On Jerusalem, Modi Government is Putting Ideology Over National Interest

Bandwagoning with the US cannot be a substitute for a working foreign policy in our own region and near abroad.

Protests break out in Palestine after President Trump’s announcement of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Credit: Reuters/Mohammed Salem

To say that the Indian response to the unilateral American declaration recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was pusillanimous is to be polite. What the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs said was a non sequitur: “India’s position on Palestine is independent and consistent. It is shaped by our views and interests, and not determined by any third country.”

But just what this position is was not spelt out, nor the fact that howsoever independent and consistent one’s position may be, it most certainly is affected by a third country – especially when that country happens to be the mighty United States.

Most countries, even friends and allies of the US and Israel, have issued more categorical statements. Singapore, for example, made it clear that any unilateral action would impede progress for a peaceful resolution of the Middle East and Palestinian problem. It reiterated its support for the two-state solution and added that “the future of Jerusalem should be decided through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.”

As for the European Union, it said its position remained unchanged: “The aspirations of both parties must be fulfilled and a way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both states.”

The Chinese spokesman bluntly outlined Beijing’s support for a negotiated settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute which would benefit regional peace and stability and be based on a “full sovereignty” Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital.” This was in line with what President Xi Jinping declared in a major speech to the Arab League in Cairo in January 2016.

There was a time in the 1950s when India played a larger than life role in world affairs. It was not a matter of our military power; it had none. Nor of its economic clout, since we were among the poorest countries in the world. It was about leadership and ideas and that somewhat undefinable thing called integrity. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s advocacy of non-alignment gave the developing world an alternative to the binary of the US-Soviet contest and ensured that we did not get involved in their proxy bush wars. Its ultimate success was in the near-universal adherence it gained from most developing countries in the world. Nehruvian non-alignment was also pragmatic –India secured massive quantities of US economic aid to assist its development, even while equipping its military with weaponry from the Eastern Bloc obtained at “friendship prices.” It also required courage, such as in developing nuclear capacity and refusing to be herded into regimes like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the face of multiple sanctions by the US.

Non-alignment meandered away from relevance in the 1980s and lost its raison d’etre the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, but it provided India with a framework policy which served us well.

The framework of the Modi-era foreign policy is not very clear. There is certainly great energy in the prime minister who has toured most of the world. But just what India, which looms far larger in terms of its economic and military standing, represents today is not clear. The BJP may have an ideological preference for Israel, but that should not trump national interests. Who will deny that peace and stability in the Middle East is, perhaps, the most important imperative of Indian foreign policy, and that it will be adversely affected by the dynamics that Trump’s policies will unleash?

Some 70% of our oil comes from the region, seven million of our citizens work there. Four times in recent history, India has had to evacuate its nationals from the region; in 1990 from Kuwait, Lebanon in 2006, Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015. The US decision, against international consensus, could well stoke off further instability in the volatile region and lead to yet another bout of Islamist radicalism – all matters of direct concern for India.

Elsewhere too, the drift is evident

That Indian policy is faltering because of the lack of a coherent structure is evident also from the happenings in Myanmar. We are of course, familiar with our waffling on the Rohingya issue. Again, something that concerns us directly because it has the ability to destabilise our neighbourhood via Bangladesh. As Suhasini Haidar wrote in the Hindu, India has dithered on the issue even while the US, European Union and Singapore have sought to find a way out of the crisis. Once again, the BJP’s ideological position viz. its attitude towards Muslims, seems to have dictated its policy, rather than national interests which would demand an active role by New Delhi to reverse the flow of refugees who could affect India and undermine the stability of our neighbour.

Ironically, as Haidar points out, the Chinese have taken the lead in trying to resolve the crisis. Following a visit by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi to Naypidaw and Dhaka, Myanmar and Bangladesh reached an agreement to repatriate refugees back to the Rakhine state. Of course, China has also defended the Myanmar government and helped in watering down UN pressure. China is working along its national interests. It has substantial economic interests in the Rakhine State where it has developed the Kyaukpyu port and from where it transports gas and oil to its Yunan province. It is set to enhance its investments in the region and so, it is seeking stability there. Whether China’s activism works or not, only time will show, but what is clear is that India is marked by its absence in a crisis which can have direct effects on its security.

