Taipei, Jan 17 (IANS) China’s policy toward India is a coherent multi‑pronged strategy that blends political engagement, territorial incrementalism, and proxy support to constrain New Delhi’s options, a report has highlighted.

A recent article in the ‘European Times’ scrutinised the meetings held by a delegation of China’s Communist Party of China (CCP) during its New Delhi visit, earlier this week stating that the CCP’s united front strategy is designed to cultivate interlocutors abroad who normalise China’s rise and mute criticism of its authoritarianism.

“At the same time, it is salami slicing territory along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and supporting Pakistan’s strategic posture against India. Taken together, these moves form a coherent design: weaken India internally, erode its sovereignty externally, and box it in regionally,” wrote Khedroob Thondup, son of Gyalo Thondup, elder brother of the Dalai Lama.

The recommended remedy, he mentioned, is an equally layered-response combining military preparedness, political vigilance, and international partnerships to restore deterrence and protect regional stability.

Sun Haiyan, Vice Minister of the International Department of the Communist Party of China (IDCPC), led the Chinese delegation during the January 12-14 visit.

Highlighting the “strategic intent” of the delegation’s visit, Khedroob Thondup wrote that the aim was to “soften resistance, exploit India’s pluralism, and create channels that temper India’s responses to Chinese assertiveness. This tactic mirrors Beijing’s outreach elsewhere, from cultivating business elites in Australia to engaging political parties in Nepal.”

The report described “salami slicing” – incremental territorial encroachment at the border – as the second pillar of Beijing’s strategy, with concrete manifestations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) through road building, patrols, and small advances that cumulatively alter facts on the ground. These tactics are designed to avoid triggering full‑scale conflict while steadily expanding Chinese control and complicating India’s ability to respond without escalating into war.

Thondup draws a direct parallel to China’s maritime tactics, where artificial islands and gradual militarisation shifted realities without formal treaty changes, underscoring the strategic logic of incrementalism.

The third element, he highlighted, is China’s sustained support for Pakistan, which is a “proxy dimension” that keeps India strategically distracted on multiple fronts. Through military assistance, economic investment, and diplomatic backing, Beijing ensures that India must allocate attention and resources to its western front, thereby diluting its capacity to focus solely on the China challenge. This triangular pressure – internal influence, border coercion, and proxy bolstering – creates a cumulative effect that the author argued, is intended to box India in regionally.

“The erosion of sovereignty and regional encirclement demand multidimensional resilience — military vigilance, political awareness, and narrative counter-strategies. For the international community: Beijing’s tactics highlight the limits of existing legal frameworks. The absence of binding dispute resolution mechanisms in the Himalayas mirrors the vacuum exploited in maritime Asia,” wrote Thondup.

— IANS

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