Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited China from January 13 to 15, and his three-day official visit came almost five years after then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s China trip in June 2003. And Dr. Singh’s visit was crowned with a tremendous success.
To associate his visit on par with the China trip of Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, which concluded only half a month ago, a sign of simultaneous, positive mutual-induction among the three Asian nations has been unprecedented ever since the end of World War II. So it is worth both attention and observation to see whether this trend will help turn them into a "harmonious triangle".
Contact among the three Asian countries can be said to have a longstanding history. Historical records show that contact and communications between China and India originated in the second century B.C., and Japanese-Indian exchange dated back to the sixth century A.D. with the Buddhist culture exerting a profound impact on their civilizations. In post-WWII years, however, there was a rare sign of positive mutual inductions among them, despite the fact they are all Asian nations.
China and India forged their official diplomatic ties back in April 1954, and so India was the first non-socialist country to establish its diplomatic ties with China. Moreover, they were the initiators of the world-renowned Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence in the 1950s. Chian and Japan, however, did not have any diplomatic relations then because of the impact of the cold war.
Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru gifted two Indian elephants Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo in 1949, and thus renewed contact with Japan. Three years later, India signed a peace treaty with the East Asian nation and normalized bilateral relations. Their bilateral exchanges, nevertheless, remained inactive for quite a long period of time.
China’s relations with Japan resumed and proceed to develop with the normalization of their diplomatic relations in 1972. But Sino-Indian relations at the time were cold and sluggish due to influences the border conflict of 1962 had left on the popular psyche of people in both nations. Furthermore, the tendency to incline toward the right-wing forces in Japan at the end of cold war and Indian nuclear tests in 1998 cast a slur on the relations between the three Asian giants.
Since the early 2006, there has been a new indication that the active development of their mutual relations is quite likely. First of all, Sino-Japanese relations began to warm up gradually. From the "ice-breaking" visit by then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in October 2006 to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s "ice-thawing" tour of Japan in April 2007 and to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s trip of "ringing in the spring" in December 2007, a positive, lively momentum has taken shape, in which leaders of both nations has an exchange of visits and met repeatedly on the sidelines of multi-lateral occasions in a bid to practically implement their bilateral strategic and mutually beneficial ties.
Secondly, Sino-Indian relations have developed steadily. As the China-India Friendship Year in 2006 was taken a step further with 2007’s Tourism Friendship Year, leaders of both countries met frequently on the sidelines of multi-lateral functions, and Sino-Indian strategic dialogue and other relevant mechanisms have been institutioned. With a rapid increase in bilateral trade, China has already become the second largest trading partner of India and India the 10th largest trading partner of China. In the words of Prime Minister Singh, India currently has "very good" relations with China, and the "complex and complicated" talks on the border issue were proceeding in the "right direction".
Meanwhile, Japan’s relations with India have also warmed up in a sustained way. Indian Prime Minister Singh visited Japan in December 2006, the first-ever visit made by an Indian prime minister after an interval of five years. His visit upgraded their bilateral ties from a "global partnership" to the "strategic global partnership". In August 2007, the then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s trip to India and the release of a road map for the new era pressed forward tremendously with their strategic cooperation.
The rapid improvement of Sino-Japanese ties and the mutual inductions of the China-Japan-India relations are beginning to bring drastic changes to the existing political setup in Asia, which epitomizes a new, fresh atmosphere alive with harmony and a win-win outcome for Asian nations. The mutual inductions of the three nations not only facilitate peace, stability and prosperity in the Asia region, but herald a wide perspective for their cooperation in trade and investment, climate change, environment protection, energy conservation and development, food safety and other related spheres.
As a matter of course, numerous problems remain to be resolved. Hence, more careful, in-depth observations are still required to see if this positive trend for the continuous improvement of their relations will be turned into a new mechanism of cooperation among them.
By Zhao Liang, a postgraduate student with the Institute of International Studies of elite Tsinghua University in Beijing and translated by People’s Daily Online
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