Beijing has been widely criticized for limiting families to only one child, but India has adopted many aspects of its policy. With 1.2 billion people and on course to overtake China as the planet’s most populous country in about a decade, India is taking steps many consider nearly as harsh – but cloaking them in the far more benign-sounding “two-child norm.”

[…] “We’re on the track to be just like China,” says Leena Uppal, an earnest activist who co-ordinates the National Coalition Against Two-Child Norm and Coercive Population Policies. “It’s entirely coercive – for the women, for the health worker, who will lose her job if she doesn’t bring in enough people. The whole focus is on closing off wombs, of making sure these women don’t have any more babies.”

[…] A.R. Nanda, who was once in charge of population policy for India and established its family planning department, says that not only is there a two-child policy, it was explicitly borrowed from China: “The idea of withholding benefits comes from China … ‘If China can do it.’” [Source]

Quartz’s Gwynn Guilford notes that 37% of all the world’s female sterilization procedures take place in India, where it is by far the most common method of contraception. See more on India’s family planning policies at Human Rights Watch and Bloomberg, and on China’s, including prospects for their reform, via CDT.

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Post tags: demographics, family planning, India, one-child policy, population control
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Many of these inaugural trips involve China’s neighbors: Russia, Southeast Asia, Mongolia, India and Pakistan. Beijing has always considered the nations that surround it as the starting point for its diplomacy, and repeatedly refers to a policy in pursuit of an “amicable, secure and prosperous neighborhood”. With China engaged in territorial disputes with several Southeast Asian countries and with India, these first visits can help not only to attenuate doubts and confusion, but also reflect China’s continued emphasis on peaceful coexistence. Meanwhile, relations with Russia, Pakistan and Mongolia are already relatively sound, and visits to these countries simply seek to strengthen traditional friendships.

Africa and South America are rapidly joining Asia as the “new engines” of international politics and economics. The fact that these regions have been top destinations for the Chinese leaderships shows that Beijing is looking to combine neighborhood stability with outreach to its fellow emerging nations.

If the media is right, and Li Keqiang’s first trip includes Switzerland and Germany, then this inaugural round of Chinese diplomacy can be considered balanced and comprehensive. In other words, focus on the emerging world without ignoring relations with developed countries.

[Source]

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Post tags: foreign policy, India, Li Keqiang, mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, Xi Jinping
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In his meeting with Singh, Premier Li said China and India are important neighbors and partners by nature.

He noted that remarkable advancement has been made in bilateral ties, political mutual trust deepened, fruitful results made in the cooperation of every field, and people-to-people exchanges constantly expanded.p China and India have made satisfactory coordination and cooperation on major regional and international affairs, and achieved positive progress on border negotiations, Li added.

[...]Li said choosing India as the first leg of his maiden overseas tour as Chinese premier demonstrated the sincerity of China’s new leadership and the great importance that it attaches to developing ties with India.

China is willing to join efforts with India to seize the opportunities to deepen cooperation and let the two peoples benefit from the development of the China-India ties, Li said.

[Source]

After their talks, the two leaders signed numerous agreements on trade and resources. The Times of India reports:

To enhance trade, both the sides decided to set up three working groups under the Joint Economic Group. The three groups are Services Trade Promotion Working Group, Economic And Trade Planning Cooperation Group and Trade Statistical Analysis Group.

[...]In 2012, bilateral trade between the two countries was $66 billion, a decline from over the $74 billion mark in 2011. The two countries have set a target of $100 billion by 2015 for bilateral trade.

[...]Another pact was signed between the two sides under which China will provide information of water level, discharge and rainfall twice a day from June 1st to October 15th each year in respect of three hydrological stations on the mainstream Brahmaputra river.

[...]An agreement was also signed between Export Inspection Council of India (EIC) and AQSIQ on trade and safety of feed and feed ingredients.

[Source]

Last month, the long disputed and heavily militarized border between Tibet and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh came into attention as Chinese soldiers set up camp in northern India, hundreds of miles from the disputed region. During today’s talks, the border dispute was identified as an impediment to a healthy and productive bilateral relationship. From Reuters:

The number two in the Chinese leadership offered New Delhi a “handshake across the Himalayas” and said the world’s most populous nations could become a new engine for the global economy if they could avoid friction on the militarized border.

“Both sides believe that we need to improve the various border-related mechanisms that we have put into place and make them more efficient. We need to appropriately manage and resolve our differences,” Li said at a joint news conference with India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

[...]Among the measures being looked at to reduce the risk of confrontation is allowing higher level meetings between regional military commanders, an Indian official said.

[Source]

Despite Li’s extension of a pan-Himalayan “handshake,” the New York Times reports on Indian concerns that China may have gained more from the talks, and mentions unease over China’s damming plans for the Brahmaputra River:

[...]Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said that India had so far gotten little of value out of the visit, including no reassurance about the border.

