Red Fear: The China Threat

By Iqbal Chand Malhotra

What was the reason for the first real armed encounter between Indian and Chinese troops on Chinese soil in the town of Dinghai on Chusan Island in July 1840?
Were the orders for the invasion of Aksai Chin issued by Mao from Moscow in December 1949, at Stalin's behest?
Was the pluck and raw courage of Lt. Gen. Sagat Singh to hold Nathu La first in 1965 and then again in 1967 the basis for General K. Sundarji's bold moves at Sumdorong Chu in 1986 and 1987?

Red Fear: The China Threat catalogues, evaluates and infers the consequences of the political and military confrontations between India and China from the 15th to the 21st century.
Contrary to the glowing accounts in popular imagination of a congruence of values and interests between these two nations, the relationship has been confrontational and antagonistic at many levels throughout these last six centuries.
The lessons of history are hard to learn. Nevertheless, China seems to have learnt them better than India. It bided its time well and positioned itself to humiliate and denigrate India whenever possible as retribution for the perceived harm India and Indians did to its society and economy during the infamous Chinese century of humiliation between 1839 to 1940.
For India, today's post-Galwan situation is reminiscent of the challenge India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru faced in 1962 and the identical challenge India's 14th Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces in 2020. Vedic philosophy argues that time is cyclical, and not linear, and by this argument, the year 2020 completes a 60-year cycle that began in 1960. How Modi responds to this challenge will define India's relationship with China as well as its position in the world through the rest of the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9789389867596

Book preview

PREFACE

It was sometime in the winter of 1961 in Bombay, as Mumbai was then known. I was a little boy, all of five years old. My grandmother took my hand and told me we were going to take a short walk from our flat in Carmichael House, Carmichael Road, to ‘The Cliff’, about half a kilometre away. The Cliff was an impressive colonial mansion of the early 1920s. My grandmother’s chachaji, her father’s younger brother, used to live there. He was M.L. Tannan, the author of the famous book ML Tannan’s Banking Law and Practice in India, which is still in print sixty years later! Another famous occupant of the building was Sir Homi Mody, the former Governor of Uttar Pradesh. Chachiji, his wife, called my grandmother that morning and told her that ‘Hop Sing’, her regular Chinese supplier of household embroidered linen, ‘was disposing of all of his stocks’ as he was emigrating from Bombay to Singapore, and he would be bringing a collection over to her flat at 11:00 AM that day.

Waiting for us with his linen all laid out was a wizened old Chinese gentleman, wearing a blue Chinese-collared shirt with a pair of white pyjamas and a black traditional Chinese cap. He had a long white goatee and moustache. Hop Sing smiled when he saw us and asked my grandmother’s permission before giving me a delicious green peppermint drop. I wondered if all Chinese men were that nice.

Every Thursday, my father, who worked as an assistant editor in the Times of India at Bori Bunder, would leave the office early and take me to gorge on chocolate pastry at Bombelli’s in Breach Candy. That would be followed by a visit to N.J. Nanporia’s flat further down Warden Road. Nanporia was the editor of the Times of India and my father’s boss. Nanporia and my father were both collectors of Chinese porcelain, so my father would take along a piece or two that he had picked up from Chor Bazaar to be valued by Nanporia. I would spend my time gazing in wonder at the pieces of Chinese porcelain arranged all over his flat.

A year later, when we had moved to New Delhi and were living in our house on 24, Ferozeshah Road—which the Australian High Commissioner Walter Crocker vacated after his term had lapsed—the war with China started. I was in the first standard at Raghubir Singh Jr. Modern School on Humayun Road. Our school was enveloped in nationalist fervour. Patriotic songs were sung by us small children every morning in the assembly. Every Sunday, my weekly treat was a children’s movie in the morning at Sapru House Auditorium on Barakhamba Road. The movies would begin with a short film showing the song ‘Aye Mere Pyaare Watan’, from the 1961 film Kabuliwala, sung by Manna Dey. All the children in my class began to hate the Chinese. Every evening, my grandmother would feed me dinner at 7:30 and we would listen to the news about the war on the All India Radio. I wished for a Tommy gun to blast the Chinese.

