India's autocratic streak of democracy

Last week in a conversation triggered by Yogi Adityanath's style of governance by fiat, a colleague argued that India cannot function with the liberal democratic system. It needs a dose of authoritarian rule to transform itself. 

There is little doubt that if the country were to hold a referendum today, the result would favour those who will accept curbs on freedom of our precious freedoms of speech and action as a necessary sacrifice for economic growth. 

There is one problem with this model. Prime Minister Naerndra Modi, and now, the Yogi, may be paragons among leaders - honest, deeply committed to the nation and enormously hard-working. 

But they are neither gods nor supermen. They cannot themselves administer every department they oversee, nor ensure that there are excesses committed in the name of the policies they advocate. 

Nationalism 

Implementing Modi or Yogi's stern pronouncements depend on a capable bureaucracy or a dedicated party organisation. 

 

 

Yogi and Modi cannot themselves administer every department they oversee, nor ensure that there are excesses committed in the name of the policies they advocate.

There are two ways to achieve that goal - one is to have a governmental system populated with people with their own qualities down the line from the secretariats to city municipalities and village panchayats. 

But, the Indian bureaucratic culture until now has been associated with inefficiency, corruption and lassitude. It can change, but only slowly and over a period of time. 

The other option is to rely on party cadre. In that sense the BJP government is well endowed. The party and its mentor organisation, the RSS are a cadre-based outfits with committed and dedicated personnel. 

Whether they intend to, or can provide, expertise in building a modern state is another matter. What seems to drive them is cultural nationalism - gau raksha, vegetarianism, re-writing history text books, promoting traditional medicine and so on. 

The big problem with authoritarian systems of the type that my colleague envisages is that they choke off feedback loops. It is possible to use all kinds of mechanisms like town hall meetings and the social media to know what the public is thinking. 

But over time, it's clear, this simply doesn't work resulting in explosive revolts leading to a great deal of death, disruption and destruction. 

Perhaps the best example of a contemporary authoritarian system is China. The Communist Party of China, currently some 121 million strong, runs everything there, the state, every school, university, municipality, all the big industry, indeed, even the Chinese military is actually an arm of the Party, rather than Chinese state. 

So, the best and the brightest, if they want to flourish, must become part of the party system. 

This system has achieved a great deal - it has transformed China from a poor Third World Country into one which is seeking to emerge as the pre-eminent world power. 

But in the process, it has also committed great crimes, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people. 

Legitimacy 

Under Xi Jinping, the CPC is seeking to reinvent itself as the party that will lead to China's rejuvenation as the world's foremost power. But it is acutely aware of the fact that it sits atop a vast corrupt system where there is little justice for the average person. 

He/she cannot move across China and settle down where they will, they cannot get justice because the party is the prosecutor and judge and its functioning opaque. 

It walls off China's internet and strictly controls the flow of ideas in the educational system and media. 

History shows that as countries like Japan, Portugal, Spain, Israel, Greece, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore transited from the middle-income to high-income levels in the 1960s and 1970s, they also shed authoritarian rule and became democracies. 

Middle income China confronts this dilemma today. The CPC may not acknowledge it openly, but it faces a crisis of legitimacy. Having achieved middle-class status, people also want a say in their own governance and liberty of thought and action. 

Besides, there are the intangibles that democracy delivers in terms of its cultural eco-system where entrepreneurship and innovation flourish. 

India, of course, is an exception being poor and a democracy, though it is, as historian Ramchandra Guha says, an 'election-only' democracy.

Stability 

India, of course, is an exception being poor and a democracy, though it is, as historian Ramchandra Guha says, an 'election-only' democracy. So does it require a dose of authoritarian rule to transit to a middle-income economy? 

Many in India would argue that it does. The Modis and Yogis are looked up to because they have an authoritarian streak, but their problem is that they do not have the large numbers of administrators and managers who can get this system to work at higher levels of efficiency. 

On the other hand, they have a large team of raucous cadre who are undermining the already fragile social stability and rule of law in the country. 

Mail Today, 23 April 2017

Why Is China Renaming Seemingly Unimportant Places in Arunachal Pradesh?

Two of the six spots renamed could be of significance, but the other four are simply points on a map. Is there a method behind this that we cannot discern at the moment?

