A top American expert on China believes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only world statesman to have stood up to China's Belt and Road Initiative, while the United States itself has been largely silent.
Testifying before a Senate panel this week, Michael Pillsbury, Director of the Centre on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, made a laudatory reference to Modi and his team of officials for being “quite outspoken” over Beijing's BRI push.
“The only statesman in the world who stood up to it yet is Prime Minister Modi. He and his team have been quite outspoken, partly because the Belt and Road Initiative includes violation of Indian sovereign claims,” he said, pointedly adding: “But the US Government, until now and this is a five-year-old initiative if you count the early part of it, has been silent.”
A pet project of President Xi Jinping, BRI envisages building a vast network of infrastructure projects with China's expertise and capital in different parts of the world. It includes a $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that has prompted strong Indian protest as the corridor will traverse through Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK). India followed it up with a boycott of the Belt and Road Forum meet, organized by China last May.
Pillsbury, a former high-ranking US official and author of numerous books and reports on China, reckons that President Trump is on the right track to pursue strategic cooperation with China, but has cautioned the US against any complacency.
“The problem of complacency threatens us. Too many believe China will not be a challenge because it will collapse long before surpassing us. Others claim we have been in charge of China since 1969 and that China has no strategy, but is merely muddling through. Is this trueIJ” he posed in his written testimony.
On President Trump's push for a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, which has already raised the hackles of Beijing, Pillsbury said in reply to a question from the panel: “The Indians, fairly recently, were joking about we want to make the Indian Ocean the Indian Ocean, by which they meant the purchase of several billion dollars worth of American PA aircraft, which have weapon systems in the back that can sink ships…”
“The Chinese are very angry about this. They have criticised the Obama administration for its effort to, as they say, boost India, to a higher rank order in comprehensive power than the Chinese believe India deserves,” he said.
Author of a book titled, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”, Pillsbury said: “My thesis in The Hundred-Year Marathon is while Americans have the illusion we have been managing China's rise, the truth is the other way around -- China has been doing a much better job of managing America's decline. My book advocates 12 steps for a new strategy toward China, which I will not elaborate today.”
Pillsbury said his own advice to the Trump Administration as a transition adviser was simple. “We need a holistic approach led by the President himself who alone can coordinate the Defence Department, USTR, Commerce, Treasury, and important elements in the State Department in designing new strategies to deal with the issues of trade, security cooperation, and multilateral coordination.”
He felt it is way too soon to judge “whether the Trump Administration will have the leverage to significantly change Chinese predatory practices, a concern that has been publicly raised by USTR Ambassador Bob lighthizer”, noting: “My view has been that we need to press the Chinese toward reforms by working with our allies, not alone.”
