Andrew Small's compelling study of PRC–Pakistan relations is far more than the best up-to-date book on an important topic. The author delivers on what the sub-title promises, a broad and deep geographical and historical exploration of changing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruling group purposes and policies in South Asia, Central Asia and West Asia. This important study is solidly built on pioneering research and path-breaking interviewing all over the region.
Small clarifies how decision-makers in Beijing responded to unexpected geo-political earthquakes such as the implosion of the USSR, the sudden appearance of Muslim states on China's borders or the spread of a violent Islamism throughout the region and into Uyghur majority regions. The future is presented as open-ended as India has the potential to emerge as “a first-rank power” and a rival to the CCP state (p. 55) and Islamism spreads in the region.
In Chinese policy-making, Small finds that Chinese business people and labourers sent to develop economic ties are acutely aware of how frequently Chinese in Pakistan have been targets for violent Islamist militants. The author vividly describes how Chinese diplomats get involved in instances involving the hostage-taking of Chinese. On the other hand, the concerns of Chinese security forces are not uniquely in the economic realm of win-win growth. They want Pakistan to stop the spread of Islamist militants into Uyghur majority territory. The voices of security interests seem increasingly weighty in PRC policy debates. They see dragons that need slaying.
The book offers an excellent chapter on China–Afghanistan relations going back to the 1979 USSR invasion that was intended to keep a communist party leader friendly to Moscow in power. To the CCP, the “revisionist” USSR was enemy number one. The PRC swiftly involved itself in supporting Islamist resisters with Soviet-style arms from China. With the Taliban in Afghanistan largely a Pakistan creation and with Pakistan a close partner of the PRC, the CCP was intimately involved with the Afghan Taliban even when only three states in the world would recognize the regime. The key CCP goal which trumped virtually all other concerns was to keep the Taliban and other Islamists from backing Uyghurs in the PRC.
As a world power thinking about the global balance of power, already in 1959–60, the CCP wanted to use Pakistan to balance against the USSR and its supposed efforts to encircle China. Beijing wanted to cause difficulties for Soviet Russia's friendly policies towards India. Back then, with China isolated and stagnant, a Pakistani partner whose “GDP per capita was ahead of China's” (p. 95) had a lot to offer the PRC, including access to nuclear weapons technology from Europe.
China in the Deng era swiftly became another country. Its GDP grew to “35 times the size of Pakistan's” (p. 95). An ever more Islamist Pakistan, “more Taliban than the Taliban” (p. 79), had ever less to offer a successful PRC. Pakistan would therefore do almost anything to keep the PRC supporting Pakistan. As a result, “China's highest ranking party-military families” (p. 108) materially benefited from interactions with the Pakistanis.
In contrast to the Pakistan of the 1960s and 1970s, by the 1990s an ever more Islamist Pakistan could not stop the Pakistan Taliban from assisting Uyghurs. In comparison, under Obama, “the United States has done more to support the elimination of ‘anti-China elements’ in Pakistan in two years than the Pakistan government had done in ten” (p. 147).
Given Pakistan's increasing inability to deliver to China what the CCP most wanted, voices in the CCP policy debate rose on behalf of tilting more toward a rapidly rising India. Small clarifies the painful conundrums facing CCP policy makers in dealing with South, Central and West Asia, as the CCP searches for ways to keep surging Islamists from reaching into the PRC. This is a major focus for a Chinese government seeking to build close ties to regions to China's west. The CCP state does not want Islamists becoming obstacles to a PRC policy of building pipelines from Central Asia to China and rail lines from China to Europe. Small shows how international dynamics combine with CCP ambitions to virtually guarantee that China will become increasingly involved in the politics of the wider Muslim region.
Indeed, China is already getting more deeply involved in Afghanistan as the Americans depart. Yet even as Washington and Beijing find issues to cooperate on in policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, CCP paranoia about a US whose policy goal supposedly is to encircle China does not wane.
Small's work cannot readily explain the CCP fixation on the Pakistani port of Gwadar, unless it is to enrich military-security families. Roads, railway tracks and pipelines from Gwadar to China have to cross tribal territories not controlled by Pakistan's central government. Hopes that Gwadar would become another Dubai have gone nowhere. Far from being an alternative to oil from the Middle East going to China, it actually would be easier for a foreign military “to prevent the unloading of oil at Gwadar than to blockade the Strait of Malacca” (p. 103). Is the CCP going to create a quagmire for China?
The PRC has long tried not to get bogged down in the conflicts of this larger region. Time after time, China rejected offers from Pakistan for more military involvement. The PRC acted cautiously, narrowly focused on domestic stability, trying to keep the Taliban away from Uyghurs. If Small's analysis is right, those days of cautious and limited Chinese involvement are coming to an end because the geo-politics of the region have changed and Chinese ambitions and capabilities have grown.
