China takes a long and winding Kashmir road

China's interest in the Kashmir issue stems from three main reasons. First, China occupies since the 1962 Sino-Indian border war about 38,000 sq km of Indian Kashmir. In addition, it acquired another 5,000 sq km from Pakistan under the 1963 border demarcation accord with the latter.

Second, China is concerned with the issue of maintaining security in South Asia where the Kashmir dispute represents one of the explosive problems in view of Indo-Pakistan hostility.

Third, the Kashmir question, particularly since its re-emergence on the surface in the late 1980s, has been having impact on China's domestic affairs in terms of escalating separatist demands in Xinjiang province under the notion of Jihad.

Xinjiang shares borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan's North West Frontier Province from where Muslim militants carry out operations in Indian Kashmir.

Some of the captured militants admitted that they were from Xinjiang and that they were trained by Jihadi organisations in Baluchistan.

For a better understanding of Chinese perspectives on this thorny and multi-dimensional issue, we need to go back to history as it clearly reveals how the Chinese changed their position towards Kashmir from time to time in accordance with its developments and implications upon their own national security.

During the era from the 1950s to 1980s, China persistently adopted a Kashmiri policy that strongly backed the Pakistani viewpoint as a result of its delicate status in the international system in the 1950s and 1960s, cold war conflicts, disputes with India and the latter's policy towards Tibet including playing host to the Dalai Lama.

In other words, during the Maoist era China supported Islamabad in the latter's dispute with India over Kashmir. China held the view that Kashmir was a disputed territory and that the way to settle it should be by giving the people of Kashmir the right to self-determination according to UN resolutions.

Owing to this Chinese position and due to its need for a powerful ally against India, Pakistan overlooked the Chinese occupation of vast chunks of territory in Kashmir and even gave legitimacy to such occupation by signing an agreement for the formal demarcation of the boundary between Xinjiang and Kashmir.

In order to avoid embarrassment (especially for the Pakistani side), the boundary agreement stated that the Kashmiri territories under China's control should be subject to negotiations between the two friendly countries when the people of Kashmir would liberate their land from the Indians.

With China's abandonment of radical foreign policy and with its rise as a recognised global power in the 1980s, there was a noticeable change in its Kashmiri policy, especially in the wake of the historic visit to Beijing in 1988 by the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

The change included the disappearance in China's official rhetoric of anything about the right of the people of Kashmir to self-determination or any reference to the UN relevant resolutions as though China realised all of a sudden that the contrary would mean an implicit agreement to grant the people of Xinjiang and Tibet the right to self-determination.

The new policy line advocated in all references to the Kashmir issue that it is a dispute between two nations that it should be settled through negotiations and peaceful solutions.

This reinforced India's emphasis on bilateralism. However, the most significant development in China's policy towards Kashmir was in the 1990s when Indian Kashmir was turned (following the momentum of the Afghan Jihad) into a battle-field between the Indian army and a number of Jihadi organisations mounting their attacks from Pakistan.

The struggle escalated when Pakistan-backed Taliban seized power in Kabul and turned Afghanistan into a base for armed Jihad against India, China and Central Asian countries. At that time, it was noticed that China sought to distance itself from the Pakistani viewpoint towards Kashmir and to get closer to the Indian viewpoint.

This became more apparent in Beijing's stand during the 1999 Kargil war, its publication of a White Paper in 2000 that declared for the first time that India did not represent a security threat to China, and the unprecedented visits by senior Chinese leaders to New Delhi.

It is true that during the Kargil crisis the Chinese did not condemn Pakistan in public in a bid to maintain their strategic relations with the latter, especially in view of a number of unresolved issues in the Indo-Chinese relations.

Nevertheless, according to informed sources they expressed their dissatisfaction over Pakis-tan's role in creating Taliban and consequently escalating the struggle in Afghanistan and Kashmir. China's position was dictated by internal and external considerations.

On the one hand, there were fears of the possibility that the deteriorating conditions in Kashmir could lead to a nuclear war on the southern borders of China that could destroy the regional security and stability necessary for China's continuous economic rise.

On the other hand, the more important consideration was that any victory achieved by the armed Kashmiri factions could give a strong fillip to the separatist aspirations of Xinjiang's Muslims following their moral gains with the emergence of the independent republics of Central Asia and the fall of neighbouring Afghanistan in the hands of Taliban and Al Qaida.

It should be noted that Xinjiang province or East Turkmenistan, which is rich in coal and oil, was formally annexed to China in 1884. It is the home of the majority of China's Muslims who total around 20 million. Its population are Turkic of Uighur, Tajik, Kazak, and Kyrgyz origins.

They have over the years continued to maintain their distinct cultural identity in the hope of an independence state.

A close look at the current Chinese rhetoric towards Kashmir will enable us to conclude that Beijing opposes any development that leads to the emergence of an independent Kashmiri state or even Pakistan's full sovereignty over the entire Kashmir soil, because both scenarios are not in its favour.

The first scenario means the creation of an entity dominated by extremist armed factions on China's western borders that could give strong support to Xinjiang's secessionists, hence Beijing will find itself in a similar situation to that currently faced by India in Kashmir.

The second scenario is also disadvantageous to Beijing because it inevitably means that Pakistan will claim back the Kashmiri territories that are presently occupied by China. Even if this is not done by the Pakistani regime, the people of Kashmir and their allies of Pakistani radical organisations will undertake it, causing trouble for the Chinese.

Thus, it can be said that China's enthusiasm about participating in the war against terrorism (despite the fact that it is a US-led war and that its outcome would result in furthering Washington's influence in China's neighbouring states) is not only linked to the requirements of protecting its security and national unity that are threatened by Xinjiang's jihadi groups but are also linked to emergence of conditions in areas neighbouring China, such as Kashmir, to be