“My assessment is that China has gained more from these meetings than India,” he said. “The Chinese side conceded nothing.”

[...]The two sides discussed India’s growing alarm over China’s plans to build a series of dams on the Brahmaputra River, which flows into India’s northeast provinces.

India has repeatedly asked China to provide more information about its plans and the effects they will have on India, but China has so far resisted. In a statement, Mr. Li said China was willing to “strengthen communication” with India over its dam developments.

[Source]

Meanwhile, Australian think-tank the Lowy Institue for International Policy recently released a study surveying the Indian public on their global outlook. China and Pakistan — whose longtime strategic partnership has been warming over recent years — were both identified as security threats by large portions of respondents. The Hindu reports:

Not surprisingly, Indians see Pakistan and China as the biggest foreign threats to their nation. Only nine per cent of Indians believe China does not pose a threat, while 84 per cent believe it does, with 60 per cent identifying it as a major threat. Seventy per cent of the respondents agreed that China’s aim is to dominate Asia. The responses were roughly equal, however, between those who believed that India should join with other countries to limit China’s influence (65 per cent), and those who believed India should cooperate with China to play a leading role in the world together (64 per cent). In fact, some Indians clearly hold both views at once, an interesting sign of the tensions or indeed duality within Indian foreign policy expectations.

From all those who had identified China as a threat, over 80 per cent agreed that threat was for the following reasons: China possesses nuclear weapons, it was competing with India for resources in other countries, it was strengthening its relations with other countries in the Indian Ocean Region, and it was claiming sovereignty on parts of India’s territory. Only a slightly smaller number believed that the threat was because of China’s stronger military, its bigger economy, its military assistance to Pakistan, and because it does not “show respect” to India.

[Source]

The Wall Street Journal’s look at the Lowy report shows the same anxieties, but also mentions a public desire for India to increase cooperation with China:

The survey revealed that – like its government – Indians are perhaps unclear about how to respond to China’s growing power. About two-thirds of respondents said India should ally with other nations to limit China’s influence.

A similar portion of those interviewed also said India should cooperate with China to play a leading role in the world. Two-thirds of respondents said they would like relations with China to strengthen.

And there was some admiration for the way China does things. Just under half of those surveyed thought that India could learn from the way the Chinese government functions.

[Source]

Another point of contention in the Sino-Indian relationship deals with the Tibet question. India has provided refuge for the exiled Central Tibetan Administration since the Dalai Lama fled Chinese-controlled Tibet in 1959. While Tibet protests were suppressed in the lead-up to the New Delhi talks, The Hindu reports on the bilaterally strategic decision to leave the “T-word” out of the joint Li-Singh statement:

India’s decision to once again avoid reaffirming its commitment to a ‘One China policy’ has raised eyebrows in Beijing but Indian officials are playing down the omission of “Tibet” from the joint statement issued after talks between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

[...]The first time India dropped the reference to ‘One China policy’ was during Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit in 2010. India made the point then that Kashmir was as much a core concern of India’s as Tibet was to China, and that China’s policies of issuing stapled visas and carrying out projects in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir violated this core concern.

This is the point that Indian officials sought to make again. “If they had insisted on Tibet, then [we] would have asked for something else [Kashmir] to be included,” an official said, pointing out that there were enough indirect references in the joint statement to make good the exclusion of the T-word.

[Source]

China is currently India’s largest trading partner. Premier Li is set to depart India for Pakistan on Wednesday, followed by visits to Switzerland and Germany.

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The wind-scoured desert valley here, just south of Tibet, was once a famed transit point for the Tibetan yak caravans laden with salt that lumbered over the icy ramparts of the Himalayas. In the 1960s, it became a base for Tibetan guerrillas trained by the C.I.A. to attack Chinese troops occupying their homeland.

These days, it is the Chinese who are showing up in this far tip of the Buddhist kingdom of Mustang, northwest of Katmandu, Nepal. Chinese officials are seeking to stem the flow of disaffected Tibetans fleeing to Nepal and to enlist the help of the Nepalese authorities in cracking down on the political activities of the 20,000 Tibetans already here.

[…] For decades, there had been an understanding that Nepalese border guards would allow refugees they encountered to continue on to sanctuary. But now Tibetans suspect that the low numbers of refugees reaching Katmandu could be in part a result of guards sending back Tibetans they catch, especially since China is now involved in border security training programs.

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In 2001, China’s GDP was equal to the GDP of all the RIBS combined. In the five years since the global financial crisis, just the increment of growth in China’s economy is larger than the entire economies of Russia and India combined. Indeed, in the half decade since the financial crisis, 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in China.

[…] Concepts that jumble together elements with more differences than similarities sow confusion. While it may have played a useful purpose at the beginning of the century to highlight faster-growing emerging economies, BRICS has become an analytic liability. Like generalizations about per-capita growth in countries where wealth disparities are widening (as the rich get richer while the income of the poor declines), submerging China in this acronym misses more than it captures. If a banner is required for a meeting of these five nations, or for a forecast about their economic and political weight in the world ahead, RIBS is much closer to the reality. Even if governments, investment banks, and newspapers keep using BRICS, thoughtful readers will think China and the rest.

