Quad-China

On Board US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Aircraft. Terming the “conflict in the Himalayas” between India and China “gross aggression” by the Chinese government, the US has accused Beijing of not playing by the rules for resolving this and other issues in the region – but declined to comment on whether New Delhi had been “more forward leaning” on the issue.

Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaiskahar (left) at the Quad meeting in Tokyo on October 6

It also noted that due to certain goals set for 2021, 2035 and 2049, there had been “unfortunately bashing of nationalism” inside China that “corners” the government “to do things that it otherwise would have been able to back down from”.

“If you look at the conflict on the – in the Himalayas between China and India, something that has been in the past handled according to unspoken or unwritten rules in the past to prevent these things from getting out of control, and then you look at what happened here recently, where you’ve got actually people beating each other to death (the Galwan incident of June 15)… it’s a sudden turn toward gross aggression by the Chinese Government in its entire periphery.

“I mean, you take it all the way around the Indo-Pacific and its western borders; you’re seeing things that you haven’t seen before, and these are responding to that,” one of three senior State Department officials told reporters on board Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s aircraft while returning from a meeting of the Quad Foreign Ministers in Tokyo.

“And I think it’s – and Chinese aggression certainly draws a big part of this, but it’s also about the different models that we stand for, democratic countries and an authoritarian model, and which ones will be sort of more successful in the long run. We obviously believe ours is the one to follow to ensure that countries can best deal with the problems that they face and the common challenges that we have,” the official added.

Noting that “we also have to frame the problem correctly”, another State Department said: “This isn’t about a U.S.-China dispute. This is about the free world versus Chinese authoritarianism. And the Secretary speaks frequently about that, and that’s the way he framed his discussions (at Tokyo), and there was a lot of agreement around that table.

Question: “I just want to go back to what you just said about India and that border dispute. So do you think the way it turned out this time, or do you think the way Indian Government has handled that border dispute, was an evidence of Delhi being more forward-leaning about all of this, maybe wanting to take that position against China there and apply it to their wider strategy towards them?”

“So yeah, I don’t want to speak for India,” the official said.

Question: I mean, your I impression of, like, because you were talking about a change here, a shift here.

Answer: Right.

Question: So your impression of that, I’m curious about.

Answer: I would note that the change coming out of Beijing as – there seems to be a race to get to certain goals. They talk about their 2021 centenary goal, their 2035 goal, and their 2049 goal. They’re accelerating. There’s also been this unfortunately bashing of nationalism inside the PRC by the government, which then corners it to do things that it otherwise would have been able to back down from.

And so the – as a growing power, they need to understand that there are things that great powers do. They participate in arms talks when they have a nuclear capability with delivery systems. These are all things that we’ve talked about that – they talk about, again, the U.S. versus China. It’s everybody is saying if you’re going to have these capabilities and if you’re going to have this economic power – WTO, you should use it in ways that are acceptable to everybody and not exclusively for your benefit as part of a global system, the official said.