Himalayan assault: India and China clash

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There's a mystique to mercenaries, hired guns with serious grit and flexible ethics. The UN has formally outlawed them, but these days the shadowy business is becoming more accepted. And in Africa, there may be more of them than ever. And history is littered with artists who died as paupers, their genius undiscovered. It's happening less and less. Artists are planning for their legacies early on, and galleries are spending quite a lot of their time and effort on the dead. First up, though, High in the Himalayas is a mostly barren 2,100-mile frontier between India and China. The border has long been the site of scattered disputes, but on Monday, things took a deadly turn for the first time in 45 years. At least 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese troops were killed in the region of Ladakh. The world's most populous countries and Asia's largest nuclear powers are now seeking a way out of the situation. While saving face.

This particular crisis erupted about a month ago, but the border dispute itself goes back a half century.

Shashank Joshi is our defense editor.

India and China fought a border war in 1962 in which China defeated India, and the most important thing to understand is there isn't really a border at all. There are two competing lines that's called the Line of Actual Control. Each side disagrees where it is, and so over time you repeatedly have patrols bumping into each other facing off, and that will continue to happen as long as neither side agrees where in the mountains their actual frontier lies.

So how did things get so out of hand on Monday if these kinds of tensions are always there?

What happened is back in the spring, India delayed one of its own military exercises because of COVID-19. China continued with its own drill on its side of the border, but the People's Liberation Army, which is China's army, peeled away from those exercises, and they occupied some of the disputed posts on the border in an Indian territory called Ladakh, which is at the very far north of India. India's army found them at the end of April, they panicked, they thought, hang on a minute, these guys are in territory that we think is ours in a few strategic areas. And so that caused a crisis. Both sides moved thousands of troops, artillery, tanks to the region closer to the border. And there were punch-ups twice in May resulting in very, very serious injuries.

And steadily building since then?

Well, not really. There was sort of a lull about 10 days, 2 weeks ago. India's government had been playing down the severity of the crisis. They didn't want to give the impression they had been caught napping on the border with China. And they were mindful that if the television media in India got wind of this, there would be a sort of nationalist backlash that would make it much more difficult to defuse the situation. So on June 9th, India's government said that there had been a disengagement agreement reached, that China was moving troops, tents, and vehicles back at one of the sites known as the Galwan Valley. Galwan Valley, which is one of the three sites where there had been a standoff, and that India had been reciprocating. And it all seemed to be going pretty well. What happened a few days later on Monday night suggests it wasn't going well enough. The Indian side was patrolling to look for evidence that the Chinese had disengaged as per the agreements. And what they found is that a Chinese patrol had camped itself on the southern bank of the Galwan River. And when they confronted them, it seems the Indian side was very quickly overwhelmed. Their commanding officer was attacked. A large number of Indian troops were critically injured. You know, it really seems to have been a very, very brutal fight.

But not so far away, India and Pakistan have these kinds of border clashes all the time with fatalities. I mean, how different is this?

Of course, India-Pakistani troops send shellfire across the border all the time. They have many deaths on the border. This is different. This is the first time since 1975 that blood has been spilt on the India-China frontier. It's the deadliest clash for Indians since 1967. And if Chinese troops have died, this could be the first time there have been PLA combat fatalities since the 1980s. And these are Asia's two biggest rising powers. These are two nuclear-armed countries that have stabilised their relationship in many ways over the past 15, 20 years. So this is a watershed moment for Asia, I think, and a really serious landmark for India-China relations as well.

And what have the two countries' governments said about all this?

Well, unsurprisingly, they blamed each other. China's government says that India crossed the border twice illegally and attacked Chinese personnel unprovoked. The Indian side is a bit more cautious about what it's saying, but it's arguing that China did not adhere to the agreements, the disengagement agreements that had been formulated a week or two previously. It effectively said China didn't stand by the commitments it had made to pull its forces back a few kilometres.

And significant though it is, is this really just about a bit of territory in northern India, or do you think there's a broader geopolitical story that this is just the flashpoint for?

