My grandmother sighs when she talks about the Sino-Indian war. “One week, Chou Enlai was in Delhi to a grand welcome, smiling and talking to Nehru [then India’s Prime Minister] and promising there would be no war.”
“A week later,” she says, “war was declared.”
My father, who was 9 years old then, is angrier when he recounts the story. But the story is the same.
The Sino-Indian War was really a mini-war; it began in September 1962, and hostilities ceased in November 1962—less than 2 months. And to top it all, though the Chinese emerged as the victors by all accounts, they returned 70% of the hard-won land back to India!
While the war has apparently been largely forgotten in Mainland China, it remains seared in the minds of most Indians who lived through it as an example of “Chinese artifice.”
What most people might have missed was that the war was not just trickery against the Indian nation; it was trickery against the whole world. Even as one of the world’s most atrocious tragedies was happening in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used the war to pull the wool over the eyes of the rest of the world.
The Background
While no one is exactly sure how the war started, there are accounts that both sides had aggressively laid claim to territory that lay on the other side of the border. The war itself is said to have been triggered when a small People’s Liberation Army (PLA) detachment surrounded an Indian post in a disputed area. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, then in London, and Defense Minister Krishna Menon ordered Indian troops to “free our territory.”
With Indian resistance being determined, but insufficient and slow, the Chinese quickly outmaneuvered the Indian army, moving into one town after another. In November 1962, the PLA declared a unilateral cease-fire, right around the time the United States decided on its course of action and flew in massive supplies to Indian forces.
The PLA then withdrew to the positions it had occupied before the war. Even though it had technically “won,” it acted as though there had been no war—and no disputed territory. Over time the issue was largely forgotten in China.
It was different in India and the rest of the world. An anti-China sentiment prevailed until recent times and it probably still lives on among those who lived through the war. Indians reacted with a surge of patriotism to what was universally seen as duplicity by the Chinese leading to a national humiliation.
But the real cause of the war might have actually been the need of the CCP to deceive its own people.
Covering Up China’s Internal Crises
In the late 1950s, China was dying. This is not an exaggeration—the purge of the intellectuals and the “Anti-Rightists” had deprived China of the cream of its intellectuals. The “Great Leap Forward” had been a disaster—Chairman Mao’s ridiculous “dream” of converting every village into its own industry with steel and iron factories had become a nightmare.
Even as the official mouthpiece of the CCP claimed that an unbelievable amount of wheat was being produced per acre in the fields, the farmers who tilled the fields were dying without even money left behind for cremation. Humans were forced to become cannibals and ate their own children to survive—an episode documented in full detail in the recently published “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.”
The people and the nation were dying, and Chairman Mao and his cronies knew it. Under these circumstances, what the CCP needed was an external target—a diversion by which they could hide their grievous misdeeds.
And they found a perfect target—India.
Timing
Whether the CCP timed the war perfectly or not remains to be discovered. However, at that time, India had just annexed the Portugese colony of Goa, and with insurgency in Kashmir and the Indian Army still in its infancy, India’s hands were full.
The CCP, however, had complete command over the Chinese army, which had been used in all kinds of subterfuge for nearly 30 years. Their army was ready for action, even as the common Chinese people were dying like flies.
So the CCP and its army moved swiftly, and with little to lose. Promising no war first so as to relax the opponent, and faced with a lumbering Indian army during the war itself, the CCP quickly moved into Indian territory—and withdrew just as quickly two months later.
The results were probably what the CCP had hoped—it shook the world, making them wonder what tricks the CCP had under its sleeve. While India was humiliated and the Indian Army was overhauled after the defeat, Nixon’s United States and the West would be alert to a question—what was Red China planning next?
As a result, the CCP nicely swept the largest ever man-made disaster—the Great Leap Forward—under the carpet. The full extent of this tragedy was discovered only much later, when it would simply become a sad historic event.
The Present and the Future
In the Sino-Indian War, the CCP has shown its willingness to attack a foreign nation in order to hide internal crises.
Now, it has shown its war-lust again. Its war-mongering has already hinted attacks on Taiwan if it shows any streaks of independence; recent threats by China’s General Zhu Chenghu and former Defense Minister Chi Haotian published under the auspices of the CCP have both advocated nuclear and biological warfare with the United States.
Of course, war isn’t what the CCP wants—what it wants is to cover up its absolute failure in governing the Chinese people.
What it wants to cover up is the tidal wave of resignations triggered by The Epoch Times’ “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” which have already led to 4.4 million resignations from the CCP—the biggest crisis the CCP has faced in all of its existence.
The CCP has battled before to hide the ugly truth inside China—what’s to prevent it from doing so again?
Feeds