 

Earlier this month China’s ministry of civil affairs, responsible for social and administrative affairs under its government, published a notification changing the names of six places in Arunachal Pradesh, which China has claimed since the 1950s and now says is South Tibet. According to the state-owned daily Global Times, this is a “move to reaffirm the country’s territorial sovereignty to the disputed region.” But there is little doubt that the step is a deliberate move aimed at punishing India for permitting the Dalai Lama to visit the Tawang monastery earlier in April.
China’s renaming places is part of what is called lawfare, where countries seek to get the legal high ground to press their claims. This is not a new feature for the Sino-Indian relationship. For instance, when China wanted to press a claim to Barahoti Pass in Garhwal, it renamed it as Wu Je. Likewise, Demchok, which is in Ladakh and claimed by China, was named Parigas. Similar examples abound in cases where China or other countries dispute territory. We are familiar with the Argentinian designation of Falklands Islands as the Malvinas, or the differing names used by the Vietnamese and Chinese for the Paracel and Spratly Islands.

The notification on renaming of six places in Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls South Tibet.

Along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), where Indian and Chinese claims overlap, the naming and renaming is accompanied by another manifestation of the game – leaving behind tell-tale signs. Chinese patrols enter areas within the Indian claim line and leave behind newspapers, cigarette packets, old uniforms and so on. Often they paint rocks declaring it to be Chinese territory. Indian patrols do the same and whenever they come across Chinese tell-tale signs, they deface them and carry away or destroy the litter.
The Chinese ministry published its notification of April 13 giving the names in the Chinese, Tibetan and English scripts along with the latitude and longitude of the places. However, they did not indicate the original names of the places.
Plotting the Chinese given latitude and longitudes onto Google Earth results in a fascinating revelation – while two of the spots could be of significance, the other four are simply points on a map with no habitation and no prominent landmark. One would imagine that they are totally random, but perhaps, since this is just the first of many similar exercises, there is a method that we cannot discern at this stage.
Plotting “Wo’gyainling” (91° 52’ 25”E and 27°34’54”N) on Google Earth reveals a nondescript locality in Tawang 1.70 km from the monastery as the crow flies. However, some 300 metres away is the small but elegant Urgelling Gompa. Now there are scores of gompas all over the area, but the significance of Urgelling is that it is the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama.
“Mila Ri” (93° 52’ 25”E and 28° 03’ 06”N) – “ri” means mountain in Tibetan – is not even the highest point on a forested mountain slope. “Qoidengarbo Ri” (93° 45’ 57”E and 28°16’ 50”N) is clearly a peak, though its significance is not known to this writer. Maybe, it and Mila Ri are places of local religious significance.
“Mainquka” (94° 08’ 04”E  and 28° 36’ 03”N ), or Menchuka as it is now known, seems to be just about the only place of significance renamed. It is a town with an airstrip just about 30 km from the LAC.
“Bumo La” (96° 46’ 25”E and 28°06’ 55”N) was initially assumed to the Bum La (27°43’ 31”N and 91° 53′ 32″E), the pass north of Tawang where India and China have their routine military-to-military meetings. But the coordinates provided land you up at the eastern extremity of Arunachal Pradesh, some 24 km west of Walong, while Bum La is on the western extremity. Further, Bumo La does not appear to be a pass, as the suffix “La” would suggest; it is merely a point on the slope of a mountain.
“Namkapub Ri” (95° 06’ 05”E and 28° 12’ 49”N) is the big mystery. There was an assumption that this could be the Namka Chu ( 91° 40’ 40”E and 27° 49’ 18”N), which is in the western extremity of the Sino-Indian border in Arunachal Pradesh. This was the site of the first attack by China in 1962. But the coordinates provided by the China’s civilian affairs ministry lands you on a forested slope where there are no distinct geographical features like a river, a mountain peak, pass or a dwelling of any kind.
The Wire April 24, 2017

China renaming places in Arunachal is an old ploy to delegitimise adversaries

China has long mastered the art of “lawfare” or the system through which legal claims are put forward to delegitimise adversaries. Renaming places is not something new. So the Chinese call the Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea as the Xisha and Nansha islands or the Senkaku islands which they dispute with Japan as the Diaoyu islands.
 