In line with the perspective of stabilising a neighbouring region, in the past year, China has sought to play a mediatory role in Myanmar to resolve conflicts between the state and its ethnic minorities. In March 2017, its representatives set up meetings with the United Wa State Army, the largest armed ethnic group in Myanmar, as well as with the Northern Alliance comprising of a slew of groups like the Arakan Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Kachin Independence Army.

The decision to play a mediatory role is a new phase in Chinese policy which otherwise famously avoids getting involved in internal issues of its interlocutor countries. But with its new Belt and Road Initiative, China has realised that non-involvement is a luxury it may not be able to afford for too long. If there were important economic and strategic interests in a region, Beijing no longer has the option of standing by as a crisis develops.

To come back to the Modi era. The prime minister began with a strong commitment to anchor India’s foreign policy to strong ties with our neighbours in South Asia. Today as we do the sums we find that the Pakistan and China parts of the ledger are in the red. We are missing in action in Myanmar and Bangladesh and neither here nor there in Sri Lanka. As for Maldives, the recent Chinese free trade agreement points to India’s impotence. That leaves Nepal. The victory of the alliance led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) is a major setback which will have serious implications for India-Nepal relations.

All this is an ironical consequence of a government in New Delhi that sought to move away from the past and promised a new era in foreign policy. In part this is a result of pursuing ideological goals, rather than national interests, and in part because Modi simply lacks a strategic framework upon which to build policy. Bandwagoning with the US is no substitute for a working policy in our own region and near abroad.

The Wire December 10, 2017

Trump’s 'social insecurity' Bill

On Saturday, the Republican Party passed a tax bill which critics say will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

The Borowitz Report, a satirical column in The New Yorker, said Kim Jong-un was concerned that his plan for destroying the US had been “made totally irrelevant by the Republican tax bill moving through the Senate”. 

The Republicans, he believed, would upstage his plan to destroy America.

Debt plunge  

The plan would add $1.4 trillion (`90 lakh crore) to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that could lead to future cuts in medical and social security programmes. The display on the National Debt Clock mounted on Times Square in New York is around $20.5 trillion (`1,320 lakh crore) and rising. It is the highest as a proportion of the economy since 1950. 

The solipsistic Trump “revolution” is unfolding on fantasies about economic growth. Just how the President expects to embark on his proposed $1 trillion (`65 lakh crore) plan of revitalising the crumbling infrastructure of his nation is difficult to fathom. The tax cuts will, if anything, reduce the capacity of the state and local governments to fund new projects and maintain older ones.

Earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a failing grade to American infrastructure, saying that even to reach passing grade, the country would have to spend $4.59 trillion (`300 lakh crore). Infrastructure investment was a major theme of the Trump campaign, but as of now the only thing that is being built is the Great Wall to keep out Mexican migrants. 

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 A triumphant President Trump was quick to announce the new measures

 But despite his boorish behavior, Trump is very much in command. Just who was responsible for the identical items carried in the Washington Post  and New York Times last week that he was about to replace secretary of state Rex Tillerson is not clear. But Trump took the opportunity to not only deny the story, but to emphasise that even though the two of them have differences, “I call the final shots.” 

The US remains the most important economic and military power in the world. The Narendra Modi government has put all its foreign policy eggs in the American basket. If the US is determined to commit harakiri, it has implications for India, if not the world.

China Factor

New Delhi has been moving rapidly to embrace the Trump administration’s new Indo-Pacific policy articulated by Trump and Tillerson. In essence, it seeks to bring India into the American military calculations in the power balance against China. 

New Delhi, too, needs the US because the state of its own economy and military reveal an increasing gap in the relative power between India and China. India has quickly embraced the Quadrilateral idea has played an active role in the meetings at the ministerial and official levels in 2017. 

