Hands Across the Himalayas

"The Pyrenees are no more," said Louis XIV of France when his grandson Philip acceded to the throne of Spain, and it's tempting to think that the same is true of the Himalayas. The visit to India that starts this week by Wen Jiabao, China's Premier, is being spun as a celebration of relations between Asia's giants that are good, and getting better. Whatever the truth of that claim, this much is certain: very soon, meetings between the leaders of China and India will not be of merely regional interest. They will be watched by the whole world.

Combined, India and China account for nearly 40% of the world's population. Fueled by turbo-charged growth, they are both consolidating their positions as central actors in the international economy. Inevitably, their economic heft will be accompanied by political influence. China is pursuing economic alliances everywhere from Southeast Asia to Latin America; India may well soon have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Taken together, India's and China's rise to prominence is the great story of our time.

In an ideal world, Wen and Manmohan Singh, India's Prime Minister, would spend their time together eagerly discussing what they could learn from each other. China has been much more successful than India at creating a modern urban infrastructure and at eradicating really dire poverty. India has been better at seeding centers of excellence in high technology. (Wen will visit Bangalore, of course.) China, for all its astonishing success, still has to figure out how a monolithic, nondemocratic governmental structure can manage a decentralized market economy. In India, as a senior New Delhi-based U.S. official said recently, "that question is settled." Messy and frustrating to international investors though it may often be, India's commitment to democracy, to checks and balances, to regional autonomy, has provided a framework in which manifold economic and political interests can coexist peaceably—just about.

Yet much as one might hope that Sino-Indian meetings were something like a graduate seminar on development economics, it's plain that the two nations could one day end up as rivals. After all, they have been before: in 1962, China humiliated India in a border war, and that still rankles. Sun Shihai, a specialist on Sino-Indian relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, notes that although there has been a general rapprochement between New Delhi and Beijing since the 1980s, questions over the border continue to be an irritant. And in the future, the two nations' rapacious demand for energy will almost certainly involve them in contests for influence in such resource-rich states as Bangladesh and Burma.

In the context of inevitable (although manageable) friction between India and China, recent actions by the U.S. are, well, curious. Two weeks ago, in briefings in Washington and New Delhi, senior American officials went out of their way to state that it was now a U.S. goal to "help India become a major power in the 21st century." This, said one official, was a "highly significant development," and so it is. Taken together with the strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance that has been such a feature of the presidency of George W. Bush, Washington's strategic embrace of India can be seen as part of an insurance policy that guarantees that the U.S. has friends in the region if China flexes its muscles a bit too grandly.

So far, Beijing has responded to the new U.S. policy with notable insouciance. "India is already a major country," said Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei last week, when asked about the American briefings. Sun Shihai remarked: "If the Bush Administration's partnership with India fosters peace and security in the region, then China will welcome it." And Yan Xuetong, a foreign-relations expert at Tsinghua University, made the obvious—but accurate—point that "being a powerful country is something that only India can do for itself ... the U.S. is not in the business of creating other superpowers."

But at the very least, the new American policy shows how Asia is changing. Not long ago, the Asian story was all about economics—about a miracle that started in Japan and spread through Southeast Asia to China, transforming the life chances of more people in a shorter time than the world had ever seen. At the same time, there was only one potential Asian superpower in the American imagination, and its capital was Beijing. But now geopolitics are starting to define the Asian story, and Washington has woken up to the fact that China is not the only Asian power that is rising.

How this plays out will be one of the century's great themes. The potential for increased human happiness flowing from China's and India's continued economic and cultural development is almost limitless. But the possibility of future conflict cannot be discounted. There's no reason that history should repeat itself. Still, it's worth remembering that shortly after Louis XIV proclaimed the disappearance of the Pyrenees, Europe was plunged into long and bloody war. It will take more than seminars on development economics to guarantee that Asia does not go the same way.