Several months later in the summer of 1963, I went to spend a few weeks in Calcutta, now known as Kolkata, with my Masarsahib Squadron Leader R.K. Jaywant Singh of Limbdi, my aunt Índi and their two sons, Vijit and Shivraj. Uncle Jay, as I used to call him, loved to eat out at Nanking and Fat Mama’s Place in the old Chinatown. He taught me how to wield chopsticks and I soon became adept at the art; I also developed a lifelong love for Chinese cuisine. Though Uncle Jay was officially posted under Air Vice Marshal Shivdev Singh at Eastern Air Command HQ in Fort William, very often he would fly a CAP (Combat Air Patrol) over Tibet. When we would ask him where he had flown, he would smilingly say, ‘Son, I was chasing the Chinese off Mt Everest.’

We also used to visit my mamaji (mother’s brother) Brig. (later Lt. Gen.) P.S. Bhagat vc. He was the co-author of the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report, although, I dare say, he did most of the writing. Lt. Gen. Bhagat was an ardent follower of Sun Tzu, the famous 6th-century Chinese military strategist. He used to keep Sun Tzu’s The Art of War close at hand and tell me war stories from the book.

The 1960s gave us three cult films about the 1962 war, namely Sangam, Haqeeqat and Prem Pujari. The Chinese were the villains in all of them. Haqeeqat was my favourite, and it starred one of my good friends Sanjay Khan.

In the early 1970s, when I was at the end of my school years in Modern School, Barakhamba Road, life in Delhi was rocked by extreme-left Naxalite violence in Delhi University. Slogans like ‘China’s chairman is our chairman’ were smeared as graffiti on the walls leading to the university. There were revolutionaries and informers all over the place. It was very fashionable and trendy to hang a photo of Chairman Mao in one’s bedroom. However, I soon dumped mine and replaced it with one of Mumtaz’s, my favourite heroine.

Towards the end of the 1970s, when I was studying economics at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, I used to attend the famous development economist Suzy Paine’s lectures on the Chinese policy of walking on two legs and whether Deng Xiaoping’s retreat from collectivised agriculture would be successful for China.

In 1983, when I was in a management consultancy business, one of my clients, S.K. Chakravarty, a former card-carrying member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), asked me to go to China to negotiate the purchase of some spares for the combine harvesters that he used to assemble in his factory in Faridabad. My first stop was Beijing. I decided to stay with my cousin Rukmini and her husband, Biren Nanda, who used to work in the Indian Embassy. Biren, who was a few years senior to me in school, spoke fluent Mandarin. It was only a few years after the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping. Everybody was still mainly dressed in blue. Beijing was a one-horse town and, despite the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, wasn’t a patch on New Delhi. The Chinese were very interested in doing business with India. I remember visiting the office of a senior bureaucrat called Ma. He served me Coca-Cola and asked me some political questions, which I dodged. I told him I was not a politician, only a management consultant. He had set up a meeting for me with some students of economics and agriculture at Beijing University and insisted that I address them and answer some questions. I remember one student who was unable to understand the concept of migrant labour. I told him that in India there was free labour mobility and that was a constitutional freedom. The gathering was amazed and couldn’t digest that reality. My Chinese hosts fed me very well, and Uncle Jay’s chopsticks lessons at Fat Mama’s Place held me in good stead. The Chinese were very impressed.

My next stop was Shanghai. I stayed at the Park Hotel near the famous Bund. I had a few meetings with the manufacturers of spares, after which I wandered around the city. I remember that my right shoe broke and the concierge directed me to a wizened old cobbler on Fuzhou Street. He spoke English and, before the 1949 revolution, ran a custom-made shoe shop. He made a drawing of my feet and told me that I had fallen arches and needed handmade shoes if I wanted to get rid of my headaches, which were a common feature with me in those days. After I returned to Delhi, I showed the drawings to K.K. Lee, the proprietor of the K.K. Lee shoe store in Khan Market; he made me my first pair of handmade shoes. I patronised the K.K. Lee store for twenty-five years till he died.

In 1992, a close friend of mine, Shashi Bhushan Dubey, introduced me one evening to Maj. Gen. S.S. Uban, the founder of the Tibetan sabotage force called Establishment 22. I met Maj. Gen. Uban a couple of times, and he shared many stories about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) cooperation with the Intelligence Bureau (IB) that led to the creation of this force. When I mentioned these meetings to my father-in-law, Air Com. H.S. Bedi (Retd.), he broke his silence and told me about his reconnaissance flights over Aksai Chin on Supermarine Spitfire PR XI and XIX aircraft when he was based in Srinagar in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In 1999, my father died and I had to dispose of most of his vast collection of Chinese porcelain from the Ming and Qing eras. In order to properly value the pieces, I delved into the study of different Ming and Qing emperors and the differences in the type of porcelain manufactured during the reigns of Emperor Wanli and Emperor Kangxi of the Ming and Qing dynasties, respectively. These were essentially the periods from which a majority of the pieces in my father’s collection originated. Ultimately, the only buyers were dealers from Chor Bazaar whose predecessors had originally sold these to my father! I must confess that I am one of the few people in the 21st century who regularly dine off Ming porcelain. I enjoy cooking and I am fairly adept at making Chinese food, which we eat off Ming plates and bowls.

