I. The Big Story:  China-India Brief

China and India have disengaged from the Gogra area in Eastern Ladakh after reaching an agreement during the 12th Corps Commander-level meeting last week. “As per the agreement, both sides have ceased forward deployments in this area in a phased, coordinated and verified manner. The disengagement process was carried out over two days, August 04 and 05. The troops of both sides are now in their respective permanent bases,” noted Indian Army’s statement. The agreement on PP17A was a part of a series of measures to resolve the 15-month standoff in Ladakh. Before this, the two countries had disengaged from Pangong Tso in February this year.

All temporary structures and other allied infrastructure created in the area by both sides have been dismantled and mutually verified, noted the Indian Army. “The landform in the area has been restored by both sides to the pre-stand-off period.” This agreement ensures that the LAC in this area would be strictly observed and respected by both sides and that there was no unilateral change in status quo, added the Army statement. The disengagement has led to a 5 km buffer zone between the two armies at PP17A. This is the third such patrolling zone between China and India in Eastern Ladakh – the previous two at Galwan and Pangong.

However, no agreement has been reached yet on the PP15 – Hotsprings Kongka La sector. The next round would focus on this area. Previously, two countries had issued a joint statement on August 2 claiming that the 12th Corps Commander-level talks were “constructive” and “would further enhance mutual understanding.” Notably, this is the only statement from the Chinese side. I tried checking China’s MFA, MOD and the PLA Daily. There is no word from China on the Gogra disengagement yet. Perhaps, as my colleague Manoj Kewalramani argues, it’s due to the CCP top leaders’ annual summer Bedaihe conclave. But this absence of a statement on disengagement is notable.   

Meanwhile, reports indicate that China has refused to discuss the Depsang Bulge area, where the PLA has been blocking the Indian patrols at PP10, PP11, PP 11A, PP 12 and PP13 since early last year. Shishir Gupta writes for Hindustan Times that India is preparing for a long haul with China. This is mainly due to recent Chinese activities in Tibet and its approach to resolving the Depsang issue, reports Gupta. Upgrading infrastructure on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) is one aspect of preparing for the long haul. India’s Border Roads Organisation has recently constructed and completed blacktopping of the world’s highest motorable road at Umling La in Eastern Ladakh - it’s at 19,300 feet. The 52 km long tarmac road under ‘Project Himank’ Chisumle to Demchok villages. Demchok is where some Chinese tents are found on the Indian side of LAC during the ongoing stand-off. The project has been underway since 2017. Infrastructure development in such harsh terrain is extremely challenging, with temperatures dipping to -40 degrees during winters and oxygen level is almost 50% less than at normal places. Besides infrastructure upgrades, as detailed in last week’s newsletter, India has inducted Rafales into Squadron Number 101 at Hasimara Air Force station in West Bengal. This is the second Rafale squadron with the first squadron stationed at Ambala. India has also started sea trials for its first indigenously made aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. With this, India joins a select club of a handful of countries that can manufacture these complicated naval vessels.

Meanwhile, the Indian Army and the PLA have also established a hotline in Kongra La, North Sikkim (Khamba Dzong in TAR for China). It was inaugurated on August 1, PLA Day. This is the sixth such hotline between the two armies. There are two hotlines each between the Indian Army and PLA at Arunachal Pradesh, Eastern Ladakh and Sikkim each. In addition to the Corps Commander level talks, the two sides had also had ten Major General level talks, 55 Brigadier level talks, and around 1,450 calls over the two hotlines in Eastern Ladakh since the beginning of the stand-off last year. The two sides are also discussing a hotline between the Indian Army’s Director General of Military Operations and China’s Western Theatre Command.

On the Chinese side, the CMC appointed Lt Gen Wang Haijiang as the Xinjiang Military District Commander. He was formerly the Commander of Tibet Military District but moved to Xinjiang when Gen Wang Kai took over as the TMD Commander. There was confusion over his appointment since Chinese media stated that Lt Gen Wang Haijiang would go to Xinjiang and work for the government. For a very long time, I thought Let Gen Liu Wanlong was still the XMD Commander and Lt Gen Wang is working in the provincial government as an advisor or special appointee. But now, this clears the picture. The South Xinjiang Military District, the focal point for the ongoing China-India stand-off, comes under XMD’s jurisdiction. 

