With its new wealth, China has been inventively building trade and transportation links to further its larger interests. Such links around India’s periphery are already bringing this country under strategic pressure on three separate flanks. China is fashioning two north-south strategic corridors on either side of India — the Trans-Karakoram Corridor stretching right up to Gwadar, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz; and the Irrawaddy Corridor involving road, river and rail links from Yunnan right up to the Burmese ports. In addition, it is shoring up an east-west strategic corridor in Tibet across India’s northern frontiers...Just as the southbound roads China built in the Fifties were later used for aggression against India, the new Tibetan railway indubitably carries significant strategic ramifications for India. And just as the newer highways into Tibet have helped dramatically increase Han migration, the railway to Lhasa and Xigatse will further accelerate Tibet’s Sinocisation and the economic marginalisation of its native people...Ever since the elimination of Tibet as the outer buffer, India has regarded Nepal and Bhutan as its inner security buffers. Chinese efforts to make strategic inroads into those inner buffers thus challenge Indian security.
With China’s accumulating power becoming the single biggest instigator of qualitative change in the geopolitical landscape, India faces a mounting strategic challenge. Despite New Delhi’s accent on cooperation, Beijing will not shy away from ploughing more and more of its resources into activities and capabilities antithetical to Indian interests and security.
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