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ShareAnd as if long-standing, hugely contentious disputes over the Line of Actual Control weren't enough, China has in recent weeks opened a new flank by needling India on the Kashmir issue.
First, it issued visas to students from Jammu and Kashmir on slips of paper affixed to their passports, a symbolic statement that it considers Kashmir a disputed territory. More recently, it has resorted to cartographic provocation by depicting Jammu and Kashmir as an entity independent of India.
Analysts have been puzzled while trying to figure out the underlying reason for this ratcheting up of tensions from the Chinese side. Why, they wonder, is China opening up new disputes with India, particularly when even the long-standing ones have proved difficult to reconcile?
One clue to the rationale for these recent Chinese provocations directed at India lies in the evolving political landscape in some of China's other frontiers, particularly in East Asia. Even up until last year, China had testy relations with its eastern neighbours, particularly Taiwan (a de facto independent state over which China claims sovereignty) and Japan (whose savage colonial occupation of China until the end of the Second World War remains a festering wound).
For eight years from 2000, Taiwan was ruled by a coalition headed by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which favours Taiwanese independence. Those years were characterised by a tense stand-off between Taiwan and China and the build-up of military arsenals by both sides.
Yet, for China's leaders, the DPP rule served one additional purpose: as a prop to summon up nationalist Chinese anger against the DPP's "provocations". Such invocations of nationalism helped to deflect criticism away from the Communist Party of China's corruption and other failings, and instead direct popular discontent at an external "enemy".
The same was the case in Japan, where the centre-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was in power for almost all of 54 years from 1955. LDP leaders' social conservatism and nationalism manifested itself in their leaders visiting the Yasukuni Shrine (which commemorates some convicted war criminals, among over 2 million war dead) and their denial of Japan's wartime atrocities; in China, these "provocations" again served as handy events to whip up nationalist fervour.
In March 2005, illustratively, Japanese embassies and commercial interests in Chinese cities were vandalised following riots that Chinese authorities either incited or tolerated in response to Japanese attempts to rewrite war history in its favour.
Given the strains in China's relations with its eastern neighbours until last year, Chinese strategists had argued against accentuating China's conflict on the western frontier with India, since it would effectively divide China's political attention and military resources (if they had to be summoned) on two flanks. Coincidentally, during this period, China did not make too many discordant public articulations on the border dispute in the Arunachal Pradesh region, and even came close to accepting India's position on Kashmir.
However, the political landscape in both Taiwan and Japan has changed dramatically since last year. In Taiwan, the DPP coalition was voted out of power in May 2008, and replaced by a coalition headed by the Kuomintang Party, which favours eventual Taiwanese reunification with China. This has led to a marked lowering of political tension between China and Taiwan, and a dramatic improvement in relations between them.
Likewise, in Japan, the LDP-led coalition was voted out in August 2009 and replaced by the Democratic Party of Japan, whose leader has pledged to review Japan's military relationship with the US and explore closer integration within East Asia and, in particular, with China.
While the emerging entente with its eastern neighbours yields China a 'peace dividend', it also means that the two pillars on which a ready (and useful) invocation of Chinese nationalism rests have been knocked down. It is this vacuum that Chinese leaders are looking to fill by turning Sauron's Red Eye on India: after all, India has a long-running border dispute with China, has offered refuge to the Dalai Lama (and tolerates his travels to Arunachal Pradesh), and represents (in however small a scale) a rival emerging power in Asia.
India does not lack defences to face down the Red Eye, but it helps at the first level to know the underlying reason for the recent excessive attention that the Eye has bestowed on India. The Eye is inflamed by the perceived need to keep Chinese nationalism on slow burn and serve it hot, should domestic political circumstances ever warrant it.
The writer is DNA's East Asia correspondent
