The Chinese leader’s visit is a further
display of his ambitious aims — both economic and strategic — on India’s
doorstep.
By Bhadra Sharma and Kai Schultz
 |
|
Portraits of President Xi
Jinping of China and President Bidhya Devi Bhandari
of Nepal in Kathmandu on
Friday. Credit Niranjan Shrestha/Associated Press
|
KATHMANDU,
Nepal — Xi Jinping touched
down in Nepal on Saturday, the first visit by a Chinese president to the
country in more than two decades, underscoring Beijing’s increasing interest in
South Asia as a strategic hub for defense and transit projects.
Ahead of Mr. Xi’s two-day visit, which
follows a trip to India, thousands of security officers took up posts around
Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Workers planted flowers, repaired potholes and hung
the Chinese president’s portrait on electricity poles.
Though Nepal has traditionally been close to
India, in recent years, Chinese investors have pumped millions of dollars into
the country, one of Asia’s poorest and least-developed democracies. And under
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, leader of the Nepal Communist Party, Nepal has
tried to diversify its trade agreements and move away from dependence on India.
Nepal, which borders Tibet and northern
India, is the chief candidate for a new trans-boundary railway under China’s
Belt and Road Initiative that would link China to the subcontinent.
Constantino Xavier, a foreign policy fellow
at Brookings India in New Delhi, said, “China is seeking to find a sweet spot:
to increase its influence in Nepal without upsetting India’s security concerns
in what used to be its predominant sphere of influence.”
The balance is tricky. China and India have
historically jockeyed for influence in Nepal, and they share their own sources
of tension. Lately, that has been over the disputed region of Kashmir, China’s
Belt and Road agreements with Pakistan, and over a military standoff in a
mountainous border area claimed by Bhutan.
In recent years, India’s relationship with
Nepal has also suffered. In 2015, after Nepal released a new democratic
Constitution following a bloody Maoist insurgency and decades of rule by
monarchs, India unofficially imposed a monthslong blockade along the border.
The blockade, which many believed was
retaliation by New Delhi for not having a bigger role in helping to draft
Nepal’s Constitution, led to a humanitarian crisis. Trucks piled up on the
India border. Nepal’s access to food, medicine and fuel was pinched off. Aid
workers were unable to obtain crucial supplies to rebuild Nepal after
devastating earthquakes that spring killed about 9,000 people and destroyed
hundreds of thousands of homes.
Mr. Oli, who served as prime minister during
that period, was re-elected in 2017 under a banner of nationalism and a party
vow to increase business with China. China, at the same time, has aggressively
courted closer relationships with Nepal and other countries traditionally in
India’s sphere of influence, including Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Rajan Bhattarai, a foreign affairs adviser to
Mr. Oli, said that in addition to the railway project, Nepal expected to sign
deals with China that could transform the entire Himalayan region by revamping
underperforming hydropower, energy and transit industries.
But Mr. Bhattarai insisted that there was no
bad blood with India.
“Friendship with all, enmity with none: It’s
a core principle of our foreign policy,” he said. “Since the last Chinese
president visited Nepal in 1996, things have significantly changed with China
in terms of its role in regional and international affairs.”
But as China’s influence rises in South Asia,
some officials in Nepal have voiced concerns about whether dealing with Mr. Xi
will mean losing sovereignty.
To the south, Sri Lanka’s leaders have
struggled to pay back China for funding a huge but failing port project,
forcing the government to turn over the port and 15,000 acres of land around it
to Beijing. The 2017 transfer gave China a strategic foothold along a crucial
commercial and military waterway, as well as territory just a few hundred miles
from India’s shores.
“There is a rising skepticism about Chinese
ability to deliver on key projects, as well as concerns about credit terms and
debt sustainability,” Mr. Xavier said.
In Nepal, monetary concerns have collided
with ideological ones. Last month, Mr. Oli, his party and a 50-member
delegation from the Communist Party of China hosted a two-day symposium on “Xi
Jinping Thought,” the political theory undergirding China’s communist
government.
The event drew ire from Nepal’s opposition
leaders, who saw the exercise as a troubling way for a democracy to curry favor
with China.
“Our constitutional and political provisions
are based on democracy, pluralism, federalism, an open society and
parliamentary democracy, all of which are missing in the Chinese system,”
Bimalendra Nidhi, the vice president of the Nepali Congress party, told The
Kathmandu Post.
Among the more sensitive issues on the table
between Mr. Xi and Mr. Oli is the signing of an extradition treaty that could
allow China to remove Tibetan refugees from Nepal, where many transit on their
way to more permanent settlement in India.
Analysts said that the fate of the
extradition bill could have implications for China’s surveillance capacity in
South Asia as it extends credit lines across the region. It is this deal, which
officials have declined to discuss in detail, that has been a primary pressure
point by the Chinese ahead of Mr. Xi’s trip.
“The Chinese are offering huge economic
incentives during this visit, but they are injecting their own interests, too,”
said Mrigendra Bahadur Karki, who heads the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies
at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. “Xi is coming to Nepal to take it under
China’s grip.”
Bhadra Sharma reported from Kathmandu, and
Kai Schultz from New Delhi.
Kai Schultz is a reporter in the South Asia
bureau, based in New Delhi. He has reported from five countries in the region
and previously lived in Kathmandu, Nepal. @Kai_Schultz