But while China may have little in common with the RIBS economically, Beijing still appears to see political utility in BRICS membership. From Yun Sun at Brookings:

Xi’s first overseas trip reveals the international quagmire China is in. The past 10 years witnessed unprecedented growth of Chinese economy, but it was also accompanied by unparalleled foreign policy challenges. As many Chinese analysts observed, China’s external environment did not improve as a result of China’s rise, instead, it has worsened. China has become richer, but less respected. It has more transactions with the world than ever, but less friends.

Therefore, Xi’s trip to Russia, Africa and the BRICS summit genuinely reflects China’s strategic moves to break away from this predicament. It seeks to reconsolidate friendship with a Russia also antagonized by the West, with Africa to reinforce its developing-country identity and solidarity with the developing world, and with other emerging economies to align their collective power against the traditional developed countries. China learned its lesson that it is yet to be strong enough to challenge the existing international order (and the supremacy of the U.S.) alone. Alignment with other rising powers, like the BRICS countries, and reinforcement of its friendship base among developing countries will be a new emphasis for China’s foreign policy in the foreseeable future.

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Post tags: Africa, Brazil, BRIC, BRICS, economic growth, financial crisis, India, Russia, South Africa
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Five years ago, for example, you might think that the pollution of a local river was just a problem with a nearby factory, but thanks to Deng Fei’s weibo campaign and others, it’s easy to see on Weibo that many rivers nationwide have similar problems. So, what you previously considered a local problem is now a national one, and when that happens, you’re more likely to try to push for national changes instead of just complaining about your local authorities.

[…] That’s why Weibo’s fight with WeChat is so crucial. WeChat is a totally different service with a very different focus, but the more time users spend on WeChat, the less they’re spending on Weibo. And while chatting with your friends and following celebrities is fun, the service just isn’t designed for the swift passing-along of information the way that weibo is. WeChat’s focus is your circle of friends and your local area, Weibo’s focus is far wider. To return to our polluted river analogy, on Weibo you share your photos of the river with your followers all over the country, and they pass it on to theirs; quickly, it can go national. But on WeChat, you bitch with your friends and coworkers about the river and it stays in your (mostly) local social circles. Even if it does spread, that spread isn’t easily visible or trackable, which makes it seem like fewer people are talking about it and thus reduces its impact.

While Sina Weibo currently has 500 million registered users to Weixin’s 300 million, its lead may be less substantial than it appears. Also at Tech in Asia, Steven Millward suggested last week that as many as 95% of all Sina Weibo accounts may be either “zombies” or spammers, and Weixin is likely to reach the half-billion mark within the next twelve months. Whether or not Weixin encourages a narrowly local focus among users, Tencent has global ambitions for the service. Its largest user bases abroad are currently in Malaysia and India, but the company appears intent on conquering America as a springboard to world domination. From Fang Yunyu at Global Times:

“We are planning to set up our WeChat office in the US, in a bid to explore opportunities in the US market,” Tencent Holdings said in a statement e-mailed to the Global Times.

[…] “If a foreign product can succeed in the US market, where many excellent IT products and companies were born, it will be relatively easy for the product to go into other markets,” Tencent noted.

[…] Tencent announced last month that the total number of WeChat users had reached 300 million, including over 10 million overseas users, about two years after the Shenzhen-based company launched the mobile application.

“The figure may exceed 500 million by the end of this year, which will be equivalent to the number of Internet users in the country. In other words, it means the domestic WeChat market will very soon be saturated,” Fang Xingdong, founder of the Beijing-based industry consultancy Internet Laboratory, told the Global Times Monday.

International users may be deterred, however, by reports of Weixin actively assisting Chinese authorities with surveillance of political dissidents and censorship even of users outside China.

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Post tags: India, Malaysia, river pollution, sina, sina weibo, social networking, tencent, United States, Weixin
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In both countries recently, highly publicized gang rapes have dramatically raised public awareness of a hidden problem. Of course, rape is to some extent a hidden issue everywhere, even in societies with efficient legal systems and liberal attitudes toward women. But in China and India, as in other places where traditional notions may judge a raped woman as “ruined,” there are especially powerful disincentives to reporting the crime, experts say.

Here are the painful stories. On Dec. 16, a 23-year-old student was gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi, the Indian capital, dying of her injuries two weeks later.

Few believe that’s the full extent of it, but the Chinese conviction figure is apparently higher than India’s. Women in China also experience far less sexual harassment in public, or “Eve teasing,” as it’s known in India.

