The Phnom Penh paradox

via CAAI

Dhiraj Nayyar

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Posted: Mon Sep 27 2010

Contrasts don’t get much sharper than this: when Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping visited Cambodia last December, he announced soft loans and grants worth $1.2 billion to one of the poorest countries in the ASEAN bloc. When President Pratibha Patil visited Cambodia last week, the first visit by an Indian president in over 50 years, India offered Cambodia just $15 million (plus $246,000 for a rural school) in the form of aid. It isn’t hard to see which of the two countries is likely to come out on top in the battle for influence in Cambodia. President Patil may have reiterated the prime minister’s view that there is enough room for both India and China to grow simultaneously. But on the ground, it appears that China has already occupied much of the space.

In Cambodia, at least, India ought to have had a clear lead over China in the game of influence. To start off with, of course, India’s civilisational links stretch back thousands of years. The world heritage site of Angkor Vat, built originally as a temple for Vishnu by the Khmer king Suryavarman II, is the most famous symbol of those links. But even in more contemporary times, India has played its diplomatic cards better than China. China supported the notorious Khmer Rouge regime which presided over the mass murder of an estimated one to two million Cambodians. India, on the other hand, was one of the first countries (in fact, the first non-Soviet bloc country) in the world to recognise the government that replaced the Khmer Rouge regime in 1980 after a Vietnamese-led invasion.

Cambodia’s current prime minister, Hun Sen, was one of the leaders of the Vietnam-assisted rebellion against the Khmer Rouge and was foreign minister in the government that Indira Gandhi recognised as the official government of Cambodia. He isn’t likely to be favourably disposed to the Chinese for reasons of history, but finds it difficult if not impossible to look away from the massive amounts of money China is pumping into the Cambodian economy. Consider the scale: Chinese investments in Cambodia over the last four years total $6 billion; the total size of the Cambodian economy is just $10 billion. The economy is practically breathing on Chinese-infused dollars.

Andrew Burmon, an American national and associate editor of the English-language Cambodia Daily, worries about the excessive influence of China in this country and in the region that surrounds it (Laos and Burma in particular). He says, “The US and India need to get together to form a strong counterweight to Chinese interests in this region.” The US, of course, ceded its space in this region after the Vietnam War. In more recent times, the US has been too pre-occupied by the Middle East and Afghanistan to worry about East Asia, a region where it once wielded considerable influence, especially in the Cold War period.

Kay Kimsong, editor-in-chief of the Phnom Penh Post’s Khmer edition believes that people in Cambodia are ambivalent about China’s influence. “It’s 50-50 as far as China is concerned... the investments are, of course, an attraction.” He also points out that India’s visibility in his country, even in soft power terms, has actually declined over the last two decades.

“Indian films used to be big in the ’80s, but now South Korean films dominate the market,” says Kay.

That isn’t particularly good news for India as it tries to extend its influence in this part of the world. India is unlikely to be able to compete with China in either hard power or the doling out of dollars (even though we can do better than just $ 15 million): we aren’t, after all, a huge surplus economy like China’s. India’s best bet in the near future is soft power, and not simply films.

India’s great strength is to be a role model for countries like Cambodia. China, for all its success, is too unrealistic a role model for countries such as Cambodia to ape. It may not even be desirable given its continued disdain for democratic freedoms. On the other hand, India’s solid, even if sometimes slow-moving, democracy and experiment with free markets led by individual entrepreneurs rather than the state are better role models for countries which are following similar institutional paths.

Writing in the Phnom Penh Post during President Patil’s visit, columnist Steve Finch made this argument powerfully. In a column titled “Let’s learn from India’s wealth of rural expertise”, Finch wrote about how Cambodia’s telecom infrastructure, terribly lacking in rural areas, could take out a leaf from the Indian telecom sector’s book. His overall argument was best summed up by the following line: “In many ways Cambodia can glean more from India’s economic model than that of China.”

What the government of India needs to do more forcefully is to project these ideals, and share India’s knowledge base more openly. These would be useful and powerful counterweights to China’s dollars.

dhiraj.nayyar@expressindia.com