For both China and India, Buddhism is a useful enhancer of cultural soft power. The religion has, over the past decade, increased in importance for India as New Delhi tries to re-energize the religious tradition and integrate it into the country’s cultural strength; for China, meanwhile, Buddhism is an important means of soothing domestic discontent […]
By bringing its position on Tibet into alignment with China’s claim, India has not won Chinese gratitude; rather, it has boosted Beijing’s clout and encouraged Chinese re-engineering of transboundary river flows, on which India is critically dependent. Read Here – Nikkei Asian Review
The Chinese geopolitical reality is that it is an isolated country that is also deeply divided internally. Its strategic priority, therefore, is internal stability. Isolation amidst internal disorder has been China’s worst case scenario. The government of President Jinping Xi is working aggressively to avert this instability, and this issue defines everything else China does. […]
May 23rd marked the 65th anniversary of the Chinese annexation of Tibet. That was the day the “Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” was declared in the aftermath of the Chinese invasion of October, 1950. The document was rejected by many Tibetans at the time, and has been controversial ever since. Read […]
When identifying threats to Himalayan ecosystems, China stands out. For years, the People’s Republic has been engaged in frenzied damming of rivers and unbridled exploitation of mineral wealth on the resource-rich Tibetan Plateau. Now it is ramping up efforts to spur its bottled-water industry – the world’s largest and fastest-growing – to siphon off glacier […]
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 brought the world close to a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev drama eclipsed another momentous event that occurred at the same time: a border war between the world’s most populous countries, China and India. A new book by Bruce Riedel, JFK’s Forgotten […]
The Chinese conquest of Tibet was a calamity for the Tibetans — and a disaster for India. This book is a sad chronicle of the tragedy that followed the Chinese defeat of the Tibetan army in 1950 and the signing of the 17 Point Agreement affirming Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Though the agreement was to enable Tibet to live […]
Chinese President Xi Jinping has asked for more efforts to promote economic growth and all-round social progress in Tibet and Tibetan-inhabited areas in four other provinces, vowing sustainable measures and continued preferential policies. Read Here – Global Times
While everyone’s anxiously watching and analyzing the events unraveling in the South China Sea, there’s another resource conflict involving China that also deserves attention. In the Himalayas, China and India are competing for valuable hydropower and water resources on the Yarlung Tsangpo–Brahmaputra River. The dispute offers some important lessons for regional cooperation (on more than […]
The 80th birthday of His Holiness the Dalai Lama has occasioned a spate of comment on his life and message. Two recently published books – Tibet: An Unfinished Story and The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong – have received little attention in India although they have interesting revelations to make on the recent history of Tibet. Read […]
looking beyond borders 