Privately, researchers confide they have no idea what the real number of rapes is. Some estimate that less than one in 10 cases is reported. That might make at least a quarter of a million a year in China, but probably far more. In the United States, with less than a quarter of China’s population, Census Bureau figures show a fairly consistent rate of “forcible rape” (excluding statutory rape) of just over 80,000 a year over the last decade.

CDT previously reported on the detention of Li Guanfeng, son of People’s Liberation Army General and renowned singer, Li Shuangjiang, for his alleged involvement in a gang rape case. In response to this case, the Global Times published two commentaries: Freelance columnist Lian Peng claims there needs to be a fundamental cure for society by strengthening the law, while Xiao Baiyou,  ”Wolf Dad,” says parents need to be stricter with their children. Lian Peng says:

On the one hand, the case mirrors social hatred toward officials and the rich. These deeply rooted social conflicts are worth pondering. There are too many cases in which the privileged are seen to fly above the law. People worry that if they do not strongly condemn this action, Li Tianyi might receive a lighter sentence or even escape legal punishment altogether.

If social order and justice are not done and crimes are not punished, the psychology of the people will be gradually distorted and social conflicts and hatred will spread. But the very first step is to practically restore the dignity of the law. Under this circumstance, a spirit of social tolerance, sympathy and understanding can return.

While Xiao Baiyou comments on parents’ responsibility:

This largely relates to poor family education. Because of unreasonable parental discipline, they go astray. Some among these groups despise the law, because they believe they are privileged and can easily escape from legal punishment.

I can responsibly say that if I was allowed to teach Li Tianyi from today on, I would return the Li couple a well-disciplined son who would have learned from his crimes.

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China financed more than 80 percent of the $248 million development cost of the port on the Arabian Sea, as part of a plan to open up an energy and trade corridor from the Gulf, across Pakistan to western China.

When complete, the port could be used by the Chinese Navy, analysts say, and Indian Defence Minister A.K. Antony told reporters on February 6 that Chinese control of the port was “a matter of concern.”

Indian policy-makers are wary of a string of strategically located ports being built by Chinese companies in its neighborhood, as India beefs up its military clout to compete.

China has also funded ports in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, and Chittagong in Bangladesh, both India’s neighbors.

China has repeatedly denied harboring any military intentions, however. A Global Times editorial, ‘Gwadar move renews ‘China Threat’ cliché‘, argued on Monday that such fears were simply the latest expressions of a more general insecurity.

Gwadar port is located in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province. As it’s close to the Strait of Hormuz and Pakistan’s border with Iran, it is considered strategically important. The West believes that the port is the starting point of an energy corridor that will connect China to the Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz and also a strategic branch for China to influence the situation in the Persian Gulf. Some even see it is part of a Chinese “string of pearls” strategy aimed at encircling India.

Behind these analyses are worries and reservations over China’s rise. Energy security plays a fundamental role in this rise. The West is alert to any overseas move by China related to energy.

Any port has potential military value. There are growing suspicions that China will station fleets of warships in the Indian Ocean or other waters and establish naval bases worldwide. However, few Chinese support this. There are no benefits for China in encircling India, and strategists in both countries don’t want to play such a game.

[…] Enclosing and colonizing land overseas and expanding powers are all strange concepts to Chinese. Chinese merchant ships can be seen all over the world nowadays, but we have no interest in “pirate civilization.” China alone cannot convince the outside world, but regional prosperity promoted by China’s operations at Gwadar port in the future will be strong evidence of this.

Some outside China are also skeptical of the encirclement theory. From Daniel W. Drezner at Foreign Policy early this month:

For the past few years, a low level theme that occasionally pops into my news feed is the idea of greater Sino-Pakistani cooperation. Now this has a certain amount of realpolitik sense to it. The United States and Pakistan are not exactly on the best of terms, China is a rising power, they share a comon interest in containing India, yadda, yadda yadda. As a result, there has been the occasional press story about closer ties, which begets the inevitable U.S.-based blog posts about China expanding its “string of pearls” strategy of more deepwater ports in the Asia/Pacific region.

There’s just one thing. The more closely one reads these stories, the less clear it is that China wants a string of pearls. Most of these stories talk about great Pakistani enthusiasm for more Chinese involvement. That enthusiasm is not really reciprocated by China, however. […]

[… T]o sum up: despite Pakistan prostrating itself before China, Beijing has been extremely leery of getting too enmeshed in that country. It has rejected repeated requests for military basing, and only now has a commercial Chinese company agreed to manage a port that appears to be the Pakistani exemplar of “white elephant.”

So please, no “strong of pearls” posts from the national security blogosphere […]. These pearls are about as fake as you can get.