Last week, it  was announced that Indian Navy ships would be able to refuel and restock in Singapore’s Changi Naval base. Significantly, in mid 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to be the star guest at the Shangrila Dialogue, organised by the IISS, London and blessed by the government of Singapore.  

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Tump spoke again of the victory at a Republican fundraising breakfast at Cipriani's in New York later

As of now, the Trump vision for the Indo-Pacific has been articulated through speeches. But it is waiting to be fleshed out to offer a credible and sustainable response to the rise of china

India’s presence at this Track 1 security summit has so far been fitful. Modi is likely to use the occasion to further cement India’s commitment to Trump’s Indo-Pacific vision. How does all this connect up with the state of the US ? The credibility of any leader or nation is based on its domestic and international profile. 

Alternative

The combined military might of the US, Japan, India and Australia is much greater than that of China, but smaller Asia Pacific states are awaiting an economic and investment policy that will offset the gravitational pull of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. 

In his speech at the CSIS earlier this year, Tillerson had said that a “quiet conversation” had begun between various countries to come up with alternative financing institutions, while warning that it would not be easy to compete with Chinese conditions anyway. 

For his part, Trump did not even bother to speak of this issue in his Asian tour, having gutted the TPP, all he had on offer were bilateral trade deals for which there have been no takers. India needs all the money it has to build its own infrastructure. Japan by itself cannot be the sole provider of foreign assistance. 

But with the American elite focused on itself, there is little chance that it will cough up resources to power the Indo-Pacific alternative Tillerson has spoken off. This is what America First looks like, anyway.

Mail Today December 3, 2017

The Upside Down World of America the Turbulent

Trump’s rise symbolises the US’s polarised polity, but he is only the manifestation of the disease, not its cause.

A man holds a flag of US President Donald Trump as a monument of Jefferson Davis is removed in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., May 11, 2017. Credit: Reuters

Washington DC: The Black Friday sales were good; $20 billion of business transacted over one weekend (Thanksgiving) signifies an economy is doing well, with unemployment is down to 4.1%, the lowest in 17 years.

But beneath the surface there is considerable turmoil in the US. Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s, a major factor in the shift of many Democratic manufacturing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania towards Donald Trump in last year’s election. Larger and more worrying trends show that many parts of the country are being left behind by the current economy according to a county-by-county report of the Economic Innovation Group.

According the group’s Distressed Communities Index, some 52.3 million Americans live in economically distressed communities that are spread across the nation, while 84.8 million live in prosperous communities. While prosperity is widespread in a country like the US, it is the persisting pockets of poverty and deprivation that add fuel to its toxic politics of today.

And all this overlays what has been called the “opioid crisis” where the misuse of that class of drugs has led to the deaths of some 64,000 persons last year, more than those killed by guns or the HIV epidemic at its peak. In October, Trump declared the opioid problem to be a “public health emergency”.

But little has been done to curb it.

In the shorter term, in a highly charged partisan atmosphere, the US Congress confronts a crowded agenda of legislation that could also lead to a shut down of government as the funding for the budget ends on December 8. A lot depends on how Trump leads and this poses its own questions because of his erratic record. The Republican leaders are keen to pass their tax overhaul measure, but there are other issues demanding attention like the immigration reform, which will decide the fate of 7 lakh young immigrants, and the fate of the Obama healthcare legislation.

The US has a polarised polity, with intense divisions that affect communities, families and even in some instances, spouses. The rise of Trump, of course, symbolises the toxic trends in the US, but he is only the manifestation of the disease, not its cause. Sadly, instead of using the presidential bully pulpit to calm the situation, Trump draws his political sustenance from it. Whatever the world may think of him, Trump remains wildly popular with the Republicans and his base of white Americans.

He is careful to play to this base, regardless of what the “liberal establishment” may say. One example is his support for the embattled Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for an off-year election to the US Senate from Alabama who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. Of course, Trump himself faced similar charges in the run up to the election.

