A Lesson in Astigmatism

As dawn broke over the Himalayas one chilly morning in 1962, thousands of crack Chinese troops swarmed south through 14,500-foot-high passes along Thag La Ridge, a windswept rim along part of the disputed border between Tibet and northeastern India. At the same time, more Chinese forces sprang into action 900 miles to the west in another disputed area, the sere wasteland known as Aksai Chin, or Desert of White Stone.

In short order, India's shamefully ill-prepared troops were retreating at full tilt on both border fronts, the world's largest working democracy was paralyzed with shock and humiliation, and the Western world had new reason to fret about the Chinese menace. Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru, the great apostle of nonviolence, thundered that Communist China had proved itself "a wholly irresponsible country that does not care about peace." In the White House, John Kennedy quickly agreed to New Delhi's urgent request for U.S. arms. Explained Phillips Talbot, Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State: "We are helping a friend whose attic has been entered by a burglar." Exactly 32 days later, the border crisis ended as abruptly as it began, when Peking declared a unilateral ceasefire.

Punitive Expedition. Had the burglar been frightened off? Not at all, according to Australian Journalist Neville Maxwell, the London Times correspondent in New Delhi from 1959 to 1967. In India's China War, published in the U.S. last month, Maxwell argues that the real felon in 1962 was not China but India. Though world opinion sided instinctively with New Delhi at the time,

Maxwell argues that the Chinese attack was not an unprovoked act of aggression but "a giant punitive expedition" that India had brought on itself.

Since Mao Tse-tung established the People's Republic in 1949, Maxwell maintains, China has striven not to expand but to legitimize its borders. With barely a quibble, Peking negotiated border agreements accepting the postwar status quo with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Mongolia and Burma. The author believes that the Chinese were ready to settle the fuzzy frontier between India and Tibet in roughly the same way. But Nehru was supersensitive to charges from the Indian right that his policy of nonalignment meant "appeasement" of Communism. Gradually, Gandhi's white-capped protege became a hardhat on the Tibetan border question; that meant siding with those who thought that India should press its extremely doubtful claim to Chinese-held Aksai Chin on India's northwest border and a stretch of the Himalayan foothills in the northeast.

Only Aksai Chin, which lay along the shortest route between China's Sinkiang province and Tibet, was really important to Peking; neither area meant much to India. In 1958, when an Indian patrol confirmed rumors that the Chinese had built a road across Aksai Chin, Nehru felt compelled to act. He reiterated angrily that India's borders were "not negotiable" and dispatched troops to the disputed areas with orders to establish Indian outposts and "clear out" the Chinese. Evidently, Maxwell says, Nehru believed that Peking was too timid, weak or unconcerned to do much about the "forward policy," as it was known in New Delhi. Peking proved him tragically naive. In a matter of days the Chinese wiped out the 65 Indian outposts on the two fronts and drove as far as 45 miles into Indian territory; China never revealed its losses, but India's casualties were tragic: 3,968 troops were captured (and later repatriated), 1,383 were killed and 1,696 simply disappeared.

Loose Talk. Outside New Delhi, where one Indian critic relegated it to "the dunghill of propaganda," Maxwell's assessment is widely accepted. To Harvard Sinologist John K. Fairbank, the episode is "an object lesson in international astigmatism." At the very least, it questions the assumption that Peking is fundamentally reckless, belligerent and expansionist--the axiom that was used to justify the "containment" policy pursued by the U.S. in Asia for 20 years. In fact, serious China watchers have long regarded Peking as extremely cautious in its foreign policy decisions.

The border war illustrates another important Chinese characteristic: a deep psychological commitment to righting what Peking considers historical wrongs. The Sino-Soviet split developed partly because Moscow would not concede that borders had been forced on a weak, pre-Mao China in "unequal treaties." By the same token, Peking is unlikely to welcome a real rapprochement with the U.S. until its claim to Taiwan is settled. The Chinese obviously regard that as a far more vital and volatile issue than the Indian borders ever were.

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