than they did 6 months ago.
17. June 2020 at 10:10
Scott do you believe China has a rightful claim on Tibet? If you don’t, then China’s actions in Ladakh are clearly in the wrong.
17. June 2020 at 10:11
The amazing thing is that nobody fired a single shot when 20 Indian soldiers were clubbed to death in the fight. Do none of them carry guns? You’d think that in a melee that violent one of the men would have reached for his gun before letting his head get bashed in.
17. June 2020 at 10:38
@Carl
Looks like they didn’t bash each other to death, they fell from a narrow ridge:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/india-says-soldiers-killed-on-disputed-himalayan-border-with-china
17. June 2020 at 10:49
Another article with more information:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/17/shock-and-anger-in-india-after-worst-attack-on-china-border-in-decades
All this is the Indian narrative though. There has been very little information from the PLA
17. June 2020 at 10:53
As I understand it, the timeline of events is as follows:
China and India both make excursions in disputed territory. Both nations issue warnings to each other to stop, and then they come to some kind of agreement where India stops enforcing its claim over a small region. Fine.
China then sets up a post and encampment clearly on the Indian side in Ladakh. Indian soldiers are sent to investigate. Those soldiers are then ambushed. Because of the region itself, it’s cold, steep, with cliffs and mountains at high altitudes, such a clash is extremely deadly, even with no guns. Which is exactly that ended up happening.
Based on that timeline, China is clearly being more aggressive here.
I will also point out that that region means almost nothing to China. It means almost everything to India. China doesn’t need any meaningful control of those mountains to operate. For India, every time India has resisted invasion for the past 2 thousand years it has been because they provide a key defensive strategic advantage. Any loss of that is seen, correctly, as a loss of sovereignty across all of India.
China was engaging in these disputes generally over a mistaken belief it could revive the tribute system of thousands of years ago. Under that, Japan, Korea, etc. are under the preview of China. For other nations in the sea, it is far easier to negotiate something when people are making legitimate claims and no one is saying, all of this is mine.
But here, India was never a tribute nation to China. Even that argument fails. You can have a meaningful discussion as to what the boundaries are following the Sino-Indian war. The actions of China are hardly reasonable, especially when they are already thought to be responsible for numerous Maoist terrorist attacks across india (I have found that argument ridiculous but India does believe it, and tensions are already high because of that.)
17. June 2020 at 11:06
One thing I think I know—is when countries, or ethnic groups start or continue fighting over “what was never theirs”——it looks like……….the history of the world.
17. June 2020 at 11:36
Akash, I don’t really have a view about who is “right” in this particular dispute, but it makes no sense to say that the region is defensively important to India but not to China. A buffer zone is inherently important to both sides—and China was invaded from across the Himalayas by the British in the early 1900s while l don’t know of any times when India was invaded from across the Himalayas. Also, if Indian claims are justified by the need for a defensive barrier in the Himalayas, then China’s South China Sea claims are clearly justified by the fact that all the European invasions of China took place from the South China Sea.
It seems to me that the Chinese-Indian dispute is just another example of poor borders imposed by the British, which has inflamed recently due to the events in Kashmir. The border disputes seem to also involve Pakistan and it is interesting that China and Pakistan have managed to settle their border dispute so it does not seem so intractable. Also, from various maps it seems that there are towns in the disputed regions. Perhaps there should be a plebiscite of people who live in those regions if negotiations don’t work.
17. June 2020 at 11:53
I also find it interesting that they have used Stone Age weapons in this conflict so far. That suggests that it’s more show than anything else, and that both sides actually try to prevent a war in this case.
On the question of who is the greater aggressor of the two, one could for example scan the world’s press articles for conflicts involving one of these states in recent years.
Here I see CCP China clearly in front. Maybe the list should be the other way around to make it shorter: which country on Earth was not threatened CCP China in recent years, and quite often because of minimal trivialities, where you can only scratch your head.
Of course it is theoretically conceivable that CCP China has been the passive victim in all these conflicts, but simple mathematics and common sense speak against this.
Modi’s India is certainly also aggressive, but they do not have the capabilities and capacities of CCP China. India is more of a CCP wannabe. They’d really like to, but they’re rather impotent.
In theory, CCP China can almost impose its complete will on India, if it wants to. India has lost the last conflict decades ago, and back then CCP China was a small light, today it is a world power.
17. June 2020 at 13:17
Well, I mean, I think the reason Pakistan has settled is dispute is that Pakistan essentially gave China everything it wanted in exchange for protection. The capture of Osama Bin Laden, the election of Modi, the election on Donald Trump, all had the effect of pushing the United States away from Pakistan as an ally.
Sidenote: There are a ton of Hindus, in my experience, who despise Trump but are infatuated with Modi without a hint of irony. Its kinda hilarious.
But India, moving towards the US, and as a larger power, cannot settle so easily. At least not without toppling the existing government, that has promised to make a stand.
17. June 2020 at 14:34
It’s a rather optimistic story. It’s proof neither side cheated the no-weapons treaty by even a pistol. It’s proof of seriously the risk at that border are taken by the higher ups on both side.