Meanwhile, China is giving military-style training to kids between 8-16 years old in Nyingchi, Tibet. Chinese state media have called this 军事夏令营, Jūnshì xiàlìngyíng (“Military summer camp”) for Tibetan teenagers. Chinese state media reports that these centres are crucial steps in providing national defence education for Tibet’s youth to inculcate patriotism, love for China and the spirit of defending national borders. Within a short space of time, children staying at the camp are given a crash course in military discipline, including military drills and physical activities. The state media also reports that the purpose of these centres was “...to increase the spirit of patriotism and defending the nation, increase physical strength, inculcate mental strength and stamina, and also to increase the spirit of unity among the children”. It looks like the first camp was held on July 26 at Draksum Tso’s banks in Nyingchi. Another report states that such camps are also held at Lhasa and other areas of Southern Tibet. China observer Aadil Brar shares the TAR Communist Youth League Committee’s agenda: To organise the youth in the region to carry out patriotic education with the theme of safeguarding the unity of the motherland, strengthening national unity and opposing secession. “The Basongcuo Youth Activity Camp in Nyingchi is part of the agenda given to the Communist Youth League Committee of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and remember that the Communist Youth League is also referred to as a reserve army by the CCP,” tweets Brar.

Staying with Nyingchi and Tibet, the PLA used the newly-inaugurated bullet train to transport its troops to a remote exercise field in Tibet. The railroad connects the capital city of Lhasa to the Tibetan town of Nyingchi and is part of the Sichuan-Tibet railway line connecting Lhasa and Chengdu- which would be fully functional by 2030.

Finally, China’s official English television channel, CGTN, has uploaded a video on one of the four PLA soldiers who died fighting Indian troops in Galwan Valley in June 2020 on social media and its website to mark the armed forces’ founding day on August 1. The focus of the video is Chen Hongjun, one of the four PLA troops killed in the brutal fight with Indian border personnel on the night of June 15, 2020. Besides interviews of Chen’s family members, including his wife, the video shows edited footage of the clash between the two armies, Chinese equipment on the banks of the fast-flowing river, soldiers, mostly Chinese, wading in knee-deep water, and personnel from the two sides charging at each other.

Read More
- My piece in the Times of India on the PLA’s 94^th anniversary and four things India should worry
-  Dr Liu Zongyi: India’s public opinion war against China
- Amb Vijay Gokhale: China is a master at manipulating time
- India’s tabletop wargaming exercise
- Tibet and China clash over the reincarnation of Lama

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II. Developing Stories

The South China Sea

Many developments in and about the South China Sea have happened this week. Let’s first start with China. China’s State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated China’s principled position on the South China Sea while attending the 11th East Asian Summit Foreign Ministers’ Summit. He called all parties to adhere to “four respects” – historical facts, laws, consensus and regional countries. More importantly, he also urged extra-regional forces to “stop extending their hands to the region.” Interestingly, as Prof M Taylor Fravel highlights that Wang’s claimed, “The allegation that China claims all waters within the dotted line as its internal waters and the territorial sea is a deliberate distortion of China’s position.” But his statement makes no mention of China’s claims to historic rights (to resources in the South China Sea).

Earlier this month, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin became the first cabinet minister from the Joe Biden administration to visit the region. Later this month, Vice-president Kamala Harris will become Biden’s highest-ranking official to tour Asia when she makes her first official visit to Singapore and Vietnam. She is also the only US vice-president to visit Vietnam. Harris’s office said her trip would “build on the Biden-Harris administration’s message to the world: America is back”. The visit is aimed at rallying international support to counter China’s growing global influence. Harris will focus on defending international rules in the South China Sea. “We do not want to see any country dominate that region or take advantage of the power situation to compromise the sovereignty of others. The Vice-president is going to underscore that there should be a free passage for trade throughout the South China Sea, and no single country should disrespect the right of others,” said a White House official.
 
Meanwhile, the US Indo-Pacific command is planning a near-month-long series of global exercises with major allies and partners in the South China Sea and Western Pacific Ocean. Already, the UK carrier strike group was sailing in the region last week. SCMP’s Minnie Chan reports that the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier and strike group didn’t sail near Beijing’s artificial islands when it was in the South China Sea last week. The British warships left Britain two months ago and are on a 42,000km (26,000-mile) mission that will continue until the end of the year, including exercises with the US, Australia, France and Japan in the Philippine Sea.
 
Germany also dispatched its naval frigate for a six-month voyage in the South China Sea and Western Pacific Ocean. This is the first time in 19 years that a German naval warship will pass through the South China Sea. The vessel is expected to cross the South China Sea in mid-December, making it the first German warship to pass through the region since 2002. “We want existing law to be respected, sea routes to be freely navigable, open societies to be protected, and trade to follow fair rules,” said German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. However, Germany requested a port call in Shanghai. It also invited Chinese forces to participate in “Kiel Week”, a series of sailing events in September. But while Beijing has not ruled out either possibility, it has demanded that Berlin clarify the reason for the port call, signalling that it is not interested in ambiguity from Germany. Beijing says that it will not consider a port call request from a German warship to stop at Shanghai until Berlin clarifies its intentions in sending the frigate through the South China Sea.
 
