Popular distrust challenges peaceful rise of India and China

NEW DELHI — Persistently questioned by an Indian journalist over a disputed map, the Chinese ambassador finally lost his temper.

“Shut up,” Ambassador Zhang Yan snapped at the correspondent at an event last month, his undiplomatic tone a reflection of China’s deep discomfort with India’s raucous and often nationalistic media.

(AP/AP) - Fresh recruits of Chinese People's Liberation Army stand at attention during a ceremony before leaving their hometown in Suining city, in southwestern China's Sichuan province, Nov. 22, 2011.

The uncomfortable questions arose from a map issued by a private Chinese company showing China’s long-standing claims to a huge swath of Indian territory.

But the clash also revealed a much more fundamental antipathy between the cultures and political systems of the world’s two largest nations, whose relations have hit rough weather in the past six years, despite booming trade ties.

That deterioration is reflected in, and magnified by, growing popular distrust between Indians and Chinese, a trend that in turn undermines efforts to settle the countries’ long-running border dispute and threatens to propel an arms race between the nuclear-­armed Asian giants, which fought a brief border war in 1962.

Indeed, Indians’ distrust of the Chinese and the Chinese dislike of the Indians appear to be growing as the Asian nations emerge and compete as global powers, experts say.

Surveys conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project show that just 25 percent of Indians had a favorable or somewhat favorable view of China in 2011, compared with 34 percent in 2010, albeit among a different population sample, and 57 percent in 2005. Only Turkey recorded a lower score among the 22 nations surveyed.

“There is a clear consensus that China’s military rise is not in India’s interests and that China’s growing economic power is also not in India’s interests,” said Pew’s Richard Wike.

To make matters worse, China’s perceived reluctance to recognize the rise of India “is something that really touched a raw nerve among the Indian elite and middle classes,” said Harsh Pant, an Asian security expert at the Department of Defense Studies at King’s College in London.

It flows both ways. Just 27 percent of Chinese surveyed by Pew had a favorable or somewhat favorable view of India in 2011, compared with 32 percent in 2010.

Simon Shen, an associate professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and former visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, carried out a study of online comments from Chinese netizens and found that the vast majority were “filled with hostility and contempt for India.”

“In their minds, India is stereotyped by terms such as ‘curry,’ ‘dirty’ and ‘poor,’ and these images are almost always connected,” Shen writes in a research paper that will be published in China Quarterly next year.

This in turn means India’s rise is uncomfortable for many Chinese, who consider their neighbors racially, economically, militarily and culturally inferior.

Battle in the media

Sino-Indian relations started to fray after the United States and India drew closer and ultimately signed a civil nuclear cooperation deal in 2008.

Feeling threatened, the Chinese government drew even closer to Pakistan, its long-standing ally and India’s arch-rival.