True to form, the Chinese have pushed up their claim over Arunachal Pradesh to another level. The English daily Global Times said in a news item today that “China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs announced on April 14 that it had standardised in Chinese characters, Tibetan and Roman alphabet, the names of six places in ‘South Tibet’, which India calls ‘Arunachal Pradesh’ in accordance with the regulations of the central government.
So, Bum La, the pass that marks the Line of Actual Control (LAC) north of Tawang has become Bümo La and Namka Chu, through which the current LAC runs and where the fighting first began in October 1962, has become Namkapub Ri and Menchuka, a small town in West Siang district, has become Mainquka.
China has long mastered the art of “lawfare” or the system through which legal claims are put forward to delegitimise adversaries. Renaming places is not something new. So the Chinese call the Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea as the Xisha and Nansha islands or the Senkaku islands which they dispute with Japan as the Diaoyu islands. So Aksai Chin which India claims as being part of Jammu & Kashmir is occupied by China and is said to be the southwestern part of the Hotan Prefecture of Xinjiang.


According to the daily, the aim is to “reaffirm the country’s territorial sovereignty to the disputed region”. The paper cited a Chinese specialist Xiong Kunxin to say that the renaming and standardisation were part of “China’s growing understanding and recognition of geography in South Tibet.”
India’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh rests on the Simla Convention of 1914 which it arrived at with the Tibetan authorities which marked the border through what was known as the McMahon Line. The great monastery of Tawang thus became a part of India, though it was administered by Tibetan monks till 1951 when an Indian patrol team led by Major R. Khating sent them away. China says that its representative had not agreed to the Simla Convention, though the record says that he initialled it. Further in ensuring years, the Chinese authorities did not raise any issue with regard to the McMahon Line.
Even though China claimed a boundary on the foothills of the Assam plains from the outset, it did not press its claims. In 1962, following the defeat of the Indian Army, China occupied all of Arunachal Pradesh, but voluntarily withdrew thereafter.

Earlier in 1960, Premier Zhou Enlai offered to trade Chinese claims in Arunachal with India’s claims in Aksai Chin which China was occupying. This offer of a swap was repeated again by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. However, since the mid-1980s, the Chinese have been saying that India should concede Tawang to them. And now, following the most recent visit of the Dalai Lama, which China warned would spoil Sino-Indian relations, Beijing has taken this additional step.

However, in 2005, in signing the agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principle for the Settlement of the India-China Boundary Question, China accepted under its Article VII that “In reaching the boundary settlement, the two sides will safeguard due interests of their settled populations in border areas.” Indians assumed that the Chinese were willing to again forgo their claim on Tawang, but a year later China disavowed this as well.
Last month, Dai Bingguo who was Beijing’s top negotiator on the border dispute with his Indian counterparts between 2003 and 2013, said in an interview with the China-Indian Dialogue magazine that “The disputed territory in the eastern sector of the China-India boundary, including Tawang, is inalienable from China’s Tibet in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction.” Indeed, he had the chutzpah to suggest that India was blocking China’s “reasonable requests” in not offering Tawang up as part of a border settlement. Indian negotiators have repeatedly told the Chinese that bringing up Tawang is a deal breaker.
Now, it is not just Tawang, clearly the Chinese are hardening their claim on the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh. And the prospects of a border settlement look remote. But this is not just something that affects India. Across their periphery, whether in the Senkaku/Diayou islands, or the South China Sea, China’s position on its borders has become more assertive and inflexible.
Hindustan Times April 24, 2017

Whatever the Provocation, the Indian Armed Forces Cannot Take Recourse to Illegal Acts

The state’s monopoly of violence is accepted only if it follows the rule of law; if it doesn’t, it justifies the breaking of its monopoly by individuals, mobs and insurgents.

