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May.21 (China Military News cited from Reuters) — China is building an advanced combat jet that may rival within eight years Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-22 Raptor, the premier US fighter, a US intelligence official said.

The date cited for the expected deployment is years ahead of previous Pentagon public forecasts and may be a sign that China’s rapid military build-up is topping many experts’ expectations.

“We’re anticipating China to have a fifth-generation fighter … operational right around 2018,” Wayne Ulman of the National Air and Space Intelligence Centre testified yesterday to a congressionally mandated group that studies national security implications of US-China economic ties.

“Fifth-generation” fighters feature cutting-edge capabilities, including shapes, materials and propulsion systems designed to make them look as small as a swallow on enemy radar screens.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates had said last year that China “is projected to have no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020″ and only a “handful” by 2025.

He made the comments on July 16 to the Economic Club of Chicago while pushing Congress to cap F-22 production at 187 planes in an effort to save billions of dollars in the next decade.

Ulman is China “issues manager” at the centre that is the US military’s prime intelligence producer on foreign air and space forces, weapons and systems. He said China’s military was eyeing options for possible use of force against Taiwan, which Beijing deems a rogue province.

The People’s Liberation Army, as part of its Taiwan planning, also is preparing to counter “expected US intervention in support of Taiwan,” he told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

He said the PLA’s strategy included weakening US air power by striking air bases, aircraft carrier strike groups and support elements if the US stepped in.

Attacks against US “basing infrastructure” in the western Pacific would be carried out by China’s air force along with an artillery corps’ conventional cruise missile and ballistic missile forces, he said outlining what he described as a likely scenario.

He described China as a “hard target” for intelligence-gathering and said there were a lot of unknowns about its next fighter, a follow-on to nearly 500 4th generation fighters “that can be considered at a technical parity” with older US fighters.

“It’s yet to be seen exactly how (the next generation) will compare one on one with say an F-22,” Ulman told the commission. “But it’ll certainly be in that ballpark.”

Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s No 1 supplier by sales, is in the early stages of producing another fifth-generation fighter, the F-35. Developed with eight partner countries in three models with an eye to achieving economies of scale and export sales, it will not fly as fast or as high as the F-22.

Gates has argued that the United States enjoys a lopsided advantage in fighters, warships and other big-ticket military hardware. Some US congressional decisions on arms programs amount to overkill, out of touch with “real-world” threats and today’s economic strains, he said in two speeches on the issue this month.

“For example, should we really be up in arms over a temporary projected shortfall of about 100 Navy and Marine strike fighters relative to the number of carrier wings, when America’s military possesses more than 3,200 tactical combat aircraft of all kinds?” Gates said on May 8.

China says its J-10B is a 4th generation fighter

“Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?” he added at the Eisenhower presidential library in Abilene, Kansas.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, discounted the gap between the timelines cited by Gates and Ulman. He declined to comment on whether China had made enough progress since last July to change intelligence on the next fighter’s debut.

Richard Fisher, an expert on the Chinese military at the private International Assessment and Strategy Centre, said Gates’ decision to end F-22 production is proving to be “potentially very wrong.”

“We will need more F-22s if we are going to adequately defend our interests,” he said in an interview on Thursday at the hearing.

Bruce Lemkin, a US Air Force deputy undersecretary for ties to foreign air forces, told the commission he had visited Taiwan twice in his official capacity and that the capabilities of Taiwan’s aging F-16s, also built by Lockheed, were not “keeping up.”

Whether to meet Taiwan’s request for advanced F-16 fighters or upgrade the old ones was still under review by the Obama administration, he said before Ulman spoke.

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By admin

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SEOUL, South Korea — When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday declared America’s solidarity with South Korea in its mounting confrontation with North Korea, she had more than a domestic audience in mind: she was also speaking to the Chinese.
By post-gazette.com

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When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday declared America’s solidarity with South Korea in its mounting confrontation with North Korea, she had more than a domestic audience in mind: She was also speaking to the Chinese.
By seattletimes.nwsource.com

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Apr.26 (China Military News cited from IANS) — The US is the greatest “perceived threat” to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and cross-Straits relationship was the most likely subject to provoke a China-US war, a top Chinese military strategist has said.

“The US is the only country capable of threatening China’s national security interests in an all-round way,” Rear Admiral Yang Yi, former head of strategic studies at the PLA’s National Defence University, said last week to a group of visiting senior US officials.

“Japan has no such ability, while Russia has no such motivation and India is more worried about China,” Yang said while addressing delegates at the weeklong US-China Government Executive Global Leadership Course that concluded last Friday.

Yang said Beijing was hoping to maintain and develop a stable and healthy relationship with Washington but it also needed to make necessary preparations for any possible threat.

“Fortunately, the risk of a Sino-US confrontation is decreasing due to the relaxation of the Taiwan question,” China Daily reported Sunday quoting Yang.

He said the Taiwan question would be solved politically rather than militarily, adding the cross-Straits relationship would become even more stable and secure if it continued to develop positively over the next five to 10 years.

Talking about US arms sales to Taiwan, Yang said: “Those weapons will be ours sooner or later.”

The 17-member US group included directors of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Defence Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

This is the first time that Washington has sent senior government officials to Beijing to engage their Chinese counterparts in a comparative educational dialogue.

Sun Zhe, director of Tsinghua University’s Centre for US-China Relations who planned the course two years ago, said Yang had answered the questions in a frank manner.

“A US navy official in charge of intelligence asked the question and he quickly responded that it was the same case for China about the US,” Sun said, adding it is very unique for naval officials from the two sides to exchange thoughts so honestly.

According to Sun, the frank communication was not intended as a threat, but that it would help the two powers to avoid strategically misjudging the other.

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By admin

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Copper ingenious rings puzzles, 1998. NEW YORK, NY.- This November, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites visitors to explore the intellectual, historical, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of puzzles with an exhibition of antique games from China.
By artdaily.com

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Apr.13 (China Military News cuted from press TV) — India and the US have engaged in talks over China’s upgraded 2.25-million-strong armed forces and its strategic maneuvers in the Asia-Pacific region.

Wary of China’s long-term intentions, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President Barack Obama shared their own assessments of what has been described as China’s trans-border military capabilities and its growing presence in the Indian Ocean Region.