In 2002, my wife, Anu, and I joined a diverse group of travellers journeying from Lhasa to Mt Kailash. I have been a devotee of Lord Shiva since 1987, and I am grateful to Anu for having planned this trip for us. There is no greater reward for a Shaivite than to do the circumambulation of Mt Kailash. We explored Lhasa and Shigatse and drove 1,400 kilometres across the Tibetan plateau to Mt Kailash, visiting Lake Mansarovar, Lake Rakshas Taal and the shrine of General Zorawar Singh en route. It was a memorable exposure to how the Han Chinese were determined to sublimate Tibetan culture into the greater Chinese mainstream. We ended up making a film for Discovery Channel called The Road to Nirvana: A Journey in Tibet. It was a big hit and went on to get nominated for best documentary on Indian television at the Indian Telly Awards in 2005.

In 2003, a clandestine part of the government commissioned me to make a documentary on the secret trade in nuclear missiles and enriched uranium between Pakistan and North Korea, brokered by China. The film was called Nuclear Tango: Why a Hero Fell from Grace. It was bought by NHK of Japan.

In 2008, I made a film on India, China and Tibet called Chinese Checkers, Tibetan Ambivalence and Indian Delusions. It was sold to the HISTORY channel.

Also, in 2008, desperate to find a lasting cure for acid reflux, I stumbled upon Dr Raman Kapur and his charming wife, Sunita, who, apart from being qualified MBBS doctors, studied acupuncture in China and taught the subject there during their periodic visits. Dr Kapur permanently cured me of acid reflux. But I got hooked on to the benefits of Traditional Chinese medicine. For the last twelve years, I’ve been regularly visiting his clinic every Wednesday for a balancing of my ‘Qi’, which is the life force or prana.

In 2009, during a film festival of Anu’s documentaries held at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, a Chinese gentleman started talking to me. His name was Li. He said he was attached to the Chinese Embassy. I told him about my collection of Chinese porcelain and he expressed a desire to see it. I invited him to our house for a drink, and he was both amazed and ecstatic on seeing my collection. We struck up a friendship. Whenever he would drop by for a chat, he would park his car a kilometre away to avoid IB sleuths on his tail. He was too sophisticated to ask any help other than my views on several books written by Indians on China. I told him to tell his superiors that there could never be a friendship between India and China. There were three reasons for this. First, there was an institutionalised Chinese policy to constantly betray India. Second, there was a historical mix of both contempt and hatred for India amidst the Chinese establishment. Third, there was the institutionalised Chinese policy of using Pakistan as a low-cost option to pin India down. My summation to him was that as the years passed India and China would get increasingly adversarial. Further, I advised him that India would never be a pushover.

In 2013, Anu invited a Frenchman named Jean Blaise and his German girlfriend, Swaha, to stay with us in New Delhi. Jean, or Pragata, as he is better known, is a sensei or teacher of Lohan Qi Gong, which is the precursor of all martial arts. I was then a black belt in Shotokan Karate-Do and my body was giving me signals that I needed to transition to something milder. I took up Qi Gong, and whenever Pragata would visit New Delhi, he would teach me some new forms that would add to my repertoire. During this period, I was going through a metamorphosis within myself. I met a variety of healers and counter-culture practitioners from all over the world. I discovered that there were certain morphic fields in the ether as enunciated by the famous British biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake. The fields organising the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system are inherited through morphic resonance, conveying a collective, instinctive memory. This means that new patterns of knowledge can be downloaded more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.

I found that I could tap into certain morphic fields with relative ease because of the breathing technique of inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth. I had been practising this technique during my karate practice and in healing sessions with great success. A German neurosurgeon had taught me this technique in London in 2009. Anyway, morphic resonance enabled me to tap into the morphic field of the Shaolin Monastery in China, and this was further refined by the Qi transmitted to me by Pragata through the Qi Gong practice he taught me. The forms learnt by Pragata in Malaysia had been passed on through the lineage established in Malaysia by a Shaolin monk who had escaped from the monastery in China in 1901 when it was under siege. Pragata retransmitted the Shaolin Qi to me when he taught me Qi Gong. The practice of the Qi Gong was based on the principles of Jin, Qi and Shen energies, which were also followed by millions of Taoists in China over the ages. So, the Shaolin Qi connected me to the collective consciousness of all those Taoists over the ages who had imbibed this Qi, and it enabled me to view events from their perspectives and collective experiences. It was tapping into this cache of historical memories that enabled me to incisively discover the truth about Mao’s actions towards India that, though lying in the public domain, could not be accessed and connected unless the seeker was also connected to that belief system.

