RE: China-Navigating the mind game of defence
Vijai Singhal
Pleas read the attached article that appeared in Sydney Morning Herald about what mind game the Chinese play.
Please see the highlighted portion.
How true it is! When Premier Chau EnLie came to India in 1962 and completely won over Pt Nehru and we all were shouting "Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai" and when he went back China attacked India. They are playing the same game now with our current Prime Minister.
China-Navigating the mind game of defence
This article is from the May 10 issue of The Sydney
Morning Herald Digital Edition.
John Garnaut
The Art of War, still recited by Chinese generals, has little to say about the
art of actual fighting . Instead it is filled with every conceivable mind game
to convince the enemy to capitulate without firing a shot. “The supreme art of
war is to subdue the enemy without fighting ,” the war master Sun Tzu says. The
aims of “enemy work” , as they still call it today, have not much changed in
2500 years. The central strategy is to create two simultaneously contradictory
perceptions in the adversary’s mind. The first : China is friendly and benign
and not much interested in politics. This is the message drilled into visiting
businessmen, scholars, politicians, commentators and retired statesmen. It is
carefully reinforced by a system that raises barriers to access and
systematically lowers them for the chosen few. Western democracies are not
always well-equipped to cope. One scenario was neatly captured by Anne
Applebaum, a columnist for The Washington Post, as she visited Australia this
week: “A politician here told me he was recently lobbied by a constituent who
does an enormous amount of business with China: Why couldn’t Australia pick an
occasional fight with the US — just a little, symbolic one — to show the
Chinese that Australians aren’t entirely in the American pocket? A bit of
strategic distance from the US might be good for trade, after all.”
The objective of creating
the perception of benign (and potentially lucrative) friendship is to lull the
adversary into a sense of security that discourages military preparation and
saps the will to fight .
The second, contradictory
perception – to be activated at the consequential moment – is to convince the
adversary that China is ruthless , formidable and inevitable. Concede and
retreat, or be forced into more costly submission.
It is natural, indeed healthy, for Australians and others in the region to
debate the extent to which China is benign, friendly, lucrative, formidable or
dangerous.
The trick, for the Chinese strategic player, is whether those contrasting
perceptions can be manipulated for concrete outcomes at opportune times.
‘‘ Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak,” is how Sun
Tzu puts it.
And that’s why Chinese strategists are so chuffed with what they believe they
have achieved with the new Australian defence white paper.
Australia occupies an outsized space in China’s military thinking because it is
seen as the southern “fulcrum” of the American pivot to the region (operating
with Japan in the north).
The Gillard white paper talks the language of benign friendship and,
simultaneously, reflects a retreat in the face of formidable Chinese power. She
neatly ticks both of Sun Tzu’s boxes.
When Kevin Rudd released his white paper, in 2009, the costs were immediate and
obvious. It precipitated the sharpest decline
in Australia’s relationship with China since Tiananmen.
The choice of words was “stupid” , “crazy’ ’ and “dangerous” said Rear-Admiral
Yang Yi, who had been closely involved with the drafting of China’s own defence
white papers. “Rudd has turned his face against China” .
The Rudd white paper had merely however, intimated that the People’s Liberation
Army’s opacity and its development of blue-water naval capabilities raised
questions about whether its military ambitions extended beyond asserting
sovereignty over Taiwan. Despite the Chinese fury, Rudd’s proposition seemed
true at the time and has since been validated by events.
China’s rapid development of “carrier killer” ballistic missiles, nuclear
submarines and an aircraft carrier clearly implies that military ambitions now
extend beyond the Taiwan Strait. So much is to be expected by any
well-resourced rising power. More troubling is China’s willingness to engage in
high-stakes military and paramilitary stand-offs repeatedly, and even
simultaneously with neighbours on disputed borders on its southern and eastern
periphery.
On Wednesday the People’s Daily, the Chinese government’s official mouthpiece,
broke new ground by saying the time had come to discuss sovereignty of not only
the barren Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, but populated Okinawa as well.
And yet, despite China’s relentless and military-backed assertions of
territorial sovereignty, the new white paper edition has removed the wording
that caused such a strong Chinese reaction before.
It “welcomes and encourages China’s peaceful rise” and shows “respect” for the
relationship, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. China hoped it
marked a “turning point” in Australian attitudes, she said.
In the world of words, symbols and psychology that is occupied by Chinese
military strategists, the white paper is an exemplar of their success. Sun Tzu
has been validated and a victory has been won.
In the minds of those who steered the Australian white paper, in contrast, the
new conciliatory language was a costless concession for the sake of other
aspects of the relationship but the basic strategic settings remain unchanged.
The two sides are playing in the same strategic contest but by entirely
different rules.
The US, meanwhile, is playing in its own strategic cultural realm.
US military strategists are focused overwhelmingly on relative military
hardware and mastering the use of what they’ve got. This week the Pentagon reported
China’s continuing relentless progress to project military power far beyond its
shores.
China is obsessed with military psychology and political warfare but neglects
actual operational capability. The blind spot might explain why it has spent
most of the past millennium under varying forms of foreign subjugation.
America has chronically overestimated the military capabilities of its
adversaries, from the beginning of the Cold War arms race to the second Iraq
War. But its neglect of enemy psychology and politics has led to a litany of
military disasters in that time.
And both powers have routinely been blinded to how coercion breeds resistance
and contempt.
