Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today.
As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia.
Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view them solely within the context of great power competition and predominantly as reactions to Washington or Beijing, as opposed to being formulated autonomously.
Far from falling unguardedly within Beijing’s sphere of influence, India in fact issued clarifications on misrepresentations in the Mandarin transcription of Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) statement during a meeting with Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar on Monday last week.
In the transcript, Wang had declared that India recognizes Taiwan as “part of China.”
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs said this was not the case, that the Chinese side had raised the issue of Taiwan, and that “our position [on Taiwan] remains unchanged.”
Today on this page, Tamkang University Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies assistant professor Lin Hsiao-chen (林筱甄) in “India denies expanded ‘one China’” provides an eloquent analysis of why the Indian ministry was so quick to clarify this point. She gives a summary of the history of India’s “one China” policy and how it has remained consistent since India first recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1949, while China has over decades gradually extended the meaning of “one China” and weaponized it as a price for access to the Chinese market. The clarification was an intentional move to dismiss Beijing’s distortions and to protect New Delhi’s strategic calculus.
John Cheng, a retired businessman from Hong Kong, in his article “Tibet was not ‘always part’ of China,” provides another historical overview, exposing China’s mendacity in its claims over Tibet — distorting the truth to form the narrative it seeks to force upon the world.
Tibetans, Uighurs and Taiwanese are all victims of these distortions. The first two lack the platform to push back.
Taiwan has more of a platform, but the lack of international recognition weakens this. Meanwhile, as a major regional and global power, India has none of these restraints. Relations with India are important for Taiwan, not just because of increased exchange potential and shared values, interests and development complementarities, but also due to the importance of a regional security balance.
The importance of these relations were exemplified by India’s clarification of its official position on Taiwan. In the long term, Taiwan could certainly learn from India the wisdom of maintaining a principled and autonomous path, something that is increasingly necessary in these times of geopolitical flux.
To mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center and the India Taipei Association in 1995, Hashmi wrote in the Taipei Times (“India-Taiwan relations at 30 years,” May 22, page 8) of the gradual yet perceptible improvement and advancement in India-Taiwan relations.
While there are things to celebrate, there is still much room for improvement, she said.
That is something the government should be working toward. An excellent place to start would be to reinstate direct flights between the two countries.
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