Another strategic explanation for the Gwadar takeover is the prospect of a ‘Chinese California’: a borrowed west coast on the Indian Ocean, linked to China by a railway and oil pipeline to Xinjiang. This might lessen China’s reliance on oil imports carried through the potentially vulnerable Strait of Malacca, from the Indian Ocean into the South China Sea. Similar plans have been mooted in the past for Myanmar, and though plans for the Gwadar railway predate Yangon’s drift away from Beijing, that development may increase the appeal of the Pakistani route. But Gwadar’s utility in energy security terms has also been disputed. From Xu Tianran at Global Times:

The operation of the strategic port is also widely regarded as a key move by China to seek an alternative to the Strait of Malacca, through which over 80 percent of the country’s imported oil passes.

[…] Under its 12th Five-Year Plan, China has vowed to accelerate the construction of railways and highways linking Gwadar Port and Kashi in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

[…] Zhou Dadi, former director-general of the Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission, told the Global Times that the port’s role in securing China’s energy supply is being overstated, adding that the costs for building an oil pipeline and transporting oil via railways would be high.

“The idea of using the route from Pakistan to China as an alternative energy line can be seen as a last resort at most,” he said, adding that a situation in which the Strait of Malacca is blocked would result in a worldwide conflict, which is highly unlikely.

The deal may be less about Gwadar’s location than part of a broader pattern of Chinese port investments around the globe, as growth in China slows and struggling operators elsewhere sell cheaply. From Joanne Chiu at The Wall Street Journal:

China Merchants, a unit of the China Merchants Group conglomerate, last month agreed to pay €400 million ($543 million) to buy a 49% stake in port operator Terminal Link SAS from French container-shipping company CMA CGM, which was reducing debt.

Weeks earlier, China Merchants, the country’s biggest port operator by container shipping volume, acquired a 23.5% stake in the Port of Djibouti. China Merchants in 2011 took control of a container port development in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and raised its stake to 85% last year.

[…] For China Merchants, the CMA CGM deal gives access to a diversified port portfolio of 15 terminals in eight countries, including Morocco, Belgium and the U.S. The deal also strengthens the Chinese company’s relationship with the French shipping line. The companies signed a 12-year agreement in which CMA CGM’s container ships will increase calls at China Merchants’ ports.

[…] Growth in emerging markets is partly the result of a shift of some factory activity away from China. “Many manufacturers that produce low-end products, such as shoes and clothes, have been relocating their production bases from [China] to places like Cambodia, because of cheaper labor costs.…The trend is irreversible,” says Lawrence Li, a regional shipping and ports analyst at brokerage firm UOB KayHian.

Although featured on the back of Pakistan’s five rupee note, Gwadar has not been a commercial success so far. From Declan Walsh at The New York Times:

Commissioned by General Musharraf, the Gwadar port project initially set off a flurry of excited property speculation in what was once a quiet fishing village. Developers presented flashy plans for luxury apartment blocks amid talk the port could rival Dubai.

[…] But Pakistan has failed to build the port or transportation infrastructure needed to develop the port, the property bubble has burst and, according to the port management Web site, the last ship to dock there arrived in November. “The government never built the infrastructure that the port needed — roads, rail or storage depots,” said Khurram Husain, a freelance business journalist. “Why would any shipping company come to the port if it has no service to offer?”

According to reports in the Pakistani news media, the Port of Singapore Authority sought to withdraw from the management contract after the Pakistani government failed to hand over land needed to develop the facility.

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Post tags: energy security, India, India relations, Indian Ocean, Myanmar, oil, oil pipeline, Pakistan, Pakistan relations, port, railway
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China has given the go-ahead for the construction of three new hydropower dams on the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra river, ending a two-year halt in approving new projects on the river amid concerns from India and environmental groups.

[…] China has, so far, only begun construction on one major hydropower dam on the main stream of the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra or Yarlung Zangbo as it is known in China – a 510 MW project in Zangmu in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), which began to be built in 2010.

One of the three approved new dams is bigger than the Zangmu project.

[…] While they are run-of-the-river projects, they will be required to store large volumes of water for generating power. Their construction is likely to trigger fresh concerns in India on how the flows of the Brahmaputra downstream will be impacted.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei attempted to ease such concerns on Wednesday. From Xinhua:

Hong said, “The Chinese side always takes a responsible attitude towards the exploitation of cross-border rivers and every new project will be planned and reasoned in a scientific way (before being started).”

He added that the interests of the countries on the upper and lower reaches are all taken into consideration.

But The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman outlined a number of other fears surrounding renewed development on the Nu and other rivers:

Ma Jun, head of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said that because local governments and state-owned enterprises profit enormously from building large-scale infrastructure projects such as hydroelectric stations, they often cut corners on legally required environmental impact assessments.

“We had a chance to review some of the summaries of the large dam projects on the Jinsha river – there are major gaps identified in those reports, and some of them are very basic ones,” he said.

[…] The state council notice also mentions the Xiaonanhai hydropower station on the Yangtze river, a $4.75bn, seven-and-a-half-year project designed to have a capacity of 1.76 gigawatts to provide electricity to the sprawling south-western metropolis Chongqing.

