Deception is a legitimate strategy of Chinese diplomacy, says Vijay Gokhale

A new book by former Indian ambassador to China traces the strategic and political tactics used by Beijing in achieving its diplomatic success

China’s strategies in past negotiations with India, from the Tibet trade agreement in 1954 to the more recent sanctioning of the Pakistani terrorist Masood Azhar in 2019, are the subject of the new book, The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India, by former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China Vijay Gokhale, to be published on July 19. In this exclusive interview, Mr. Gokhale says many of the core strategies in Beijing’s approach, even in the present “Wolf Warrior” era under President Xi Jinping, have remained broadly consistent, and offers lessons in how to engage China. Excerpts: Before I answer your question, I want your readers to understand why I wrote this book. There are a number of wonderful books on individual issues related to India-China relations, about the issue of Tibet, about the boundary, and so on. But there are relatively few books on the gamut of diplomatic relations that covers a 60 or 70-year period, and on an analysis of how this relationship developed and how both sides approached it, negotiated it, and what the outcomes were. This was my objective in writing this book. Coming to the questions that you posed, what I tried to show in the first two chapters is that there were certain disadvantages that India faced in its early negotiations with China, whereas the Chinese leadership had some experience in foreign affairs because the Communists even when they were a revolutionary party fighting the Civil War, were dealing with the Soviet Union, United States and Britain because of the Second World War, and with the Japanese, and therefore had some diplomatic experience.