The media, too, is badly divided and instead of objectivity what we see is a partisan media where the channel you watch speaks about your politics and in turn your politics determines your media preferences.

Politics in the country has become more personal and confrontational. A major factor here is the role played by Facebook and Twitter in making anger and argument a routine social phenomenon. The leader of the pack is the president of the US whose Twitter broadsides pass off for presidential leadership these days in the land of Washington and Lincoln.

In this upside down world, despite an ongoing investigation of Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 US presidential elections, the erstwhile hawkish Republicans have gone soft on the Russians. This was a country where hostility to Russia was once the hallmark of patriotism.

Guns, of course, mark the big divide. So where huge majorities of Republicans support the idea of allowing concealed weapons in most places, even in schools, equally strong majorities of Democrats oppose it. Because of this, Americans have no answer to the terrible havoc created by the repeated attacks by gunmen who have wreaked havoc in local communities. Interestingly, the big item that sold on Black Friday sales were guns. According to USA Today, the FBI received 203,086 requests for instant gun background checks on Friday, a new record for such requests. By themselves they are not a measure of firearm sales, because a buyer could buy more than one weapon. Such checks are just about the least the US is doing to deal with the terrible scourge of gun deaths.

We can expect more turmoil in the coming period as the Trump administration readies to adopt policies that could lead to trade war with China and the scrapping of NAFTA. Trump’s attack on free trade and his promise to bring back jobs naturally has an appeal in the so-called Rust Belt. But while he has loudly declared what he is against, he has not been so clear as to what alternatives he has on offer.

Not everything is negative. The Weinstein effect has revealed the major issue of sexual harassment and exploitation that stalks the country. By bringing out the issue into the open and naming and shaming powerful predators, the country would become a better place for women. The fact that the process is working top down from members of the Congress and celebrities is a mark of its impact, which will not be confined to just one party but across the political spectrum. Though whether it will have a lasting effect and also percolate to the lives of ordinary folk remains to be seen.

The Wire November 28, 2017

Trump got it wrong again. His Asia tour was no success

US President Trump has, in his narcissistic way, declared that his recent Asia tour has been a stupendous success. The excursion has many facets worth exploring. From the point of view of American business, it most certainly has been a great success. The US has announced that some $253 billion (Rs 16,42,982 crore) worth of trade deals were arrived at in China. There is, of course, the view that Beijing played Washington well in the process.

In fact, when you do the maths, it is apparent that the tour served to put a stamp of legitimacy on China’s status as a Pacific power. Chinese President Xi Jinping made it a point to tell Trump that “the Pacific Ocean is big enough to accommodate China and the United States”.

Chinese whispers

In the past year, since the South China Sea arbitration award and the Belt and Road Forum, we have seen a distinct incoherence in American policy and a subtle shift in the region’s approach towards Beijing. Many of them, especially ASEAN nations are adapting to China’s power; even feisty Singapore has been forced to kowtow to Beijing.

The US allies were broadly happy that Trump strongly stated American intentions of upholding its security commitments to the region. His tour took him to Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, besides China. He also articulated a new Indo-Pacific strategy and the US working to revive the Quadrilateral Security dialogue.

But by walking out of the trans-Pacific partnership, the Americans knocked off a key leg of their Asia-Pacific or, Indo-Pacific strategy. The President says he wants to do bilateral deals, as though little Vietnam or the Philippines would risk underrating such a negotiation with the mighty US. Smaller powers have always banded together in such agreements to protect and further their interests. So, there are no takers for the offer.

Smaller powers are therefore acting on their own to increase Asian connectivity and balance against China. The TPP countries ranging from Australia to Vietnam have begun talks to revive a variant of the organisation minus the US, which they hope the US will join once it comes to its senses. Minus Cambodia and Laos, states in Asia are concerned about the “America First” agenda, especially its withdrawal from multilateral positions on trade and climate change.