Critics say that the project will displace about 40,000 people, submerge about 20 miles of arable land and destroy endangered fish species including the Dabry’s sturgeon, a 140m-year-old “living fossil” which has appeared on a Chinese postage stamp.

A slideshow at The Guardian showed some of the areas, communities and habitats under threat from new dams.

As Kaiman noted, reservoir-induced seismicity is another worry in parts of the country already prone to landslides and earthquakes. In December, a Probe International study suggested that the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake which killed some 80,000 people was likely caused by the weight of water behind the nearby Zipingpu dam.

For more information, see International Rivers’ China resources.

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The incident and the protests in New Delhi in recent days have received wide attention in China. While the brutal attack was initially highlighted by Communist Party-run outlets as indicative of the failures of India’s democratic system to ensure stability, the following protests in New Delhi triggered calls from pro-reform bloggers for the Chinese government to learn from India and to allow the public to express its voice.

The rape case was one of the most discussed topics in Chinese microblogs over the past week, prompting thousands of posts and comments. By Sunday, however, the authorities appeared to move to limit the debate: on Monday, a search for the topic triggered a message on Sina Weibo – a popular Twitter-equivalent used by more than 300 million people – saying the results could not be displayed according to regulations. The message is usually seen as an indicator of a topic being censored by the authorities.

[…] That Communist Party media outlets and academics often point to India’s “disorderliness” as an outcome of the democratic system and to justify one-party rule is a sore point among many liberal Chinese who are pushing for democratic reforms.

Western responses have also come under fire: Emer O’Toole wrote at The Guardian that media commentary focusing on cultural rather than political issues has frequently displayed “uncomfortably neocolonial” attitudes.

In a recent essay at Foreign Affairs, Eric X. Li argued that Chinese authoritarianism has proven its superiority over democracy, while at The New Republic, Pankaj Mishra lamented India’s “budding likeness to China—the onset, in particular, of an informal authoritarianism in the hollow shell of a formal democracy” (both via CDT).

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Post tags: democracy, India, India comparison, rape, sina weibo, state media
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CHINA IS shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed, the world’s largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade after we were told that China and India were “flattening” the world, expediting a historically inevitable shift of power from West to East, their political institutions and original nation-building ideologies face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Both countries, encumbered with dynastic elites and crony capitalists, are struggling to persuasively reaffirm their founding commitments to mass welfare. Protests against corruption and widening inequality rage across their vast territories, while their economies slow dramatically.

If anything, public anger against India’s political class appears more intense, and disaffection there assumes more militant forms, as in the civil war in the center of the country, where indigenous, Maoist militants in commodities-rich forests are battling security forces. India, where political dynasties have been the rule for decades, also has many more “princelings” than China—nearly 30 percent of the members of parliament come from political families. As the country intensifies its crackdown on intellectual dissent and falls behind on global health goals, it is mimicking China’s authoritarian tendencies and corruption without making comparable strides in relieving the hardships faced by its citizens. The “New India” risks becoming an ersatz China.

For more on the global princeling epidemic, see The Hindu’s Hasan Suroor on Britain’s several budding political dynasties, and Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy and Katherine Moon at the South China Morning Post on the several Asian countries which have elected or selected current leaders with political pedigrees. These include Japan, both Koreas, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

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Post tags: authoritarianism, democracy, India, India comparison, India relations, princelings
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Writing for The National Interest, James Clad and Robert A. Manning claim that Beijing’s provocative moves have backfired:

A joke now making the rounds in Asia asks, “who is America’s most effective diplomat in Asia?” The punch line brings knowing laughter: “‘Mr. Beijing.’ Yes, Mr. Bob Beijing is playing America’s best hand.”

The joke’s sting lies in the law of unintended consequences. Beijing’s increasingly provocative moves include cutting a Vietnamese seismic-exploration ship’s cables, disrupting oil exploration, declaring the entire South China Sea under Chinese sovereignty and making some hitherto unpublicized but very sensitive challenges to Malaysia. All seem tailor-made to produce exactly what China says it doesn’twant: a de facto anti-China coalition backed discreetly by the United States and reaching from India to the Sea of Japan.

As if to put an exclamation point on it, the Philippine foreign minister recently said that if Japan rearmed and abandoned its pacifist constitution, Manila “would welcome that very much.”

Meanwhile, The Diplomat’s Minxin Pei suggests a few steps China can take to dig itself out of its diplomatic hole:

The most urgent action item is to stabilize Beijing-Tokyo ties. The actions taken by Beijing to contest Tokyo’s claims to the disputed islands in the East China Sea are fraught with risks of escalation. While they may be designed to force the Japanese to the negotiating table, the Chinese government needs to take extra precaution to avoid dangerous confrontations and escalations. Under current circumstances, the smarter way is not to escalate, but deescalate, so that Beijing can give Tokyo an opportunity to respond. With anti-China sentiments high among a broad segment of Japan’s population and elites, it is unwise to expect Tokyo to meet Chinese escalations with concessions.

