Will 2011 be better than 2010? We can only hope. Many columnists agree with Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria that 2010 was a tough year. And if we read the tea leaves correctly, 2011 is going to be a hard one, too.
2010 was a year of dire natural catastrophes: according to Munich-Re, an insurance company, there were 960 earthquakes, floods, droughts and other disasters; climate change is intruding palpably in our daily lives; U.S. President Barack Obama, his approval rating at a personal low of 36 per cent, lost the House of Representatives to ever more petulant and aggressive Republicans; the euro almost failed, as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain faced insolvency; and an increasingly assertive China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.
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The Chinese premier’s visit will boost bilateral trade, the bedrock of Sino-Indian relations
To the millions of Chinese children, Premier Wen Jiabao is affectionately known as grandfather Wen, conveying the tremendous success he has achieved in cultivating the image of ‘people’s man’ or the ‘humane face’ of the Chinese government. This sentiment was transmitted to Delhi’s Tagore International School, which was Wen’s stop on the first day of his recent trip to India. A child asked him, “Could I call you Grandfather Wen?” Pat came his reply, “I love to be called that, especially by children.” Perhaps this exchange was scripted, but one indisputable feature of how he came across—whether meeting schoolchildren or addressing business leaders or talking to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—was his winsome demeanour. Through it, he conveyed the message that he’s a reasonable man, arguably India’s best bet to improve its relations with China.
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To borrow a line from the nuns in that old musical, how do you solve a problem like China?
It isn’t a will o’ the wisp that’ll go away; it isn’t a clown, though it might think the rest of us are. It is a worry for the world and a headache for India.
The Economist, which is now a weekly must-read for trend analysts everywhere, ran a special survey recently on ‘The Dangers of a Rising China’. Several Asia-watchers have written volumes full of anxiety. One by Martin Jacques, titled ‘When China Rules the World’, declares in its subtitle: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. China’s influence, says Jacques, will extend well beyond the economic sphere. It will have social, cultural and political repercussions.
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Now that it is in the process of emerging as a leading economic power, some politicians and pundits are warning that not unlike the Soviet Union in its heyday, China is becoming a champion of a universal ideology that aims at supplanting the western political and economic model represented by the US.
Intertwining with legitimate concerns as well as with plain scare-mongering about China’s growing economic and military power, the tendency among these observers is to assume that China is exporting its political-economic model worldwide as part of a strategy to win international legitimacy for its stands. That several governments have joined China in boycotting the ceremony in Oslo in which Chinese democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was supposedly an indication that the Chinese campaign was achieving its goal.
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China’s growth has spawned an anxiety industry to rival the infamous ‘Yellow Peril’ panic of a hundred years ago
China was at last awake… She was the colossus of the nations, and swiftly her voice was heard in no uncertain tones in the affairs and councils of the nations… China’s swift and remarkable rise was due, perhaps more than to anything else, to the superlative quality of her labour. The Chinese was the perfect type of industry. He had always been that. For sheer ability to work, no worker in the world could compare with him. Work was the breath of his nostrils. It was to him what wandering and fighting in far lands and spiritual adventure had been to other peoples. Liberty, to him, epitomized itself in access to the means of toil… China rejuvenescent! It was but a step to China rampant.
– The Unparalleled Invasion (1910), Jack London
Look out, because the Chinese are the masters now – or shortly will be. At least, that’s the impression that can be drawn from recent media headlines and new books. “Buying up the world – the coming wave of Chinese takeovers,” blared the cover of The Economist last month, followed up a few weeks later with a front page devoted to “the dangers of a rising China”. Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World was published last year and will come out in paperback in 2011. Last week, in The Financial Times, the headline on an article by Philip Stephens informed us that “a risen China reaches for power”. Unsettled yet?
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The West and China both seem to be making huge efforts to understand each other better. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to China was the latest in a long series of high-level visits by Western leaders. But will such visits lead to greater mutual understanding? My experience of writing an article in The Guardian last month suggests there are still major obstacles to overcome.
The West and China both seem to be making huge efforts to understand each other better. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to China was the latest in a long series of high-level visits by Western leaders. But will such visits lead to greater mutual understanding? My experience of writing an article in The Guardian last month suggests there are still major obstacles to overcome.
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Is China making an unprecedented leap to the top of the global economic hierarchy? Yes, Martin Jacques asserts confidently in his buzz-generating When China Rules the World
Is China making an unprecedented leap to the top of the global economic hierarchy? Yes, Martin Jacques asserts confidently in his buzz-generating When China Rules the World. He sees the country, which recently passed Japan to become the world’s No. 2 economy, rising smoothly to the top spot by continuing to follow a thoroughly distinctive, Confucian-tinged development path. No, say China skeptics like economist John Markin and hedge-fund honcho James Chanos, with equal self-assurance. They predict that bursting bubbles will lead to a Chinese equivalent to Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s. To them, as George Friedman pithily puts it in his best-selling The Next 100 Years, which is sometimes displayed near Jacques’ tome in airport bookstores these days, China is just ‘Japan on steroids.’
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China is flexing its trade and military muscles. What does it mean for the West?
In the world of prized metals, dysprosium lacked a certain star power. It lies deep in the so-called f-block of the periodic table—that free-floating part near the bottom you never used in high school chemistry—along with the other so-called rare-earth elements with tongue-twisting names like neodymium and lutetium. No one ever set out with mule and pick-axe to find dysprosium. It occurs only as a constituent part of other mineral compounds, which explains why its name derives from the Greek for “hard to get at.”
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At a symposium sponsored by the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington which had as its theme: “The impact of China on the Caribbean”, one of the panellists, Dr Richard Bernal, is reported to have said that Chinese aid was replacing that previously provided by traditional sources in the West.
Bernal noted that the interest which China was showing in the Caribbean was being driven primarily by diplomatic rivalries with Taiwan.
The assertiveness of Beijing in the Caribbean is however driven by other important considerations.
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