Lack of strategy

The US appears to lack a coherent strategy for the Asian region. Reaffirming military commitments, even while undermining economic ones is not a credible response to Beijing, which through its Belt and Road Initiative, is riding on its vast capital resources and working systematically to knit together a web of influence through infrastructure construction, trade and investment.

The PLA flag follows this and its manifestation is the far-flung base in Djibouti and the PLAN ships and submarines that now regularly visit the Indian Ocean. This is the reason why India needs to exercise caution while getting involved in Trump’s revived Quad and his Indo-Pacific construct.

The idea is clearly aimed at drawing India into the Pacific military equation. Among Asia-Pacific countries, only India has the potential to effectively balance China. Japan is a formidable military power, but it is locked in an existential struggle with North Korea, Australia is inconsequential as far as China is concerned and Vietnam too vulnerable, physically and economically

The one thing instantly evident about the Indo-Pacific construct is that there is a lot of Pacific in it, and little of the “Indo”. The main reason for this is that Indo-US ties have strong military content and are supervised by the US Pacific Command, whose geographical jurisdiction ends at Diego Garcia, south of Sri Lanka. The area that matters most to India — the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea — has been excluded from any Indo-US discussion.

Complex politics

This, as is well known, is a vastly more important external region for India as compared to the Pacific. This also happens to be a politically volatile region. Of course, it is not simple to navigate through the complex regional politics. India, for example, has good ties with Iran, while the US sees it as an adversary.

Likewise, the US has historically had excellent ties with Islamabad, while New Delhi sees it as an enemy. These are only some of the equations that need to get untangled before we can talk about a comprehensive and joint “Indo-Pacific” strategy.

India certainly needs close ties with the US to offset growing Chinese power, especially since its own economy has yet to take off and its military remains unreconstructed and obsolete. But it needs to ensure that there be some balance in the Indo-Pacific obligations.

Given the shifting dynamics of this vast region, it is not as though the two sides have to dot every i and cross every t to begin with. But they need to recognise that for a durable and workable partnership they need to be upfront about their respective medium to long-term calculations.

Mail Today, November 20, 2017

Why India Should Be Wary of the Quad

Like it or not, the term ‘Indo Pacific’ seems to be a means of including India in the military calculations of US strategy in the Pacific.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with US President Donald Trump, Japanese Prime Shinzo Abe and other world leaders at an ASEAN Summit dinner in Manila on Sunday. Credit: PTI

The second coming of the Quadrilateral alliance of the US, Australia, Japan and India to confront China in the Asia-Pacific may not be the proverbial farce, but it is close enough.

The first time around it collapsed when two of its members found it inconvenient to go ahead. And now, after a decade, in which China has militarily consolidated itself in the very region that the Quad had hoped to challenge, the chimera is once again being chased.

Mooted as an alliance of democracies, it seeks to upend everything we know about international relations, where the drivers are national interests, rather than values. Even that titanic struggle against evil in World War II, pitted a partial democracy (the US), an empire (the UK) and the communist Soviet Union against the Nazis and the Japanese militarists.

Ordinarily this would not matter much since the Quad would largely be a talking shop with some joint naval exercises thrown in. But parallel to this, US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have drawn up an overarching vision of the policy they have in mind to replace the now abandoned “pivot.” They are pointedly wooing New Delhi into what could well be a military alliance. Trump’s effusive remarks about India and the pointed re-christening of the Asia-Pacific region as the Indo-Pacific are the soft sell. Like it or not, or hide it or not, the term now seems to be a means of including India in the military calculations of US strategy in the Pacific.

In Manila for the ASEAN anniversary and East Asia summits, the leaders of the four countries met each other individually while their officials will convene separately as the Quad. Clearly, there is some amount of caution in not provoking a hostile response from Beijing, whose response has actually been fairly mild. Following the meeting of officials, the Indian foreign ministry spokesman said that “a free open, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region serves the long-term interests of all countries in the region and the world at large.” But some nuances were visible as the Indian statement avoided mention of the North Korea issue, while the US, Australian and Japanese ones focused on it.