…

Parallel to its efforts to stabilize Sino-Japanese relations, Beijing’s second policy priority is to defuse itstensions with ASEAN over the South China Sea disputes.   Chinese policymakers must first realize that its stance on the maritime disputes in the South China Sea has painted Beijing into a corner.  The historical claims are increasingly difficult to defend.  The insistence on bilateral negotiations, not multilateral ones, looks too self-serving.  The use of a proxy such as Cambodia to undermine ASEAN’s unity on the South China Sea disputes may be a temporary tactical success, but it comes with long-term strategic costs and will ultimately be futile.

A bold move for the new Chinese government to take is to do a U-turn on the South China Sea.  It can do so by announcing its willingness to negotiate in a multilateral setting and adhere to existing international laws, not historical claims.   This dramatic change of policy will not necessarily produce an outcome totally unfavorable to China.  Because most of Vietnam and the Philippines’ claims are equally weak under existing international laws, shifting China’s position will not necessarily strengthen their claims.  The practical effect will be prolonged negotiations that can defuse the tensions – and repair China’s tattered image as a bully.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: diaoyu islands, India, Japan, oil exploration, philippines, South China Sea, Taiwan, United States, Vietnam
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Both sides agreed to create a favorable atmosphere and conditions for the final settlement of the border issue and agreed that it should not affect the positive development of China-India ties, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement.

China’s State Councilor Dai Bingguo and India’s National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon co-chaired talks here on Monday.

The two sides confirmed they will speed up work to further narrow differences, on the basis of peace and friendship, equal consultation, mutual respect and mutual understanding, according to the statement.

Menon said that India and China share common views on many major issues and their consensus is far greater than differences. Developing relations with China is one of the priorities of India’s foreign policy, he said.

He stressed that India will not participate in any attempt to contain China.

The United States has been an active player in the continuing border disputes, but Beijing is seeking to discourage “American Interference,” The Times of India adds:

 India and China were engaged in tough bargaining on Monday with Beijing seeking an assurance that New Delhi would not encourage “American interference” in the region. The Indian delegation, led by National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, will continue discussion on the border dispute and the passport controversy.

Chinese leaders revealed a strong desire to keep India out of the emerging club of nations – Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines – involved in territorial disputes with China. Beijing’s anxiety offers an opportunity for India to negotiate some tough issues like China’s continued arms support to Pakistan.

Aside from border issues, Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and Menon have promised to deepen ties between the two countries, from the New York Daily News:

China and India have the capability and wisdom to resolve boundary issues and it is Beijing’s strategic choice to step up cooperation with New Delhi, said key Chinese legislator Wu Bangguo Tuesday when he met India’s National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon.

Wu said China would like to work with India to deepen political trust and boost bilateral strategic cooperative partnership, which complies with fundamental interests of both countries and works for regional and world peace, stability and prosperity.
As the international situation is undergoing profound changes, China and India share extensive common interests, enjoy broad room for cooperation and face new opportunities for development, Wu said.

Menon underscored India’s commitment to developing a strategic cooperative partnership with China that is oriented toward peace and prosperity.

According to The Hindu, China and India have a ‘convergence of views’:

“Mr. Menon’s visit is not about the boundary issue [alone]. It is about the whole relationship,” Qin Gang, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, told reporters.

“We have seen a lot of convergence of views and shared interests, shared aspirations, shared goals,” Mr. Qin said. “This meeting will send out a strong message that as two neighbours China and India will continue to work for good neighbourly relationship. This meeting is not an occasion where both sides expressed differences on the boundary issue.”

Mr. Dai said China’s policy towards India was “in alignment with the diplomatic thinking” expressed at the party congress. The new leadership, he said, “attaches great importance to relations with India.”

The Chinese State Councillor — a rank below Vice-Premier in the State Council, or Cabinet — will step down as the Special Representative on the border talks when he retires at the Parliament Session in March. He was accompanied at Monday’s talks by Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying. A member of the newly selected Central Committee, she has been seen as one of the candidates to take over his role as the SR in the boundary talks.

Read more about China’s relationship with India, via CDT.

© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: border disputes, Dai Bingguo, diplomacy, India, India border, India relations, Qin Gang, United States, Wu Bangguo
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At a press conference on Monday, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland presented the U.S. position: that accepting the passports for entry to the U.S. does not constitute endorsement of any territorial claims, and that the department expects “a conversation” on the issue with China.

MS. NULAND: Our position, as you know, on the South China Sea remains that these issues need to be negotiated among the stakeholders, among ASEAN and China. And a picture in a passport doesn’t change that. […]

QUESTION: Do you care what China has – what they print inside of their passports? Does this raise any concern at all with you, because is it simply their business and they can do – they can put whatever they want in their passport?

MS. NULAND: My understanding is that we – and I looked into this a little bit and didn’t get a complete sort of brief on this – but my understanding is that we have certain basic international standards that have to be met in a passport in the way it’s presented […] for us to honor it. And stray maps that they include aren’t part of it, so –

QUESTION: Okay. And does that – that would go for any country?

MS. NULAND: Yes.

QUESTION: So then, I mean, if Mexico put a new passport with a map that had Texas and New Mexico on it – (laughter) – that wouldn’t be a problem?

MS. NULAND: Again, that’s a hypothetical we’re hoping not confront, Matt. (Laughter.) […] As a technical legal matter, that map doesn’t have any bearing on whether the passport is valid for U.S. visa issuance or for entry into the United States. There are a bunch of other issues –

See also Global Times’ special coverage of the passport controversy.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Aksai Chin, Arunachal Pradesh, India, philippines, South China Sea, State Department, Taiwan, territorial disputes, United States, Vietnam, visa
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“I think it’s one very poisonous step by Beijing among their thousands of malevolent actions,” Nguyen Quang A, a former adviser to the Vietnamese government, told The Financial Times, which first reported on the modified passports.

A senior diplomat based in Beijing told the paper that the new map represented “quite a serious escalation because China is issuing millions of these new passports and adult passports are valid for 10 years. If Beijing were to change its position later it would have to recall all those passports.”

[…] John Blaxland, a research fellow at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at Australian National University, said the map gambit was “pretty clever.”

“It basically forces everyone who’s a claimant of South China Sea elements to acknowledge it by stamping it,” he told VOA News, calling it part of the “long game” being played by Beijing.

For now, the Philippines is playing along, but Vietnam has started issuing new visas on separate pieces of paper and invalidating existing ones to avoid endorsing the new passports. India has been more assertive, reports Rama Lakshmi at The Washington Post:

Now, the Indian Embassy in Beijing is doing a tit-for-tat with its own map. It has started stamping its version of the Indian map on visas issued to Chinese citizens, one that includes the two regions.

[…] Two years ago, China caused much irritation among Indian officials when it began stapling the visas of residents of Kashmir, a Himalayan province where Indian troops are fighting to put down a Pakistan-backed separatist Islamist insurgency for more than two decades. By stapling the visas, instead of stamping them, Beijing was declaring that they regarded Kashmir was a disputed region as well.

Indian officials had to sternly remind Beijing in 2010 to be “sensitive” to its concerns about Kashmir, just as New Delhi is sensitive to Beijing’s attitude about Tibet.

Earlier this year, Beijing declined to issue a visa to an Indian air force officer who hails from Arunachal Pradesh. The row led New Delhi to cut the size of the military delegation that visited China in January.

The controversy arrives barely a month after the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, fought over disputed territory in Arunachal Pradesh. Future conflict between the two countries may be more likely at sea, however. From The Economist:

China suspects India of complicity in efforts to undermine its sweeping claim to sovereignty over almost all of the South China Sea. It saw evidence of this in India’s involvement in oil-and-gas exploration in waters disputed by China and Vietnam. The underlying fear is of an American-led plot to contain China. Even were such a plot hatched, India would be a reluctant conspirator. But it and China are in a “security dilemma”, where one country’s “essential steps” to safeguard its interests are taken by the other as threats that demand a response.

[…] The risk, as Chinese and Indian warships venture farther afield, is akin to that in China’s maritime disputes with Japan and its South-East Asian neighbours: of an accidental conflict that escalates. This is exacerbated by an absence of codes of conduct and forums to thrash out disputes. The East Asian Summit, which includes America, might one day become such a gathering. But for the time being it aims only at “confidence-building”. Marred this year again by squabbles about how to discuss disputes in the South China Sea, the summit finds even that elusive.

Meanwhile, The Japanese government and The Washington Post’s Max Fisher have both suggested that the hotly disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands are absent from the passport map. (CDT believes it can see a slight thickening of the map’s texture in roughly the appropriate location, though well short of anything that might indicate a duplicate set of islands). Even allowing for the islands’ tiny size, one would expect them to be more obviously visible given China’s recent demands for cartographical fastidiousness. At the height of the islands row in September, Beijing increased penalties for publishers of maps which failed to include all outlying islands claimed by China. From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Current regulations, drafted in 1995, allow for a maximum fine of 10,000 yuan (US$1500) which would increase to 100,000 yuan (US$16,000) if the new law is passed, according to the Xinhua news agency.

The draft also proposed greater supervision of Internet map services, requiring providers to place data servers within China’s territory and use only approved maps.

Charles Custer tweeted that these regulations can greatly complicate magazine design, as not only formal maps but any graphical representation of China’s shape must include “ALL distant islands”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Aksai Chin, Arunachal Pradesh, containment, diaoyu islands, diplomacy, India, Japan, Kashmir, maps, New Delhi, Pakistan, philippines, South China Sea, Taiwan, Tibet, Vietnam, visa
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