The immediate cause is probably India's border construction in Ladakh. For many years, China had much better logistics in the region, right? It could rush troops to the front more quickly than India could. And over the past 10 years, what's been happening is India has been building roads, it's been building high-altitude airstrips, It's been putting new tanks in the region. And I think all of that infrastructure development and military buildup is seen by China as a challenge. And some of it is seen by China as an unacceptable change to the territorial status quo, one that needs a response. But the geopolitical environment has also contributed to that mistrust. We have seen, you know, last year, for example, India revoked the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, the state in the north, And let's remember, China has part of that state because Pakistan gave it a little strip back in 1963. So the Chinese were irritated by that. On the other hand, India is anxious about the way in which China's economic and political influence has been growing all over South Asia, in Pakistan, in Nepal, in Bhutan, in Bangladesh, in Sri Lanka, and the fact that the Chinese Navy has been a growing presence in the Indian Ocean. And in response to that, India has tilted ever closer to America, China's rival. So the geopolitics of this effectively exacerbate all of those local tactical border tensions as well.

But what about this most recent flashpoint then? How does this de-escalate if it's, you know, the first deaths in absolutely decades? It looks hard to come back from.

It looks very hard to come back from. The border war in 1962 that India lost was absolutely traumatising for the Indian government. You know, every Indian will be aware of it, and it sort of haunts India-China relations. I think this is going to be a turning point. It's going to accelerate all of those trends I talked about. I think that India is going to deepen its relationship with America and American allies in Asia, like Japan and Australia. I think India is going to spend more on defence. It may prioritise some of its defence spending away from Pakistan and towards China. And I think China is also going to take a harder line with respect to India. So for the past 10 years, the competition between the two countries has intensified on the border, on the Indian Ocean, across the region, internationally. But I think we're now going to see a much more intense and even dangerous phase in the way that that competition plays out.

Shashank, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

In 2015, when Boko Haram was running riot in northeastern Nigeria, It took a group of battle-hardened soldiers to help turn the tide against the jihadists. The government brought in a bunch of grizzled South Africans for help, many of them in their 50s. These professional hired guns or mercenaries are increasingly prevalent in Africa. Despite a UN treaty that bans them, there may now be more mercenaries across the continent than ever before. Their remit goes beyond just fighting jihadists or standing in for national armies. They're also tasked with things like protecting wildlife conservation areas and removing landmines. But among these motley crews are veterans of some of the continent's messiest coup attempts.

I think the main point about mercenaries is that they were a dirty word in Africa, particularly in the early '60s, mid-'60s.

Zan Smiley is editor-at-large at The Economist.

There were a number of attempts to overthrow governments, to help secessionist movements, for instance in Nigeria, Biafra, and also in the southeastern province of Congo known as Katanga. A lot of these mercenaries were ruthless killers basically who were there purely for the money. However, in the last few years, one or two African governments, in fact at least a dozen have been hiring mercenaries to prop themselves up on the basis that these companies now calling themselves private military companies are very experienced. Very often they were people who were in the armies of Rhodesia, as was before it became Zimbabwe, or South Africa. And the same people, very professional soldiers, have, as it were, turned their coats and are now helping to sustain governments, sometimes even governments that they were fighting against 25 or 30 years ago.

And, and who are they? Where do they operate?

The most recent example is in Mozambique, where in the northeastern province, close to projects which are likely to produce vast amounts of gas offshore, has been facing a jihadist rebellion. And the government of Mozambique at first hired a well-known Russian company called Wagner, or Wagner, who had rather a rough ride and in fact have turned tail and given up. Whereupon the Mozambicans hired a company led by a well-known former Rhodesian officer called Lionel Dyck and has taken up their services to see if they can do a better job knocking back the jihadists in the northeastern province of Mozambique.

And so why employ these companies and their mercenaries at all? Why not use your own nation's army?

Well, I think the simple reason is that they are efficient, they're ruthless, they're nimble, they are flexible, they're extremely experienced, but they're much cheaper than hiring conventional weaponry, tanks, aircraft, and so forth. It should also be mentioned, I think, particularly in the case of Wagner, that very often they're doing the dirty work, if you like, on behalf of official governments. But those governments are able to offer what used to be called plausible deniability, particularly in the case today of Wagner, The Russians can maintain that they have nothing to do with fighting against jihadists in northern Mozambique, for example, even though everybody knows that Wagner is actually a company quite close through its personnel to President Vladimir Putin.

But they aren't just operating in the place of conventional armies, right? What about the other activities they've been engaged in?

These guys they hire, they are mostly former soldiers in regular armies, and they can carry out quite a wide range of activities from what you might call sort of obviously do-gooding at one end to the more ruthless business of killing people and serving as bodyguards at the other. And of course, nowadays they make much of the fact that they help in conservation efforts. But I mean, they are pretty tough in the way they do it. They use helicopter gunships to deter poachers and so forth. They've done a lot of demining in countries where there are still litterings of landmines which need to be unearthed and made safe. Obviously, the demining operations are benevolent. And then there's the whole range of serving as bodyguards to both companies and to governments and even on occasions to the UN.