Also, in 2014, my old school friend Sanjeev Singh, who then lived in Singapore, took me to the Kuan Yin Temple on Waterloo Street. Sanjeev Singh was perhaps the only Sikh devotee of Kuan Yin; he used to practically visit the temple five days a week. The Goddess Kuan Yin is the Chinese name for Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion. At our home in New Delhi, we have an old 17th-century Tibetan Thangka of Avalokiteśvara and also an old 17th-century Blanc de Chine statue of Kuan Yin sitting on a lotus flower astride a Fu Lion. Ever since then, at every visit to Singapore, I make it a point to visit the temple and pay my respects. Each visit to the temple brought me closer to an understanding of the Chinese mind.

Without consciously making an effort, a lifetime’s brush with different manifestations of the Chinese civilisation had collected in my consciousness and needed to be told as a story.

Last year in 2019, I co-authored my first book, Kashmir’s Untold Story: Declassified. It did rather well. When my publishers, Bloomsbury, asked me if I had another book in mind, I said I have a book on China. When they asked me why China, I replied that I had a feeling in my bones that 2020 was going to be the year when China will be on everyone’s mind. Little did I know how prophetic I was going to be!

Iqbal Chand Malhotra

Introduction

For many of us in India, the shadow of China has loomed large ever since the invasion of India by the Chinese Army under the leadership of its paramount leader Mao Tse Tung, who saw October 1962 as the most opportune time to teach India’s overbearing prime minister, Pandit Nehru, a lesson. The Chinese Army routed the Indian Army that simply wasn’t equipped or allowed to fight as it could have. The impact of the Chinese scar was deep; it affected me as an Indian and, subsequently, a soldier. Growing up as the son of an army officer, I’d hear conversations about ‘Himalayan Blunder’, to use the title of Brigadier John Dalvi’s book. In fact, that was perhaps the first book that I glanced through—not read—as a young boy and asked my parents what had led to it. In most circles, the blame went to Nehru and his arrogant defence minister, Krishna Menon. But there were others who were guilty too for the debacle of 1962. This I later found out as I read more and spoke with Iqbal (the author of this book), few historians and Indian military officers, including veterans of the 1962 conflict.

I recall a particular day in 1967, when one afternoon, my mother had just driven us home from our school. We were then in Delhi, as my father, an army officer, was posted in Rashtrapati Bhavan (the Indian President’s estate). My father came rushing home in an army jeep, and as he whisked my mother away to the military hospital in Delhi, all I heard him say was ‘Rai Singh has been shot’. He was talking about Lieutenant Colonel Rai Singh. He was my father’s regimental officer, a role model, and then, the commanding officer of the 2nd Grenadier regiment. He was seriously injured when confronting the Chinese on the disputed boundary at Nathu La in Sikkim (as the picture on the cover of this book shows). Both sides suffered hundreds of casualties, but the message went out to the Chinese that the Indian Army had learnt its lessons from the debacle of 1962. Colonel Rai Singh was later decorated for gallantry with a Maha Vir Chakra (mvc).

Subsequently, as an Indian Army officer, I learnt more about how the Chinese inflicted massive damage on the few Indian units that stood up to them in the 1962 conflict in the ‘war that wasn’t’¹. As a cadet in the Indian military academy, I was tasked to assist my coursemate Anil Nayar in a presentation on the battle of Namka Chu, where the 2nd Rajput put up exemplary ‘defiance in defeat’. This gave me my first serious understanding of what led to India’s only military defeat since its independence. And then, one long evening in April 1995, I had an opportunity to spend some time with the late Indian Army Chief General K. Sundarji, after dinner, along with our host in Washington DC where I was on a fellowship at the Stimson Centre. The general was my Army Chief too, but by 1994 I had left the army. General Sundarji gave us a ringside view of Operation Chequerboard in which he checkmated the Chinese in 1987—in the same area on India’s north-eastern boundary with China where the Chinese Army had dealt a devastating blow twenty-five years earlier—even though India’s policies on China remained focussed on ‘not upsetting the Chinese’.

