By Sanjay Upadhya
With the dust still swirling on the path Chinese President Xi Jinping tread during his 22-hour state visit to Nepal earlier this week, the international reaction is all over the place. From one set of headlines, you would be forgiven for believing that Xi just pulled the geostrategic locus of the world’s newest republic – ruled by democratically elected communists – northward.
From the other set, you could hardly be faulted for wondering how Kathmandu mustered the courage to snub Beijing by so brazenly refusing to sign extradition and defense treaties. In an age of extremes, such tension acquires additional news value.
The reality, though, lies somewhere in the middle.
While Xi’s visit was long on pomp and ceremony, it was also the first visit by a Chinese president to Nepal in 23 years. Kathmandu was the last South Asian capital Xi chose to visit since assuming the presidency six years ago. (Bhutan, which is under India’s tight overlordship, does not qualify yet as a destination for a Chinese president.)
Nepal’s plight was a far cry from the proximity it enjoyed with China under Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. While Mao never went abroad barring two trips to the Soviet Union, his premier, Zhou Enlai visited Nepal twice. In early 1978, Deng made Nepal as part of the itinerary of his first foreign visit since his return to power in post-Mao China. President Li Xiannian visited in 1981, which Jiang arrived in 1999.
A significant fact is that Xi landed in Kathmandu after holding an informal summit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in southern India. Although Beijing and New Delhi remain tight-lipped on the place Nepal occupied in the bilateral agenda, post-visit comments in both capitals have spoken of a new era of trilateral cooperation between China and India and Nepal.
Nepali Prime Minister K.P. Oli affirmed his government’s support for the Belt and Road Initiative more cogently, a decision widely seen as having been reached in consultation with New Delhi. Despite India’s own reservations on the ambitious Chinese project, New Delhi recognizes the value of Beijing-built infrastructure that would bolster Sino-Indian trade and commerce through Nepal.
While Kathmandu declined to accede to a formal extradition treaty with Beijing, it did sign a treaty on mutual legal assistance, a thinly veiled substitute.
Globally, the comments that got the widest play internationally were Xi’s warning that anyone who attempted to split any region from China would perish, “with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder”.
Naturally, many were quick to link that warning to the protests in Hong Kong. If Xi had Tibet in mind, others wondered, why he would issue that warning in Nepal, which has consistently refused the Dalai Lama entry, and not in India which hosts the Tibetan leader as well as the Tibetan government in exile?
For Nepalis, there was an additional mystery. That section of Xi’s public pronouncements in Kathmandu was not conveyed by his official interpreter. The warning came in a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement issued in Beijing.
But, then, considering that very little is unscripted in Chinese officialdom, maybe that was a message from Beijing to third countries not to use Nepal’s instability and flux to foment unrest in Tibet amid the Dalai Lama’s advancing age and inevitable succession.
After all, Nepal’s northern Mustang district did serve as a base for CIA-backed Khampa rebels in the 1960s before the onset of the Sino-American rapprochement in the early years of the following decade.
Today, caught between the BRI and the United States’ Indo-Pacific Strategy, Nepal poses a peculiar problem for both its giant neighbors. They have deep and entrenched strategic differences that transcend those two issues but also have worked to boost cooperation in areas they consider mutually productive. More specifically, India and China realize that Nepal – through the auspices of third countries – has the potential to undermine the careful balance they have struck in their simultaneous quest for global leadership.
Amid its praise for New Delhi’s overall strategic autonomy in external affairs, Beijing has been careful not to challenge India’s core interests in Nepal. The two countries’ respective emphasis on cultural nationalism would find new ground for cooperation in Nepal, imbued as it is by Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
To be sure, such a Sino-Indian framework for stability – if what that is indeed – is embryonic. But it would be vital on a volatile front that is becoming increasingly so. Western powers, on the other hand, have invested too heavily in national re-engineering in Nepal in the name of enlightened and progressive transformation. It will take a long while for the dust to settle, if at all.