It was during Tillerson’s visit to India on October 25-26, that Alice Wells, the acting assistant secretary of state for South Asia, told accompanying reporters that Washington was “looking at a working level quadrilateral meeting in the near term.” The idea was to bring together countries that share the same values “to reinforce those values in the global architecture.” She, of course, denied that the idea was aimed at China, through she did say that it would “coordinate” efforts of countries seeking infrastructural development through means that “don’t include predatory financing or unsustainable debt (read: China’s Belt and Road Initiative).

A couple of days earlier, Japan’s foreign minister Taro Kono, had proposed reviving the forum, something he said he had discussed with Tillerson and his Australian counterpart Julie Bishop at the sidelines of a meeting in Manila in August. The purpose of the idea, Kono said, was to seek a peaceful maritime zone from Asia to Africa. Essentially, it meant the introduction of Australia into the US-Japan-India trilateral, which has been functioning for a while.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe first pushed the idea in 2005 with a view to developing a broad front to balance China shortly after first coming to power that year. When anti-Japanese demonstrations hit China in 2004-5, Tokyo was shocked. It had for long assumed that Chinese animosity towards Japan for its World War II atrocities had been smoothened by the substantial economic aid that Japan had given China in the 1980s and 1990s, and the massive trade between the two. But the Chinese had merely been biding their time.

As for the US, it first mooted the “pivot to Asia” strategy to rebalance 60% of its naval assets to the region. It sought to buttress this with the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Despite initiating the move to re-establish the Quad and change the nomenclature of Asia Pacific to “Indo Pacific” it’s not quite clear how Trump will operationalise his policy. Would it mean a more muscular set of freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea? And how would it differ from Obama’s pivot, which has already been undercut by the US abandonment of the TPP?

India was leery of the Quad the first time around, but now it says it would be ready to discuss the new terms of engagement for a revival of the proposal. This time around, the Japanese, invigourated by the victory of Abe in the recent elections, have said they would take the initiative to promote substantive cooperation between the countries in defence, maritime security and infrastructure development. Tillerson has also indicated that the Quad would also seek to promote a rival project of connectivity and infrastructure development that would not be predatory and unsustainable.

The first Quad foundered as Australia peremptorily walked out and India followed suit. This was coincidentally around the time of the 2007-2008 economic crisis that saw Chinese economic power go up several notches and the initiation of a phase of military assertion by the Chinese across the board – in the Senkaku islands and on the Sino-Indian border.

At the public level, everyone says that China is too big to be contained. But that cannot negate the nature of international politics, which is based on maximising national, rather than collective gain, and the relentless pursuit of national interest without any special regard to values and principles. No matter what Japan, India, the US and Australia say, the name of the game today is containing China. There is nothing particularly sinister about this. China has not shown itself to be a power that is peaceful or restrained. It has taken recourse to threats and bullying at the drop of the hat. Note the manner in which it sought to browbeat Bhutan on the Doklam issue, penalised South Korea for deploying the THAAD and pushed South-East Asian nations on the basis of its nine -dash line maritime boundary, which has no basis in international law.

The question is whether the Quad process is based on an honest assessment of the challenge, and an equally honest commitment of all those involved. Australia’s history is well known. In the late 1980s, when Prime Minister Paul Keating was asked who he would side with in the event of a Japan-US trade war, he said Japan. Given the country’s economic profile, it is not surprising that he said so, but the same logic holds for the country’s trade with China. Australia is much more economically dependent on China than the other three countries of the Quad. As for Japan, it still has a significant “peace” constituency which could very easily change course once Abe is gone.

In many ways, India and Japan are the frontline where China is concerned, but would a Quad mean that they would support each other militarily were their respective disputes heat up? Actually, it is difficult to see Japan removing its eye from the issues in the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan.

And what about the US? For all its talk of the “Indo-Pacific”, it refuses to associate with India on issues relating to the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, two of the most important external areas for India. Shorn of the rhetoric, Indo-Pacific merely means an Indian military commitment to the US-led alliances in the Pacific Ocean. There is no reciprocal US commitment to issues of Indian concern relating to Pakistan and the dangers arising out of the highly volatile environment in the Persian Gulf area which the US has helped create.

