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The 6^th Plenary session of the 19^th Central Committee was recently concluded in Beijing between November 8 and November 11, 2021. The session was attended by 151 alternate members and 197 members of the Central Committee.

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Evergrande is today China’s largest real estate company, which started off with selling bottled water and pig farming. It also features in the Global 500, owns around 1300 residential projects, food companies, theme parks and a soccer team called the ‘Guangzhou Evergrande’. Evergrande succeeded on the growth in the Chinese real estate sector.

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India’s commitment to ‘All Alignment’ has added credibility to the view that the Quad has no relation to security. This is in contrast to AUKUS, which is entirely about security, and which it would be beneficial to the Quad members to integrate into a more formalised and capable alliance.

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China’s recent crackdown on its tech giants brings to fore memories of Chen Yun’s ‘bird in a cage’ proposition from the years post the disastrous Great Leap Forward. The debate on whether China pursues socialism with Chinese characteristics or whether it is appropriate to call it capitalism with Chinese characteristics has been a long one and is all about the relationship between the bird which stands for the market and the cage which stands for state regulations.

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In the praxis of Xi Jinping Thought, he is the sun of the solar system represented by the CCP. The party is itself the sun in the solar system of national life in the PRC, while the geopolitical focus of Xi is to make the country he leads the sun around which all other major countries must rotate.

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Disasters have had a long tumultuous relationship with China, be they natural or humanmade. Of late the line between natural and humanmade disasters has been blurring with examples ranging from the outbreak of Coronavirus in 2019 which still plagues the world; to the floods in Henan this year. In all these cases, because of the ways in which the leadership handles the crises, the common people continue being the sufferers. Yet, to change the discourse around human suffering caused by humanmade causes, China uses its own narrative to present a different picture.
 

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It was a French philosopher who wrote that “we are never contemporaneous with the present”. The past lingers, even the distant past lingers in the frame, while the present is being considered. When tectonic changes take place in geopolitical plates that affect major changes, if policymakers allow conclusions valid in the past to affect the present, there will be trouble ahead.

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If there is a veritable Achilles Heel in India then it is truly the 22 Km long Siliguri corridor that connects the North East to the rest of India.  In his book Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century, John W. Garver writes thus: The Chumbi Valley points south towards the Siliguri corridor. The distance from Yadong to Siliguri is only a bit over one hundred kilometres.

The India-EU Leaders’ Meeting held on May 8, 2021 marked a historic development in India’s relationship with the European Union (EU). The developments represent a significant corrective to New Delhi’s strategic dogma and the strategic shift of the EU towards the Indo-Pacific region. The Bi-polar Cold War dynamics and the North-South divide had prevented Delhi from creating active partnerships with the continent.

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Since last year I have been writing that the origin of the Chinese Virus was from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).  It is not a zoonotic transmission from bats to humans in the Wild Life Market at Wuhan – a hypothesis peddled by China.