India’s relations with China have become increasingly confusing. For more than 20 years, the two countries have maintained a high degree of military stability along the border. After the diplomatic spat in 1998, over India’s nuclear tests, Delhi and Beijing have been very civil in public. The past two years, however, have been worrying. China has increased the number of troop incursions across the line of actual control; and its diplomacy has hardened. The Indian government has reacted calmly, for the most part, but has also hardened its stand. What is going on with China?

Since 1988, India and China have assiduously built a diplomatic and military architecture designed to normalize relations. There have been four pillars to this architecture: summitry, border negotiations, confidence-building measures, and trade. Indian and Chinese leaders at the highest levels have met more times in the past 20 years than in the previous four decades. The two countries have held border negotiations continuously over that time. They have initialled and implemented a series of very sensible CBMs. And they have taken bilateral trade from less than $200 million in the 1980s to over $50 billion in 2008.

On the other hand, since 2007, Chinese military moves have rung alarm bells. The Indian press has reported and the Indian military has reluctantly confirmed a growing number of incursions by the Peoples’ Liberation Army across the LAC. Fortunately, these have not been militarized — the two sides have not fought each other or stood eyeball-to-eyeball on the line. In addition, Beijing has signalled that it is preparing to push its navy into the Indian Ocean and that it does not recognize this as an Indian “lake”. The Chinese navy’s suggestion to Admiral Timothy Keating of the United States of America that the US and China should divide the Pacific Ocean between them and leave the Indian Ocean to Beijing sent New Delhi a reminder that competition might be extended to the oceans as well.

More disconcerting have been a series of diplomatic provocations. The most serious have related to Arunachal Pradesh. Beijing has objected very publicly to calling the state a part of India. It has opposed loans from the Asian Development Bank for projects in Arunachal. It has also criticized visits to the state by the Indian prime minister and by the Dalai Lama. Also galling to India has been Beijing’s attitude recently to Sikkim and Kashmir. In 2003, it had seemingly accepted India’s integration of Sikkim. In recent pronouncements, it has once again raised questions about it. After years of staying aloof from the Kashmir issue, it has begun to irk New Delhi by representing the state as an independent political unit.

How can we make sense of these seemingly contradictory forms of behaviour and action? If we discount the idea that recent reports on India-China relations are alarmist or motivated, three interpretations suggest themselves.

The first is that Beijing is seeking to strengthen its hand in the border negotiations and would like to bring those talks to finality. Here the main goal is Chinese control of the Tawang monastery in Arunachal Pradesh which is important for Tibetan Buddhism, particularly in the succession politics after the Dalai Lama’s passing from the stage. New Delhi must, in this view, be brought round to giving up Tawang, if not larger portions of Arunachal Pradesh.

The second interpretation of recent Chinese behaviour is that Beijing, in its nervousness over its internal weaknesses, specifically in Tibet, is attempting to intimidate India. Thus, China needs to humiliate India in order to demonstrate to the Tibetan resistance that it has no succour and that its putative allies are weak. In addition, Beijing is warning India not to take advantage of China’s troubles in Tibet — or else risk serious consequences. Another explanation tied to internal politics points to the role of the PLA. The hardening of China’s behaviour, it may be argued, can be traced to the more nationalist view of the armed forces which is suspicious of India and less accommodative of rising Indian power. Yet another perspective is that India is part of an internal squabble over leadership which will climax in 2012 at the 18th Communist Party congress.

Third, Chinese behaviour may be traced to global geopolitics. At the heart of this geopolitics is the issue of a rising India and New Delhi’s relationship to China’s other strategic concerns — principally the US and Japan. The Chinese are beginning to take seriously the possibility that India will be a power of some scale and substance, even though its progress is hobbled by bad governance, internal unrest, and a noisy democracy. India’s demography twinned to its economic and military surge have caused Beijing to sit up. In league with American and Japanese power, India could constitute a threat well before it becomes a threat all on its own.

China’s various moves over the past two years, from this vantage point, could be regarded as a series of probes — military and diplomatic. Beijing may well be attempting to gauge how India will react to a military challenge by China, particularly in the borderlands but perhaps also in the Indian Ocean. The probe may be intended to discern whether or not New Delhi is serious about being an autonomous centre of power and following its own course. Or is New Delhi drifting into an anti-China alliance structure, however loosely and informally, with the US and Japan? At the same time, the probe could be a device to measure very carefully the US and Japanese reactions to Chinese provocations and stances. Do the two powers show signs of coming to India’s defence, at least diplomatically? Beijing may be trying to assess who, apart from the US and Japan, would offer India any kind of support — the European Union, East and Southeast Asia, Australia, or others in the developing world.

Which of these interpretations is right? It is, of course, hard to be definitive. Clearly, though, Beijing has shown no hurry in settling the border. The notion that it is seeking to move things along more quickly is therefore not terribly persuasive. That China’s moves over the past two years relate to internal instabilities is an attractive thought because it suggests that there is nothing that India has done to trigger Chinese behaviour. However, M. Taylor Fravel of MIT, in his fine study of Chinese policy towards its territorial conflicts, has suggested that Beijing tends towards concessionary rather than aggressive policies when it is internally weak.

The geopolitical argument may well be the best interpretation of China’s motives. Judging by the reactions of India, the US, and Japan, Beijing should be reassured. India has reacted fairly coolly to China’s provocations and probes, and the US and Japan have not uttered a single word in India’s support (nor has anyone else). Indeed, the Obama administration’s courting of China and the new Japanese government’s more conciliatory disposition towards the Chinese have left New Delhi in a rather lonely spot strategically — which is exactly what Beijing may have wanted to bring home to South Block.