As Shakespeare reminds us, “what’s past is prologue.” This is especially the case with China, a nation with a continuous written history spanning three millennia. In particular, knowledge of five major historical events is essential to fully understanding contemporary Chinese politics and foreign policy. Read Here – The National Interest
The majority of the people caught up in Xi’s crackdown have been low- or midlevel party members and functionaries. But corruption investigations have also led to the removal of a number of senior party officials, including some members of the Politburo, the group of 25 officials who run the party, and, in an unprecedented move, […]
A series of meetings over the last two weeks — especially between Maoist chief Prachanda and K.P. Sharma Oli, chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) — to bury their bitter past seems to have sent across a message that it was poor leadership that came in the way of the timely […]
The appointment of a former Director, Intelligence Bureau as envoy for Af-Pak and West Asia indicates that the Modi government is looking at the entire Islamic world to India’s West through an intelligence-security prism and not a diplomatic-cultural construct. Modi’s Pakistan policy is conditioned by a similar mind-set of talking but not negotiating, while building […]
China isn’t an enemy of the U.S. But coercive diplomacy with China today is arguably more complicated than it was with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, at least after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Read Here – Bloomberg
Deng famously said that to open the economy, the party would have to “let some people get rich first.” This was one of the most creative policies ever advocated by a Communist Party leader, as it was in direct contradiction to the party’s founding aim. Read Here – New York Times
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent comparison of the boundary settlement with Bangladesh to the fall of the Berlin wall a quarter century ago might be surprising for many. The PM, who spent much political capital to get Parliament to approve the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) with Dhaka, was reacting to the insufficient public appreciation of […]
Despite its quickly increasing defense budgets in the last 20 years, China still lacks the ability to project combat power in a sustained way far from its shores, and the U.S. maintains full-spectrum military superiority, even in East Asia. Chinese forces lag far behind their U.S. counterparts in quality of equipment, experience and training. Unfortunately for […]
Ever since Independence, peace and stability have been treasured luxuries in the Indian states of Nagaland and Manipur. In the last two decades, however, while peace talks may have produced little in the way of progress, ceasefire agreements with the various warring groups have at least provided a relative peace. Read Here – The Diplomat
Recent strategic shifts by China and Russia simultaneously – and paradoxically – mark closer ties, challenges to the U.S., an unequal partnership, and rivalry between them in Eurasia. Read Here – The Diplomat