PLA Navy’s Advanced Type 039B Conventional Submarine

China has also forged extensive maritime links with regional countries such as Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar, The Times of India reported Monday.

China’s ambitious aircraft-carrier-building program was of particular interest in the talks, since it is one area in which the country actually lags even behind India, the daily reported, quoting sources.

Currently, China’s fleet comprises of about 62 submarines, with 10 nuclear-powered ones and three armed with long-range ballistic missiles, and 75 major warships.

The two leaders held a one-on-one meeting on the sidelines of this week’s 47-nation Nuclear Security Summit in Washington DC.

There has been no official Chinese reaction to such discussions by two of Beijing’s arch rivals in terms of military and economic assertiveness.

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By admin

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The damage done by the financial crisis now seems to require not a refurbishing job but an extreme makeover. While soul-searching and even self-loathing are inevitable during a crisis, this is no time for America to shy away from a capitalist system that has produced decades of economic growth, writes Krishna Kumar.
By rand.org

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Feb.03 (China Military News cited from Reuters and written by Adrian Croft) – China and India sharply raised defence spending in 2009 despite the economic crisis but most European NATO members face a squeeze on defence budgets as they rein in gaping deficits, a report said on Wednesday.

The impact of the global financial crisis on defence and security spending varied across regions and countries, the International Institute for Strategic Studies thinktank said in its annual report “The Military Balance”.

PLA Navy Warwhip’s Main Gun and HHQ-9 air Defense Missile

U.S. defence spending almost doubled under former President George W. Bush but President Barack Obama had signalled that the need to tackle a big budget deficit would require “a dramatic reprioritisation within defence spending”, it said.

Obama asked Congress this week to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2011 — including a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon’s base budget — but said he would continue his drive to eliminate wasteful programmes.

A sharp recession had led the Russian government effectively to abandon a comprehensive military re-equipment plan due to run from 2007-15 and to replace it with a new 10-year plan starting in 2011, the report said.

“In contrast to developments in advanced economies, both India and China have maintained their recent trend of double-digit increases in defence spending,” it said.

PLA Army Type 59 Main Battle Tank 

India boosted defence spending by 21 percent in 2009 after the 2008 Mumbai attacks killed 166 people, it said.

China’s official 2009 budget included a 15 percent rise in defence spending to 480 billion yuan, equal to $70.3 billion at market exchange rates, the report said.

However, it said the official Chinese defence budget did not reflect the true level of resources devoted to the People’s Liberation Army. It was widely believed that the official budget took no account of weapons bought overseas or research and development funding, it said.
EUROPEAN DEFENCE LIKELY TO SUFFER

Other Asian countries, such as Australia, Indonesia and Singapore, had also posted increases in defence spending, it said.

PLA Air Force J-11B Fighter

In Europe, though, many countries had seen their budget deficits rise sharply as they pumped money into the economy to try to end the recession.

“When the time comes to redress these fiscal imbalances, discretionary spending will come under considerable pressure and defence is likely to suffer, particularly in those countries facing a looming demographic shift requiring greater expenditure on pensions and healthcare,” the editor of the Military Balance, James Hackett, wrote in the report.

Britain faced a challenge in reconciling its budget deficit with its large and growing future equipment plan, it said.

Among European members of NATO, only Norway and Denmark were likely to increase their defence budgets in 2010, and over the medium term most other countries would do well to increase defence spending in line with inflation or match existing budget levels, it said.

This would lead to pressure to step up pooling and multinational management of defence assets, to countries specialising in niche capabilities and to the collective procurement of critical defence equipment, it said.

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Jan.21 (China Military News cited from telegraph.co.uk and written by Dean Nelson) — The US wants to open Cold War-style arms reduction talks with China to prevent future military confrontations, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said in New Delhi on Wednesday.

His comments appeared to confirm Washington’s acceptance of China as a military superpower amid growing regional concerns over its build-up in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

China is currently undergoing a major overhaul of its armed forces. Beijing’s increasing number of nuclear submarine deployments have caused alarm in India, which regards China as its main regional rival.

China has further antagonised India by increasing military co-operation with India’s rival Pakistan, which is developing a new deep sea port at Gwadar, and neighbouring Burma.

India’s relations with China have deteriorated following a series of incursions along its disputed Himalayan border and a cyber attack last month on computers used by its top intelligence officials.

Mr Gates said he had discussed cyber security and China’s military build-up with the Indian prime minister and voiced America’s hopes to deepen understanding between Washington and Beijing on the issue.

He had been involved in the United States’ Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, which he believed had played an important role in avoiding armed conflict between the two countries. He said the same approach could help relations with China today.

“There was discussion about China’s military modernisation programme, what it meant, what the intentions of that military build-up and the desire on our part to engage China in a more routine and in depth dialogue about our strategic intentions and plans to avoid any miscalculations or misunderstandings down the road.

“I was involved in the strategic arms talks (with the USSR). I’m not sure they reduced any arms but the dialogue and candour about nuclear capabilities, how each side looked at nuclear weapons, played a significant role in preventing miscalculations and mistakes during the Cold War. That kind of dialogue with China would be most productive and in the interest of global security,” he said.

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By Atlantic Online (blog)

originally published at china-defense-mashup.com

Jan.14 (China Military News cited from AXcess News and written by Erich Hiner) — Senior military and government officials assured members of Congress Wednesday that China does not pose a significant security threat to the U.S.

In a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, witnesses from the Navy, the State Department and the Defense Department said China’s armed forces are rapidly expanding, but the nation itself is not set to become a direct U.S. military rival.

Although troubled by China’s rapid increase in military-related spending and its positioning of missiles near the island of Taiwan, the witnesses said China’s increases do not necessarily come at the expense of U.S. security.

Wallace C. Gregson, assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, said the two nations can find common ground despite China’s ongoing buildup.

“China is not a strategic adversary,” Gregson said. “It is a partner is some respects and a competitor in others.”

Gregson and other witnesses said China has been cooperative in pressuring Iran and North Korea to abandon their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Despite those positive steps, witnesses said China competes with the U.S. for influence, economic gains and commercial opportunities. As the Chinese military grows, U.S. military and state officials foresee an unavoidable rise in tensions.