The disturbing footage of a Kashmiri man, Farooq Ahmed Dar, strapped to an army vehicle in Beerwah tells us a great deal about how bad things are in the Valley. As the vehicle drove through different towns and villages, soldiers inside the jeep warned, ‘Those who pelt stones will meet the same fate.’
For the record, Dar said he was not a stone pelter and had in fact voted that morning, but no matter what the provocation, the armed forces of the Union of India cannot and should not take recourse to illegal action. Using a captive human being as a shield certainly constitutes an illegality and, hopefully, the authorities will act against the troops in question.
From the outset, the Indian authorities have sought to use proportionate and legal force to counter the Kashmiri militancy. In line with this, they have punished soldiers and policemen who crossed the red lines. It is true that in the first five years of the insurgency, many got away with torture and custodial deaths, but by and large, the record of the Indian army has been good.
An important legal aspect of the use of force against insurgents is the principle of proportionate violence. The Indian security forces have upheld this by not using heavy weaponry against the insurgents who are often sheltering in densely populated areas. The clear perspective with which counter-militancy is practiced is that, unlike Israel, Indian forces are dealing with Indian nationals who are also entitled to the full protection of its laws and constitution.
However, fighting a clean fight against insurgents anywhere and by any army is an ideal, rather than a reality. Insurgents often shelter among the people and use them as a cover and a shield and in the hurly burly of an incident, it is often difficult to discriminate between the bystander, militant and what is termed as his “over-ground worker”. Not surprisingly, nearly 15,000 civilians have been killed since 1988 in the process of counter-militancy operations.
Still, a state cannot abdicate its responsibility to engage in legal conduct under all circumstances. The state’s monopoly of violence is accepted only if it follows the rule of law; if it doesn’t, it justifies the breaking of its monopoly by individuals, mobs and insurgents. This is why recourse to the kind of tactics that are displayed in the video are wrong and illegal.
Dealing with an insurgency requires a two-pronged strategy – defeating both the armed challenge of the militant and his political message. The security forces have spectacularly achieved the first task through great grit and sacrifice. Over 6,000 personnel were killed in the 1988-2016 period and probably as many injured and maimed. In the last decade, the number of security personnel killed came down from a high of 1067 in 2001 to just 17 in 2012.
Unfortunately, since then the figures have risen again touching 88 in 2016.
The reason for this is that the second leg of a counter-insurgent strategy has not come into play. There has been little or no effort to counter the political message of the militant. Indeed, the policy of the government – both state and Union – amounts to benign, or to be precise, malign neglect. Simply no effort has been made to address the underlying political aspects of the situation.
A measure of the public unhappiness, if not anger, is the sharp downturn in the electoral turnout in the recent by-elections in the Kashmir Valley. In the first “free and fair” assembly poll in 2002, just 43.70% voters participated. This went up steadily to 61.60% in 2008 and 65.52% in 2014. Srinagar and many urban constituencies which are the heart of separatism had always recorded low turnouts. But in 2014, even they saw a significant rise. This time around, they are back to their historical low, ad worse.
In the 2014 assembly poll, an unusual polarisation led to a situation where the Bharatiya Janata Party had no seats in the Valley, while the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of Mehbooba Mufti was confined only to the Valley. This led to a coalition between two improbable partners to form a government. The current situation is a direct outcome of this because of the resentment this coalition raised among the PDP’s supporters, especially in south Kashmir.
Blaming Pakistan all the time will not help, though Pakistani militants have been a factor in attacks across the Line of Control such as the ones in Pathankot, Uri and Nagrota in 2016. The fact is that the recent uptick in violence has a domestic element and it works along two lines – first, an increase in attacks on army camps and convoys, second, through violent civil protest, including stone-pelting.
Instead of using the BJP-PDP coalition to heal the rifts in Jammu and Kashmir, the leadership in the state and in the Union government has allowed things to drift. Incredibly, some senior officials have now come to believe that leaving things as they are is a weapon to defeat separatism.
Allowing things to fester takes it toll on both the Kashmiris and the security forces. So, while the government may not sympathise with the Kashmiri stone-pelters, it should have some concern for the security forces. A feature of this “violent civil protest” has been the public’s willingness to come out and help militants trapped in security cordons and during intelligence-led raids on their hideouts. This is a manifestation of popular feelings and anger, and poses a particularly difficult problem for the security forces. Counter-insurgency now is a two level problem – one dealing with armed militants, which is fairly simple, the other is to deal with stone-pelting mobs, which requires specialised police forces, equipped and trained to deal with violent civil protest.
Fighting insurgency is never an easy or pleasant task. Besides the risk of death and maiming is the constant tension that a soldier or policeman faces. Then there is the psychological toll on the jawan who is part of guard duty and road-opening sorties day in, day out, or simply going in a convoy to Jammu to catch a train home or facing stone pelting mobs. Unfortunately, minus any political efforts to resolve the situation, the security forces have been given the Sisyphian task of dealing with repeated bouts of violence that show no signs of ending.
The Wire April 15, 2017

Death sentence for Kulbhushan Jadhav: A Pakistani provocation

Civilised countries do not sentence spies to death except in war time. Despite bad relations, India and Pakistan are not at war. 