There is a broader issue here as well. Where the US seems to have lost its vision in the mindlessness of “America First”, China has categorically laid out its ambitions for the next 30 years. By 2035, it aims to become a global innovation leader and remove poverty totally from the country, and by 2050, an overall global leader and “a great modern socialist country.” For this, China has laid out a grand plan that it is pursuing and is offering its model of a single-party authoritarian state as against the multi-party liberal democratic model which, to go by the experiences of the UK and US, is clearly faltering.

The only power that can effectively balance China is the US and the world can’t be sure where it’s headed. Even with its great endowments and abilities, the current situation in the US does not generate much confidence. Unlike the seemingly united and aggressive posture that China is taking, there is an intense and almost violent conflict of ideas within the US about who and what America is all about. In such circumstances, it would be hazardous to depend on the US for an effective leadership of the coalition needed to balance China.

November 13, 2017

China on top? Xi unveils soaring ambition of making China the centre of the world

Given China’s closed system, you can interpret the outcome of the recent 19thCongress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways.

Some say that the new leadership is carefully balanced between various factions, others that Xi, the Chairman of Everything, is supreme, with his “Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese characteristics for a New Era” bringing him on par with Mao. Has Xi emerged as the new Emperor, or is his goal shoring up CPC’s supremacy? But one thing has come out clearly, the soaring ambition of making China the centre of the world. So we need to pay attention to the outcome of the meeting.

Xi, who was flanked at the Party Congress by his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, clearly has the support of the mainstream of the party whose members know they must hang together, if they are not to hang separately. The one dissonance is that there are no 1960s born leaders in the lineup of the 7-member apex ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). In other words, no clear successor to Xi when he is supposed to retire in 2022. Recall, Xi, who became general secretary at the 18th Party Congress, was appointed to the PSC in the 17th, his predecessor Hu Jintao was put into that committee at the 14th Congress, even though he took office in the 16th.

Continuity has been personified by the elevation of Wang Huning to the PSC. Wang, a former law professor, has little experience in administration. He is a theoretician who has formulated the ideas of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessors. He is the man shaping CPC’s ideas and messaging, suggesting that China is creating a Sinicized form of Marxism-Leninism which combines an authoritarian political system with a market economy, layered over with a generous dose of nationalism.

The second major issue is that China intends to come to the centre of the world stage. To this end China has outlined a path to enhance its economy by harnessing technology and innovation with artificial intelligence on one hand, and expanding its economic reach abroad through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

China is singularly favoured at this moment by the self-defeating leadership of the United States. When Washington has signalled retreat from multi-lateralism and globalisation, Beijing has signalled its desire to take the lead on matters like climate change and trade. It is also rapidly developing its military capabilities to assume a larger role outside its own borders. Simultaneously, it has sought to tighten its authority over Hong Kong and assert its Taiwan claim emphasising its intention to strongly protect its national interests.

There is now an explicit challenge to the world order which was led by Washington. China has benefited hugely from this world order and has no intention of upending it; what it seeks is to slowly supplant the US. But where the US-led order emphasised liberal values and democracy, China insists that its illiberal ways work better, a message that resonates well in many parts of the developing world.

This said, it needs to be noted that China’s problems are also daunting – massive debt, growing inequality, an ageing population, a polluted landscape. The Party has, in its arcane Marxist-Leninist jargon, altered its understanding of the principal contradiction facing China says it will now seek to address issues arising from the persistence of poverty, regional imbalance and a poisoned environment.

CPC has brought unprecedented prosperity to the country and it is not easy for it to digest that its policies may be wrong or require correction, and its authoritarian and centralised structure often prevents effective feedback. So far CPC has shown an impressive ability to surmount challenges as they have emerged. But the obstacles of the future look even more daunting, especially when you put them in the context of the ambitions of Xi Jinping.

Times of India, November 11, 2017