Members of the committee were hopeful for future U.S.-China negotiations on security issues, but said China must be willing to play a larger role if tensions are to decrease.

Rep. Howard P. McKeon, R-Calif., the committee’s senior Republican, said U.S.-led negotiations can go only so far.

“While I believe that coming to the table is vital to avoid misunderstanding and miscalculation, we must be mindful that it takes two to make a relationship work and that our priority focus must always be on protecting America’s national security interests,” McKeon said.

China has increased its military spending over the past two decades, boosting its defense budget by double-digit percentage increases every year. The most recent increase, from 2008 to 2009, was 14.9 percent, bringing the official amount of Chinese military spending to roughly $70.6 billion. U.S. military officials suspect the actual sum is many times greater.

China has also modernized its armed forces. According to witness statements, China is developing ballistic missile systems capable of striking U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific. The country is also developing a submarine-launched ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental U.S.

The witnesses expressed their most serious concern over China’s refusal to discuss the true extent of its military increases or its intentions. Beijing has not disclosed its plans for a larger, more-advanced People’s Liberation Army.

Adm. Robert F. Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, said China’s stated goal of a defensive military runs contrary to its actual combative capabilities. The PLA is becoming more capable of waging the type of fast, modern warfare needed to fight high-tech armies.

Willard said Beijing’s silence can be addressed with improved communication and cooperation. That would also improve military-to-military relations and help avoid international incidents, Willard said. The PLA and the U.S. military have no established communication channels.

“It is clearly in both nations’ interests, and the Asia-Pacific region’s interest, to manage these complexities and develop a relationship with China that is constructive in every way,” Willard said.

Some representatives were wary of China’s future capabilities, but witnesses said the country’s primary concern remains internal stability.

“I think the Chinese pay a lot of attention to internal security and internal social issues,” said David B. Shear, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. “That is the No. 1 goal for them.”

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By admin

originally published at rand.com
Ever since China test-fired ballistic missiles… in 1995 and 1996, many analysts have sounded the alarm about the threat of China’s military power. This has been a false alarm until now, but within a decade China could supplant America as the dominant military power in East Asia, writes Roger Cliff.
By rand.org

East Asia Forum

via Thinking about the Asia Pacific Community.

Authors: Hadi Soesastro (CSIS, Jakarta) and Peter Drysdale (ANU, Canberra)

The idea that regional architecture in Asia and the Pacific is not up to the tasks it now needs to serve has been around for some time. It has been inspired in part by worries about the untidiness in the competing structures — across the Pacific, of APEC, and within East Asia, of ASEAN +3 and the East Asia Summit (EAS). There has also been a hankering after ‘robust’ regional institutions modelled on the arrangements in Europe or North America, however unsuited they are to Asia Pacific circumstances.

,

What is different about the thinking that led to Prime Minister Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal is that these worries are incidental to its main strategic motivation. The Rudd idea is grounded in the reality of the big shifts taking place in the structure of regional and world power. These shifts in the structure of power have two main implications.

First, Asia’s growth is changing the structure of the world economy and shifting global economic power, and ultimately, strategic weight towards Asia, in particular China and India. Economic and political changes in Asia and the Pacific challenge the primacy of some dimensions of American power. These developments underline the gap in the framework for regional political and security dialogue in Asia and the role that such dialogue could play in helping to manage the long-term change in the structure of Asian economic and political power and political security relations between Asia and America.

Second, the scale of Asia’s impact on the global economy means that there is urgency in energising regional efforts to deliver on Asia’s global responsibilities – in the financial and macro-economy, in trade policy and on climate change – and how that might be assisted through regional structures.

Until the collapse of world financial markets and world trade in the global financial crisis, the East Asian region, including Australia, was preoccupied with managing all aspects of the China boom – the pressure on energy, resource and food markets, the macroeconomic pressures, the looming foreign direct investment and commercial presence – and beginning to think about its long-term political consequences. India too was more and more caught up in the wave. All was premised on the continuing strength of North American and European markets.

East Asian economies should have been more conscious of their role on the world stage and the need to reposition quickly to manage the global system consequences of their own economic success and the dangers presented to its sustainability that the huge imbalances had created on the way. East Asia bore no responsibility for America’s squandering the beneficence of East Asia’s success – the apparently never-ending supply of cheap credit negligently guarded by the private and public custodians of the developed world’s financial system. But in this and in many other global system-making or system-destroying economic and political affairs, East Asia had significant prudential responsibility and it failed collectively at every stage to exercise it.

The reason for this failure is simple.

Despite the emergence of East Asia as a major economic force in the world – China, Japan and the rest of East Asia through to Australia and New Zealand reaching out to India – the East Asian economies collectively could not step up to the mark because regional structures were still not up to the task of effective global participation. The stage was still set for the wrong play – reactive responses to regionalism in other parts of the world, the trivia of regional FTAs and ‘mickey mouse’ financial cooperation – and there was no platform on which to perform globally.

In East Asia, like elsewhere in the world, the risks that we now face in recovery from the global financial crisis, not only economically but also politically, are a consequence of failure in the architecture of governance, including regional architecture, that frustrated a coherent East Asian and international response to the big problems of the day in their global context.

The global financial crisis and the emergence of the G20 has changed all this dramatically and propelled the G20’s Asian members to assume a new role and their proper responsibilities in managing the world economic order. ASEAN is the fulcrum of Asian cooperation arrangements, including APEC, ARF, ASEAN+3 and the East Asian Summit (EAS) but, with the rise of the bigger powers in Asia, and the G20, this is changing.

How can regional architecture be restructured to relate effectively to the new global arrangements?

The starting point is to understand that, while they may have failed to connect Asia’s regional with its growing global interests and responsibilities and they have other weaknesses, the regional arrangements we have in place are huge assets in going forward. APEC is entrenched as the primary trans-Pacific arrangement. ASEAN+3 and the East Asian Summit have assumed an important role in developing the Asian regional agenda. APEC, in its first twenty years, has provided a workable strategy in trade and economic diplomacy in East Asia and the Pacific supporting policies of liberalisation and structural reform, organised around the principle of open regionalism (a strategy well suited to the development, objectives and diversity of the Asia Pacific region). But after the Asian financial crisis and the global financial crisis, these regional arrangements (APEC, ASEAN +3, ASEAN+6) must now relate more strategically to the global arrangements (the G20 group). And there is a whole new political and security agenda to navigate within the Asia Pacific region.

Clearly, the Asia Pacific Community idea needs to relate to these established regional structures – APEC and East Asian arrangements – if it is to be both accepted and serve its underlying political-security purpose. It will only be worthwhile and practical if it limits dialogue to the major players. Hence, although it cannot encompass all APEC’s membership, or all the membership of EAS, a dialogue on political and security affairs needs to represent both as they are presently constituted. It needs to link to, be coordinated with, and draw on the base of all of the established trans-Pacific and East Asian arrangements.

While none of the existing regional institutions addresses all of the key dimensions of regional cooperation that they now need to – providing a collective forum for regional leaders to address the full range of regional and global issues; dealing effectively with the consequences of economic integration, particularly its trade and investment but also its financial and macro-economic dimensions; addressing issues of political change and security; and educating the public and opinion leaders about the region – nor should any one organisation need to perform all these roles. Each of these forums has evolved to serve some or other of these roles and they can all make an input across the range of issues that are now important.

This points to the need for a new heads of government meeting that transcends APEC and EAS (encompassing the Rudd and Hatoyama proposals) that can address the full range of regional and global issues, including issues that might arise in APEC, EAS, ARF or other regional forums and feed into the G20 and other global processes. This summit could eventually constitute an Asia Pacific Council, underpinning the continued development of the regional community. It would not need its own secretariat but draw on APEC and the ASEAN-based groups to develop issues for consideration.

There may be sensitivities in creating a new summit involving a limited number of countries, the ‘larger’ players in Asia and the Pacific. But so long as it is structured so that it is representative of all the regional arrangements, these sensitivities need not be important. The most practical proposal and most logical starting point is that this summit should begin by including the Asia Pacific members of the G20, and meet adjunct to the APEC summit. A dialogue among these countries does not entail creating an additional institution as G20 leaders will continue to meet beyond the current financial crisis, encompass the core players in APEC and EAS and meet in conjunction with the annual APEC summit . These are all  important considerations in taking the next steps towards realising vision of an Asia Pacific and East Asian Community.

The clear message is that ‘no one wants more meetings’ and that there is ‘no appetite for additional institutions.’ But there is strong support for developing more effective alignment of regional strategic purpose, a sentiment that is at the core of the idea of an Asia Pacific Community.

If this is an idea that seeks to anticipate and shape our regional political and economic future, it is an idea that cannot be put on hold, take a decade to implement or wait until the United States signs on to EAS, an ASEAN-based, primarily Asian-oriented and still nascent grouping.

The next APEC meeting in Japan, provides an excellent opportunity to convene a side-dialogue of this group, including India, on these issues, likely just prior to the G20 meetings in Seoul, to lay the foundations for a representative Asia Pacific Council that can give leadership to taking the Asia Pacific Community idea forward.

Dr Hadi Soesastro is a senior economist with CSIS in Jakarta and Peter Drysdale is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University. The original version of this essay was submitted as background to the Asia Pacific Community Conference held in Sydney at the instigation of Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, 3-5 December 2009.

IntelliBriefs

via To please China, US slights India.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/216752/To-please-China-US-slights-India.html

US President Barack Obama’s China visit has put the writing on the wall in bold: China is the next superpower the world must watch out for. Clearly, the US realises there is little it can do to prevent China’s phenomenal rise and growing influence; it has therefore decided to partner that growth. And, what better way than to use a presidential visit to Beijing to declare America’s most serious geopolitical rival Asia’s Big Boss and cozy up to a major global player in a rapidly multipolarising world. Admittedly, none can deny that China has been moving in that direction with very sure steps; it was only a matter of time before the US acknowledged that. Following his summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Mr Obama therefore said, “The Sino-US relationship has never been more important in our collective future.”

Except, the declaration comes at a huge cost for India which, following the Indo-US nuclear deal, was being hailed as a strategic partner of the US, a counterbalance to China’s alarming growth in the region and in the world. While the deal clearly mortgaged India’s nuclear freedom, the Manmohan Singh Government drew false comfort from becoming a “strategic” partner of the US. Mr Obama’s joint statement with Mr Hu now categorically indicates that far from being a possible counter-China presence in Asia India is, in fact, a subject of joint US-China monitoring, a perception Mr Obama has merely offered to “share” with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the latter’s forthcoming visit to the US.

The Obama-Hu statement begs serious and immediate attention. In a highly inexplicable, unprovoked and offensive manner, the joint statement says both “support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan”. The casualness with which India has once again been hyphenated with Pakistan is alarming, to say the least. It was indeed an arduous diplomatic drill for India during the 1999 Kargil conflict when the world in unison reprimanded two nuclear neighbours for baring their fangs at each other. However, global capitals soon realised that Indian restraint alone had prompted US intervention which forced Pakistan to back off. In the subsequent years, courtesy some hectic diplomacy by its leadership, India was able to convince the world that it was a mistake to measure the two nuclear armed states with the same yardstick. India’s economic growth and political credibility in the decade that followed finally gave world powers the confidence to de-hyphenate the two South Asian neighbours and deal with India as an emerging global power and with Pakistan as a failed Talibanised state.

As a country that calls India a strategic partner — an unstated tool to contain Chinese hegemony — the US would have surely known what the re-hyphenation of India and Pakistan on Chinese soil meant. Mr Obama may be new in office but surely an American President cannot be ignorant enough about India’s sensitivities to ask China — long seen as Pakistan’s aide in its conflict with India, its prejudices and ploys no state secret — to monitor an arena in which Beijing itself has geopolitical stakes. Is Mr Obama not aware that had it not been for Chinese help Pakistan, a rogue state, would never have acquired a nuclear weapon? Is he also unaware that China is engaged in huge infrastructure building in northern Kashmir so that Pakistan maintains a strategic edge over India? This, apart from the infrastructure build-up along China’s own disputed borders with India that have put a huge question mark on India-China relations of late.

Today the creator of a nuclear monster like Pakistan, with its own reasons to keep India down, has been entrusted the task of monitoring “good relations” between a failed state and a responsible democracy like India. Indeed, India’s stature vis-à-vis Pakistan has been reset to 1998 when a US-China joint statement by Mr Bill Clinton and Mr Jiang Zemin, ordered the two to “resolve peacefully the difficult and long-standing differences between them, including the issue of Kashmir”. Short of saying ‘intervention’ that statement had asserted that the US and China were “ready to assist in the implementation” of the resumption of dialogue between the two countries.

Times — and the language Americans would use with India — were to change in subsequent years, remarkably so after Mr Clinton’s visit to India in March 2000. Notably, after a five-day visit to India, Mr Clinton stopped over in Islamabad only for a few hours. The de-hyphenation had begun. Then came 9/11. With a terror attack on US soil, American engagement in the Asian arena was to change forever, an engagement that would leave India only as a bystander. In hindsight, India’s distance from what transpired in Afghanistan and Iraq and with what is now happening in Pakistan helped it stay above the conflict and prove to the world that the problem in South Asia is not an India-Pakistan border/territorial conflict but an alarmingly growing fundamentalist Islamic terror machinery that knows no borders.

Mr Obama’s visit to China comes at a time when India-China relations are at their pre-1962 worst and when US-China relations are at their all-time best. In such a scenario, for an American President to discuss India with China in the context of peace, stability and sustainable development in the region is patently offensive. Agreed, Mr Obama has to keep China in good humour. After all, the American and Chinese economies have become so interlinked that all other issues, including meeting the Dalai Lama, must be kept on hold. The compulsion is more serious on the American side. Also, it is quite evident that Mr Obama’s AfPak policy is headed nowhere. He is therefore seeking more partners in this theatre of conflict. By ceding China that strategic space the US can make a dignified exit out of a war it could never really fathom. The possible trade off: China minds Iran and North Korea.

In the process, if India’s strategic stature just got dwarfed in Beijing it has only the Manmohan Singh Government to blame. For, its first tenure saw India sign off crucial political leverage with the US in an inexplicably rushed nuclear deal. Its second tenure has seen its abject failure to counter growing Chinese belligerence on the border issue. Laughably, instead of outright rejection or outrage India’s feeble response to the China-US statement is that it is “committed to resolving all outstanding issues with Pakistan through a peaceful bilateral dialogue…A third country role cannot be envisaged nor is it necessary.”

PLA Plans to Hack, Sniff, Explode: “When one of China’s top two military leaders visited America last month, the PLA launched an impressive and coordinated propaganda effort. The Chinese also have crafted an coordinated approach to using cyber warfare, melding it with signals intelligence, electronic warfare and precision guided weapons in a new strategy called Integrated Network Electronic Warfare (INEW). ‘This sort of multi-spectrum assault has potential implications that go well beyond the battlefield,’ Larry Wortzel, a top China expert will tell Congress Tuesday.

India is acquiring ultra-modernBritish super carrier to counter Chinese Navy threat in Indian Ocean (India Daily): “Indian Navy plans to acquire super modern carriers, submarines, and war ships from Russia, Britain and America to dwarf Chinese Navy presence. As part of its cost-cutting plans, Britain will sellone of its new £2-billion aircraft carriers to India, which has lodged a firm expression of interest.”

China’s role on world stage is no cause for alarm, says Obama: “

Barack Obama introduced himself as America’s ‘first Pacific president’ as he launched his four-nation tour of the region, vowing to deepen ties with Asia and arguing that China’s rise should be welcomed rather than feared.

Kicking off his visit in Tokyo, he also sought to thaw the chill in relations with his hosts, America’s closest allies in the region. The new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has vowed to make Japan less dependent on the US, but the two men agreed to put off the issue of resolving the future of US forces in Japan.

However, police in China are reported to have detained dozens of dissidents in a crackdown ahead of Obama’s arrival there today. Human rights campaigners said that at least 30 activists who were expected to apply for the right to hold protests directed at the Chinese government during the US president’s visit were arrested.

Reformers worry that Obama will play down China’s poor human rights record in order to maintain good relations on issues such as the economy. ‘We get the impression Obama doesn’t want to talk about human rights on this trip, but it is precisely because of his visit here that these people are being rounded up and detained right now,’ Ai Weiwei, a Beijing-based artist and social commentator, told the Financial Times.

Speaking yesterday during the first stop on his nine-day Asian tour, Obama told an audience of 1,500 in the Japanese capital: ‘I want every American to know that we have a stake in the future of this region, because what happens here has a direct effect on our lives at home.’

American officials have portrayed the trip as an opportunity to develop relationships and make progress on non-proliferation, climate change and the economy, and are playing down expectations of any agreements.

As in his previous foreign affairs speeches, Obama emphasised his personal ties in the region – referring to his birth in Hawaii, time in Indonesia and boyhood travels in Asia – and the administration’s break with unilateralism.

‘We welcome China’s efforts to play a greater role on the world stage – a role in which their growing economy is joined by growing responsibility,’ he said. ‘Power does not need to be a zero-sum game and nations need not fear the success of another.’

He held out a hand to North Korea again, calling for it to denuclearise; and to Burma, if it undertakes democratic reform and frees political prisoners, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma’s prime minister will be present at the president’s meeting with Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean) leaders in Singapore.

Obama also announced that the US will sign up to a trans-Pacific free trade agreement. That may help to deflect accusations of protectionism, which are likely to be aired throughout his tour. He stressed the need for ‘balanced’ growth and said Asian countries should not be dependent on exports to the US.

The economic crisis has underlined the interdependence of ‘Chimerica’ in particular and the trade imbalance that has left China with vast US dollar holdings. Washington wants the Chinese currency, the yuan, to appreciate further; Beijing will repeat its concerns that US debt could endanger its dollar holdings.

But Obama’s Chinese visit is about more than money. The world’s two largest carbon emitters are meeting just weeks away from the Copenhagen climate-change conference.

China’s influence on North Korea and Iran are central to Obama’s non-proliferation agenda. Its handling of Afghanistan and Pakistan will also be high up in discussions.

Obama’s China policy is essentially his predecessor’s; the relationship is increasingly amicable. But some fear attempts to broaden it could mean less meaningful engagement.

‘Bush’s approach was: you are rising in the international system and need to take on more responsibility,’ said Victor Cha, director of Asian affairs in the National Security Council under George Bush and now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. ‘Obama is heaping on all these very, very high expectations – on issues like climate change and currency – and I think they are expectations that China cannot possibly meet.’

China sees itself as a vulnerable developing country as well as a rising power. And shared anxieties – such as those over proliferation – do not equal identical interests. “China’s own interests in those hot spots [North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan] make it deeply conflicted about playing a larger role on the world stage,” said Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt of the International Crisis Group. “While the United States frames China in terms of its growing responsibilities as a major power, China continues to think primarily in terms of its own interests.”

To some observers, the administration is also too keen to please Beijing, wasting leverage rather than smoothing the path to greater gains.

Obama’s decision not to meet the Dalai Lama last month – aides say he will do so in future – ‘doesn’t send a signal that the US wants to work with China; it sends a signal they have basically got us,’ said Cha.

US and China, locked in equal embrace | John Gittings: “

Obama’s trip comes at a time when the US needs China as much as China needs it – and neither nation can afford to let go

When President Obama arrives in Shanghai tomorrow he will be carrying the baggage of a relationship between communist China and capitalist America that dates back more than 60 years.

‘There is no such thing as America not intervening in China,’ Mao Zedong told a US diplomat in 1945 – and offered to fly to Washington to talk about the future with President Roosevelt. Mao’s proposal, made a year before the Chinese civil war in which the US backed Chiang Kai-shek’s rule, never reached Roosevelt. What might have happened if they had met is a fascinating counter-factual question of history.

After the communist victory in 1949, two decades of hostility ended with Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 when China became a useful ally for Washington against the Soviet Union. Since then the relationship has fluctuated but has always been seen on the Chinese side as essential – less consistently so by the US.

What is different today, and what takes the Obama administration into new territory, is that it is at last a relationship of equals: the US now needs China as much as China needs the US.

The contrast with the last presidential state visit to China, by Bill Clinton in 1998, is striking. That event was more show than substance, carefully choreographed to give the president a much-needed boost after the Monica Lewinsky affair. Clinton urged the virtues of democracy upon President Jiang Zemin and offered to act as a go-between for him and the Dalai Lama. It looked good at the time but the Tibetan offer came predictably to nothing and six months later Jiang launched a crackdown on the Chinese democracy movement.

Within another six months, the US air force bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, provoking a wave of genuine anger across China. George Bush, in his presidential campaign, would label China as a potential strategic threat, not as a partner.

It was the shock of 9/11 that gave China a grim golden chance to make itself more useful to the US (and target its own Muslim dissidents in Xinjiang province) by signing up to the war on terror. Yet in spite of Chinese entry into the World Trade Organisation, Beijing knew that the relationship remained less than equal: in the wry expression of a senior Chinese diplomat ‘we think it is better to remain number two’.

Today’s relationship occupies a completely different world in which there is talk of a Sino-US G2, and even suggestions that China might become No 1. The past rhetoric of both sides – ‘empty cannons’ as Chairman Mao once called them – seems dated. China is not going to make too much fuss about continued US arms sales to Taiwan (when was that island last in the headlines?). Human rights in China – never a huge concern to Washington (only a month after the Beijing massacre in 1989, a secret US envoy was sent to Beijing to maintain relations) – will be mentioned for form’s sake by Obama. But the priorities identified by Obama earlier this week are the only ones that really matter: ‘climate change, economic recovery, nuclear non-proliferation’.

The US says it seeks a ‘comprehensive partnership’ with China in what Jon Huntsman, new US ambassador to Beijing, calls ‘the most important bilateral relationship in the world’. This is music to the ears of Chinese foreign policy advisers in Beijing who have often worried about the underlying ‘inequality’ in US-China relations.

The presidents whom they advised, Jiang and now Hu Jintao, can privately tell internal critics that their long-term strategic policy of putting the relationship with the US first has paid off.

More openly, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has warned the US military establishment that China should be regarded as a partner, not an adversary.

Does China perhaps have the upper hand in this relationship, as it measures another 8% growth in GDP against the limping US economy? Hardly so, if we consider the real implication of the familiar statistic that China now holds $800bn in US Treasury bonds.

Obama may ask Beijing to revalue the Renminbi; Hu may ask Washington to ‘focus on its own financial deficit’, but the Chinese surplus rides on the American debt as if on the back of the Old Man of the Sea: neither can let go of the other.

And China’s extensive growth over almost two decades is not only unhealthily dependent on foreign markets, but has been bought at the expense of a deteriorating environment and a worsening rich-poor divide.

US presidential visits to China have always had a showbiz element – ever since Richard Nixon stood on the Great Wall and declared that it was truly a great wall. We may expect a wave of Obama-fever in the Chinese media: every tabloid paper – and there are a lot of them now – will want to have Michelle on the front page. Yet the widely read Huanqiu Bao (Global Times) says that the Obama visit ‘won’t shake the world’ and that most Chinese people have ‘neither strong concerns nor high expectations’. In a more equal Sino-US partnership, fewer heads may actually turn for the presidential motorcade.

China: A Superpower Stirs:
By ANDREW BROWNE

Beijing

The wooden treasure ships commanded by Admiral Cheng-ho, a Chinese Ming dynasty eunuch, were among the largest vessels ever built, nautical monsters that by some accounts carried nine masts.

Bigger by far than the ships of Christopher Columbus that set out decades later for the New World, they were the flagships of an armada that ventured as far as the east coast of Africa on seven naval expeditions. The first embarked in 1405 bearing some 30,000 men; the seventh in 1430.

Then the expeditions suddenly stopped. Cheng-ho’s adventures had helped to ruin Ming finances. The emperors put a halt to sea trade and closed the shipbuilding industry; China looked inward for the next four centuries. The expeditions to the “Western Seas” were a glorious aberration.

Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, the world is looking to China to assume an unfamiliar role of global leadership. At a time when American prestige is fading, China’s status is rising.

Jon Krause

President Barack Obama arrives in China next week seeking help on everything from climate change to North Korea’s nuclear threat. At meetings of the Group of 20 nations, China’s opinions are urgently sought on issues such as banking reform and executive pay. Persuading China to take a lead will be a challenge.

History has done little to prepare this country for the kind of leadership that an anxious international community seems so ready to thrust on it.

Unlike the U.S., China doesn’t aspire to remake the world: Its longstanding mantra is “nonintervention” in the internal affairs of other countries. Even under Chairman Mao’s reign, China never sought world domination, like the former Soviet Union—although it stirred up revolution in other parts of Asia and beyond. Now that China has largely discarded socialism, it’s hard to find a definition for what remains of its ideology, values and world view.

Recently, at a dinner in a Beijing restaurant of a group of young Chinese professionals—several of them Communist Party members—somebody raised a question that should have been simple to answer. Can anybody list the “Three Represents”? The reference was to the political theory of former President Jiang Zemin, which has been written into the state constitution and is taught in schools. Not a single hand went up. Could anybody name two? Nobody. One? With difficulty.

A hard-nosed pragmatism is generally considered to be China’s guiding principle at home and abroad: whatever produces growth in gross domestic product.

China’s aloofness from the world was interrupted when the West came knocking. In 1793, Lord Macartney was dispatched to China by Britain’s King George III to open the country to trade. He arrived with presents meant to dazzle the court of the Qianlong emperor—mechanical clocks, chronometers, telescopes and mathematical instruments. The 600 packages required 200 horses and 3,000 porters to transport.

“There is nothing we lack,” the emperor famously told the royal emissary. “We have never set much store on strange and ingenious objects.” The British forced open the doors to trade with gunboats; an enfeebled China was carved up by Western powers in what China calls its “century of humiliation.”

It’s easy to forget, driving by Beijing’s Olympics-inspired landmarks—the Birds Nest Stadium, the Water Cube, the colossal CCTV Tower—that until quite recently China had closeted itself again.

For most of the first 30 years of Communist rule in China, which started in 1949, it was hard and often outright impossible to get a visa. Businessmen were granted access once a year for the Canton Trade Fair. In neighboring Hong Kong, tourist buses would deliver groups of camera-toting Americans and Japanese to the border to catch a glimpse of “Red China” on the other side. The rare Chinese official who ventured to the West was a curiosity, much like North Koreans today.

China was in turmoil. To divine what was going on inside the country, foreign intelligence decamped in Hong Kong to monitor local radio stations.

Deng Xiaoping put an end to Chairman Mao’s era of murderous seclusion—its endless class struggles and man-made disasters, including the world’s worst famine—with his “Open Door” reforms in 1978.

The decision to open the country to foreign trade and investment, initially through Special Economic Zones along the coast, set China on its path of supercharged economic growth. China is shortly expected to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy.

China’s achievements have provided a beacon for much of the developing world: its success in lifting 300 million people out of poverty; its fight against disease and illiteracy; its embrace of technology that has put Chinese astronauts in space. All this, while allowing an unprecedented flowering of personal freedoms.

Now, as the global economy emerges shakily from the worst recession since World War II, China is attracting admiration from new corners.

While the Western world hurtled towards the financial abyss, China was moving ahead cautiously. It has emerged from the crisis with an economy growing powerfully. Its banks are unpolluted by toxic assets; hardly a ripple disturbs its vast pools of national savings. This year, property markets in Beijing and Shanghai are sizzling.

There are hopes, too, that China will use its new strategic heft—and its apparently deft touch—to help resolve the most pressing security issues of the times. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, proposed a drastically slimmer G20—a G2, the U.S. and China—to deal with the nuclear threat posed by Iran and North Korea; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; India-Pakistan tensions; climate change.

When he arrives in Beijing, Mr. Obama will be clutching a geopolitical “to-do” list that looks quite similar. America’s broad goal has been to persuade China to assume the global responsibilities that go with its growing economic influence in a way that strengthens, rather than threatens, existing international arrangements. China, urged former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, should become a “responsible stakeholder.”

Yet China’s official commitment to a “harmonious world” is often at odds with an assertive America fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More often than not, it has meant that China has been a reluctant follower not a leader. Critics say that China’s record in the world’s trouble spots, from North Korea to Iraq and Darfur, suggests that it defines its responsibilities in ways that enhance its economic interests.

On North Korea, China has been heading diplomatic efforts to try to rein in Pyongyang’s nuclear program. But it is hesitant to threaten the flow of Chinese oil and food that keeps the regime alive. Skeptics in the U.S. say that China holds back because it fears a collapse of North Korea that would not only unleash a flood of refugees across its border but also place U.S. forces face-to-face with its own.

Similar tensions between China’s economic interests and international obligations play out in Africa, where Chinese companies are investing massively in energy and raw materials to fuel China’s growth. The “no-strings” investments from Nigeria to Ethiopia fly in the face of Western efforts to link investment with improvements in human rights and the environment. In Sudan, China has sent peacekeepers to the war-torn region of Darfur, while bolstering the government by buying oil and selling arms.

Iran may provide the biggest test to date of China’s willingness to lead. Washington and its European allies see China’s role as critical in the effort to pressure Tehran over its nuclear program. So far, China has resisted tougher sanctions against a country that is its second-largest oil supplier after Saudi Arabia.

China’s leaders wrap their great power aspirations in modesty. They point out that China is still a poor developing country, with one tenth of the per capita GDP of the U.S.

Yet China is rapidly modernizing its military forces. Every schoolchild in China knows the story of the Dowager Empress who used funds earmarked for the navy to build stone boats at the Summer Palace in Beijing. The story has become a metaphor for national weakness, and a call to arms.

A military parade last month to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China sent a powerful message to China’s 1.3 billion people. The intercontinental ballistic missiles that rumbled down Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, and the tanker planes that lumbered overhead, signaled that China not only was at last a strong country, but also could project power beyond its shores.

These days, China’s appetite for “ingenious objects” from the West knows no bounds. It has 650 million mobile phones; it has passed America as the world’s largest auto market.

No emerging nation on earth has seized the opportunities of global trade more enthusiastically than China. Its decision to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 launched its economy into a new orbit. Surpluses from foreign trade—particularly with the U.S.—have helped China rack up more than $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.

So what does China want to do with the enhanced status that it craves, and which the world seems equally anxious to concede to China?