The Pakistani decision to sentence Commander Kulbhushan Jadhav to death for espionage should be seen to be the provocation that it is. In the 21st century, civilised countries do not sentence spies to death except in war time. And, notwithstanding their frosty relationship, India and Pakistan are not at war.



The official Pakistani press release, of course, claims that he has been sentenced for “his involvement in espionage and sabotage activities against Pakistan” and that he was tasked by India’s Reserach and Analysis Wing to “coordinate and organise espionage/sabotage actiities aiming to destabilise and wage war against Pakistan….”
As of date it has provided no proof of this. And most certainly it cannot expect either India, or the world community, to take the word of a Pakistani military court on the issue. Till now, India has been denied consular access to Jadhav, and neither has he been produced in a Pakistani court of law.
Commander Jadhav is a hero and an extraordinary man who undertook a very difficult mission. But he is neither a saboteur nor a terrorist. His job, in all liklihood, was naval intelligence relating to Karachi and Gwadar which he successfully managed from Chah Bahar.
The Pakistani authorities have only made a general charge that he was involved in Baloch activities, no specific incident has been blamed on him.
Indeed, as a serving naval officer, he would have been very careful in actually entering Pakistani territory which he is alleged to have done. And that, too, carrying his cover, but genuine, passport made out in the name of Hussein Mubarak Patel.
There is every indication that he was kidnapped from the Iranian side and handed over to the Pakistanis. When news of his arrest was revealed, a well-connected Afghan journalist Malik Achakzai tweeted to that effect on April 2, 2016.

On the same day, in Karachi, a former and very knowledgeable German ambassador to Pakistan Dr Gunter Mulack, said, according to the Dawn “that the Indian spy recently arrested in Balochistan was actually caught by Taliban and sold to Pakistani intelligence.”

In his so-called confessional statement, which for obvious reasons must be taken with a large dose of salt, he says that he began his work in 2003 and was allegedly seconded to R&AW in 2013. Even here he says “My purpose was to hold meetings with Baloch insurgents and carry out activities with their collaboration. These activities have been of criminal nature, leading to killing of or maiming Pakistani citizens.”
It is not clear whether he or the Baloch organisations are being accused of the actual acts of “killing and maiming”.

“There are finances which are fed into the Baloch movement through various contacts or various ways and means into the Baloch liberation (movement) and various activities of the Baloch liberation and RAW handlers go towards activities which are criminal, which are anti-national, which can lead to maiming or killing of people within Pakistan and mostly these activities were centred around of what I have knowledge is of ports of Gwadar, Pasni Jewani and various other installations, which are around the coast damaging various other installations, which are in Balochistan.”

If you parse the statement carefully, you can see that he was more into espionage about the ports, rather than sabotage. The bits about the violence and criminal activities have been pasted on.

Inconclusive and insufficient

You may recall also the contretemps over the statement of Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz on December 8 when he told a meeting of the Pakistan Senate Committee of the Whole House that the government could not finalise the dossier on Jadhav because of inadequate evidence provided till then. “The [provided] material, in our view, was insufficient,” he said.
Later the Pakistan Foreign Office scrambled to deny that Aziz had said that and gave a different spin to the statement. In January, Pakistan submitted a dossier to the UN on Jadhav’s involvement in subversive activities.
There was another interesting sidelight to all this during Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s visit to Pakistan in March 2016. The local media claimed that Jadhav’s activities had been raised by Pakistan Army Chief Raheel Sharif with Rouhani. The Iranians hotly denied that such a conversation had taken place and even dismissed the press reports as “undignified rumours” and a “product of thinking which does not like further expansion of ties” between Iran and Pakistan.
Pakistan later asked Iran to investigate the issue. In January 2017, a senior Iranian official, Allaudin Boroujerdi, Chair­man of Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security of the Islamic Consultative Assembly of Iran, was reported to have said that the Iranian investigations had been inconclusive.
Espionage is a fact of life, and so is the process of getting caught, howsoever that happened. Commander Jadhav is a hero and a patriot who has risked his life for something he believed in passionately. The government of India must do all it can to ensure his release.
And, meanwhile, a retired Pakistani colonel has reportedly vanished in Kathmandu. Will this bring another turn in the already twisted drama that we have been seeing?
Scroll.in April 10, 2017

