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An opportunity to be a part of a recent think tank delegation to China offered the author insight into China’s foreign policy, development plans and issues affecting the India-China bilateral relationship. Gaps in perception that keep both countries apart must be bridged for them to leverage their emerging positions in Asia and the world
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China’s resurrection of the ancient Silk Road is ambitious, sprawling, hegemonic. Its pre-European origins, though, lay in a criss-crossing of nameless caravan routes on which Indian cotton was traded as vigorously as Chinese silk, tangible proof of the interdependence of two ancient civilisations over two millennia
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The Indo-Pacific region is home to some of the largest and most rapidly growing economies as also powerful military forces. Nuclear threats, international terrorism and climate change are some of the issues that define the region. Uncertainty dogs relations among the four nations in the top league—U.S., China, India and Japan—but what is emerging is a hawkish, policy stance from the U.S. as opposed to an isolationist outlook apprehended earlier
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A strategic coming together of the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India was close to fruition some years ago, impelled initially by the tsunami of 2004. The spirit of the enterprise remains alive even now, and there are many merits in India joining the quad, but such an arrangement can skew existing Asian equations, jeopardising the Act East policy
Courtesy: Gateway House
Clas Neumann in his interview envisions the new type of globalisation that the digital economy has created. The increase in distribution of work and revolution of global supply chains. He discusses the winners and losers of the changes in the H1B visa systems, specifically the brain drain reversal, and the alterations the Indian business model needs to make to adjust to these changes. He further emphasises on the idea that for technology companies to foster and develop, their closeness to "innovation clusters" is most important. And describes the role of governments in enabling the cultivating of digital spaces and digital cities.
Courtesy: The Wire
China has launched the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative in an attempt to rebuild the ancient Silk Road with proposed land and sea routes to promote infrastructure, trade, and investment in the regions that it will thus connect. The challenge will be to attract private financing to support the official and multilateral ones
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The West Asian monarchies are being forced to ‘look East’ due to a range of factors: the rise of the Islamic State, their need to boost falling oil revenues and doubts about the United States continuing to remain a guarantor of regional stability. Quite coterminously, India is looking towards the Gulf for energy security besides fulfilling other geostrategic goals: this is an ‘East’ and ‘West’ where the ‘twain will meet
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Trump’s cabinet has a preponderance of China hardliners, which has wider implications for the Asia Pacific region while some of its members view Narendra Modi as Reaganesque and a man of the times
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The Russians have concluded that the Afghan Taliban offer a better shield against the Islamic State than the old Northern Alliance. A negotiated settlement in Afghanistan could be achieved if Washington and New Delhi join Moscow, Beijing, Islamabad and Tehran in a joint effort.
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The year 2017 may change some equations in the East Asian region. Will the near parity that the U.S. and China currently share turn into a keener contest? Will strained relations between India and China persist? Donald Trump’s election as the next U.S. president casts the spotlight squarely on these inter-state relationships