Reshma Patil - Strangers across the Border: Indian Encounters in Boomtown China

STRANGERS

ACROSS THE

BORDER

INDIAN ENCOUNTERS IN BOOMTOWN CHINA

Reshma Patil

HarperCollins Publishers India

For my parents

CONTENTS

BEIJING

Where is India?

I t was Yuvraj Singh, the man who is to Indian cricket what 7.6-foot-tall Yao Ming is to Chinese basketball. India did not know it but the strapping Punjabi photographed mid-leap, bat in left hand, was roaming around numerous schools and universities nationwide on the cover of Chinas first-ever official cricket textbook. To me, the cricketer on the Mandarin-language book instantly evoked an example of Indian soft power capable of striking a chord with Chinese students who can rarely access first-hand information on their largest neighboura destination for an average of 150,000 out of nearly a hundred million Chinese tourists going abroad each year. Six times as many Indians visit China. The symbolic Indian import made no difference in easing the strained relationship between Asias two emerging giants.

Singh was a stranger in the Chinese Cricket Association in Beijing where a young man gave me a copy of the two-year-old textbook. The short and thin bureaucrat, sitting at a desk cluttered with documents listing national goals to train 150,000 cricketers by 2020, admitted that he could not recognize the lithe Indian sports star on its blue cover with Chinese characters. Singh was anonymous among cricketers themselves on a century-old campus in the Chinese capital where Chinas future communist technocrats attend class; former president Hu Jintao and his successor, Xi Jinping, are both alumni of Tsinghua University. Who is Xi Jinping? Were not quite sure. Sixty-year-old Xi in 2013 took over as president on the slogan of realizing a grand Chinese dream of national revival. Under his leadership, Beijing executes reformist economic policies and continues to make hard-line unilateral moves to assert claims on land, sea and airspace where China has disputes with several Asian neighbours.

The chemical engineer rose in the ranks starting as secretary to an official in the Central Military Commissionwhich he now chairsand held important posts in wealthy regions including a brief charge of Shanghai. Xi, the son of an ex-revolutionary veteran of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), comes from a so-called princeling faction in dynastic politics. The state-run media project the well-built supremo as a son of the soil who once hauled manure and coal and a humble leader who inspects provinces in rolled shirt sleeves, black umbrella in hand. As a modern black-suited avatar of Mao Zedong, Xi orders his Mandarins to shun extravagance and simultaneously crack down on both corruption and civil society. As a military strongman he rides a new wave of territorial nationalism and exhorts his 2.3 million soldiers to prepare to win every war. In his speeches Xi calls for stability on the Sino-Indian border, the worlds longest disputed 4,057 km front line which China claims is about 2,000 km long. On the ground, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) which he leads provoked the Indian army in 2013 after an army unit camped 19 km across the Line of Actual Control. It was the PLAs boldest territorial incursion in over twenty-five years.

Xi has the last word on repositioning Chinas India policy for the next ten yearsa landmark decade when China may overtake the US as the worlds largest economy and further bolster Beijings military build-up. His government shapes and monitors perceptions and nationalist sentiments across universities and millions of Twitter-like Mandarin micro-blogs like never before. These public perceptions impact our political, personal, trade, business and academic linkages with Chinathe worlds largest trading nation, exporter, energy user and coming superpower. India needs to bulldoze logistical and language barriers to decode Chinas public mood because it will influence the CCPs ultimate decision whether to resolve, shelve or stoke up the border dispute. The embassy of India in Beijing runs an operation of about fifteen diplomats. Some of them learn Mandarin only after arrival in the country. Four Indian print journalists work on modest news-gathering budgets in China, the worlds largest newspaper market, compared to their sixteen counterparts including four broadcast journalists posted in India. My reporters job and the corresponding social network helped me assess nuances and trends in public sentiment towards India beyond embassy circles and Beijing.

So on my way to stately old Tsinghua, I worked up great expectations of enjoying a rare chat about India, then the worlds second-fastest-growing economy after China, with the coach who wrote the cricket manual on Indias favourite sport and his ace students who memorized it. They gave Liu Jingmin, a kindly middle-aged biomechanics professor, one month to master cricket in an official camp a few years ago that produced the first coaches of shen shi yun dongthe Chinese name for cricket which means the noble game. Now here we were, watching his fresh-faced lanky students awkwardly bat and bowl on an outdoor rink behind an Olympics-quality indoor pool. I mentioned Yuvraj Singh to break the ice.

I dont know who he is. Somebody took his picture from the Internet and put it on the cover, said Liu, shrugging off my question, pale forehead creased under a maroon cap. A cricket ball rolled to our feet.

Tsinghua in 2005, he said, became the first Chinese university to join the batting order. Six years later in 2011, budding Tsinghua cricketers, some of the smartest students in the sports superpower, were so isolated from the neighbouring world that they were unaware that the battle for the Cricket World Cup was ongoing in India. They were no ordinary geeks. Tsinghua spends an annual average of $51,000 (Rs 25.5 lakh) per student compared to $8,000 (Rs 4 lakh) in the IIT, its Indian equivalent. They were not curious to discuss Indian cricketers and Chinas relationship with India. Beijing bureaucrats promote cricket for one pragmatic reason alone. China will feel obliged to go for gold if cricket ever becomes an Olympics game.

Why are Indians not good at table tennis, heh? murmured Liu, who happened to be a ping pong coach too. Cricket is just like large-scale table tennis!

His students looked perplexed as our conversation went on, but finally opened up. Does your government have no money for sports? Why is India an Olympics failure? China scooped up a hundred medals when Beijing hosted the Games for the first time in 2008. India won three medals in Beijing and six in London four years later. Days after my Tsinghua visit, unnoticed in China, India lifted the Cricket World Cup 2011. Man of the tournament: Yuvraj Singh.

My experience at Tsinghua was one of numerous such encounters while trailing the curious arrival of emerging India in rising China. I invited two Chinese students home to watch the film Slumdog Millionaire a day after it swept the 2009 Oscar awards, making Chinese cinema-goers aware of modern India for the first time since a pre-war 1950s Hindi movie. A large poster of Awaara still decorates a trendy Beijing multiplex. The boy was short, thin, bespectacled and a movie buff who named himself after Stuart Little, an animated Hollywood mouse. Stuart chatted in English about going to the US to celebrate graduating with a management degree from a Beijing college. His short and easy-going friend Susie, who regularly watched the American sitcom Friends in college to practise English, wondered aloud whether Mumbai looked like Beijing. She had not yet come across images of Indias financial capital which is comparable to Beijing in population but not in its record-setting infrastructure and architecture. Stuart sat cross-legged on my red carpet, gaping at a blanket of slums draping Mumbai in contrast to Chinas concealed urban poverty of chawl-like clusters far from commercial and tourist centres. He thoughtfully turned to ask: