Kissinger’s China, India’s neighbor

“On China” is Henry Kissinger’s effort to draw a long arc that traces the political history of China, from an ancient civilization with “no beginning” to a modern-day state that is fast becoming the 21st century’s most consequential power.

November 24, 1973: Then U.S. Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, right, with Mao Zedong, left, in Beijing.

Can India learn anything more about its neighbor from a diplomat who has closely watched the country over the last 40 years?


The book’s prologue dramatically starts with a conversation between Mao Zedong and his top commanders on the eve of China’s war with India in October 1962.  The border war is one of the only parts of the book where Mr. Kissinger deals with India directly, giving a blow-by-blow account of events. India gets little attention elsewhere, which may be an accurate depiction of the lack of deep engagement between the two neighbors historically, or perhaps a reflection of Mr. Kissinger’s acceptance of the current Beijing narrative that India is inconsequential to China’s rise on the world stage.

But Mr. Kissinger’s story on how the border conflict came to be is interesting in its own right, given that it sharply contradicts the popular Indian version of itself as the aggrieved party.

The former U.S. Secretary of State goes back to the 1912-1914 Simla conference convened by the British with Chinese and Tibetan authorities to settle the borders between the three countries. The Chinese delegate, citing his country’s weakened condition at that stage, initialed the resulting agreement on the McMahon line but did not sign the document, thus keeping the border dispute open. Decades later, in the late 1950s, upon completion of Tibet’s annexation, Mr. Kissinger says Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai made an offer to accept the Indian position in the west (Arunachal Pradesh) in return for recognition of Chinese claims on Aksai Chin in the east. India Prime Minister Nehru rejected the offer.

Full report here WSJ blogs

A Sinopolar world

Forget about G2, China could be G1 soon. Arvind Subramanian's wake-up call is a must read

An economist and this newspaper’s columnist, Arvind Subramanian, has written a provocative book announcing the potential arrival of China as the world’s “dominant” economic power sooner than widely imagined. Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance (Peterson Institute of International Economics, 2011) warns a complacent West (a distracted India must also pay attention) that “Chinese economic dominance is more imminent and more broad-based – encompassing output, trade, and currency – than is currently recognised”.

The nineties saw many books predicting the “coming collapse of China”, while more recently there has been a spate of books recognising China’s rise but adding the caveat that the United States is going to remain on the top for the foreseeable future.

Much has, of course, been written about the “power shift” from the West to the East, the decline of the G7 economies, and the rise of China. Till 2008, and well into 2009, many in the United States, led by Fred Bergsten, had assumed that China and the US could create a G2 and run a bipolar condominium.
The Chinese pooh-poohed the G2 idea, seeking to retain their status as a voice of the developing world and preferred the French view of a “multi-polar” or “polycentric” world, perhaps partly to assuage fears in Asia about the rise of an “assertive” China.

Full report here Business Standard

Does the US have a future?

Failure after failure after failure. Bubbles that end in busts. Wars that aren’t won. Stimuli that don’t stimulate. All together plunging the United States into the worst economic slump since the 1930s. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, America faces a geopolitical rival that is also an effective economic competitor — a combination not seen since the kaiser’s Germany.

Into this grim situation, Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum step forward to offer hope. Or do they?

For there is an unnerving tension at the core of That Used to Be Us, a discordant emotional counterpoint. I don’t think it’s a disagreement between the authors so much as a disagreement within each of them.

Friedman and Mandelbaum repeatedly describe themselves as “optimists”, albeit “frustrated” optimists. Yet the stories they tell repeatedly suggest very different and less reassuring conclusions.

The main line of the book’s argument will arrive with congenial familiarity. Friedman is one of America’s most famous commentators, Mandelbaum one of its most distinguished academic experts on foreign policy. Their views – and their point of view – are well known. They speak from just slightly to the left of the battered American political centre: for free trade, open immigration, balanced budgets, green energy, consumption taxes, health care reform, investments in education and infrastructure.

Full review here Business Standard

About turn…

“I feel that by bracketing themselves as the developed world, the West has bracketed themselves as an elite group that does not need any more development. They are yet to realise that the ideas and innovations that the developing world is conjuring up will enable them to catch up soon and emerge more successful,” says Fredrik Haren, an accomplished author and speaker, who has delivered many presentations and lectures on creativity, idea generation and entrepreneurship.

In Bangalore for the CIO 100 awards function, Fredrik is eager to talk about his latest book, The Developing World that seeks to explain how the spread of creative ideas in the developing world is changing the planet. “Take the mobile phone, it was born in Sweden. Today, the best models of mobile handsets are available in China, India and Brazil. Such instances should make the developed world sit up and take notice.”