So it's not merely euphemistic then to call them private security companies if they're broadly accepted, they're permitted anyway, and people think that broadly they work for the causes of good, either the good guys in conflicts or in things like conservation and so on. They're just private security companies.

Yes, they are. And of course, the term mercenary does have all sorts of sort of unpleasant connotations. So private military companies has a much more sort of polite ring about it. I think on the moral side, the main lesson one could learn is how things change. How times change, how alliances change, and indeed how the personalities probably change. Because after all, 30 years ago, some of these guys were working for countries that were widely reviled, for example, South Africa under apartheid. And now that that's all over, they still have their military skills with them, but they are deploying them for generally a better cause.

Zann, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much.

Achieving lasting artistic fame was, for centuries, a bit hit and miss. Take Johannes Vermeer. He was unknown not just in his lifetime, but for two centuries after he died. It was the French modernists, who noticed his painterly eye and rescued him from obscurity. These days, artists who have long passed are still being rediscovered, but it's happening less and less by chance.

Sophie Tauber-Arp may really be the most influential artist you've never heard of.

Fiametta Rockel is The Economist's culture correspondent.

She lived around the time of the First World War. She was Swiss. She did these extraordinarily colorful, joyous, geometric paintings. She did elaborate dance routines. Sculpture, textile design, architecture. She was right at the center of the Dada movement, and then suddenly, in the middle of the Second World War, she died. Her husband Hans Arp went on to concentrate on his own career, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp was all but forgotten. All of that, though, is about to change. Hauser Wirth, one of the world's biggest commercial galleries, is set to represent the Taeuber-Arp estate, and what's going to happen is a series of incredibly important exhibitions. Starting next spring, a major traveling retrospective will open at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. It will then go on to Tate Modern and finally will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022.

But I mean, it's not so uncommon for an artist to be rediscovered after her death, right?

It's not uncommon, of course, but the whole process of shaping artistic posterity has become big business, and that is completely new. Any artist who's signed up now to a major gallery is going to get advice about legacy creation, about reputation, about how their name should be represented after they die. What's really changed is that for the galleries, this has become really a major part of their business. They now court executors, they try and poach estates from each other. Hauser Wirth represents 90 artists probably a third of them are dead.

And how do galleries go about this process of legacy creation after one of their artists dies?

The first thing that the galleries do is to do a major survey of the artist's work. They then begin mapping out a series of exhibitions that show off dead artists in the sense that they are put into context of where they fit into art history vis-à-vis their peers, how they were influenced, how they themselves also went on to influence other people. Ivan Wirth, the art dealer, told me, "Art history likes to put a label on people. If people can't find that label, it's very hard. You need to be able to tell a story." Context is the story. That's the most important thing of all.

But galleries that want to sell an artist's work clearly have a vested interest in building those reputations.

That's a very valid point, but you can't really do this for an artist who has no talent. People want to be educated. They don't want to have the wool pulled over their eyes.

Okay, but what they're doing is kind of creating art history from whole cloth here. I mean, isn't that the job, for example, of museums?

Well, what's been absolutely fascinating is the way that big galleries like Gagosian, Hauser Wirth, David Zwirner have all moved into doing museum-quality shows, in building galleries that look like museums. And in fact, hiring art historians to create their exhibition program. A very, very good example: in 2009, Gagosian put on a show of Picasso's musketeer paintings, his great musketeers with mustaches. They've really been derided as the mud-colored final scribblings of a lazy old man. A lot of them were painted in just one day. Gagosian hired the great Picasso curator and biographer John Richardson to curate that show, and Richardson really reshaped how these works to see, and of course, prices surged as a result.

So with this growing trend of more legacy management, do you think we'll hear more about artists that we haven't heard anything from yet?

The big galleries' focus has really been on the abstract expressionists like Rothko, a group of long undervalued Italian modernists, the American photographers after the Second World War. The results that have been seen with these groups of artists have really set off a search among galleries for dead artists who might be deserving of the same treatment. And I think we're going to see a big surge in this. Alan Schwartzman, who's a very experienced art advisor in New York, said to me, they're looking at opportunities that never existed before. We are really just at the beginning.

Piumetta, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. See you back here tomorrow.

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