17. June 2020 at 15:17
As usual, my sympathies are with the pawns, that is the soldiers, to lose their lives as Xi and Modi sit comfortably in national capitals.
A world of city-states, not nations, is an interesting idea but only a fantasy.
17. June 2020 at 15:31
OT: over at Econlog, Scott Sumner posits the Federal Reserve is not monetizing the national debt, as it pays interest on commercial bank excess reserves. This holds even if the Federal Reserve increases its balance sheet in perpetuity and the federal government regularly runs deficits.
So, no matter how large the Federal Reserve balance sheet becomes, and if even if the balance sheet is held in perpetuity, the Federal Reserve has not monetized national debt, Sumner posits.
But interest on excess reserves is a relatively recent invention. Should the Fed begin to reduce interest on excess reserves, or eliminate interest on excess reserves, would that amount to monetizing the national debt?
Another interesting twist: Sumner and others have advocated negative interest rates as a policy tool. If the Federal Reserve should begin to charge negative interest rates on excess reserves would that mean it is, in effect, monetizing the national debt?
To readers, I apologize for posting these questions here, but I am banned from Econlog.
17. June 2020 at 15:55
Michele, You said:
“History has taught us that multicultural societies fail.”
Yes, that’s why countries such as Switzerland and the US have such low GDP/person.
Orange County (where I live) is a real hellhole.
ReadPeople, You said:
“You should probably read up on geopolitics in the area before making comments.”
Did people not realize I was joking in this post.
Ray, You said:
“Hmm, why is Sumner trolling Akash?”
Because he took me seriously.
Shyam, You said:
“Scott do you believe China has a rightful claim on Tibet?”
What does that even mean? Does Spain have a “rightful claim” to Catalonia? Depends how you define these terms.
In any case, does India have a rightful claim to Kashmir?
Akash, You said:
“As I understand it”
I’m not asking how you understand it, I’m asking for evidence. I know how you understand it.
Christian, You are taking India’s side? I’m shocked.
I’m with Ben, I’m taking the side of the poor soldiers who got killed. It’s the leaders who deserve to suffer.
17. June 2020 at 16:53
Scott,
Sometimes the poor soldiers are nationalistic itching for a fight that the leaders don’t want to get into right now.
(Of course, even if that were the case with China, much of the nationalism was fostered by the leadership for their own reasons.)
17. June 2020 at 21:34
scott
[quote]Akash, How do you know that India is not to blame?[/quote]
[quote]I’m not asking how you understand it, I’m asking for evidence.
I know how you understand it.[/quote]
On COVID and other topics touching on China, one observes that you agree that China did bad (sometimes begrudgingly) and immediately do a but/whatabout on “XXX/YYY/UK/US also did bad”.
Though here I don’t see you but-ing. You say “How India is not to blame?” Great question. Where is the but-ing on “How does one know China is not to blame?” What evidence there is to say China isn’t an instigator?
18. June 2020 at 09:05
Scott,
When it comes to CCP China, your reading comprehension is shockingly poor, as always. You only read what you want to read. The same thing happened in the post about Spain and CCP China. And so on and so forth. It’s a bit like a CCP party man reading. Or as in Monty Python: “He said Jehovah! Now stone him!”
18. June 2020 at 17:22
anon, I don’t blame India at all. I just asked the guy how he knows China was to blame. I was trolling him. The whole post is a joke. Let’s face it, no one knows who’s to blame, and most people go with their prejudices. I don’t have any, as I dislike both regimes. I don’t even care who started it.
As far as “whataboutism”, if people say “we should punish China because they lied about Covid-19”, don’t you think it’s material that Trump lies and lies and lies again about Covid-19? How is that not material to the question of whether we should put trade sanctions on China for lying? If people say put trade sanctions on China and the US, I’d have more respect for them.
Christian, You said:
“On the question of who is the greater aggressor of the two, one could for example scan the world’s press articles for conflicts involving one of these states in recent years.
Here I see CCP China clearly in front. Maybe the list should be the other way around to make it shorter: which country on Earth was not threatened CCP China in recent years, and quite often because of minimal trivialities, where you can only scratch your head.
Of course it is theoretically conceivable that CCP China has been the passive victim in all these conflicts, but simple mathematics and common sense speak against this.”
Yes, “mathematics” suggest that China’s to blame. LOL.
19. June 2020 at 01:49
Scott,
I see that it is news to you, because most of your economic reasoning is without mathematics, but probability theory and game theory are based on mathematical models.
Maybe that’s why the other economists don’t listen to you, because you don’t use mathematics.
Say what you want, but I have actually brought arguments why China may be an aggressor here. I also said that India is like China but more of an amateur wannabe.
You haven’t brought any arguments in the whole thread, except childish LOL LOL LOL and your typical shining through that you see CCP China here once again disadvantaged and wrongly judged, whereby nobody really knows where the disadvantage and wrong judgement might be, because as I said, you bring zero arguments.