I thought my view of India-China relations was my utterly singular. So I am a little astonished to see that it is shared by Arun Shourie - with whom I rarely find myself in agreement!
His latest book, just published is: ARE WE DECEIVING OURSELVES AGAIN?
The reference is to India's self-deception in response to Chinese assurances of peaceful intent in relation to India between roughly 1950 and 1962 (when the Chinese invaded India).
China has astonishingly risen to world power status in some 20 years. Equally rapidly, as I have suggested in this Blog, it may find itself descending again, speeded on the way by the current global crisis. Meanwhile, China's rise, under authoritarian rule, is the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since Fascism in the 1930s. The Chinese modus operandi of promising peaceful intent, but then employing force to change facts on the ground, is well documented by Shourie. And India is not the only country that has to learn to deal with the realities of China.
I strongly recommend this book to governments in the USA, the EU, Switzerland, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Kazakhstan and Mongolia - though some of them have their own, even older, experience of China - an experience that is hardly less painful.
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Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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A couple of years ago, I attended a roundtable in NYC for an international group that is predominately Indian. I mentioned that I thought China would start a war in Asia within the next 5-10 years and was surprised by the shock that elicited. The current financial crisis may reorder the world enough to make war much more attractive to the Chinese leaders.
Oddly, the Sino-Indian War is almost unknown in the United States, even by elites. But the joint training operations between US and Indian forces probably means that the US military understands the benefits of an Indo-American relationship.
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