The Kazan meeting with Xi Jinping is a grave mistake by Prime Minister Modi-The Week

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping – their first since the 2020 Galwan clash – on Wednesday, October 23, on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan.

I believe that such a meeting is a grave mistake by the Indian Prime Minister. It’s like a meeting between a sheep and a wolf, who wants to eat it. Let me explain.

The Prime Minister has met his Chinese counterpart many times in the past in an attempt to improve relations between the two countries, but I believe that certain realities seem to have been overlooked by the Indian side. To understand this, you need to know that today’s China only pretends to be a communist country, but is actually capitalist.

It is the nature of capital to seek opportunities for profitable investments, markets to conquer, and cheap raw materials. After industrialization has developed to a certain level, a country becomes imperialistic, that is, it looks for overseas markets and raw materials. That is why England conquered India, and France conquered Algeria and Vietnam.

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In the 1930s and 1940s, the real danger to the world was Nazi German imperialism, not British or French imperialism.

This was because German imperialism was rising and expanding at the time, and so was aggressive imperialism, while British and French imperialism were on the defensive. While the latter only wanted to keep their colonies, the Nazis wanted to conquer and enslave other countries. Therefore, the Nazis were the real danger to the world.

In the same way, the danger to the world today does not come from America or Europe, but from China, because the Chinese are moving towards aggressive expansionism in the world. With their vast industries looking for markets for their goods and cheap raw materials, and with their enormous foreign exchange reserves of $3.2 trillion hungrily seeking opportunities for profitable investments, the Chinese today are aggressive imperialists and the greatest danger to the world.

It is true that they are not currently expanding militarily like Nazi Germany, but they are aggressively expanding economically by penetrating and undermining the economies of many countries in the world. Over the past decade, Chinese foreign investment has increased dramatically. Nowadays the Chinese are present almost everywhere: Asia, Africa, Latin America and of course the US and Europe.

Their Belt and Road Initiative is a network of roads, railways, oil pipelines, electricity grids, ports and other infrastructure projects that connect China to the world. It aims to improve infrastructure and connectivity between China and the rest of Eurasia, to dominate the country. China’s focus is often on vital infrastructure, such as ports such as Gwadar in Pakistan, Piraeus in Greece and Hambantota in Sri Lanka, with the aim of gaining a strategic foothold in these countries.

By selling goods at less than half the price at which American or European manufacturers can afford to sell (given higher labor costs), the Chinese have destroyed many American and European industries. Now the Chinese are trying to capture markets and raw materials in underdeveloped countries by dumping goods at very low prices, making the local product uncompetitive.

Pakistan, for example, is flooded with cheap Chinese goods. While conquering foreign markets, the Chinese carefully protected their own markets with high tariffs. To President Trump’s credit, he called the Chinese bluff and bluntly told the Chinese that this is not enough. You can’t impose a 25 percent tariff on car imports into China when the US only imposes a 2.5 percent tariff on car imports into the US.

Trump has imposed tariffs on several Chinese goods and has announced more in the future. The Chinese then announced retaliatory tariffs, but that did little to hurt the Americans. It is common knowledge that the Chinese have no business ethics, which is why many American and European companies are reluctant to hire Chinese from mainland China, as they often engage in spying on industrial secrets.

Being an Indian, I would like to refer to China’s economic relations with India.

As is well known, India was a British colony until 1947, and British policy was broadly designed to keep India non-industrialized. However, after independence, a certain amount of industrialization took place in India and we started producing goods that we had previously had to import.

Now the Chinese have to some extent penetrated our market at the expense of our domestic industries. An article titled ‘How Chinese companies are beating India in its own backyard’ published on December 12, 2017 in The Economic Times provides some interesting details.

Indo-Chinese trade is strongly in favor of the Chinese.

Indian exports to China (at the time the above article was published) amounted to $16 billion, mainly raw materials. But imports from China amounted to $68 billion, mainly of value-added goods such as mobile phones, plastics, electrical goods, machinery and parts. This is typical of the relationship between a colony and an imperialist country. Chinese companies use aggressive pricing, state subsidies, protectionist policies and cheap financing.

In certain sectors, Chinese companies dominate the Indian market. For example, 51 percent of the telecom sector is owned by the Chinese. Indian homes are full of Chinese goods such as fittings, lampshades, fluorescent tubes, etc. Now the Chinese want to go further. Their companies such as Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, Xiaomi, CSITEC, CMIEC, Haier, TCL, Jiangsu Overseas Group Companies and FiberHome Technologies are aided by the Chinese government and aggressive diplomacy to spread their tentacles around the world.

These companies are active in high-tech, intercom, computers, metallurgy, steel, etc. and have made deep inroads into India. Those who think that the Chinese danger can be averted by sweet words and flattery do not understand the nature of Chinese imperialism, based on certain iron objective economic laws that apply regardless of one’s subjective personal wishes.

Continuing to think that you can improve India-China relations is just wishful thinking. It’s like imagining that a fox and a chicken can coexist in the same coop. To ignore this danger is to act like an ostrich, like Neville Chamberlain who continued to think Hitler was not a danger until it was almost too late. The Chinese today are like ravenous wolves, and only if the countries of the world realize the danger and oppose them strongly and unitedly can they be stopped from swallowing up other nations.

Justice Markandey Katju retired from the Supreme Court in 2011.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are not intended to reflect the opinions or positions of THE WEEK.