He contends that the developed world has taken some steps, such as including the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) bloc in the G8 etc. “They remain shy of throwing out countries that no longer deserve to sup at the top table of the world. They must realise that unless they bring in more innovations and become more creative in their outlook, they will lose out to the developing world.”

Full report here Hindu

The oil canvas

India’s national security discourse has long seen the eastern and western parts of Asia as two unrelated worlds. If there were good reasons for this in the past — the political cultures, economic preoccupations and the international relations of the two Asian regions were indeed poles apart — Geoffrey Kemp persuades us to see the strategic consequences of the unfolding integration of East Asia and the Middle East.

Kemp, a well-known American specialist on the Middle East and long-time follower of Indian strategic debates, focuses on the growing Chinese and Indian role in the Middle East and the implications of the oil-rich Gulf “looking East”. At the core of this new integration is the insatiable appetite for oil in China and India.

Kemp asks some simple questions with enormous consequences. Will these two big Asian consumers of oil agree to live with American hegemony in the Persian Gulf? Or will they choose to become security providers, in their own right, to the Middle East? Will an exhausted America cede a bit of its burden in the oil-rich region to other powers?

Full review here Indian Express

There's a joker in the pack

I stumbled upon a fascinating piece by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman called The Myth of Asia's Miracle: A Cautionary Fable. It was written in the early 90s — therefore, it can be interpreted with the luxury of hindsight. Krugman analysed two earlier economic races: one between the US and Soviet Union (1950s through to the 1980s), and another between the US and Japan (1970s and 1980s). He cited plenty of popular commentary from those days, which read ominously like today's obituaries.

By way of example, he quoted economist Calvin Hoover (1957) who had predicted that “a collectivist, authoritarian state was inherently better at achieving economic growth than free-market democracies (and) the Soviet economy might outstrip that of the United States by the early 1970s”. Others asserted that “Japan would overtake the US in real per capita income by 1985, and total Japanese output would exceed that of the US by 1998”.

According to Krugman, these predications were bound to fail because they ignored the intangible force-multipliers of innovation, technology and competitive efficiency. He added that similar predictions were also being made then (do remember that 'then' were the early-90s!) about the US and China. 'The World Bank estimates that the Chinese economy is currently about 40 per cent as large as that of the US. If China can grow at 10 per cent annually, by the year 2010 its economy will be a third larger than ours.' Of course, at that time Krugman concluded that this comparison, too, could fail. Today we are in 2010, and we know that Krugman was right. Forget about being a third larger, the Chinese economy continues to be less than 40 per cent of the US even today.

Full report here Hindustan Times

REVIEW: From Unipolar to Tripolar World

REVIEW

From Unipolar to Tripolar World
Arvind Virmani
Academic Foundation
Rs. 995.

Pp 352

ISBN - 978-81-7188-799-6

Hardbound

Blurb
Developed country experts on international affairs and the global economy have consistently underestimated the speed with which China’s economy and power would rise relative to Germany, Japan and the USA. They are now similarly underestimating the speed at which India’s economy will close the economic size and power gaps. This book shows, why and how a tri-polar global power structure will emerge from the current confused system variously described as ‘multipolar’, ‘apolar’, ‘pluripolar’, ‘West and the rest’ and ‘unipolar with an oligopolistic fringe’. The Book goes on to draw out the implications and consequences of this evolving global power structure and makes suggestions on the policy options that need to be explored and pursued to increase the possibility of a peaceful transformation .

Review
And now, a tripolor world Hindu
After holding some key positions in the country — such as Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance; Principal Adviser, Planning Commission; and Director, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations — Arvind Virmani has moved to the International Monetary Fund, where he is serving as Executive Director.

The first two chapters of this book, he says, summarise the analysis done during 2004-05 and 2005-06 on the “economic foundations of a nation's global power.” They spell out the author's notion of the power of nations using an index he has developed — Virmani's Index of Power, VIP for short. In the rest of the chapters, barring two, there are repetitive elaborations and restatements of this theme. In fact, the volume is just a compilation, without careful editing, of papers presented by him over a decade.

Of the two exceptions, the chapter on China's socialist market economy is a self-contained piece, having some bearing on the main theme. However, the other, on “proliferation by nuclear weapons states and NNWS NPT partners”, provides an account of Pakistan's explorations into the nuclear arena, and is at best only tangentially related to the theme.