NEW DELHI -- Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans coined the phrase the "100 percenters" to describe Beijing's international fans who support whatever China says 100 percent. Publishing under the pen name Simon Leys, Ryckmans compiled the statements of these toadies in defense of Chinese actions, including Mao Zedong's disastrous Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and how the same sycophants later pitifully joined Beijing's denunciations of the very "successes" they had extolled. Today such hangers-on are trying to market China as a "near-superpower."
While 100 percenters in the West remain on the fringes of the decision-making processes, they have influenced the policy debate in India from the very beginning, despite China's record of gobbling up the Tibet buffer in 1950, invading India in 1962 and supplying technologies to Pakistan for the manufacture and delivery of weapons of mass destruction.
This tribe of Indian appeasers operates on the tenet that China can do no wrong but India can and does. They have an explanation to justify any Chinese action against their country's interests.