China Perceives Rising India As ‘Rival’, Wants To Cut Its Ties With US, Allies: Report

The report said the People’s Liberation Army recently provoked skirmishes along its disputed border with India, which killed dozens on both sides.

The US State Department said in a report that China perceives a rising India as a “rival” and wants to constrain its strategic partnership with the US, its allies, and with other democracies, stressing that Beijing intends to displace America as the world’s foremost power.

The detailed policy document, coming ahead of the transition of power from Donald Trump’s administration to President-elect Joe Biden’s administration after the November 3 US presidential election, highlights that China is undermining the security, autonomy and economic interests of many nations in the region.

“China perceives rising India as a rival and seeks to impel it to accommodate Beijing’s ambitions by engaging economically while constraining New Delhi’s strategic partnership with the US, Japan, Australia and its relations with other democracies,” the report said.

“China is undermining the security, autonomy, and economic interests of many others in the region such as member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including those in the vital Mekong Region, as well as the nations of the Pacific Islands,” it added.

Awareness has been growing in the US – and in nations around the world – that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has triggered a new era of great-power competition, the 70-page report states.

“Yet few discern the pattern in China’s inroads within every region of the world, much less the specific form of dominance to which the party aspires,” the report added.

The report stressed that the Chinese Communist Party aims not merely at preeminence within the established world order, an order that is grounded in free and sovereign nation-states flows from the universal principles on which America was founded, and advances US national interests but to fundamentally revise world order, placing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the centre and serving Beijing’s authoritarian goals and hegemonic ambitions.

“In the face of the China challenge, the US must secure freedom,” the report said.

It said China seeks to diminish US influence by fostering a sense in the region’s nations that China’s dominance is inevitable.

“Prime targets include US treaty-based allies Japan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines as well as emerging strategic partners such as India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Taiwan,” the report said.

The report said the People’s Liberation Army recently provoked skirmishes along its disputed border with India, which killed dozens on both sides, and remains in a tense standoff with India’s military.

Highlighting Beijing’s hard relations with Taiwan, which it claims as its territory, the report said: “Beijing menaces democratic Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, intending to reunify Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary. And the PLA Navy and Chinese Coast Guard increasingly challenge Japan’s administrative control of the Senkaku Islands.”

“The Trump administration achieved a fundamental break with conventional wisdom. It concluded that the CCP’s resolute conduct and self-professed goals require the US and other countries to revise assumptions and develop a new strategic doctrine to address the primacy and magnitude of the China challenge,” the document read.

The report also mentions the Covid-19 pandemic that emerged from China’s Wuhan.

“The Chinese Communist Party’s recklessness in allowing the novel coronavirus born in Wuhan to develop into a global pandemic coupled with the concerted disinformation campaign that Beijing undertook to conceal China’s culpability should put doubts to rest. Yet many people lack a proper understanding of the character and scope of the China challenge,” it said.