Meanwhile, even India deployed its four ships in the region, including a guided-missile destroyer and a missile frigate. These warships will be deployed for two months to Southeast Asia, the South China Sea and the western Pacific, the Indian navy said in the statement. The Indian ships will take part in annual joint war drills with Quad countries near Guam. They would also engage in bilateral exercises with Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia in the region. As I have argued in my IPPR journal article earlier this year, it’s a welcomed step, and India should flex its muscle on the east of Malacca.  Also, check this ORF Issue Brief by Dr Premesha Saha on how India is recalibrating its approach to the South China Sea.
 
China has reacted to all these developments. It announced that it would hold military drills from Friday to Tuesday in the region. China has set up a vast navigation restriction zone resembling the PLA's last year's drills in July after the then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement on the US position on maritime claims in the South China Sea. Beijing had tested the DF-26 from Qinghai province and DF-21D from Zhejiang province last year in similar tests in the region.

Read More
- US-Indonesia joint military drills
- Memories of 1949 Yangtze naval clash
- CSIS expert working group on SCS

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China’s Missile Silos

In a commentary for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Dr Tong Zhao explains what is driving China’s nuclear build-up. He claims that this is an abrupt departure from China’s long-standing minimalist nuclear policy, and the lack of any official Chinese confirmation or explanation has contributed to confusion and suspicions about Beijing’s intentions.

He explains that China has worried about US missile defence systems and precision strike weapons – which could undermine China’s credibility to retaliate against a nuclear attack. As a result, China has consistently agreed upon gradual modernisation of nuclear forces. However, under the current regime, he argues that China’s rise is coupled with disputes with Western countries over the rule of law, international norms and liberal order. Fearing that any weakness would embolden Western countries to destabilise China and threaten its regime’s security, Chinese thought leaders stress that it is critical for China to quickly build a much larger nuclear arsenal, which would make the country’s rivals respect China and exercise more self-restraint when dealing with Beijing.

For instance, Dr Tong Zhao stresses on the March 2021 national political meeting, in which, Xi directed the military to “accelerate the construction of advanced strategic deterrent” capabilities, which was the strongest and most explicit public instruction on the topic to come from China’s highest-ranking leader. 
 
He argues that China’s nuclear build-up seems to be inspired by the Cold War prism, where the Soviet Union felt that keeping up with the United States’ nuclear arsenal was necessary for it to achieve real political equality with Washington. “Today, similar reasoning seems to be behind China’s nuclear buildup—a belief that the United States won’t drop its hostility against China unless its hand is forced by robust Chinese strategic power,” he argues.

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III. Research Paper

Ian Easton published a paper for Project 2049 Institute on Taiwan’s ports and the PLA invasion plan. He explores the following questions: How is the PLA preparing to exploit existing port facilities in Taiwan to support an island invasion campaign? What are the assumptions guiding these preparations? Based on known PLA assumptions and other factors, which ports in Taiwan might be targeted for seizure in the event of an invasion and why?

He claims that the scale of the Taiwan invasion scenario would defy human comprehension as nothing like this has ever occurred before. The D-Day Normandy landing in rural France and Operation Iceberg during the battle of Okinawa were very small compared to the Taiwan invasion scenario. Taiwan’s extreme geography is thick with armed defenders, its coastline is heavily urbanised, and the probable US role in Taiwan’s defence makes it an extremely challenging operation for China.  

The following two maps, according to him, are China’s staging area for an amphibious landing and potential beaches for an invasion:

As the PLA research examines, this would be followed by integrated port seizure operations in multiple phases. According to him, the Kaohsiung Port, Zuoying Port, Taichung Port, Keelung Port, Taipei Port, Su’ao Port, Mailiao Port, Anping Port, Hualien Port and Makung Port are ten probable ports for Chinese invasions. He has arranged them from high to low probability based on their suitability for an invasion.

He argues that China could use one or a combination of the following methods for a forced reunification:

-Direct Amphibious Attack
-Indirect Amphibious Attack
-Sea-Skimming Raids
-Air Assaults
-Horizontal Attacks
-Special Forces Infiltration

Read more in the document. Each of these methods is explained in the document. 

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V. Read More

- NIDs China Security Report 2021. (Don’t miss the Cyber and Space sections in this report. They are very interesting)