India and China’s confrontation is not the only impediment their nationalistic leaders are imposing on themselves
ASIA TIMES
India and China are confronting each other across a disputed Himalayan border, with more violence reported this week. But the hardline nationalism in both nations that brought them to blows also appears to be hampering their relations with much of the rest of the world.
In India, that’s manifest in the struggle to find its place as a regional power between the west and China, a pursuit that’s looking likely to undermine its ties with both. Meanwhile, China’s travails are encapsulated in the battle over technology giant Huawei.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains popular despite an economy that’s going backwards and a national failure to come to grips with the coronavirus pandemic. He can add diplomatic folly to that list.
The standoff with Chinese soldiers in Ladakh is only the most visible expression of a destabilisation in relations with Beijing that’s taken place since Modi decided to look to the West to counter a perceived threat rising in the East. Bim Phurtel argues this has inadvertently ceded India’s upper hand in the Asian game of geopolitical poker.
But Delhi’s Westward view may also be weakening its cards with the US, writes MK Bhadrakumar. Washington’s aim is to get the Quad grouping of the United States, Japan, Australia and India to work together as a bulwark against “a potential challenge from China”. But in doing so, the Modi government has removed India’s “chastity belt” and is readying it to be another concubine in the superpower’s harem, argues Bhadrakumar.
Modi’s failure to address the shortcomings within India’s own borders are also causing him problems. The BIMARU states – Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh – have long suffered from deprivations caused by poor economic policy and planning. But failure to bring the mineral-rich region into India’s economic transformation threatens to undermine its superpower ambitions, opines Ravi Kant.
China’s technology industry has taken the brunt of US President Trump’s Sinophobia, especially communications firm Huawei. Sanctions that threaten companies that try to do business with Huawei have made the Chinese giant a political football. But despite months of wrangling, the likely outcome still looks worse for the US than China.
For a start, blocking Huawei from the US is very likely to damage the American chip industry, writes David Goldman.
Similarly, Scott Kennedy argues that a total decoupling of the nation’s tech industries is a “race to the bottom, a chaotic and unprincipled slugfest, with the US ending up as isolated as China”.
And if the US had hoped for its supporters to help address the shortcomings of its policy, it’s likely to be disappointed: the O-RAN coalition of opposition to Huawei and China faces such a headwind of technical issues that it might be dead on arrival, writes Hunter Dorwart.
This article looks like a Chinese version of “Project Fear”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Fear
Putting it simply, Chairman Xi is consciously becoming the Leonid Brezhnev of China, instigating a new Cold War with the West. OF COURSE the West needs to decouple with China’s intelligence network, built around state-owned enterprises like Huawei; and of course this will have a “negative effect” on technology in both countries, as though that’s something to be feared.
The US-led Western World was decoupled from the Soviet Union for over 70 years with reduced inter-block commerce and technical collaboration. This may have had a slightly “retarding” effect on the West, as a few highly-skilled Soviet scientists could not easily share their skills with Western counterparts; but it had a far greater effect on the Soviets, who ultimately collapsed and lost the economic war with the West. If the West and China do successfully decouple, it is China that will collapse; because their economy is built upon cheating, stealing and espionage (like the former USSR), and the West’s economy is based on the genuine innovation that comes from freedom of expression — IF INDEED WE CAN RETURN TO THE FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION WE ONCE HAD.
“CCP Announces Major Internal Purge: “It Will Be Like Yan’an”
07/10/2020Massimo Introvigne
— https://bitterwinter.org/ccp-announces-major-internal-purge/
The Yan’an purge was instigated by Mao Tse Tung, following the advice of Joseph Stalin. That is the direction that China is headed, and we do well to decouple from them.