Some two-and-a-half millennia ago, the Chinese philosopher Laozi wrote: “Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.” The advice was aimed at the scholar-officials that ran China—a Mandarin class that became a model of governance for the ancient world. The light touch has never been a hallmark of Communist rule, or of its statecraft. That matters greatly in a world in which influence and legitimacy derive more than ever from the attractiveness of a country’s governing ideals.

Last month, the Frankfurt Book Fair offered the world a glimpse into the internal workings of the Chinese state, and a case study on the limitations of China’s “soft power” and its ability to lead.

China was invited to the fair as the guest of honor. The Chinese government had invested millions of dollars in the event, lining up some 2,000 Chinese writers, publishers and artists to attend. All went well until organizers invited two Chinese dissidents to a prefair symposium titled “China and the World—Perception and Reality.” Furious Chinese officials threatened to boycott the event and backed down only when organizers withdrew the invitations.

“We did not come to be instructed about democracy,” Mei Zhaorong, China’s former ambassador to Germany, icily declared.

“Two principles also apply to the Frankfurt Book Fair,” said a German foreign ministry spokeswoman. “Guests are treated like guests, and art without freedom is inconceivable.”

The coming isolation: “India has to gird up to face internationally new tough times, warns N.V.Subramanian.

http://www.newsinsight.net/archivedebates/nat2.asp?recno=1910

11 November 2009: As the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, meets Manmohan Singh tomorrow purportedly as a ‘friend’ and so does the US president, Barack Obama, later, it should be clear to policy-makers here that India is entering a period of strategic isolation. The isolation is on account of two facts, one longstanding, and the other of more recent origin.

The current reason for the isolation that this writer perceives coming arises from the presidential change in America, although that change is more than nine months old. Obama is not the close friend of India (although he is fairly close to the Indian-American community and has an incredible fondness for Hinduism) that his predecessor George W.Bush was. For example, he is not as keen on the Indo-US nuclear deal as Bush was, who was its architect.

Without promising ENR technologies to India, Obama is benchmarking further progress on the deal on India entering the non-proliferation regime, and his officials are in Delhi (proper non-proliferation ayatollahs) to soft-soap Manmohan Singh on it before he visits the US as Obama’s state guest. This writer has already warned of this in previous commentaries, and urged him to go to the US with limited or no expectations (Commentary, ‘Manmohan Singh’s US visit’).

But not only is Obama less friendly to India than Bush, he is a weaker president, and he is being steadily daunted by the problems he has inherited (Afghanistan, the economy) and by the new ones that have arisen in this presidency (for example, the Fort Hood shooting, which suggests an internal crisis with Muslim community integration almost as dangerously significant as the 9/ 11 attack that was externally inflicted). This writer had warned that China, for one, would see through Obama’s growing weakness and exploit it to India’s disadvantage, and this happened with Obama’s Dalai Lama meeting, which he dropped out of under Chinese pressure, although the White House denies it. Almost simultaneous with Obama chickening out of squarely facing the Tibetan issue, China has inexorably raised the pressure on India on Arunachal Pradesh and the Dalai Lama’s visit to it, orchestrating a barrage of criticism against the Dalai Lama and against India in the controlled Chinese media, and making threatening references to the 1962 war that India lost to the PLA. But in a reversal from before, India has withstood Chinese threats, and permitted the Dalai Lama to go ahead with his programme, although with the usual qualification that no political activity is being undertaken during the tour. The fact remains though that Obama has softened on the Chinese on Tibet because he needs them to save the US economy, and this has tilted the balance in China’s favour vis-a-vis India. If China benefits against India, so will Pakistan, etc. The linkages are very well-defined to be repeated again (see Commentary, ‘Fighting on two fronts’).

That is the current reason for India’s looming isolation. By the looks of it, India is also going to be isolated in Af-Pak, and it may have to fall back on the Northern Alliance-II option (Commentary, ‘Northern alliance II?’). The longstanding reason (mentioned earlier in the piece) for India’s recurrent isolation is that it is unable to influence international outcomes, not at least since Indira Gandhi liberated Bangladesh, absorbed Sikkim, and so on.

A friendly US president (George Bush) had to do all the heavy lifting to get the nuclear deal past the American Congress and the NSG (the Americans privately then complained that the Indians were doing very little successful international lobbying for the NSG waiver; the watchword is successful), and when that president’s Republican party was voted out, his Democratic successor has commenced to reverse it all. India cannot put all its eggs into one presidential basket. And of course the most ignominious example of India being unable to influence outcomes is its failure to win a permanent UN Security Council membership.

But China is not the only state to perceive India’s isolation as a friendly US president is replaced by an unfriendly if not hostile successor, on top of which India’s inability to influence outcomes is well-advertised. Australia, among others (and importantly, the South East Asian countries), has perceived India’s helplessness perfectly (it is another matter that Australia is also adrift), especially Rudd, a China-lover, or at least a former aficionado. Australia voted with China against India when the Arunachal Pradesh issue came up in the ADB, and Rudd, being a liberal politician like Obama, won’t dare befriend India at the price of annoying the Chinese. It is small consolation that Australia says Arunachal Pradesh is indisputably India’s when it voted otherwise in the ADB. Added to the fact that Obama is tilting China-ward, Australia would have no option but to go the American way. So forget any breathtaking breakthroughs when Rudd meets the PM tomorrow. No Australian uranium will reach India in a long time, unless, that is, India is able to influence outcomes.

What should India do with this approaching strategic isolation? Stay calm. Deng Xiaoping would have advised that. Where India can stand up to bullying, it should, on NPT, CTBT, FMCT, etc, on Tibet (the Tibet question must be opened; it is inevitable), on Kashmir, and so forth. America and the rest of the West will realize sooner than later (twelve to eighteen months maximum) that China’s rise is anything but peaceful, that there will be middle-kingdom hegemony, no less, if it is not reined in, and that counterweights are necessary to it, like democratic unthreatening India. So tomorrow, when the PM meets Kevin Rudd, and later Obama, he should be friendly but not conceal that he is steeled to face adversity. India survived an adverse Cold War so it will be more of the same for a while longer. But in this Dengian calm, India should consolidate on both the economic and military spheres and strive for internal political unity within competitive democratic politics.

N.V.Subramanian is Editor, www.NewsInsight.net

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