Word’s Eye View: What Vijay Gokhale’s China’s Wars Reveals About Beijing’s Strategy

Strategic analysts hold a belief that can be summed up like this. “The Catholic Church thinks in terms of centuries. Communist China thinks in terms of decades.”

Is this, especially as regards China, really so? Vijay Gokhale’s latest book, China’s Wars: The Politics and Diplomacy Behind Its Military Coercion, offers some answers.

Former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale is unquestionably one of India’s foremost experts on China. In a 39-year career in the Indian Foreign Service, he served not only as an ambassador to China but also in key positions in the ministry's East Asia section. A prolific writer, he has written several books on China.

This is a concise book, (if you ignore the extensive Endnotes), about 150 pages. In the book, Gokhale analyses the geopolitical as well as domestic imperatives behind four of Communist China’s wars.

What were the factors that propelled the Chinese regime to resort to military action in each of the cases? Here is what the book reveals:

The 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis: The confrontation was less about immediate invasion by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces invading the mainland and more about testing American security commitments, probing Soviet solidarity, and galvanising domestic political mobilisation.

The 1962 Sino-Indian War: According to the author’s analysis, this was not a territorial dispute but an offensive designed to deliver a decisive political blow, humiliate Indian leadership on the global stage, and secure tactical dominance along the Himalayan frontier.

The 1969 Sino-Soviet Border Clashes: These were more an exercise in signalling to the US China’s break with the USSR and laying the groundwork for rapprochement with Washington.

The 1979 Invasion of Vietnam: According to the author, this was a demonstration of Deng Xiaoping prioritising geopolitical alignment with the West and regional deterrence over battlefield symmetry.

Frankly, the Taiwan crisis of 1958 and the 1969 Sino-Soviet clashes can hardly be classified as “wars”. They were, at best, minor skirmishes. Sure, they could have led to major wars, but didn’t, because China backed down in time.

Grey-Zone Warfare

In almost the last five decades (since 1979), China has never fought an active war. However, that doesn’t mean it has given up forcefully pursuing its aims, whether through economic, diplomatic, or military (mostly threatened) means.

This short section is, by far, the most interesting of the book. Gokhale writes of the "salami-slicing" tactics in the South China Sea, continuous aerial incursions across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, or sustained infrastructure build-ups and standoffs along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Eastern Ladakh. His point is that Beijing seeks to alter reality on the ground just beneath the threshold of full-scale war. Countering this approach requires adversaries to understand that Beijing's military actions are deeply integrated with economic leverage, psychological operations, and narrative warfare, he says.

A Glaring Omission

Fascinating though the book is, I have one complaint. Since the Communist Party came to power in China in 1949, the longest war it fought was the Korean War that lasted from 1950-53. According to most historians, Communist China’s troop losses were between 118,00 (Chinese number) and 400,000 (Western estimates). Yet no analysis explains the decision-making that led to China’s participation in this conflict. In fact, I searched for the term “Korean War” in my eBook and found only two references, both tangential.

Prescription for New Delhi

If you look at the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic relations, it paints a clear picture. During the civil war with the Chiang Kai-shek regime, it depended on Soviet Russia for assistance. During the Korean War, when it felt threatened by UN forces nearing the Yalu River, it entered on the side of North Korea, supplying manpower while the arms came from the USSR. In the 1958 Taiwan Crisis and the Sino-Indian War, it held the USSR at bay. By the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969, it leaned toward the US, a position that continued through Deng Xiaoping’s tenure and beyond, as it benefited economically from access to American markets, technology, and investment. And when the relationship with the US turned adversarial, it again cosied up to Russia.

Based on these facts and China’s Grey-Zone conflicts, Gokhale concludes with pragmatic prescriptions for Indian defence planners, diplomats, and strategic thinkers. He emphasises that New Delhi cannot afford to treat border flare-ups as isolated tactical incidents. Deterring Beijing demands building asymmetric counter-coercion capabilities, developing clear red lines, investing in linguistic and analytical expertise on internal Chinese political dynamics, and maintaining robust coalition partnerships across the Indo-Pacific.

Book: China’s Wars: The Politics & Diplomacy Behind Its Military Coercion

Author: Vijay Gokhale

Publisher: Simon & Schuster India

Pages: 210

Price: ₹699

Published on: Sunday, August 23, 2026, 07:45 AM IST