Then in May that year, I attended a seminar on Sino–India relations in Milwaukee in the US. The Chinese participants, however, refused to show up, as they wished to engage only with the US—whom they regarded, even then, as their rival—and not India, which was just getting its act together by way of economic reforms in the 1990s. So, the American experts on China—there are too many to name—stood in instead! In fact, there is a big academic industry of experts on China in the US (with business cards bearing their names and other details in English on one side, and in Mandarin on the other). It is said that Beijing used ‘these experts’ to promote the idea of the ‘peaceful rise of China’. And those who do not fall in line face restrictions on their ongoing academic initiatives about China. After returning from the US, I began my career (twenty-five years ago) in television in India, covering global and regional issues that were of strategic and military importance to India. I learnt more and more about China with every passing year. They were everywhere—from the Himalayan heights to Pakistan in the west and Myanmar (Burma) in the east, strengthening them to challenge India at every level, to its increasing presence in the Indian Ocean. We just couldn’t ignore the Chinese and their range of products that flooded the Indian consumer market. China was the key to India’s regional security, and thus, my interest in China has grown considerably over the years.

Over the past several years, my interactions with Iqbal brought home the details of China’s designs in the areas north of the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh, and its strategic implications for India. These have been detailed in our earlier book, Kashmir’s Untold Story: Declassified ². So when Iqbal asked me to join him in writing this book as well, I preferred to let him do it in his own inimitable style; more so, as he is, indeed, a repository of information on China. I instead opted to assist him with the military dimension of the ongoing Sino–India boundary disputes. Little did we know then that China would dominate news headlines globally, as it has from early 2020 onwards, in the wake of the devastating impact caused by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). Indeed, nothing can match the devastating impact of Covid-19 on our lives in 2020. Ironically, 2020 is the year that China’s current paramount leader, Xi Jinping, had benchmarked for two of China’s centenary goals—to double China’s 2010 GDP and per capita income, and to complete the building of a moderately prosperous society. The bigger question now is—‘How would China and its economy come out of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic?’ The pandemic had, in the most unexpected manner, bought the world to a standstill for several months, and put China at the centre of global criticism for its initial mishandling of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is alleged to have come out of China’s wet animal market in Wuhan, causing thousands of deaths across the world. Could this all spoil China’s plan to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Could it hamper China’s leadership under Xi Jinping who had fixed the goal ‘to occupy a central position’ in world affairs by 2021?

Many Western countries, who initially facilitated China’s rapid economic growth, are very angry as a consequence of the fallout of Covid-19; more so because China has become a key to their manufacturing and product supply chains.

Many have initiated plans to decrease their dependence on Chinese manufacturing and make further investments elsewhere. While this wouldn’t upset China’s desire to announce that it has pulled off one of modern history’s most remarkable achievements by lifting its vast population out of poverty with double-digit economic growth, it would certainly require Beijing to revisit its plans for 2050 even as Communist China and its powerful party turn hundred years old in 2021. The Chinese people—as this book explains—have always believed that they are the centre of the world and that China’s place is at the top of the order.

The Covid-19 pandemic has finally exposed the fault lines in the global system today, even though these fault lines have, in fact, existed for quite some time. And in as much as there is a strong anti-China sentiment in the US and Europe today, as well as in Japan, Australia and in all the other powerful economies of the world, there is also the possibility that many smaller economies, although in the eye of the Covid-19 storm, could gravitate towards China to provide a model on how a global crisis like this can be efficiently managed. The fact that China wasted no time after the pandemic struck, except for the initial setback, and bounced back, by opening up its supply lines to meet the demand for medical products, has reassured the Chinese people that China is best placed to lead the world—this, when the world’s leaders had all but drawn inwards to address the internal challenges posed by the massive impact of Covid-19 in their countries. But, could this lead be just an extension of the existing Cold War or would it lead to a bigger confrontation? And is China ready for it?

This rigorously researched book by Iqbal answers these questions, as it explains in great detail what drives China today.