The Trump-Xi summit at Mar-a-Lago, Florida

The Trump-Xi summit at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, seems to have gone off well. A US spokesman says that the 'President was very pleased with the outcomes of the meeting.'While the Chinese readout by Xinhua was dryer, speaking of the meeting 'setting a constructive tone for the development of China-US relations.'

The most important take away was, in the words of US secretary of state Rex Tillerson that 'the chemistry between the two leaders was positive.'

Candid chemistry

Given Trump's demonisation of China through the election campaign and the early turbulence that hit the relationship on the issue of One China policy, the outcome was not easy to predict.

Clearly, however Trump went out of his way to be hospitable to his Chinese guest. 

With good chemistry to start with, the two key countries on the global stage can bring what the Chinese call 'win win' solutions to their problems, and to those of the world.

A measure of the success of the meeting was the decision to raise the level of the various bilateral dialogues that the two countries undertake on economic, law and order, cyber security and diplomatic and security issues.

They will now be overseen by the two Presidents.

There was plain speaking on both sides, more so on the Americans who profess to have had a litany of complaints.

So, as Tillerson noted, 'President Trump noted the challenges caused by Chinese government intervention in its economy and raised serious concerns about the impact of China's industrial, agricultural, technology and cyber policies on US jobs and exports.'

The US was also candid in telling the Chinese that they must adhere to international norms in the East and South China Seas and to their own earlier statements saying that they would not militarise the region.

The Chinese side emphasised its position on the 'Taiwan issue and the Tibet-related issues'.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan for dinner

In other words, re-emphasised its sensitivity to matters relating to its national territory. In addition, it out forward its position on the South China Sea issue.

There was convergence on North Korea and the need to de-nuclearise the Korean peninsula. But the Chinese made their opposition to the THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea clear.

For its part, the US, which is the target of North Korea's nuclear and missile weapons, is keeping its powder dry.

But the Chinese side could not have missed the significance of the American missile strike on a Syrian base at the time their President was dining with his American counterpart.

But it was only after Xi left the US that the Chinese media openly criticised the strike as being the actions of a weakened president who needed to show he was tough.

Mutual gains

For the Trump administration, clearly, the first priority is not North Korea or the South China Sea, but to get some action on the trade and investment front.

They are looking for short-term and long term responses from their Chinese counterparts. As part of this there is the 100-day plan which will have specific benchmarks aimed at enhancing US exports to China and reducing the trade deficit between them.

In some ways, the feel-good summit meets the purposes of both parties.

Xi Jinping has ensured that the unpredictable Trump will not surprise him between now and the all-important 19th Party Congress later this year.

At the same time he has burnished his image within his country as a statesman who can confidently step out and deal with the world's biggest power on the basis of equality.

As for Trump, the gains are more subtle. Having assumed power after a shock result, Trump was simply not ready for the complex global issues that a US President must deal with.

Following the summit, he has time to, first, work out the basic outline of what his own foreign policy will be; as of now, as the case of Syria shows, he is merely improvising.

Equally, his trade officials have time to work out a longer term policy to tackle the problems outlined by Secretary Tillerson above.

Regular dialogue 

That said, this can be seen as a first encounter between the leaders of two very important countries.

No doubt there will be many more, and perhaps some not so even. But it is in every one's interest that the two continue to engage each other and work out their problems through dialogue and negotiation.

China's impact on the world order will only intensify in the coming period. The Chinese are constantly searching for ways to tilt the playing field in its own favour and shift goalposts on whim.

The challenge is to ensure that it plays by the established rules, not cherry pick them, as is its wont. 

Mail Today April 9, 2017