Thumbnail images: 

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.

Thumbnail images: 

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.

Thumbnail images: 

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.
 

Thumbnail images: 

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.

Images: 

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.

Thumbnail images: 

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.

Introduction

Thumbnail images: 

For a world order firmly founded on sovereignty of individual states, big and small, the term “global governance” is an idealistic dream at best or simply a misnomer. It is a shadow global government, which seeks to be an international process of consensus building without any erosion of sovereignty of the individual states. The surrender of sovereignty for the good of the global commons is mostly absent beyond permitting some physical systems of convenience like communications, such as the internet.

Images: 

Water—one of the most vital natural resources on earth—has taken centre-stage in the enchanted frontiers and is progressively becoming a weapon of geopolitics. It all began as a mass movement engineered by the legislator-elect (2 May 2021) and leader of the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS), Akhil Gogoi and his formation’s demand to halt all mega dam projects in the North East without undertaking correct cumulative impact assessment studies. Gogoi incidentally won the prestigious Sibsagar seat on the ticket of a newly found political party, Raijor Dal.