China has been preparing to occupy the ‘centre of the world’ since 1949 after Communist China came into being and the party (CCP) was founded. Since then, the Chinese have only known one central narrative—of how their country’s grand centrality was destroyed by colonial aggression of the West and relegated to impoverishment with its sovereignty soiled, as this book explains. But now, with the world transfixed on China’s growing economic clout, the country appears to be ready to transform the global system by operating within and outside it—by ‘sponsoring a new China-centric international system’, argues Martin Jacques in his informed analysis in When China Rules the World. Jacques believes that this would be so as China’s communist leaders have never allowed ‘themselves to be distracted by short term considerations’.³

From 2005, a quarter-century after China launched its economic modernisation under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Chinese thinkers like Zheng Bijian recommended that China’s rise must be ‘peaceful’, and its people were thus told that 2020 would be a landmark in modern Chinese history when China would become assertive and dominant and free from pressure exercised on them by the US through the network of alliances in the east and the Pacific region. It was this hope that was held out by the party’s leadership to the Chinese people, to set aside bad memories of the decades of Maoism when Chairman Mao put the country through horrific experiences like the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in which millions died of hunger and brutality. Meanwhile, the global financial crisis (or the recession) of 2007–2008 hit the US much harder than China, which continued on the path of blistering growth to close the gaps with world’s developed economies.

Some observers have argued that the question now isn’t whether or not China will displace the US as the world’s major superpower but ‘when’, particularly with the Chinese leadership now more determined than ever to regain China’s position internationally by becoming the first ancient civilisation to do so. The Chinese people were told, repeatedly, that only the CCP could provide them stability, strength and global respect. China’s post-1949 leadership, with all their Chinese State-led campaigns of ‘patriotism’, has stressed upon the idea of a single ethnic and national identity, and the fact that China was the wealthiest and the most technologically advanced country 200 years ago and that is where it aims to go, eventually. But how did China lose its pre-eminence? Was it just the Industrial Revolution that gave the West its current-day advantage or was it the onslaught of Western naval military might that enslaved old civilisations like China?

As long ago as between 722 and 481 BCE, thinkers in China developed the idea of global unification—‘Great Unified Empire’—under a Chinese emperor to civilise the ‘barbarians’, to ensure order and economic prosperity throughout the world. Therefore, this Chinese wish for world domination originated over 2,500 years ago, as the first chapter in this book explains. By the 15th century, during the course of the treasure voyages led by a eunuch Admiral Zheng He, Ming China became the sole global naval power from the Western Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean. The fear of China’s naval might even led faraway Portugal, under King John I, to build their navy, which set in motion the ‘Age of Discovery’ with Portuguese explorers sailing across the whole world. Soon the Europeans adopted mercantilism as their national policies, which eventually led to colonialism.

And even though the Chinese reached Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and India and subdued some of its local rulers, they ceased their voyages by 1433 as Ming China turned away from the waters of the Indian Ocean for a number of reasons that have been explained in this book. It left a void that was to be filled by the European powers of that era like the Portuguese, French, British and Dutch. This, then, gave rise to the Age of Discovery. It also led to the arrival of ‘invaders’ in the Indian subcontinent. But, coming as they did from the Central Asian heartland, they had neither seen the sea nor contemplated the importance of dominating the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. But the rulers of modern China have never forgotten the importance of dominating the high seas. It is one of the goals that current-day China hopes to once again achieve in this century with an effective blue-water navy.

However, by the 17th century, Chinese rulers put the experience of maritime achievements aside as they were preoccupied with territorial threats they faced from the Mongols in the north and Tibetans in the west. Around the same time, the Mughal Empire in India, across the Himalayas, rose to a position of pre-eminence in the world. But the death of the last powerful Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, led to the unravelling of the mighty Mughal Empire. It also led to a truce between the Great Fifth Dalai Lama of Tibet and the Khoshut Mongols who controlled central Tibet from 1642 onwards. Soon thereafter, a non-Han Chinese ethnic group breached the Great Wall of China and conquered Peking—the Ming Dynasty was defeated. And even as the conquering Manchus adopted the title Qing, a Chinese term for clear or pure, they continued to fear the Khoshut Mongols and the 5th Dalai Lama in Tibet. In January 1653, the Chinese Emperor Shunzi and the 5th Dalai Lama greeted each other as equals in Peking (moments after the Dalai Lama rode on his horse, into the imperial palace and walked towards Shunzi). That perhaps set the stage for China’s desire to control Tibet and the Dalai Lamas.

The lowest point in China’s history, however, was the impact of opium on Chinese society (as explained in Chapter 2 of this book). By the 19th century, the British East India Company had started growing opium in Bengal and was selling it through private merchants to Chinese smugglers in Canton. This production and sale of opium was done by the East India Company—with London’s approval—primarily to reverse the adverse balance of trade between China and Britain over which the Chinese had a monopoly. Soon opium was in great demand in China and was sold for silver. This, in turn, drained China of her silver and increased the number of addicts inside China, which seriously worried Chinese officials. By 1838,