Whose strategic blind spots are the greatest? Some eyes are turning to the
strategic battleground of Australia to find out.
Copyright © 2013 The Sydney Morning Herald
From: vijai_...@hotmail.com
To: kka...@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: Denying One’s Own Rootsco
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:55:29 +0000
Regards,
Vijai Singhal
From: kka...@hotmail.com
Subject: Denying One’s Own Roots
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 03:58:10 +1000
When Germany is Christian, is India Hindu?
(Denying One’s Own Roots)
By Maria Wirth
Though I live in India since long, there are still some points that I find hard to understand - for example why many educated Indians become agitated when India is considered as a Hindu country. The majority of Indians are Hindus. India is special because of its ancient Hindu tradition. Westerners are drawn to India because of it. Why then is there this resistance by many Indians to acknowledge the Hindu roots of their country?
This attitude is strange for two reasons. First, those educated Indians seem to have a problem only with ‘Hindu’ India, but not with ‘Muslim’ or ‘Christian’ countries. In Germany for example, only 59 percent of the population are registered with the two big Christian Churches (Protestant and Catholic), however, the country is bracketed under ‘Christian countries’. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, stressed recently the Christian roots of Germany and urged the population ‘to go back to Christian values’. In 2012, she postponed her trip to the G-8 summit for a day to address the German Catholic Day. Two major political parties carry ‘Christian’ in their name, including Angela Merkel’s ruling party.
Germans are not agitated that Germany is called a Christian country, though I actually would understand if they were. After all, the history of the Church is appalling. The so called success story of Christianity depended greatly on tyranny. “Convert or die”, were the options given not only to the indigenous population in America some five hundred years ago. In Germany, too, 1200 years ago, the emperor Karl the Great ordered the death sentence for refusal of baptism in his newly conquered realms. It provoked his advisor Alkuin to comment: ‘One can force them to baptism, but how to force them to believe?’
Those times, when one’s life was in danger if one dissented with the dogmas of the Church, are thankfully over. And nowadays many in the west do dissent and leave the Church in a steady stream - partly because they are disgusted with the less than holy behavior of Church officials and partly because they can’t believe in the dogmas, for example that ‘Jesus is the only way’ and that God sends all those who don’t accept this to hell.
And here comes the second reason why the resistance to associate India with Hinduism by Indians is difficult to understand. Hinduism is in a different category from the Abrahamic religions. Its history, compared to Christianity and Islam was undoubtedly the least violent as it spread in ancient times by convincing arguments and not by force. It is not a belief system that demands blind belief in dogmas and the suspension of one’s intelligence. On the contrary, Hinduism encourages using one’s intelligence to the hilt. It is an enquiry into truth, based on a refined (methods are given) character and intellect. It comprises a huge body of ancient literature, not only regarding Dharma and philosophy, but also regarding music, architecture, dance, science, astronomy, economics, politics, etc. If Germany or any other western country had this kind of literary treasure, it would be so proud and highlight its greatness on every occasion. When I discovered for example the Upanishads, I was stunned. Here was expressed in clear terms what I intuitively had felt to be true, but could not have expressed clearly. Brahman is not partial; it is the invisible, indivisible essence in everything. Everyone gets again and again a chance to discover the ultimate truth and is free to choose his way back to it. Helpful hints are given but not imposed.
In my early days in India, I thought that every Indian knew and valued his tradition. Slowly I realized that I was wrong. The British colonial masters had been successful in not only weaning away many of the elite from their ancient tradition but even making them despise it. It helped that the ‘educated’ class could no longer read the original Sanskrit texts and believed what the British told them. This lack of knowledge and the brainwashing by the British education may be the reason why many ‘modern’ Indians are against anything ‘Hindu’. They don’t realize the difference between western religions that have to be believed (or at least professed) blindly, and which discourage if not forbid their adherents to think on their own and the multi-layered Hindu Dharma which gives freedom and encourages using one’s intelligence.
Many of the educated class do not realize that on one hand, westerners, especially those who dream to impose their own religion on this vast country, will applaud them for denigrating Hindu Dharma, because this helps western universalism to spread in India. On the other hand, many westerners, including Church people, very well know the value and surreptitiously appropriate insights from the vast Indian knowledge system, drop the original source and present it either as their own or make it look as if these insights had been known in the west.
Rajiv Malhotra of Infinity Foundation has done painstaking research in this field and has documented many cases of “digestion” of Dharma civilization into western universalism. He chose the term digestion, as it implies that that which is being digested (a deer for example) is in the end no longer there, whereas the ‘digester’ (a tiger) becomes stronger. Similarly, Hindu civilization is gradually being depleted of its valuable, exclusive assets and what is left is called inferior.
If only missionaries denigrated Hindu Dharma, it would not be so bad, as they clearly have an agenda which discerning Indians would detect. But sadly, Indians with Hindu names assist them because they wrongly believe that Hinduism is inferior to western religions. They belittle everything Hindu instead of getting thorough knowledge. As a rule, they know little about their tradition except what the British told them, i.e. that the major features are caste system and idol worship. They don’t realize that India would gain, not lose, if it solidly backed its profound and all inclusive Hindu tradition. The Dalai Lama said some time ago that already as a youth in Lhasa, he had been deeply impressed by the richness of Indian thought. “India has great potential to help the world,” he added. When will the westernized Indian elite realize it?
kanti Jinna
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